How was the great revolution which was to bring the church back from these corruptions of life and doctrine prepared for? Ebrard supposes that witnesses for holy living and simple faith, but partially connected with the dominant church, were never from Celtic times entirely wanting in Britain; and it may have been that, through Richard Rolle and a few other hermits, the feeble spark in the smoking wick continued to smoulder on till it was blown into a flame by Wycliffe. At any rate it was blown into a flame by him and his poor priests; and from their time witness after witness arose to contend for the right of the laity to read the Word of God, and to maintain that men were saved by the merits of Christ and should pray to Him alone, that there was no purgatory in the popish sense, and that the pope was not the Vicar of Christ. Wycliffe's poor priests, when persecuted in the south, naturally sought shelter among the moors and mosses of the north. The district of Kyle and Cunningham was "a receptakle of Goddis servandis of old," where their doctrines were cherished till the dawn of the Reformation. In 1406 or 1407 James Resby, one of these priests, is found teaching as far north as Perth, and for his teaching he was accused and condemned to a martyr's death. A similar fate is said to have befallen another in Glasgow about 1422, in all probability the Scottish Wycliffite whose letter to his bishop has recently been unearthed in a Hussite MS. at Vienna; and in 1433 Paul Craw or Crawar, a Bohemian, for disseminating similar opinions, was burned at the market cross in St Andrews. These were not in all probability the only grim triumphs of Laurence, Abbot of Lindores, one of the first rectors in the University of St Andrews, who during so many years "gave no rest to heretics," but they are all of whom records have been preserved to our time. The fact that every Master of Arts in the University of St Andrews had to take an oath to defend the church against the Lollards,[8] and the other fact that the Scottish Parliament in 1425 enjoined that every bishop should make inquiry anent heretics and Lollards, and that where any such were found, they should be punished as the law of holy church requires,[9] speak more significantly of the alarm they had occasioned than these sporadic martyrdoms. Still more, perhaps, does the abuse Fordun, or rather his continuator, heaps on them, bear witness to the alarm they had caused. Yet at the very close of the century, and in the old haunt, we find no fewer than thirty processed, and through the kindness of the king more gently dealt with than the ecclesiastical authorities wished; three of the most resolute--namely, Campbell of Cessnock, his noble wife, and a priest who officiated as their chaplain and read the New Testament to them--being released when at the stake. [Sidenote: John Major.]