Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/238

 God owes the devil love, and shows it by punishing him.] (8) If the pope be foreknown [i.e. predestined to damnation] and a bad man, and consequently a member of the devil, he has no power over Christ's faithful given him by any one, unless it be perchance by Cæsar. (9) After Urban VI no other is to be received as pope, but we ought to live after the fashion of the Greeks, [each nation] under its own laws. (10) To assert that it is contrary to holy scriptures that ecclesiastical persons should hold temporal possessions. The above propositions are described as heretical; the following are only erroneous, and contrary to the determination of the church: (11) That no prelate ought to excommunicate any one unless he first knows him to be excommunicated by God. (12) Any one so excommunicating is by that very fact heretical or excommunicate. (13) A prelate excommunicating a clerk who has appealed to the king and council of the realm is thereby a traitor to God, the king, and the realm. (14) Those who desist from preaching or hearing the word of God or the gospel preached [or, according to another reading, preaching the gospel] on account of the excommunication of men are excommunicate, and in the day of judgment will be held traitors to God. (15) To assert that it is lawful for any one—even a deacon or priest—to preach the word of God without licence of the apostolic see or of a catholic bishop or any other sufficiently recognised authority. (16) To assert that no one is a civil lord, no one a bishop, no one a prelate, while he is in mortal sin. (17) That temporal lords can at their pleasure take away temporal goods from ecclesiastics habitually delinquent, or that the people may at their pleasure correct delinquent lords. (18) That tithes are pure alms, and that parishioners may, on account of the sins of their curates, withhold them, and at their pleasure confer them on others. (19) That special prayers applied to one person by prelates or ‘religious’ persons are of no more use to that person than general prayers under the like conditions (cæteris paribus). (20) That by the very fact of a man entering any private religion whatever he is made less fit and capable of observing the commandments of God. (21) That the saints in instituting any private religions whatever, whether of the possessioned or of the mendicants, have sinned in such institution. (22) That the religious living in private religions are not of the Christian religion. (23) That the friars are bound to acquire their livelihood by the labour of their hands and not by mendicancy. (24) That any one conferring alms upon the friars is excommunicate, and so is the receiver of them. [In the version of ''Chron. Angl''. the sixteenth and the twenty-fourth of these are omitted.]

It will be observed that not all these opinions are ascribed to Wycliffe personally; still, if we allow for the crude and exaggerated way in which they are stated, they are certainly based upon the doctrines maintained in his extant writings. We may summarise the position at which Wycliffe had arrived by saying that he had now fully developed the doctrine that all authority, secular as well as ecclesiastical, is derived from God and is forfeited when the possessor of it is in a state of mortal sin; that he has applied it more definitely than before to the condemnation of many features in the existing church order; that he has denied the doctrine of transubstantiation upon which the power of the priesthood was fundamentally based, and that he has condemned the whole institution of monasticism in all its forms.

A word must be said on this last change of opinion. It is certain that in earlier life—at least from 1378 (Eulog. Hist. iii. 345)—Wycliffe had attacked the endowed orders for their wealth, luxury, and uselessness, while he had been rather inclined to approve of the mendicant rules as more agreeable to his own ideal both of preaching activity and of evangelical poverty (Chron. Angl. p. 116). When he appeared for the first time before the archbishop at St. Paul's, the Duke of Lancaster had provided four friars to defend him (ib. p. 118). A chronicler (Eulog. Hist. iii. 345) makes him (about 1377) greatly commend the religion of the friars minors, saying that they were the dearest to God (so Chron. Angl. p. 116). He speaks more doubtfully in the ‘Dialogus’ (about 1379), and from that time his hostility is ever on the increase. Though he felt that in the existing state of things it was necessary that his followers should (like John Wesley) take the whole world for their parish, his poor priests were seculars. This is a point which differentiates Wycliffe from previous assailants of mediæval abuses and preachers of practical religion. However strongly they might attack the evils of existing orders, they had usually ended by founding a new one—to divert earnest men from the ranks of the ordinary parochial clergy, and to become in a generation as corrupt as its predecessors. Wycliffe had not only seen the practical evils of mendicancy which was now being felt as a serious burden upon the poor householder, but had discerned the unevangelical character of the fundamental