But it is not only compassion for the disinherited which moves the rebel, but a profound faith in their power to work out their own salvation. The appeal to the people has been of the essence of rebel policy. The Peasants’ Revolt in England was stimulated by John Ball’s doggerel verse, which was specially intended to stir discontent. “Wyclif,” says John Richard Green, “appealed, and the appeal is memorable as the first of such a kind in our history, to England at large. With an amazing industry, he issued tract after tract in the tongue of the people itself.” He wrote “in the rough, clear homely English” of the ploughman and trader of his day. The Tractarians of a later date were only imitating their great Oxford precursor when they went distributing their tracts from door to door. But Wyclif did not confine his popular appeal to tracts. His order of “poor preachers,” “whose coarse sermons and long russet dress moved the laughter of the clergy, formed a priceless organisation for the diffusion of their master’s teaching.” John Brown addressed his propaganda at an early stage to the negro; and it is hardly doubtful that his hopes chiefly centred at last upon a general rising of negroes in support of his campaign. Long before, John Hus had carried his appeal to the Bohemian people, as Arnauld of Port Royal, convicted of Jansenism at the Sorbonne, designed to place his case before the French. Pascal’s Provincial Letters were deliberately composed as an appeal from the ecclesiastics to the public. The great emphasis upon public preaching during the Reformation was derived from this same faith in the efficacy of popular appeal. It is sufficiently well known to need no further remark than the reminder that in this way the rebel has made important contributions to the literary as well as the social and religious history of his people. The paradox of the rebel, then, is this, that while he has been assailed as a subverter of social order, his own driving force has been a social sense quicker and broader than that of his orthodox contemporaries. He attacked the existing social organisation only to break down walls that hindered fellowship. He heard the call of the disinherited and it became in his heart a call to lead them into that heritage of opportunity of which they were cheated by the cupidity and cunning of the great. He assailed the Bastilles of constituted authority, and battered hoary institutions that people might—at this point or that—come into their own. He sought to fling out wide the frontiers of privilege that the poor and the outcast might come into a world of larger life.