Others will remember that in the next century it
produced, in John Wycliffe, the great opponent of the Friars, the man
who, as the first of the Reformers, is to many the most interesting
figure in mediaeval English religious history. In the sixteenth
century, Oxford plays no great part in the actual revolution in the
English Church; yet it will be a place attractive to many who cherish
the memory of the "Oxford Reformers," the members of Erasmus' circle
--John Colet, Thomas More, William Grocyn, and other scholars--who
hoped by sound learning to amend the Church without violent change.
Some, on the other hand, will see in the sixteenth-century Oxford,
the school which trained men for the Counter-Reformation, such as the
heroic Jesuit, Campion, or Cardinal Alien, the founder of the English
College at Douai. The Anglican "Via Media" found its special
representatives in Oxford in Jewel and Hooker, and in Laud, the
practical genius who carried out its principles in the Church
administration of his day. It was fitting that the movement for the
revival of Church teaching in England in the nineteenth century
should be an Oxford movement, and Newman's pulpit at St.
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