Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/244

 of Christian morality meet strangely in Wycliffe's most characteristic doctrine—the doctrine of dominion founded on grace. All dominion, Wycliffe holds, is founded upon the will of God. Dominion is of three kinds: (1) natural, (2) evangelical, and (3) political. Natural dominion is the dominion which man had (by the grace of God) over all men and all things before the fall—a joint dominion over things and a dominion over other men of which the correlative is submission to a like dominion of those others—a state in which all in love serve one another. Were the law of Christ perfectly observed even now, this is the state to which human society would return, and then no law would be necessary but the law of Christ (though there are some reserves in favour of laws founded on the law of Christ), and coercion would be superfluous. And even now the righteous man has ideally a dominion over all things, though the fall has made it necessary for him to submit in practice to some limitation in the exercise of this dominion. It is sin that has brought with it the necessity for other laws and the coercive political authority necessary to enforce them.

But even so the laws owe their authority to their conformity with the law of Christ, the laws regarding property as much as other laws. The practical outcome of this doctrine is that lords ought to exercise their powers and to use their property in accordance with the Christian law of charity, which is sometimes identified with the law of nature. To what use of wealth this principle would point in the case of the secular rulers, Wycliffe does not explain in detail. But, though there is an admission that under certain circumstances the subject may be released from his allegiance, Wycliffe had no revolutionary practical intention as regards the state. The immediate practical object of the treatise is to develop the idea that ‘evangelical dominion,’ such as is conferred by Christ upon ecclesiastics, carries with it no property in things or coercive jurisdiction over persons; and, since all grants of property are conditional on the fulfilment of the conditions upon which it was originally given, he urges that it is the duty of the secular ruler under certain circumstances (he avoids in the treatises ‘De Dominio,’ though not in the later pamphlets, saying that those circumstances had actually arisen) to take away this property. The state should not enforce spiritual censures or the payment of tithes. Wycliffe's ideal was that the clergy should live a life of poverty—not a fantastic, technical poverty like that prescribed by the mendicant ideal, but a life of extreme simplicity, supported by the tithes or other voluntary offerings which would be freely given by their flocks to a clergy who really preached the gospel and worked among their parishioners. In urging upon the laity the duty of reforming the abuses of the church, Wycliffe was no Erastian, since, while he held strongly to a distinction of office between clergy and laity—between secular lords, to whom coercive jurisdiction was entrusted, and priests, whose authority was purely spiritual or pastoral—he asserts very emphatically the priesthood of the laity, and insists that he is only calling upon one part of the church to remove the evils due to the misconduct of another. The existence of the church is not dependent upon the clergy.

In his later theological writings and polemical pamphlets Wycliffe more and more develops into practical detail the consequences of these views. He denies more and more strongly the ‘jus divinum’ of the papacy; and he habitually treats the papacy in its present form as the most signal manifestation of the spirit of Antichrist. He accepts from Jerome the idea of the identity of the New Testament bishop with the New Testament presbyter. The priesthood, or the priesthood with the diaconate, is the only essentially necessary order of the ministry. At the same time he has no objection to episcopacy, and does not contemplate its abolition, provided it be limited to purely spiritual authority and functions. He pleads for the permission of clerical marriages, though he seems to regard celibacy as the higher ideal. More and more vehemently, as the struggle with his great enemies thickened, he denounces the whole principle of monachism. The monks are condemned for their wealth and their uselessness, the friars as the great hawkers of indulgences, pardons, ‘letters of fraternity,’ and so on—the great enemies of practical and spiritual religion in the church of his day. But his objections are not limited to the abuses of monasticism: he objects to its principle. The cloistered life, gregarious and yet isolated, the self-imposed obedience to prelates who might not be in a state of grace, the waste of time in mechanical devotions of inordinate length, the inevitable growth of a zeal for the order and its traditions, to the disparagement of the all-sufficient law of Christ, were in his view simply so many obstacles to the realisation of the evangelical ideal of life.

Wycliffe had no objection to the use of the term ‘seven sacraments,’ but held that there is no reason why the word ‘sacrament’ should be limited to the traditional seven; and, while he quite admits the necessity of signs and the