says: “Their speech became soft as oil; and with such fear were they struck, that they seemed to be as a man that heareth not, and in whose mouth are no reproofs.” Wycliffe passed as safely out of Lambert Chapel as on a former occasion he had passed out of the Ladye Chapel of St. Paul‘s. Not long after the sudden conclusion of this Lambeth synod, intimation of the Pope‘s death, on the 27th March 1378, was received in England. This so arrested the process against Wycliffe, that no further action was taken under the five elaborate bulls of Pope Gregory XI. A new chapter in the life and work of Wycliffe begins with the great papal schism of 1378. Till recently it was supposed that Wycliffe had early assumed the attitude towards the friars which had been taken by Richard Fitzralph, who, after he had been Chancellor of Oxford in 1333, and Archbishop of Armagh in 1347, died at Avignon in 1359. This supposition now appears to be historically without ground; and Dr. Lechler‘s researches tend to show that Wycliffe‘s controversy with the friars belonged not to the earlier but to the later period of his life. This view agrees with all that we know of the method according to which Wycliffe conducted and developed his great argument against the Papacy. Wycliffe‘s study of the papal claims, pretensions, usurpations, and exactions, led him to investigate the grounds and foundations not only of the political, but also of the ecclesiastical and spiritual, power and authority of the Popedom. In his reply in 1366 to the anonymous monk champion of the Papacy, he had represented or reported, with manifest approbation, the statement of one of the secular lords, declaring that the Pope was a man and peccable (_peccabilis_), and that he might be in mortal sin, and liable to what that involves. After he had taken his degree of Doctor in Divinity in 1370 or 1371, he expounded and vindicated from the Scriptures the doctrines which, by his long study of the Divine Word, he had been led to receive as articles of faith founded on the written Word of God. These views, derived directly and immediately from Holy Scripture, he illustrated by quotations from the early fathers—more particularly from the writings of Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory, the four fathers of the Latin Church. From the time when he became Doctor in Divinity, “he began,” says a contemporary opponent, “to scatter forth his blasphemies.” And as we know, it was after his return from Bruges in 1376 that he began to speak of the Pope not merely as peccable—fallible, and liable to sin—but as “Antichrist, the proud, worldly priest of Rome.”