So Wycliffe, beginning with a standpoint which could be shared, and in fact was shared, by many of the most orthodox Catholics of his time, growing as he went on more profoundly conscious of, and convinced of, the rightness of his essential principles, became less and less compromising, more and more the opponent not only of practices but of the doctrines with which such practices were associated. He became urgent against the reigning nominalist creed, but most especially against its theories of the Sacrament. For him space and time, matter and form were objective realities. The bread and wine were not a part of Christ and could not become so; they remained bread and wine in substance and could never be anything else, only Christ was present in them.[154] The doctrine of identification between the bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ was pernicious.[155] Nothing could be more horrible than the notion that a priest had the ability to ‘make’ God daily.[156] The language of the service of the Eucharist was not literal, but figurative.[157] The literal interpretation was an invitation to mere idolatry, an encouragement to the ignorant to worship the Host itself.[158] Christ indeed was present in the Sacrament, and the bread and wine were not merely commemorative symbols; on the other hand, there was no miraculous transformation of the elements. This is very much the same theory as Luther’s doctrine of Consubstantiation. Wycliffe united with it the tenet that a priest living in mortal sin could not consecrate.[159] The extent and nature of the influence of Wycliffitism in England is a difficult and somewhat controversial question.[160] The translation of the Bible certainly had its permanent influence; and the device of the Poor Preachers spread the new doctrines further afield than would have been possible in those days only with the aid of lecture, sermon and treatise. Wycliffe’s character does not appear to have been such as to have enabled him to become the leader of a great popular movement. He was too much of a schoolman; his method was too academic.[161] But the preachers—not to be thought of as crude, semi-educated men, for they were mostly clerks of Oxford, who had studied under Wycliffe—touched a wider public than their master himself reached. Clearly in popularizing, they also exaggerated his doctrines, making them more downright, more practical, more mundane, emphasizing their social tendencies, those communistic elements which had a natural popular appeal.