Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/329

 folly of precipitate action—as on the noteworthy occasion when he declined to advise the abolition of Peter's pence. But there are times when the day of caution seems to have passed, and nothing but immediate action is likely to serve the turn. It is hardly possible to doubt that in ecclesiastical affairs, at any rate, Wyclif believed that such a time had arrived. He might have been a Cranmer, a Knox, not to say a Cromwell, if the opportunity had arisen for him to strip the corrupted Church of her meretricious robes and jewels. He would have done it. He would have helped John of Gaunt to do it, with the supreme confidence of an honest man that only in this way could the Church once more deserve her majestic title as the bride of Christ.

Where the State was concerned apart from the Church, Wyclif evidently recognised that he had not the same warrant to lay down a law of conduct for his fellow-creatures. In any case he did not press his arguments with the same force and directness. They went just as much to the root of the matter for one form of government as for another; but Wyclif displayed a reserve and a reticence when speaking of the existing civil organisation which were not apparent when he spoke of the Christian community.

In a volume like the present it would be out of place to examine in detail the scheme of the two Latin works which Wyclif wrote in middle life on The Lordship of God and on Civil Lordship. The reader who will be satisfied with an abstract of these treatises—which are based in large measure, as has