In this third article, we intend to show Wycliffe’s relationship to the translation and preaching of the word of God. A dramatic background to this aspect of Wycliffe’s work is provided by an incident which is thought to have occurred at the beginning of 1379. Wycliffe, though not an old man, had fallen ill, and it was said that he was dying. The friars were overjoyed. With consummate presumption they hurried to his bedside. They began by wishing him recovery, but soon they let out the real aim of their visit. “You have death on your lips”, they said, “be touched by your faults, and retract in our presence all you have said to our injury”. Uncharacteristically, Wycliffe at first gave no reply. With unpitying eyes, the friars watched the prostrate figure. Then Wycliffe spoke, but not to his visitors: he asked a servant to raise him up. “I shall not die, but live,” he said, “and again declare the evil deeds of the friars.” Dismayed and confounded, they hurried from the scene.
The backbone of the work which was done in fulfilment of this prophecy was Wycliffe’s translation of the scriptures into English. Before his illness he had published a work “On the Truth and Meaning of Scripture”. In this book he had asserted that “Christ’s law sufficeth by itself to rule Christ’s church”. Now that he was recovering, Wycliffe set himself to open the way for the common people to have access to Christ’s word. His expression of his hope is sublime. “I will fill the realm of England with light, and the ghostly terrors inspired by the priests, and the bondage in which they keep the people through their superstitious fears, will flee away as do the phantoms of the night when the sun rises. I will re-open the appointed channel of holy influence between earth and the skies, and the face of the world will be renewed.”
There had been some previous attempts at translating the Bible in England, but these had been fragmentary at best, and some had been wholly unsuccessful. Wycliffe was certainly the first to take steps to translate the whole Bible into English. He translated the New Testament himself, but was assisted with the Old Testament by Nicholas Hereford. The translation was made from the Latin Vulgate, and took four years to complete. The language which he employed in the translation was powerful and graphic. It has been said that Wycliffe’s Bible marks as great an epoch in the development of the English language as Luther’s Bible does in the history of the German language. The appeal of Wycliffe’s English can be felt from the following passage, despite the absence of punctuation: it is his rendering of John 5, 2-9.
“And in ierusalem is a waischynge place that in ebrewe is named bethsaida and hath fyue porchis in these laie a greete multitude of sike men blinde crokid and drie abidyng the mouynge of the watir for the angel of the lord cam down certeyn tymes in to the watir and the watir was moued and he that first cam down in to the sistterne aftir the mouynge of the watir was made hool of what euer sikenesse he was holden and a man was there hauynge eiyte and thritti year in his sikenesse and whanne ihesus hadde seen hym liggynge and hadde knowen that he hadde myche tyme he seith to him wolt thou be made hool the sike man answerid to hym lord I haue no man that whanne the water is moued to putte me in to the cisterne for the while I come another goith doum bifor me. Thesus seith to hym rise up take thi bed and go and anon the man was made hool and took up his bedde and wente forth and it was saboth in that dai.”
Printing had not been invented in Wycliffe’s time, and the copying of manuscripts was a slow work. As and when the new work became available therefore, it was eagerly bought: “Poor people gathered their pennies and formed co-partneries for the purchase of the sacred volume. Those who could afford it gave a sum of five marks for a manuscript copy; others for a few leaves of Peter of Paul would give a load of hay”.
While the common people clamoured for the scriptures in their own tongue, churchmen held up their hands in horror. The Canon of Leicester, for one, was scandalised: “Christ delivered his gospel to the clergy and doctors of the Church, that they might administer to the laity and to weaker persons, according to the state of the times and the wants of men. But this Master John Wycliffe translated it out of Latin into English, and thus laid it more open to the laity and to women who could read, than it had formerly been to the most learned of the clergy, even to those of them who had the best understanding. And in this way the gospel pearl is cast abroad, and trodden under foot of swine, and that which was before precious to both clergy and laity is rendered, as it were, common jest to both”. When men are in such darkness as is seen lurking in these words, one wonders whether rational or spiritual arguments will be of any avail to enlighten them. Whatever arguments Wycliffe used to defend his action, we fear they fell only on deaf churchmen’s ears. For our own interest, however, we note that Wycliffe began his defence by demanding: “Do you know whom you blaspheme? Did not the Holy Ghost give the word of God at first in the mother-tongue of the nations to whom it was addressed? Why do you speak against the Holy Ghost? You say that the Church of God is in danger from this book. How can that be? . . . It is you who place the Church in jeopardy by hiding the divine warrant, the missive royal of her King, for the authority she wields and the faith she enjoins”.
Thus Wycliffe came into sharpest conflict with the church of Rome on the subject of the word of God. That is a significant fact, for there is no subject which lies nearer to the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
We have looked at Wycliffe as a translator: we must now consider him as a preacher.
That there were many in Wycliffe’s time who corrupted the word of God, Wycliffe himself frequently testified: he described the friars as “adulterers of the word of God, who did not preach in sincerity”. Their attempts at expositing the scriptures Wycliffe dismissed as telling of “cronylis and fablis to pleese the puple”. That he himself knew what is required of a preacher is evident from the remark in one of his sermons: “It is noo nede to dipe us in this stori more that the gospel telleth . . . Hold we us apaied (content) on the mesure that God hath govun us, and dreams we not aboute newe pointes that the gospel leveth, for this is a synne of curiouse that harmeth more than profiteth”. The following is an extract from a sermon of Wycliffe’s on Luke 15. In the interests of brevity, only a few isolated sentences are given: the spelling has been modernised.
“In this gospel telleth Christ two parables of comfort, how his people shall be saved allif (although) priests grudge there against . . . The story of this gospel telleth how publicans and sinful men were coming to Jesus to hear his lore (teaching); and he treated them graciously as a good Lord, but Scribes and Pharisees grudged against this and blasphemed against Christ, and said he ate with them unlawfully.” Later Wycliffe compared the scribes and pharisees of our Lord’s day with the prelates and monks of his own. Having made the comparison, Wycliffe pursued it, making satirical use of “scribe”, meaning “writer”, and of “pharisee”, meaning “separatist”. “And these secular prelates may well be cleded (called) scribes, for they write the money that they pile (pillage) of the people more busily than they print in their souls the knowing of God’s law. And these religious (monks) be pharisees for they be divided from the common manner of living by their rotten rites, as the pharisees were.” Though Wycliffe was the greatest scholar known in Oxford for many a year, we see from the above that his preaching was very plain and direct. Thomas Fuller has an interesting comment on this: “On the week days, in the schools, he proved to the learned what he meant to preach, and on the Lord’s Day he preaches in the pulpit to the vulgar what he had proved before . . . his disputing making his preaching to be strong, and his preaching making his disputations to be plain”.
Wycliffe placed great emphasis on the importance of the preaching of the gospel. For a time he disputed as if he were set only for the defence of the gospel. Towards the end of his life, however, he appears to have adopted wholly the principle that the best form of defence is attack. “If begging friars,” he said, “stroll over the country, preaching the legends of saints and the history of the Trojan war, we must do for God’s glory what they will do to fill their wallets, and form a vast itinerant evangelisation to convert souls to Jesus Christ.
We cannot here review the work of Wycliffe’s “poor priests”, nor the Lollard movement with which they merged. Only a fleeting glimpse we can give of this facet of Wycliffe’s work—a glimpse in which we see him bidding his departing disciples “god speed”.
“Go and preach; it is the sublimest work, but imitate not the priests whom we see after sermon sitting in the ale-houses, or at the gaming table, or wasting their time in hunting. After your sermon is ended, do you visit the sick, the aged, the poor, the blind and the lame, and succour them according to your ability.”
J.T.