CONTENTS OF VOL. I. 9-14 15-17 27-55 SECTION III.-Henry Bracton and William Occam and the Tone of Church Life and Politics in the Fourteenth Century, SECTION IV.-Richard of Armagh and the Mendicant Orders, 149, 150 NOTE II.-Provisions of the Statutes of Sir Philip de Somerville for the Study of Theology by the Fellows of Balliol College NOTE III.-State of Philosophical Parties in Oxford in Wiclif's NOTE IV.-Learned Fellows of Balliol in Wiclif's Time, . . 151, 152 153-160 ADDITIONAL NOTES BY TRANSLATOR :- 185-190 NOTE I.-Wiclif's Connection with Balliol, NOTE II.-Identity of John Wiclif, the Reformer, with John Wiclif, Warden of Canterbury Hall, NOTE III.-Wiclif-Researches of the late Prebendary Wilkinson, SECTION III.-Wiclif's Action in Public Affairs from 1366 to 1376-A ADDITIONAL NOTE BY TRANSLATOR on the Late Date at which INTRODUCTION. THERE HERE now lies between the commencement of the Reformation and our own day an interval of 360 years, period of time considerable enough to allow of our taking a tolerably free and comprehensive survey. We are thus placed in a position to embrace in one view the whole effects of the Reformation, in so far as these have as yet developed themselves; and it has also become possible for us to attain a right understanding of the conditions under which the movement took its rise, and of the manner in which its way was prepared in the preceding centuries. Our power of insight, indeed, in this matter as in others, must have its limits. Beyond all doubt, a later time will here also command a wider horizon and gain deeper reaches of insight. For what the poet says of the past is not true of it in every respect "Still stands the past for evermore.” On the contrary, the image of the past is for ever shifting and changing with the conditions of the present in which it is reflected. "The living man, too, has his right:" he has a right to the inheritance of the generations which have gone before him; he has also the right to put the history of the past in relations to the present-to study it in connection with the events and the needs and the questions of his own time and thereby to arrive at the true vision and under VOL. I. A standing of it for himself. Only our own experience can give us the interpretation of history. As a general truth, the actual knowledge which we are able to acquire is commensurate with our experience, and the more thorough and comprehensive the experience which any man has acquired, so much the deeper and more correct is the understanding of the past which he is in a condition to attain. On this ground the period of more than three centuries and a half which has elapsed since the commencement of the Reformation, both enables and calls us, in a much higher degree than the generations which have preceded us, to attain to a thorough understanding of its preliminary history, or the long series of events and transactions by which its advent was prepared. A beginning of such studies, indeed, was made as early as the sixteenth century; and even while the Reformation itself was still in progress, there were historical inquirers who cast back their eyes to men and religious brotherhoods of the past who appeared to bear some resemblance to the Reformers and Reformed Churches of their own generation. These excursions into comparative pre-Reformation history were of course of very different kinds, and issued in the most opposite results, according as they were undertaken by friends or foes of the Reformation itself. When Luther received from the Utraquists of Bohemia one of Huss's writings, and studied it, he was lost in astonishment, for all at once the light dawned upon him that he and Staupitz and all the rest had been Hussites all this while, without being aware of the fact. A few years later, he became acquainted with the writings of John Wessel, which filled him with sincere admiration of the man, and with a wondering joy; so much so that he felt himself strengthened as |