And scarce was his task well finished when, like his great predecessor Bede, the brave old priest laid down his life. He himself had expected that a violent death would have finished his course. His enemies were many and powerful; the Primate, the King, and the Pope were against him--with the friars, whom he had so often and so fiercely defied; so that his destruction seemed but a mere question of time. But while his enemies were preparing to strike, the old man "was not, for God took him." It was the close of the old year, the last Sunday of 1384, and his little flock at Lutterworth were kneeling in hushed reverence before the altar, when suddenly, at the time of the elevation of the sacrament, he fell to the ground in a violent fit of the palsy, and never spoke again until his death on the last day of the year. In him England lost one of her best and greatest sons, a patriot sternly resenting all dishonor to his country, a reformer who ventured his life for the purity of the Church and the freedom of the Bible--an earnest, faithful "parson of a country town," standing out conspicuously among the clergy of the time. "For Criste's lore and his apostles twelve He taughte--and first he folwede it himselve." Here is a choice specimen from one of the monkish writers of the time describing his death: "On the feast of the passion of St. Thomas of Canterbury, John Wycliffe, the organ of the devil, the enemy of the Church, the idol of heretics, the image of hypocrites, the restorer of schism, the storehouse of lies, the sink of flattery, being struck by the horrible judgment of God, was seized with the palsy throughout his whole body, and that mouth which was to have spoken huge things against God and his saints, and holy Church, was miserably drawn aside, and afforded a frightful spectacle to beholders; his tongue was speechless and his head shook, showing painfully plainly that the curse which God had thundered forth against Cain was also inflicted on him." Some time after his death a petition was presented to the Pope, which to his honor he rejected, praying him to order Wycliffe's body to be taken out of consecrated ground and buried in a dunghill. But forty years after, by a decree of the Council of Constance, the old reformer's bones were dug up and burned, and the ashes flung into the little river Swift which "runneth hard by his church at Lutterworth." And so, in the often-quoted words of old Fuller, "as the Swift bear them into the Severn, and the Severn into the narrow seas, and they again into the ocean, thus the ashes of Wycliffe is an emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all over the world."