Seven years afterwards, at the age of forty-eight, Wiclif was raised to the Theological Chair at Oxford; and from this period we may date the most memorable of his spiritual achievements. For it is a question whether, had he died before that time, his name would have come down to us distinguished by any peculiar characteristic from those of the other divines and doctors of his age; but when he turned this eminence into a vantage-ground for assailing the corruptions of his church, and thus recommended the expressions of truth and justice by the authority of academical dignity, his language acquired a commanding weight, and his person a peculiar distinction, which the former would never have possessed had he remained in an inferior station, nor the latter, had he not employed his station for the noblest purposes: purposes which, though they were closely connected with the welfare and stability of the Roman Catholic communion, were seldom advocated from the pulpits of her hierarchy, or the chairs of her professors. Had Wiclif been no more than an eminent and dignified theologian, he would have been admired, perhaps, and forgotten, like so many others. Had he been only a humble pleader for the reformation of the church, his voice might never have been heard, or it might have been extinguished by the hand of persecution: but his rank removed him above the neglect of his contemporaries; and his principles, thus acquiring immediate efficacy, have secured for him the perpetual respect of a more enlightened and grateful posterity.