Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/271

Rh 1366 : perhaps at this very time, hardly in any case very long after, he was engaged in his treatise Of the Divine Dominion. About five years later he supplemented the work by a more extensive treatise Of civil Dominion; so that by 1371 or 1372 his views on this characteristic subject were fully formed and given to the world.

Dominion and service, in Wycliffe's scheme, are the two ends of the chain which links humanity to God. Dominion is not indeed a part of the eternal order of things, since it only comes into existence by the act of creation: God in the first chapter of Genesis becomes Lord in the second, because there are now creatures to be his servants; just as the lower animals are put in the relation of servants by the creation of man. Dominion and service are thus necessarily correlative terms, including, but not identical with, other terms of human relation. Dominion for instance presupposes right and power, and the exercise of either; but it is not the same with them: it cannot exist without the coexistence of an object to operate upon; whereas a man may