Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/280

262 which are our proper objects. If we seek the shadow we shall fail of the substance, but if we press forward to the substance the shadow will follow and attend us too. The righteous therefore has all things, not necessarily, not principally, in this present life; but as his right now, and as his sure and indefeasible enjoyment hereafter. His dominion, being founded in grace, has the warrant of God's decree: the fruition of it may be delayed, so far as earthly goods are concerned, but possession of all things remains his inalienable right. The sinner on the contrary by the very fact of sinning loses all right to anything. His dominion is no longer founded in grace, it has no substantial existence; it may seem to stand for a time, but he reaps his good on this earth only to be one day terribly recompensed.

This opposition between the righteous who have all things and the unrighteous who have nothing, runs through all Wycliffe's argument on the question of dominion. In it he finds the secret of the differences of human lot; by its means he is able to reconcile the prosperity of the wicked with the troubles and disappointments of the good. He translates the Bible into the language of feudalism, and then he proceeds to explain his new-found polity on a strictly spiritual basis. But however ideal the principle on which Wycliffe goes, it has none the less a very plain meaning when applied to the circumstances of the religious organism in the writer's own time. For the essence of the whole conception lies in the stress which he laid upon inner elements, as opposed to outer, as those which determine a man's proper merit. To Wycliffe it was the personal relation, the immediate dependence of the individual upon God, that made him worthy or unworthy; it was his own character and not his office, however exalted in the eyes of men, that constituted him what he really was. The pope himself, if unworthy, if personally a bad man, lost ipso facto his entire right to dominion.

Here however, as so often in Wycliffe, an important