Wycliffe‘s views respecting transubstantiation having undergone a great change between the years 1378 and 1381, he felt bound in conscience to make known what he now came to believe to be the true doctrine concerning the Eucharist. For, as he says in the “Trialogus,” “I maintain that among all the heresies which have ever appeared in the Church, there was never one which was more cunningly smuggled in by hypocrites than this, or which in more ways deceives the people; for it plunders the people, leads them astray into idolatry, denies the teaching of Scripture, and by this unbelief provokes the Truth Himself often-times to anger.”[24] In accordance with all this, Wycliffe in the spring of 1381 published twelve short theses or conclusions respecting the Eucharist and against transubstantiation.”[25] All Oxford was moved by these conclusions. By the unanimous judgment of a court called and presided over by William de Bertram, the Chancellor, they were declared to be contradictory to the orthodox doctrine of the Church, and as such were prohibited from being set forth and defended in the university, on pain of suspension from every function of teaching, of the greater excommunication, and of imprisonment. By the same mandate all members of the university were prohibited, on pain of the greater excommunication, from being present at the delivery of these theses in the university. When this mandate was served on Wycliffe, he was in the act of expounding the doctrine of Scripture concerning the Lord‘s Supper. The condemnation of his doctrine came upon him as a surprise; but he is reported to have said that neither the Chancellor nor any of his assessors could refute his arguments or alter his convictions. Subsequently he appealed from the Chancellor to the King. In the meantime, finding himself “tongue-tied by authority,” he wrote a treatise on this subject in Latin,[26] and also a tract in English entitled “The Wicket,” for the use of the people. Wycliffe‘s doctrinal system may be said to have attained to its completeness when, rejecting the idea of transubstantiation, he accepted those simple and Scriptural views of the Eucharist which, apart from papalism or medievalism, have in all ages prevailed within the Catholic Church— that is, within the society or congregation of believers in Christ, irrespectively of name, place, time, ceremony, or circumstance. While this is so, “it is impossible,” as Dr. Lechler truly says, “not to be impressed with the intellectual labor, the conscientiousness, and the force of will, all equally extraordinary, which Wycliffe applied to the solution of this problem. His attack on the dogma of transubstantiation was so concentrated, and delivered (with so much force and skill) from so many sides, that the scholastic conception was shaken to its very foundations.”[27] He anticipated in his argument against the medieval dogma, and in favor of the primitive and catholic faith concerning the