Howbeit, in the beginning of the year following, Wiclif presented himself at Lambeth, before the Tribunal of the Papal Commissioners, to meet the various charges of heretical pravity. We have no room to doubt the wishes and intentions of his judges. But on this occasion he was rescued from them, for the second time, by extraneous circumstances. The populace of London, among whom his opinions may have made some progress, and by whom his name was certainly respected, interrupted the meeting with much clamour and violence, and showed a fierce determination to save him from oppression. And at the same time, while the delegates were confounded by this interference, a message was delivered to them from the Queen Mother, prohibiting any definitive sentence against Wiclif. Thus unexpectedly assailed, and from such different quarters, the Prelates immediately softened their expressions, and abandoned their design; and Wiclif returned once more in safety to the propagation of his former opinions, and to the expression of others which had not yet been broached by him. The sum of those opinions might be given with tolerable accuracy, though some of them were not perhaps propounded with perfect distinctness, and others have been made liable to consequences which were disclaimed by their author. In the first place, he rejected every sort of pretension, tenet, or authority, which did not rest on the foundation of Scripture: here he professed to fix the single basis of his whole system. Accordingly he denounced, with various degrees of severity, many of the popular observances of his church. He rejected auricular confession; and declared pardons and indulgences to be no better than antichristian devices for augmenting the power and wealth of the clergy, at the expense of the morality of the people. He paid no respect to excommunications and interdicts; he pronounced confirmation to be an unnecessary ceremony, invented for the aggrandizement of the episcopal dignity; he reprobated the celibacy of the clergy, and the imposition of monastic vows. And in his contempt for the outward ceremonies of the church, even to the use of Sacred music, he anticipated by more than two centuries the principles of the Puritans. In like manner, he maintained that bishops and priests, being one and the same order according to their original institution, were improperly distinguished; and that the property claimed by the clergy, being in its origin eleemosynary, was merely enjoyed by them in trust for the benefit of the people, and was disposable at the discretion of the secular government.