Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/154

 6. If the Pope really gave England to John, as a lord gives to his vassal, he gave it for a ridiculously small fee; and on the same principle he might squander the rest of Christendom in the same way. We ought to make a stand at once. And as the theologians say that a man who is in mortal sin forfeits his dominion, and the Pope is liable to sin, one mortal overlord is quite enough for us, and we had better give our goods to the poor instead of to the Pope, and hold of Christ alone.

7. My colleagues are forgetting the unwisdom of the King and the supreme right of the nation, without whose consent no lasting contract can be made to its damage.

"Now," says Wyclif, after reciting arguments of this kind, and so neatly turning the tables on the monk who had desired to entrap him, "unless the Doctor can support the rational character of his argument against these contentions of the English lords, it has no force against the position of our lord the King."

For those days the rejoinder was quite sufficient, and was held to have served its turn. The claim for tribute was dropped again, and Wyclif, by the cogency of his reasoning, earned both credit amongst his friends and odium at Rome. Unwelcome as such reasoning would naturally be to the Papacy, and to its warmest friends in England, there was so far no attempt to fix any charge of heresy on Wyclif. Nevertheless it was about this time that John Kynyngham, a Carmelite Friar, began to wage a pertinacious fight with him, challenging him on the score