murdered sheep of Christ, he said: "They are like Samson's foxes. They appear to be different, but their tails are tied together.' The blood-thirst of the Dominicans earned for them the stigma of 'Domini Canes,' or the 'Lord's Dogs.' The very sentences which they pronounced in mockery of trial and justice were a Satanic compound of formality and heartlessness, sanctimony and avarice, obsequiousness and arrogance. At the conclusion of a session of the Inquisition, held in Switzerland, 1430, the following decree was published:

'In the name of God, Amen. We, Brother Ulrich of Torrente, of the Dominican order at Lausanne, and with full apostolic authority, Inquisitor of heretical iniquity, in the diocese of Lausanne; and John de Columpnis, Licentiate and especially appointed to this work by the venerable father in Christ, Lord William of Challant, Bishop of Lausanne, have directed by the pure process of the Inquisition that you, Peter Sager, born at Montrich, now sixty years old, thirty years and more ago forswore the Waldensian heresy in the city of Bern, but since then have returned to that perverse faith, as a dog to his vomit, and held and done many things detestable and vile against the most holy and venerable Roman Church. You have stubbornly asserted that there is no purgatory, but only heaven and hell; that masses, intercessions and alms for the souls of the departed are of no avail; and there are many other things proved against you in your trial, that show that you have fallen back into heresy. O grief! Therefore after consideration, and investigation, and mature consideration, and weighing of evidence; and after consulting the statutes, both of divine and human law, and arming ourselves with the revered sign of the Holy Cross, we declare: In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Amen ;That our decision may proceed from the presence of God and our eyes behold justice, turning neither to the right nor to the left, but fixed only on God and on the Holy Scriptures, we make known as our final sentence from this seat of judgment, that you, Peter Sager, are and have been a heretic, treacherously recreant to your oath of recantation. As a relapsed heretic, we commit you to the arm of the secular power. However, we entreat the secular authorities to execute the sentence of death more mildly than the canonical statutes require, particularly as to the mutilation of the members of the body. We further decree, that all and every property that belongs to you, Peter, is confiscated, and after being divided into three parts, the first part shall go to the government, the second to the officers of the Inquisition, and the third to pay the expenses of the trial.

Some of the town expenses attending the execution of Peter are found in the town records, as follows: Paid to Master Garnaucie for burning Peter Sager, 20 shillings; for cords and stake, 10 shillings; for the pains of the executioner, 28 shillings; special watchmen during the execution in the city, 17 shillings, 6 pfennigs; in the citadel, 9 sols; for the beadles, 14 shillings.' The fuel must have cost a large amount, as twelve wagon loads were used. Side by side with this fiendish record stand these two charges: Twenty-eight measures of wine for the dance at the court-house, in honor of the Count of Zil. cauldron, in which Caspar Antoine,

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of Milan, was boiled.' 18 Have Waldensian blood and purity ever been avenged?

IN

CHAPTER XI.

THE BOHEMIAN BRETHREN AND THE LOLLARDS.

N the thirteenth century and onward, a few seers read the signs of the coming Reformation. Men's souls felt the need of it, and hope lived on. They saw that the cause of Christ was not dead, its vitality was but suspended, and every-where prophetic aspiration looked for the end of shameless pretension and scandalous morals in the Church. Three classes are known as the Reformers before the Reformation: the Theologic school, chilled by farcical superstition; the Mystical, who groaned in spirit after God; and the Biblical, whose faith in the word of God. never faltered. This last school longed to cast the Bible into the mass of torpid profligacy, as the prophet threw salt into the pot of death. John Tauler, A. D. 1290-1361, was the most noble and noted of the Mystics. He was the son of a wealthy farmer of Strasburg. For eight years he sought some one to lead him nearer to God, and at last found his tutor in a beggar at the gate of the cathedral. He allied himself with those known as 'Friends of God,' at Strasburg and Cologne, and deserves to be ranked with Fenelon for learning, piety and eloquence. Of his sermons Luther said to Spalatin: 'If you enjoy solid theology, just like the ancient, get Tauler's sermons; for I have found no theology, whether in Latin or in any other tongue, that is more sound and consonant with the Gospel.' He did little, however, to reform his times; he enjoyed inner fellowship with God and trampled upon his own selfishness, but had no power to work on the dead level of a reformer.

