Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/285

Rh any necessary connexion with its official establishment and left it purely spiritual, to say that a man's relation to God is determined by his union with the church, is the same as to say that he stands on his own private spiritual footing. Individualism is therefore only another aspect of Wycliffe's communism; and thus, however visionary and unpractical the scheme may be in which he framed it, however bizarre in many of its details, the fundamental principle of his Doctrine of Dominion justifies its author's title to be considered in no partial sense as the father of modern Christianity.

The uniqueness of Wycliffe's conception may justify the length at which we have dwelt upon it; but we must not claim for it more than its proper due. Wycliffe, it should seem, started from the point of view of an ecclesiastical politician. Leaving out of account some dialectical treatises, which were merely what was expected of a master in the university schools, his earliest productions were professed political pamphlets; and his maturer works on civil dominion have the appearance of giving the solution which he had discovered for the ecclesiastical problems which agitated his century, rather than the results of self-contained philosophical speculation. Wycliffe did not in fact possess the philosophical temper in its finer development. He was thoroughly grounded in what passed for philosophy in the scholastic world of his day; but it is impossible to deny that philosophy was by this time far gone in its decadence. The richer the materials in men's possession, the less they were concerned to apply to them the higher gifts of the intellect, the more they wearied themselves in fruitless ingenuity, in infinite refinements of infinitesimal distinctions. Even homely fallacies in logic they did not disdain to cloak by their expertness in its technical manipulation. Fashion demanded that a certain number of proofs should be adduced for every proposition; and the weight or even the relevance of the proof was, as often as not, immaterial. In the most laborious, or the most laboured, arguments we frequently find the elements