loudest against the sin of the prelates, because it is in itself the greatest, and to the people of greatest mischief." 62

Wiclif, as we before had occasion to see, sent forth a considerable number of tracts which related exclusively, or at least chiefly, to the itinerant preachers of his school. There are still extant both English and Latin writings of this kind. Those in English are all defences of the preachers, some of them taking the form of controversy against their opponents. To this class belong, e.g., the following tracts:-Of Good Preaching Priests,63 Why Poor Priests have no Benefices,64 Of Feigned Contemplative Life,65 Of Obedience to Prelates, Mirror of Antichrist. These writings, it is true, are all placed by Arnold among the works of doubtful authenticity. Among the Latin writings is, e.g., the small tract, Of Academic Degrees, including a defence of the itinerants; the sole object of which is to prove that the preaching of the Gospel by men who are not graduates is justified by the Scriptures, and allowed by the Church.68

67

While the tracts hitherto named treat chiefly of the itinerants, but were in the first instance intended less for them than for the people, and in part for the learned class (such as the tract last mentioned), there is also a small book which I find among Wiclif's writings, which was composed primarily and directly for those simple preachers themselves. I refer to the tract of The Six Yokes. For as to the so-called Letter to the Simple Priests, it is neither, as I have been convinced for some years, a real letter in form (although it occurs under this title in two catalogues of Wiclif's writings made at the beginning of the fifteenth century), nor does it relate to the itinerants, but obviously treats of ordinary parish priests. The whole appears to me

to be a fragment either taken from some tractate, or (which I think quite possible) from a Latin sermon.69

The tract of The Six Yokes, on the other hand, appears to me to have been designed by Wiclif for those of his friends who devoted themselves to the itinerancy. Its very commencement indicates this,-"In order that unlearned and simple preachers, who are burning with zeal for souls, may have materials for preaching," etc. And as this is the only tract of Wiclif known to us which was written for this purpose, and is besides fitted to give us some insight into the substance of these popular preachings, and particularly into their moral exhortations and reproofs, I think it advisable to publish it at full length, in Appendix No. 7. I must here remark, however, that the materials of this tract were originally interwoven with several of his Latin sermons, and were only subsequently formed into an independent whole. For I find in the Saints' Day Sermons, some of the same portions which now form several chapters of the tract.70 The English sermons, too, lately issued by the Clarendon Press, leave the impression, at least in several places, of being sketches intended by the author for the use of others rather than his own. At the end of the very first of them, e.g., occurs the remark, "In this Gospel of the day priests have occasion to speak of the false pride of the rich, and of the luxurious living of great men of the world, and of the long-enduring pains of hell and the blessedness of heaven; and may so extend the sermon as circumstances require." Still more characteristic is the concluding remark of the second sermon. "Here the preacher may touch upon all manner of sins, especially those of false priests and traitors of God, whose duty it is to deal faithfully with the people for their salvation, and

to show them the way of the law of Christ, and the deceitful wiles of Antichrist."71 These and other passages, of which we could mention several more, lead us to the conjecture that these sermons of Wiclif were composed by him, in part at least, for the benefit of the itinerants of his school, in the way of helps and guides, and collections of materials. At all events the fact is certain that no inconsiderable part of the literary labours of Wiclif centred in the Institute founded by him for this preaching itinerancy, and was designed to be serviceable to the preachers, either in the way of defending them from attack, or assisting them in their work.

NOTES TO CHAPTER VI.

1. Comp. Shirley, Fasc. Zizan., 305. Cum Magister Nicolaus (Hereford) in Quadragesima prædicasset publice in Ecclesia B. Virginis in lingua latina coram toto clero, etc.

2. Evangelia de Sanctis, No. 3, fol. 5, col. 2 of the Vienna MS. 3928. (Dénis CCCC.)

3. Twelfth Sermon, fol. 28, col. 4 of the same MS. :-Nam frater alienigena, de regno suo portans pecuniam paucam, ut theologiam discat Oxoniæ, etc.

4. No. 24 in the Twenty-four Miscellaneous Sermons, fol. 185 f. of the same MS. 5. The two oldest extant catalogues of Wiclif's writings, found in two Vienna MSS., dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century, agree in giving this collection the title XL. Sermones compositi dum stetit in scholis, in contrast to another collection which is entituled, Sermones XX. compositi in fine vitae suae. This confirms the correctness of an observation which I had made before this notice was known to me.

