Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/258

240 sole privilege of the clergy is their spiritual character. Temporal sovereignty or jurisdiction is an accident of their civil position; and all inferences from the Bible which have been imagined to authorise it, such as the famous argument of the two swords, are incompatible not only with the conception of a church but also with the plain meaning of the texts from which they are deduced. My kinqdom is not of this world.

The two books of the Defensor Pacis thus comprise,—though we have been able to give but the briefest abstract of a work which fills more than a hundred and fifty folio pages in Goldast's edition of the original,—the whole essence of the political and religious theory which separates modern times from the middle ages. The significance of the reformation, putting theological details aside, lay in the substitution of a ministry serving the church, the congregation of Christian men, for a hierarchical class. The significance of the later political revolution, even now far from universally realised, lay in the recognition of the people as the source of government, as the sovereign power in the state. Both these ideas Marsiglio appropriated. He had not only a glimpse of them as from afar off : he thought them out, defined them, stated them with the clearest precision, so that the modern constitutional statesman, the modern protestant, has nothing to alter in their principle, has only to develop them and fill in their outline. Marsiglio may be stigmatised as a doctrinaire, but he belongs to that rarest class of doctrinaires whom future ages may rightly look back upon as prophets. It is this quality, this prescience of the new order for which the world was becoming ripe, that raises him above the whole body of antagonists to the hierarchical policy of the church in the middle ages. His great colleague Ockham, his successor Wycliffe, were immersed in the petty, or at best the transitory, interests of scholasticism. In theological doctrine Wycliffe may by some be considered to have done more signal service. But his thoughts and those of his fellows move