6. The Danish and Swedish Bishops Stripped of Power.--Violent measures were adopted, and the bishops, against their wills and their efforts to the contrary, were deprived of their honors, their prerogatives and their possessions. Yet this reformation (?) of the clergy in both those northern kingdoms, was not a religious, but a mere civil and secular transaction; and it was so necessary that it must have been undertaken if no Luther had arisen. For the bishops had by corrupt artifices got possession of so much wealth, so many cattle, such revenues and so great authority, that they were far more powerful than the kings, and were able to govern the whole realm at their pleasure; indeed they had appropriated to themselves a large portion of the patrimony of the kings and of the public revenues. Such therefore was the state both of the Danish and the Swedish commonwealths in the time of Luther, that either the bishops who shamefully abused their riches, their prerogatives and their honors must be divested of the high rank they held in the state, and be deprived of their ill-gotten wealth, or the ruin of those kingdoms, the irreparable detriment of the public safety and tranquility, and the sinking of their kings into contempt, with an utter inability to protect the people, must be anticipated.--Mosheim.
7. Wycliffe.--John Wycliffe, the greatest of all the "Reformers before the Reformation," was born in 1324, and is supposed to have been a native of the parish of Wycliffe, near the town of Richmond, Yorkshire. He studied at Oxford, but little is known of his university career. Wycliffe appears to have been a man of simple faith and of earnest and manly courage. He made a strong impression upon his age; an impression that was not effaced at the time of the Reformation. The Lollards, as his disciples were called, were to be found, not only among the poor, but in the church, the castle and even the throne. Wycliffe died in the year 1384.
8. England Prepared for the Reformation.--No revolution has been more gradually prepared than that which separated one half of Europe from the communion of the Roman see; nor were Luther and Zwingle any more than occasional instruments of that change which, had they never existed, would at no great distance of time been effected under the names of some other reformers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the learned, doubtfully and with caution, the ignorant with zeal and eagerness, were tending to depart from the faith and rites which authority prescribed. But probably not even Germany was so far advanced on this course as England. { 269} Almost a hundred and fifty years before Luther, nearly the same doctrines as he taught had been maintained by Wycliffe, whose disciples usually called Lollards, lasted as a numerous though obscure and proscribed sect, till aided by the confluence of foreign streams, they swelled into the Protestant church of England. We hear, indeed, little of them during some parts of the fifteenth century, for they generally shunned persecution; and it is chiefly through records of persecution that we learn of the existence of heretics. But immediately before the name of Luther was known, they seem to have become more numerous, or to have attracted more attention; since several persons were burned for heresy, and others abjured their errors in the first years of Henry VIII's reign. Some of these, as usual among ignorant men, engaging in religious speculation, are charged with very absurd notions; but it is not so material to observe their peculiar tenets as the general fact that an inquisitive and sectarian spirit had begun to prevail.--Hallam's Const. Hist. England.