It is curious to mark how timidly the Primate of the day dealt with such a danger as this. Sudbury was acting in virtue of a Papal injunction, but he acted as though the shadow of the terrible doom that was awaiting him had already fallen over him. He summoned the popular Bishop of London to his aid ere he cited the Reformer to his judgment-seat. It was not as a prisoner that Wyclif appeared in the chapel: from the first his tone was that of a man who knew that he was secure. He claimed to have the most favourable construction put upon his words; then, availing himself of his peculiar subtlety of interpretation, he demanded that where they might bear two meanings his judges should take them in an orthodox sense. It was not a noble scene--there was little in it of Luther's "Here stand I--I can none other;" but both sides were in fact acting a part. On the one hand the dead pressure of ecclesiastical fanaticism was driving the Primate into a position from which he sought only to escape; on the other Wyclif was merely gaining time--"beating step," as men say--with his scholastic formulæ. What he looked for soon came. There was a rumour in the City that Papal delegates were sitting in judgment on the Reformer, and London was at once astir. Crowds of angry citizens flocked round the archiepiscopal house, and already there was talk of attacking it when a message from the Council of Regency commanded a suspension of all proceedings in the case. Sudbury dismissed his prisoner with a formal injunction, and the day was for ever lost to the Church.