The style of Wiclif’s Bible is simpler and clearer than the rest of his English. Green says that Wiclif’s style is a model, and that he was the father of our modern vernacular; but this is disposed of by better authority. Sharon Turner says that Wiclif’s style was inferior to that of some of his cotemporaries. Vaughn[19] whose biography of Wiclif is an almost continuous panegyric, says his style is repulsive and unintelligible. Le Bas says it is barbarous. Knight’s history says it is so obscure as to defy interpretation. The truth is, Wiclif like many another man of genius, had not the minor gift of phrase-making; and the better English of his Bible was owing to his collaborators who possessed that gift. Wiclif with the rest of his knowledge, had self-knowledge: he knew his own defects and how to obviate them. As for his opinions they were fluctuating; and different writers give different accounts of them. His eulogists say they were progressive; his enemies that he recanted. Hume says he had not the spirit of a martyr, and was ready to explain away his doctrines whenever they put him in danger; but it is probable that such was the unpopularity of the French hierarchy that he ran no risk of martyrdom. He was not only left undisturbed in his cure of Lutterworth, but in spite of his opinions he was made one of the royal chaplains at the accession of Richard II. We find him at one time appealing to the pope against the archbishop of Canterbury; at another, calling his Holiness a _purse-kerver_ that is a pick pocket. Some of his expressions seem to call in doubt the existence of purgatory; but he upholds masses for the dead. He adheres to the seven sacraments, but he not only condemns the restrictions of the Church on the marriage of relatives, he approves of that connection between those more nearly allied in blood than is now sanctioned by modern legislation. He was no doubt betrayed at times by the sharpness of his own dialectics. His was the logic of the schools, the logic of the nominalists and the realists, of Abelard, Aquinus and Dun Scotus, a logic by which anything might be proved or disproved at choice. The most important and most difficult question is what were his opinions of the Eucharist. It is commonly said that he denied Transubstantiation. But how far did he deny it?