Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/284

266 way the abstract necessity rather than the expediency of the existing order of things.

The ultimate form which Wycliffe’s teaching assumed is a commonplace of religious history. We have here restricted our consideration of it to a time when it might still be regarded as a genuine product of catholic thought. Like the ferment of questions which filled the deliberations of the councils of Constance and Basle half a century later, they are still charged with the spirit of the middle ages. Like those debates they point forward also to an age that is yet to come. The full solution of the political problems of the church was left for the more strenuous struggle of the sixteenth century; but if Wycliffe's later career made him in spirit the precursor of the protestant reformation, he had already found out for himself the great secret of modern belief, a principle far more important than any of the special doctrinal details which afterwards roused his antagonism. He has not indeed the credit of having discovered the peculiar formula of justification by faith, which to superficial readers appears to constitute the kernel of reformation-teaching, but he has dared to codify the laws which govern the moral world on the basis of the direct dependence of the individual man on God. In using the word individual we are indeed departing from the strict meaning of Wycliffe's words, and introducing an apparent contradiction to that doctrine of community which lies at the root of his exposition. Such is however the purport of his language, as we should now understand it: to Wycliffe himself the individual Christian was nothing save by virtue of his membership of the Christian body; but since he divorced the idea of the church from