those of the Trinity, immortality, the resurrection, the efficacy of prayer might be true in theology, yet quite untrue in philosophy.[136] Such a disingenuous compromise put a premium at once upon scepticism and insincerity. There was one great schoolman living against whom, despite the prolixity and barrenness of much of his logic, no charge of unreality or insincerity can be brought—John Wycliffe. Beneath the dialectical subtleties and sophistries common to all the works of the scholastic philosophers there was in his case a profound sense of the obligation to seek, and a zealous desire to discover, the absolute truth. As with all great thinkers who have left a permanent mark on the history of religious and political opinion, there was in Wycliffe a great moral earnestness, an honest hatred of shams and impurities and all that is ignoble. The scandals of Avignon and the Schism helped to form the creed of Wycliffe, as they did that of the most religiously-minded men of the fourteenth century. His teaching was the moral repercussion of a sensitive and powerful mind flung back from impact against the clerical abuses of the Church. Indeed, as in the case of Marsiglio, so in that of Wycliffe, his attack was primarily on the polity of the Church, only secondly on doctrine. Many of his writings are perfervid denunciations, in the violent language common to mediæval controversialists, of the ill-living, laxity and ostentation of the clergy. His diatribes against successive popes and the institution of the papacy became more and more unmeasured in the choice of epithets. The writings of Wycliffe cannot be taken as a true description of the Church of his time, so great is the allowance that has to be made for the hyperbolical language of furious partizanship.