Note 210 — Chapter VII · THE LUTHERAN INVASION

The same high authority, in a letter to the Guardian, March 1, 1899, says, “People will tell you, of course, that the seeds of the Reformation were sown before Henry VIII.’s days, and particularly that it was Wycliffe who brought the great movement on. I should be sorry to depreciate Wycliffe, who did undoubtedly bring about a great movement in his day, though a careful estimate of that movement is still a desideratum. Even in theology the cardinal doctrine of the Reformation—justification by faith—is in Wycliffe, I should say, conspicuous by its absence. But, whatever may be the theological debt of England to Wycliffe at the present day, twenty Wycliffes, all highly popular, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would not have brought about a Reformation like that under which we have lived during the last centuries. That was a thing which could only have been effected by royal power—as in England, or by a subversion of royal authority through the medium of successful rebellion—as in Scotland.”