The submission of John to Innocent III. was the turning-point in the history of the papacy in this country. In the humiliation of the sovereign the whole nation felt itself to be degraded. Innocent went too far; it was an abuse of assumed power; but it recoiled upon himself in due time. England never could forget such abject prostration on the part of its king at the feet of a foreign priest. From that hour a spirit of disaffection towards Rome grew up in the minds of the English people. The usurpations, the exorbitant claims, of the papacy, their interference with the disposal of English bishoprics, frequently brought the government and the church into collision and widened the breach. But just when men's patience was almost exhausted by the many practical grievances of popery, it pleased God to raise up a powerful adversary to the whole hierarchical system—the first man who shook the papal dominion in England to its foundation, and withal a man who sincerely loved the truth, and preached it both to the learned and to the lower classes. This man was John Wycliffe, justly styled the harbinger, or Morning Star of the Reformation.
The early part of Wycliffe's life is involved in much obscurity; but the general opinion is, that he was born of humble parentage in the neighborhood of Richmond in Yorkshire, about the year 1324. His destination was that of a scholar, to which, we are informed, the humblest in those days could aspire. England was almost a land of schools, every cathedral, almost every monastery, having its own; but youths of more ambition, self-confidence, supposed capacity, and of better opportunities, thronged to Oxford and Cambridge. In England, as throughout Christendom, that wonderful rush of a vast part of the population towards knowledge, thronged the universities with thousands of students, instead of the few hundreds who have now the privilege of entering those seats of learning.
John Wycliffe found his way to Oxford. He was admitted a student of Queen's College, but soon removed to Merton College, the oldest, the wealthiest, and most famous of the Oxford foundations. It is supposed that he was privileged to attend the lectures of the very pious and profound Thomas Bradwardine, and that from his works he derived his first views of the freeness of grace, and the utter worthlessness of all human merit, in the matter of salvation. From Grostete's writings he first caught the idea of the pope being antichrist.
Wycliffe, according to his biographers, soon became master of the civil, the canon, and the municipal law; but his greatest efforts were diverted to the study of theology, not merely that barren art which was taught in the schools, but that divine science which is derived from the spirit as well as from the letter of scripture. In the prosecution of such inquiries, he had numerous and formidable difficulties to contend against. It was a study which the church had not sanctioned, and had not provided for. The sacred text was neglected, scholastic divinity had taken the place of the authority of scripture; the original language of the New, as well as of the Old Testament, was almost unknown in the kingdom. But, in spite of all these disadvantages and discouragements, Wycliffe pursued his way with great perseverance. "His logic," says one, "his scholastic subtlety, his rhetorical art, his power of reading the Latin scriptures, his varied erudition, may be due to Oxford; but the vigor and energy of his genius, the force of his language, his mastery over the vernacular English, the high supremacy which he vindicated for the scriptures, which by immense toil he promulgated in the vulgar tongue—these were his own,—to be learned in no school, to be attained by none of the ordinary courses of study."