Quotes About Wycliffe

Do not let friars enter your wine cellars for fear they will bless every barrel and change the wine into blood.

Whoever reads the Scriptures in 'Wycliffe's learning' [the mother tongue, English], will forfeit land, cattle, goods, body, and life from themselves and their heirs forever; and be condemned as heretics to God, enemies to the crown, and complete traitors to England." That was man's reward to the true believers in Christ, but their Lord's reward to them was an everlasting crown of righteousness.

I joined a organisation called Wycliffe Bible Translators that had the objective of translating the Bible into all the languages of the world, and to do that you had to study linguistics, and so that was my initial exposure to linguistics.

Here's a bargain. You can take him to a sermon if you don't take him to a brothel." Mercy, he suspects, comes from a family where John Wycliffe's writings are preserved and quoted, where the scriptures in English have always been known; scraps of writing hoarded, forbidden verses locked in the head. These things come down the generations, as eyes and noses come down, as meekness or the capacity for passion, as muscle power or the need to take a risk.

Wycliffe's remains were burned on a little bridge that spanned the River Swift, which was a tributary of the Avon. His ashes were thrown into the stream. Soon afterwards a Lollard prophecy appeared: The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea. And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad Wide as the waters be. In English.

The English Bible has often been called a preacher's Bible. Written to be spoken, written to spread the word in the language of the land, a cause for which Wycliffe and Tyndale and hundreds of other English Christians had lived and died.