The last six years of Wycliffe‘s life—1378-1384—were packed full with work. For in these years, besides developing and expounding his ideas of the Church, the Papacy, and the hierarchy, and prosecuting his controversy with the mendicant friars, he trained and sent forth evangelists, “poor priests” to preach the Gospel in all places of the land; he expounded and taught the doctrine of Scripture concerning the Eucharist or the “real presence” in relation to the bread and the wine in the sacrament of the Lord‘s Supper; he professed and taught theology in Oxford; he preached and discharged the duties of an evangelical pastor in Lutterworth; and with the assistance of a few fellow-laborers, who entered into his purpose and shared with him in the desire for the evangelisation of the people of England, he translated the Scriptures out of the Latin Vulgate into the English tongue. “His life,” and more especially this part of it, “shows that his religious views were progressive. His ideal was the restoration of the pure moral and religious supremacy to religion. This was the secret, the vital principle, of his anti-sacerdotalism; of his pertinacious enmity to the whole hierarchical system of his day.”[20] Hence as his views of truth became deeper, wider, and more fixed, instead of attacking Popes and prelates, he assailed the Papacy and the hierarchy; and instead of attacking friars, he attacked mendicancy itself—denouncing it in common with the Papacy as contrary to the doctrines of the Word of God, and inconsistent with the order instituted by Christ within the Church, which is the house of God,—the pillar and ground of the truth. When Wycliffe appeared to answer for himself before the Pope‘s delegates at Lambeth, in 1378, he is said to have presented a written statement explanatory of the articles charged against him. The first sentence of that documentary confession is: “First of all, I publicly protest, as I have often done at other times, that I will and purpose from the bottom of my heart, by the grace of God, to be a sincere Christian, and, as long as I have breath, to profess and defend the law of Christ so far as I am able.”[21] A document of a somewhat similar kind, called by Wycliffe “A Sort of Answer to the Bull sent to the University,” was presented by him to Parliament.