Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/108

 church-vassal himself, he cannot be compelled thereto.

In the ecclesiastical domain we find the same ideas taken henceforth as the true basis of Church government. The Church is not the priestly order and hierarchy alone, but the whole body of Christians. The priests have their functions, but outside those functions they are members of the general community—subject to the State in their secular relations and to the Church in their spiritual relations. Marsiglio found no warrant for a hierarchy in the New Testament, nor for a human arbiter of orthodoxy, nor for any temporal visitation of pains and penalties on the ground of errors in opinion. In brief the Christian priesthood ought to be in plain truth a Christian ministry, serving and not enslaving the Church.

Evidently Marsiglio was a fourteenth-century protestant of the most uncompromising order. It may be supposed that he went too far for his friend Ockham, and too far for Wyclif—at any rate in Wyclifs earlier and more moderate phases. No doubt this must always be a matter of opinion; but it will scarcely be denied that if the Archbishops Sudbury and Courtenay had resisted the pressure brought to bear upon them by the monks and friars, and treated Wyclif with judicious coolness and patience, he might have stopped short of some of his later paradoxes and logical extremes. Wyclif, who had secured the confidence of his Oxford friends not only by his saintly life but also as a man of sense and an able administrator, was in many respects