Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/277

Rh saving this one grand principle, Wycliffe does not care to lay down any fixed rules as to the best form of government. Like Ockham, he feels too deeply the necessary infirmity of all human institutions to be able to dogmatise about their relative excellence. Suppose, he says, the whole people desire a certain man to be their civil ruler, it does not follow on that account that he is rightly their ruler; nor can any human laws touching hereditary succession or the conveyance of property make such succession or transfer righteous or true, unless they are conformable to the law of nature. The law of nature in Wycliffe’s mouth is something far different from that of which other schoolmen found the exposition in the Politics of Aristotle. He adopts in fact the point of view of the strict hierarchical advocates, only with the all-important difference that his lawgiver is not the church but the Bible itself.

There is therefore a lack of decision about Wycliffe’s treatment of the different methods according to which a society may be governed. In the abstract he thinks that an aristocracy, by which he understands the rule of judges in the Old Testament sense, must surpass any other constitution, because it is the least connected with civil ordinances. He applies the example of the Israelite history, according to which, he says, judges were first set by God over his people and monarchy was a sign of their defection from the divine rule; finally, he adds, they came under the worst sort of rule, that of priests, which was most of all vitiated by human tradition and indeed altogether corrupt. Balancing the two former modes of government. Wycliffe appears to feel that, granted the sinful state of mankind, government by single ruler is on the whole the most beneficial, since it is