CHAPTER VI.

WICLIF AS A PREACHER; HIS EFFORTS FOR REFORM IN PREACHING AND FOR THE ELEVATION OF THE PASTORAL

OFFICE.

SECTION I.-Wiclif as a Preacher; his Homiletical Principles.

WICLIF not only made use of scientific lectures from

his chair in Oxford, nor only of learned works and small fugitive tracts; he also availed himself of preaching as a means of battling with the evils which he saw in the religious condition of the National Church, of implanting sound Christian life, and of thus serving, according to his ability, the interests of his Church and people.

It is characteristic of the man and his way of acting, that in this extremely important matter he commenced by doing his duty at his own personal post, from which he afterwards extended his influence to wider circles.

This comes out with the greatest clearness from his remaining sermons, for these divide themselves into two great groups-the Latin sermons and the English. The latter are partly sermons which he may be presumed to have preached to his congregation at Lutterworth, as parish priest, and partly outlines of sermons which he prepared as a kind of model for itinerant preachers of his school; we shall return to these in the sequel. The Latin sermons were, without doubt, delivered in Oxford before the University, perhaps in St. Mary's. This is antecedently pro

bable, but it is also manifest from the form and contents of the sermons themselves. Not unfrequently we find learned matters mentioned in them in a way which makes it certain that the audience must have consisted of people of culture and scholastic learning-as, for example, when, in the first of the "Miscellaneous Sermons," he speaks of the manifold varieties then received of the sense of Scripture, and, in particular, of the sensus tropologicus and anagogicus; when quotations are introduced, not only from the Fathers, but from the Canon Law; and when abstract questions of logic and metaphysics are investigated, such as that which refers to the relation of soul and body, etc. What sort of audience must a preacher have before him when he speaks of the imitation of Christ, as Wiclif does in the third of his Sermons for Saints' Days, and asks, What does it help us in the imitation of Christ to pore over the pages of the logicians? or what aid comes from the knowledge of the natural philosophers acquired at such a cost of labour? or from the well-known method of reasoning adopted by the mathematicians? Plainly the preacher has people of learning before him the professors and students of the University. This was long ago correctly noted by a reader of the Vienna manuscript of these sermons, who writes on the margin, opposite this passage, the words, "Magistri et studentes notate." The preacher, in fact, in one instance mentions Oxford by name; and one of his sermons from beginning to end is simply an address delivered on occasion of a Doctoral promotion in the University.

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The Latin sermons of Wiclif known to us belong to very different years, as may be gathered with tolerable certainty from several internal marks. The most of these collections, indeed, belong to the latest years of his life, but one of

them, containing forty miscellaneous sermons, consists of earlier discourses, all delivered before the year 1378,5 and these are all instructive and valuable for the insight they give into the course of Wiclif's development. At present we say nothing of what is to be learned from this source of the progress of his mind in the matter of doctrine; we confine ourselves, in the meantime, to what we have been able to gather from it with respect to the views he took of the object of preaching, and of the actual condition of the preacher's office at that period.

In the last named collection of Latin sermons, belonging to the period of his academic life and work, he expresses himself in different places on the subject of preachers and preaching. Two sermons in particular-those on Luke viii. 4-15, the Parable of the Sower-the Gospel of the Day for Sexagesima Sunday-supply us with important information as to his views on this point.

Before everything else Wiclif holds up the truth that the preaching of the Word of God is that function which subserves, in a degree quite peculiar to itself, the edification of the Church; and this is so, because the Word of God is a seed (Luke viii. 11, "The seed is the Word of God"). In reflecting upon this truth, he is filled with wonder, and exclaims, "O marvellous power of the Divine Seed! which overpowers strong men in arms, softens hard hearts, and renews and changes into divine men, men who had been brutalised by sins, and departed infinitely far from God. Obviously such a high morality could never be worked by the word of a priest, if the Spirit of Life and the Eternal Word did not, above all things else, work with it."

But the grander and more exalted the view which Wiclif takes of the preacher's office, so much the more has he an

open eye for the faults and deficiencies of the actual average preacher of his own time. As the worst of these, he censures the evil practice of not preaching God's Word, but setting forth stories, fables, or poems, which were altogether foreign to the Bible. He refers again and again to this subject in sermons both of his earlier and later years, as well as in treatises and tracts." We have no ground to assume that sermons of the kind he censures were not preached upon some Bible text. It is rather to be supposed that the preachers, after giving out a text from the Scripture for form's sake, were none the less accustomed to draw the main contents of their sermons from other sources. There were not even wanting instances of preachers who were bold enough to dispense with a Scripture text, and to choose something else. Even an Archbishop of Canterbury, and a learned scholastic and cardinal, Stephan Langton, †1228, saw nothing offensive in taking for the text of a short Latin sermon which still exists, a dancing-song in old French, allegorically applying, indeed, "the Fair Alice," and all that is said of her, to the Holy Virgin. Things of this sort, however, may have been of comparatively rare occurrence; but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it had become almost a prevailing pulpit-fashion, instead of opening up Bible thoughts, and applying them to life, to draw the materials of sermons from civil and natural history, from the legendary stores of the Church, and even from the fableworld of the middle ages, and the mythology of the heathen gods. If a priest, on a Saint's Day, recounted the miracles. of the saint as set out in his legend, this had still some claim to be listened to as a piece of sacred history. But the Gesta Romanorum, and all manner of tales and fables, taken from profane sources like Ovid's Metamorphoses, were made

use of by preachers, if not for the edification, at least for the entertainment of their hearers.

The taste for allegorical interpretations and applications, as these gradually came into general use, helped men over every objection to the practice, and the craving for entertainment of this description grew always the stronger the less preachers were able to supply the souls of men with wholesome refreshment from the eternal fountain of the Word of God. No wonder that sermons often became a web whose woof and weft consisted of all other threads save those of Bible truth. And it was precisely those men of the fourteenth century who were specially trained for the work of popular preaching-namely the Dominicans and the Franciscans—who humoured the corrupt taste of the time, and flavoured their pulpit addresses with such stories and buffooneries. If the multitude were amused for the moment, and the begging friar who tickled their ears got his reward of a collection, 10 the end aimed at was gained, and the Penny-Preacher (as Brother Berthold of Regensburg, as early as the thirteenth century, calls this set of preachers) could go on his way rejoicing.

It is nothing wonderful that even Catholic literary historians, like the learned continuators of the Histoire literaire de la France, condemn a style of pulpit eloquence such as this; or that even in the beginning of last century a Dominican like the learned Jakob Eckard, pronounced the stories with which the brethren of his Order were accustomed to amuse their audiences, to be "stale and absurd." But if a contemporary like Wiclif was able to see these serious evils in their true light, and condemned them in so decided a tone, we have here a proof that his judgment had been enlightened and sharpened by the Word of God; and all the