Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/273

Rh tenure all alike. It is this principle of the dependence of the individual upon God and upon none else that dis tinguishes Wycliffe’s views from any other system of the middle ages. He alone had the courage to strike at the root of priestly privilege and power by vindicating for each separate man an equal place in the eyes of God. By this formula all laymen became priests, and all priests laymen. They all held of God, and on the same terms of service.

These are some of the elements of the doctrine of dominion which Wycliffe enunciates in the early chapters of his work De Dominio Divino. The rest of the treatise is principally occupied with the discussion of various questions of a strictly theological or of a metaphysical character, following upon his view of the relation of the Creator to the world, but only indirectly illustrative of that special portion of it with which we are here con cerned. The practical application of the latter is found at large in the three books Of civil Dominion which fill more than a thousand pages of close and much-contracted handwriting in the only copy known to exist, a nearly contemporary manuscript now preserved in the palace library at Vienna. What is essential however for our present purpose will be found nearly complete in the first thirty-four chapters of the first book, which treat of dominion and government in themselves. This section, as the following sketch will show, indicates in its main outline Wycliffe’s salient doctrine of the relation of the secular to the spiritual power; and we need not pursue its delineation further, when the author, with the exhaustive prolixity of a schoolman, defines its bearing in minute detail upon all the problems arising from this relation which called for criticism in his day.

Wycliffe begins his book by the proposition, of which the latter part was already noted as dangerous by Gregory the Eleventh in 1377, that no one in mortal sin has any right to any gift of God, while on the other hand every man standing in grace has not only a right to, but has