6. This collection of sermons stands beside a collection of Sermons for Saints' Days (written later), and of twenty-four Miscellaneous Sermons (also dating from Wiclif's last years), and also beside a few short essays, in the Vienna MS., 3928 (Dénis CCCC). The collection of forty sermons (which, however, number only thirty-eight) begins at fol. 193 of the MS., and the two sermons on Luke vi. 4 are the eighth and ninth in number of the collection, fol. 206-210. The second of these two is of sufficient importance, in our view, to be printed at full length in the Appendix, No. 5.

7. In the sermon last mentioned (comp. preceding note), Wiclif reminds his hearers of the exhortation of the Apostle Peter, "If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God;" and declares that men now-a-days in preaching do not preach the Word of God, but gesta, poemata vel fabulas extra corpus Scripturae, fol. 208, col. 1. He says the same thing in the sermon preceding, fol. 206, col. 3. In a later collection of sermons, 61 Evangelia de Sanctis-in sermon 56 he speaks of tragoediae vel comoediae et fabulae vel sententiae apocriphae, quae sunt hodie populo praedicatae. And in the work De Officio Pastorali, Leipzig 1863, v. II., c. 5, p. 37, he says of the Mendicant Monks, Et tota solicitudo est eorum, non verba evangelica et saluti subditorum utilia seminare, sed fraudes, joca, mendacia, per quae possunt populum facilius spoliare. Also in the Treatise, De Veritate S. Scripturae,

Wiclif lays down the principle: Theologus debet seminare veritatem Scripturae, non gesta vel chronicas mundiales.

8. Sermo magistri Stephani de Lungeduna, Archiep. Cantuar. de Sancta Maria, in the Arundel MSS. of the British Museum. Wright gives the whole sermon in his Biographia Britannica Lit. II., 446 f.

9. An elder contemporary of Wiclif, Thomas Walleys, an English Dominican, +1340, published a book, entituled Metamorphosis Ovidiana Moraliter Explanata, which was printed six times at least onwards from the end of the fifteenth century. Comp. Histoire Literaire de la France. Quatorzieme siecle. Tom. XXIV., p. 371 and L1. And another Dominican, an Oxford Doctor, John Bromyard, drew up a collection of histories, alphabetically arranged under certain heads, which were all intended for the use of preachers (hence the title of the work: Summa Praedicantium); but his histories are in good part taken from the popular story-tellers. Hist. Liter. de la France, XXIV., 372.

10. Wiclif-De Officio Pastorali, II., 5-thinks that the people should despise such monks as preachers, for an additional reason-viz., because it was their custom to make a collection immediately after their sermons.

11. In 1719, the French Dominican, James Echard, published vol. I., and in 1722 vol. II., of a collection, in historical order, of the works of his Order, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum, etc., in which he speaks strongly enough of the Dominican style of preaching in the fourteenth century, and censures those historiolas ineptas et insulsas, II. 762.

11. In the sermon referred to above, fol. 208, col. 1, it is said of the modern preacher: Praedicando Scripturam dividet ipsam ultra minuta naturalia, et allegabit moralizndo per colores rithmicos quousque non appareat textus Scripturae.

12. In the same sermon, fol. 208, col. 2-Inanis gloriae cupidus est qui in nititur divisionibus verborum. Illi invicem invident qui nedum divisiones thematis sed cujuslibet autoritatis occurrentis ingeminant.

13. Ars faciendi sermones. The tract begins with the proposition-Haec est ars brevis et clara faciendi sermones, secundum formam syllogisticam, ad quam omnes alii modi sunt reducendi. Comp. Hist. Liter. de la France, XXIV., 365.

14. He censures the ambitiousness which aims to exalt itself by the use of grandia verba, and disapproves of the attempt to give a more beautiful form to the sermon by the color rhetoricus and by colligantia rithmica, i.e., rhymes; he goes the length even of maintaining that by this declamatio heroica, etc., God's Word is only falsified.

15. The twenty-second of the Sermons for Saints' Days (61 Evangelia de Sanctis). Idem est spiritualiter pascere auditorium sine sententia evangelica, ac si quis faceret convivium corporale sine pane. Vienna MS., 3928, fol. 42.

16. Miscell. Sermons, No. 8.

same MS. as above, fol. 206, col. 3.

Verbum Dei habet vim regenerativam. In the

17. The twelfth sermon of the same collection has these words-Præcipuum officium viri ecclesiastici est gignere membra ecclesiae, etc., fol. 52, col. 1. Again, in