With the great revival of letters the learned began to appeal from the decrees of the Church to the text of the Fathers, from them to the Latin Vulgate, and then from that translation to the Greek parchments. But the Italian thinkers rested in the revived literature; chiefly in philosophy, the charms of verse and the golden measurement of prose. Some of them were kings amongst men; but the restored classic form, diction, elegance, imagination, were the scepter which they waved, and its motions made no stir of dry bones in the open valley of vice. Rome gloried in the beauties of Hellas rather than in the beauties of holiness, in the song and the drama rather than in the realities of saving truth. At times shame aroused her humanist mood and she had fierce fits of morality, when she thundered against her own wickedness, being careful always not to strike herself with lightning. She was like the acolyte, who all his life had been too close to the altar to feel any reverence for its mysteries. Old Greek thought was welcome, but

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A FAMINE OF THE WORD.

not the Galilean. But when her learning went on pilgrimage into the Transalpine kingdoms and touched the less volatile and more robust races, it was felt at the foundations of humanity. German and Italian mind met at Constance and Basle; the souls of Dante, Medici and Piccolomini (Pius II.) clashed with the controversialists at Prague, Vienna, Cologne and Heidelberg; and while this seething mass was all alive, Guttenburg threw the first printed Bible into the vast ferment, and it has never been quiet since. From that day, 1455, the Reformation began to set in firmly. That very year Reuchlin, the father of Hebrew learning in Germany, was born, and twenty-two years later, Erasmus. These were called the Two eyes of Germany.' The first was the great forerunner of Luther, and fought against indulgences for a generation before that monk was born. He dared to compare the Vulgate with the Hebrew and to point out its errors. When rebuked for doing so he said: 'I revere St. Jerome as an angel; I respect De Lyra as a master; but I adore Truth as a God.' In that saying he uttered the great thought of the Reformation.

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The first great master who had grasped it was the princely Yorkshireman and pure-hearted pastor of Lutterworth. He was the father of the greatest idea of three centuries, namely: The gift of the Bible to England in English, as the inheritance of all, from the king and queen down to the plow-boy and milk-maid. He read the charter of God to man traced on the parchment, and while his own heart burned he quietly vowed that it was the native right of every Englishman to warm his bosom by its reading. Men call this lowly, daring farmer's son the Morning Star of the Reformation.' More gracefully may Wickliff wear the trope of Augustine, when he compares some saints to the sun. He charmed by the luster of his rising, he strengthened by the reign of his light, he filled the heavens with the glow of his decline, and after five hundred years the moon and the stars of the Reformation make to him their obeisance. The inflow of French had corrupted the old vernacular, so that the Anglo-Saxon version had become obsolete. Besides, it had become a crime for those who could read the Scriptures in their mother tongue to do so. The clergy themselves were grossly illiterate, many curates knew not the Ten Commandments, nor could they understand one verse of the Psalter. The pope sent his bull to Beaumont for his consecration as Bishop of Durham; and Andrews, in his History of Britain,' tells us that he tried again and again to spell out its words in public, but was so puzzled that at last he cried out: By St. Louis! it could be no gentleman who wrote this stuff.' Edward III. entered his protest against this state of things, and Wickliff resolved to end it forever. At that time a manuscript copy of one page of Scripture was of immense cost and printing was not discovered. The annual allowance of a university scholar was but fifty shillings, the wages of a laboring man three half-pence a day, and two arches of London bridge only cost £25, in 1240; yet in 1274 the Abbot of Croxton paid for a fairly written Bible in nine volumes the sum of £33 6s. 8d.

WICKLIFF THE YORKSHIREMAN.

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In Wickliff's day the contest between the Church and the civil power was just growing severe, and he devoted his whole life to a struggle with the papacy. Newman well describes the conflict: The State said to the Church, "I am the only power that can reform you; you hold of me; your dignities and offices are in my gift." The Church said to the State, "She who wields the power of smiting kings cannot be a king's creature; and if you attempt to reform her you will be planting the root of corruption by the same hand which cuts off its branches.'" Bull after bull was thundered against Wickliff for one thing or another, five of them in one month; but he quietly persevered, preparing his Bible for the common people. He took the greatest pains to make it plain, casting aside all foreign terms and scholastic words, using the uncouth language of the people, so that the most lowly and unlettered could understand what they read or heard. Knighton, Canon of Leicester, his violent foe, saw his drift and said: "Christ intrusted his Gospel to the clergy and doctors of the Church, to minister it to the laity and weaker sort. But this Master Wickliff, by translating it, has made it vulgar, and laid it more open to the laity, and even women who can read, than it used to be to the most learned of the clergy and those of the best understanding; and thus the gospel jewel, the evangelical pearl, is thrown about and trod underfoot of swine.'

