Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/281

Rh distinction has to be settled. Every good man, we have seen before, is lord of all things, but he is not on that account at liberty to assert his possession of them in contravention of civil right: so also he cannot claim to disobey the civil ruler because that ruler is personally unworthy of his post; his rule is at least permitted by God. Thus Wycliffe expressly repudiates the inference which might naturally and logically be drawn from his premises. God, ran his famous paradox, ought to obey the devil; that is, no one can escape from the duty of obedience to existing powers, be those powers never so depraved. But there is logic also in Wycliffe's position. As things are, he felt, the spheres of spiritual and temporal sovereignty are kept asunder. The spiritual authority has no competence to interfere with the temporal, nor the temporal with the spiritual. Each is paramount within its own area of jurisdiction, so far as the present state of affairs is concerned; but in the eternal order of the universe right, power, dominion, and the practical exercise of authority, are dependent on the character, the righteousness, of the person to whom they belong.

It is Wycliffe's veneration for the spiritual dignity of the church that led him to sever its sphere of action from that of the world. No pope or priest of the church, he held, could claim any temporal authority: he is a lord, yea even a king, but only in things spiritual. So far as the pope, to take the salient instance, recedes from this position, so far as he holds any earthly power, so far is he unworthy of his office. For to rule temporal possessions after a civil