demn the guiltless, but if each correct his own fault, then the world is mended.

Another writer of the time, John Wyclif, saw the state of England to be much as Gower had described it, and felt, like him, that the disorders and troubles of the time were but the results of disobedience to God's laws, and the forsaking of the real teaching of Christ.

John Wyclif was born in Yorkshire about 1324. Very little is known of him until, in 1361, we find him Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Seeing, like Chaucer's parish priest, that

If gold rust, what should iron do?

For if a priest be foul, on whom we trust,

No wonder is a ruder man should rust

Wyclif began to attack boldly the corruptions in the Church; the idleness and selfishness of the clergy, the teachers of the people. He gathered around him the students at Oxford, and lectured to them on the teaching of Christ, and he wrote against the begging friars and the exactions of the Pope. In 1365 the Pope claimed tribute from England, which had been unpaid for thirty-three years. Edward III. and the Parliament refused this demand, and Wyclif wrote a Latin tract called "De Dominio Divino," or the "Kingdom of God." In it he showed that God is the King of the world; He has given power to many persons to rule, to kings quite as much as to the Pope; but each man's conscience must be subject to God alone. The wealth of the Church belonged to God and the people of England, and might be used in any way for God's service and the good of the nation.

This roused the opposition of the Church at once against Wyclif, and he was summoned to appear before the Bishop of London; but at that time John of Gaunt was the leader in the opposition of the king and nobles to the demands of the Pope, and he went himself with

Wyclif before the Bishop of London, so that no trial took. place.

He sought to bring ignorant among the He taught a number

In the meantime Wyclif had been made Professor of Divinity at Oxford; and besides lecturing there, he was doing his very best to meet the evils of the time by working in the way in which Christ first began to set up the kingdom of God upon earth. teaching and light to the poor and people; and he did this in two ways. of good earnest men the simple truths of Christ's teaching, and then he sent them out to journey about from village to village, that they might talk with the poor people in their own plain, homely way, and teach them the true Gospel of Christ; besides this, he set to work to translate the Bible into the English of that day.

In 1376 Wyclif had the living of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, given to him. Here he worked hard as a diligent, patient, parish priest. It is thought that Chaucer, who, from his connection with John of Gaunt, must have known Wyclif, had him in his mind when he described the parish priest among the Canterbury Pilgrims:-

"The good man of religión

That was a pooré parson of a town,

But rich he was of holy thought and work.

He was also a learned man, a clerk;
That Christés gospel truly wouldé preach,

His parishens devoutly would he teach."

As Wyclif went on translating the Bible and searching simply and honestly for the truth, he saw more and more how much the Church of that time had departed from it; and in his later works he not only attacked the evil lives and practices of the clergy, but pointed out very plainly where the teaching of the Church differed from the teaching of Christ. He thus began to take the first

step in freedom of thought, or of each man trying earnestly to find out the truth for himself; and we shall see in the future story of our English Literature how this becomes the very spring of its vigour, freshness, and strength, and the means by which our literature advances onward and onward in the way of truth. But at the time when Wyclif spoke and wrote the honest convictions of his own mind, rather than the teaching of the Church, it seemed something outrageous that any man should set out to seek truth for himself instead of taking as truth whatever was taught on the authority of the Church. The clergy were for the most part already his enemies, on account of his attacks on their greediness and love of power; and now he no longer had the support and protection of the nobles. Wyclif's independence of thought was so new to them that they were alarmed at it; even stout old John of Gaunt was frightened, and he bade Wyclif be silent. The peasant revolt, turning as it did against the upper classes and the Church, made the two again friends; and when, in 1382,. Wyclif was summoned by Courtney, Archbishop of Canterbury, to answer for the doctrines taught in his books, condemnation was pronounced upon him and his writings, and he was deprived of his professorship at Oxford.

One of the most important works of Wyclif's life was the translation of the Bible into the English tongue, and during the next two years he was busied in completing and revising this. In 1384 he received a summons from the Pope ordering him to appear at the Papal court in Rome to answer the charges brought against him. Wyclif was an old man now, and in feeble health, but his courage was as strong, and his utter trust in the power of truth as steadfast, as in his more vigorous years. He sent a bold answer to the Pope; but his work was done, and the eventide had come. It was Christmas week when, as he was celebrating the Holy Communion in his church at Lutterworth,

he was struck with paralysis, and on the last day of that year God called His good and faithful servant to enter into the joy of his Lord.

While Wyclif was doing his work as the faithful parish priest, teaching the people, and struggling manfully against the corruptions which were destroying the life of the Church, he had a brave fellow-worker who is more directly connected with the story of our English Literature than Wyclif himself. This was William Langland, the writer of one of the most remarkable poems of that age. Very little is known of his life, and even the place and year of his birth are uncertain. Some part of his early years was certainly spent in the neighbourhood of the Malvern Hills, and he may have been educated in the Priory school at Malvern. Later we find him in London, gaining his livelihood as a singer in religious services.

His life in some way brought him into acquaintance with nearly every class of the English people of that day, and he saw and felt deeply the evils and misery of the time. But, like the true man he was, he did not sit down to sneer and grumble without doing his part to find out the reason of the wrong, and to set it right. He tried to put clearly before the eyes of English people how all misery comes from error and wrong-doing, and then to point them to Christ in His human nature laying aside His glory and coming down to us, as the guide to truth and right-doing. He meant his

poem for all classes of the English people, so he wrote it in language familiar to the poor and unlearned; and he took up the old First English fashion of using several words in a line beginning with the same letter, as

"A fair field full of folk found I there."

Here nearly every word begins with f. And in the line"Than truth and true love is no treasure better,"

the letter is repeated.

Langland called his poem the "Vision of Piers Plowman." Throughout the poem Piers Plowman represents the Divine light and life of God in a lowly outward form such as the world despises. Thus Piers Plowman is at first the simple poor man, rich in the Divine knowledge God reveals to him; and afterwards Piers Plowman stands for the Divine Son of God Himself in the lowly form in which He became a man, and lived and taught and died on earth. The "Vision of Piers Plowman" is the vision of God's truth and love revealed to men, not in the power and wealth of the world, but in simple things, where there is nothing to take men's eyes from the glory and beauty of "truth and true love."

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Langland begins his poem by fancying himself wandering over the Malvern Hills, as a shepe" (or as one of the flock of the people) "in a somer seson whan soft was the sonné." Then he became weary, lay down on the grass, and fell asleep; and as he slept he dreamed that he saw spread out before him “ a fair field full of folk." This field, stretching wide from east to west, represents the world; in the far east rose the Tower of Truth, and in the dim west "Death dwelt in a deep dale." Upon the field was a crowd of persons, all manner of men, working and wandering as the world asketh "—that is, every one seeking in different ways his own interest, ease, gratification, and pleasure, without Truth and Love. There were labourers, traders, courtiers, hermits, priests and friars, minstrels and singers, all selfish and covetous; and there was misery in the land, famine following on waste and sloth, revolt and disorder on wrong and injustice; for Langland, like Gower, shows how the misery and evil of the time come from the forsaking of Duty.

While the poet imagines himself to be thus looking down on "all the wealth of this world and the woe both," a lady appears to him; she has come from the Tower of

F