Wickliff finished his work in 1380 and died at Lutterworth, his body sleeping there amongst his flock, in the chancel of the parish church. As his Bible aroused the English conscience, the pope felt a chill; he heard unearthly sounds rattle through the empty caverns of his soul, and he mistook Wickliff's bones for his Bible. The moldering skeleton of the sleeping translator polluted the consecrated ground where it slept. The Council of Constance condemned his Bible and his bones to be burnt together. The pope shivered all over, chilled to the marrow, and he needed a fire to thaw him withal. So after the godly preacher had slept quietly for over thirty years, Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, went down in state to Lutterworth to give new life to the venerable rector and to set him preaching again. A great body of solemn clergy went with him to enforce the grim sentence, and somehow managed to keep straight faces while they went through the pious farce of dragging the ghastly Yorkshire frame from the tomb. The little sanctuary stood on a hill, and when they had sated their ghostly ire at the charnel-house they drew the skeleton to the tiny river Swift, consumed it with dry fagots and threw the ashes into the generous stream. Every atom of his dust rested on a softer, purer bosom that day than Chicheley had ever known. Such a treasure had never floated on the laughing brook before, so it divided his holy ashes with the Severn and the Little Lutterworth was too small either for his Bible or his bones, and now they are welcomed by the wide world.

sea.

Froude finds a resemblance between some of Wickliff's views and those of the Baptists, and others have claimed him as a Baptist. But it were more accurate to say that many who carried his principles to their legitimate results became Baptists.

His foundation principles were: 'That all truth is contained in the Scriptures, and that Christ's law sufficeth by itself to rule Christ's Church; that we must receive nothing but what is in the Scripture; that whatever is added to it or taken from it is blasphemous; that no rite or ceremony ought to be received into the Church but that which is plainly confirmed by God's word; that wise men leave that as impertinent which is not plainly expressed; that we admit no conclusion that is not proved by Scripture testimony; and that whoever holds the contrary opinions is not a Christian, but flatly the devil's champion. In his translation he uses the words ‘wash,' ‘christen' and ‘baptize' in regard to the initiatory ordinance. His rendering of Matt. iii, 5, 6, is, 'Thanne ierusalem wente out to hym and al iudee, and al the cuntre aboute iordan: and thei werun waischen of hym in iordan and knowlechiden her synnes.' Again, in verse 11: 'I waisch you in watyr.' Also Mark i, 5: and thei weren baptisid of hym in the flum Iordan.' He always retains the preposition 'in' and never with,' ' in water,' 'in Jordan,' even when he speaks of Christ's figurative baptism, his overwhelming in grief he gives the same rendering, Mark x, 39: Ye schulen be waischun with the baptym, in whiche I am baptiside.' The natural force of the word in is made doubly emphatic by the use of the word 'wash,' wash in; showing that he intended to convey the sense of dip; according to Greenfield, 'It is evident, that to wash the body or person, without specifying any particular part of the body, must necessarily denote to bathe, which clearly implies immersion,' washing being the mere consequence of immersion. This sense of the translator agrees exactly with his common practice and that of his times.

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Wickliff's translation was to kindle the truth afresh through all Germany, and to light the way of John Huss and Jerome of Prague through the flames of Constance. The Bohemians came of the Sclavonic race, and were originally known as Czechs. They conquered Bohemia in the sixth century, and becoming Christians under the labors of Methodius, a Greek priest, long remained members of the Greek Church. They were brought under papal supremacy in 968, when their ritual was abolished, the Latin imposed upon them, and the cup taken from the laity. Their king was elective, and while bent on preserving their constitutional freedom against the pretensions of Austria, they were restive under the religious restrictions of the pope. Huss was of this Czech blood, and intensely national in spirit, therefore antipapal, as all Bohemian Catholics were. Insular England, also, had the ear of Bohemia through Anne, the English queen, wife of Richard II., and sister to their own king. She was the personal friend of Wickliff, who was one of her husband's chaplains. Huss made his writings his constant study, and when he not only defended them but demanded their free use amongst the Bohemians, two hundred volumes of them were publicly burnt at Prague. Some Waldensians in 1385 had brought Wickliff's works to Prague, and the Queen of Bohemia had helped Huss to circulate them. Various scandals helped to awake Bohemia; notably amongst them the discovery in an old church at Wilsnak, of three communion wafers im