The great hall, crowded to its heavy oaken doors, witnesses to the interest that is centred in the trial, and all eyes are fixed on the pale, stern old man who stands before the dais silently facing his judges. He is quite alone, and his thoughts go back, with some bitterness, to his previous trial, when the people crowded the doors shouting for their favorite, and John of Gaunt and the Lord Marshal of England were standing by his side. He has learned since then not to put his trust in princes. The power of his enemies has rapidly grown; even the young King (Richard II) has been won over to their cause, and patrons and friends have drawn back from his side, whom the Church has resolved to crush. The judges have taken their seats, and the accused stands awaiting the charges to be read, when suddenly there is a quick cry of terror. A strange rumbling sound fills the air, and the walls of the judgment hall are trembling to their base--the monastery and the city of London are being shaken by an earthquake! Friar and prelate grow pale with superstitious awe. Twice already has this arraignment of Wycliffe been strangely interrupted. Are the elements in league with this enemy of the Church? Shall they give up the trial? "No!" thunders Archbishop Courtenay, rising in his place. "We shall not give up the trial. This earthquake but portends the purging of the kingdom; for as there are in the bowels of the earth noxious vapors which only by a violent earthquake can be purged away, so are these evils brought by such men upon this land which only by a very earthquake can ever be removed. Let the trial go forward!" What think you, reader, were the evils which this pale ascetic had wrought, needing a very earthquake to cleanse them from the land? Had he falsified the divine message to the people in his charge? Was he turning men's hearts from the worship of God? Was his priestly office disgraced by carelessness or drunkenness or impurity of life? Oh, no. Such faults could be gently judged at the tribunal in the Blackfriars' hall. Wycliffe's was a far more serious crime. He had dared to attack the corruptions of the Church, and especially the enormities of the begging friars; he had indignantly denounced pardons and indulgences and masses for the soul as part of a system of gigantic fraud; and worst of all, he had filled up the cup of his iniquity by translating the Scriptures into the English tongue; "making it," as one of the chroniclers angrily complains, "common and more open to laymen and to women than it was wont to be to clerks well learned and of good understanding. So that the pearl of the Gospel is trodden under foot of swine."