“To the memory of one of the greatest of Englishmen, his country has been singularly and painfully ungrateful. On most of us the dim image looks down, like the portrait of the first of a long line of kings, without personality or expression. He is the first of the Reformers. To some he is the watchword of a theological controversy, invoked most loudly by those whom he would most have condemned. Of his works, the greatest, ‘one of the most thoughtful of the middle ages,’ has twice been printed abroad, in England never.[37] Of his original English works, nothing beyond one or two tracts has seen the light. If considered only as the father of English prose, the great Reformer might claim more reverential treatment at our hands. It is not by his translation of the Bible, remarkable as that work is, that Wycliffe can be judged as a writer. It is in his original tracts that the exquisite pathos, the keen delicate irony, the manly passion of his short nervous sentences, fairly overmasters the weakness of the unformed language, and gives us English which cannot be read without a feeling of its beauty to this hour.”[38] The mind of Wycliffe was constitutionally of large capacity—strong, many-sided, intense. The strength and the luminousness of his understanding, operating through an emotional nature of great tranquillity and depth, found for themselves unimpeded expression in the force and energy of a self-determining and resolute will. His deliberations, not his passions, prompted, directed, and controlled his actions. Hence the decisiveness of his conclusions; hence also the heroic pertinacity with which he adhered to his convictions, and, whether amidst compliments or curses, prosecuted his work. For to him personally, _dominion_ signified the lordship of the intellect over the emotions, the sovereignty of conscience over the intellect, and the monarchy of God over all. The “possessioner” of rich and varied mental endowments, he put forth all to use. For in all the departments of learning and science, John Wycliffe was second to none whose names adorn the annals of Oxford University and are the glory of England. Wycliffe’s works, when known in Oxford and in this country will not only vindicate what we have said, but will show that if his constitutional abilities were singularly great, his industry was indefatigable, and his studious course splendidly progressive. “Proscribed and neglected as he afterwards became, there was a time when Wycliffe was the most popular writer in Europe.”[39] Contact with his mind through his works, seems to have had a remarkably infectious influence on the men of his time and on the following generation. Hence the unexampled measures taken not by William Courtenay alone, but by successive Popes and by the Council of Constance (1415), to suppress the heresies of Wycliffe.