Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/330

 already been indicated, on the works of Marsiglio, Ockham, and Fitzralph—may be referred to the account which has been given of them by Mr. R. L. Poole (Wycliffe and Movements for Reform).

It is in the Civil Lordship that we should look for Wyclif's more deliberate views on the relations of government and the governed; and it is there, in fact, that we find the most direct statement of what has been called his "subversive doctrine." He considers two distinct phases of lordship, the natural and the civil, the latter being essentially based upon the former. Like other writers of his age on kindred subjects, he takes his illustrations and his parallels from the feudal system, and especially from the mutual relation of lordship and service, upon which the whole edifice of that system rests. In natural or religious lordship he finds the grand peculiarity that the lord paramount is the only absolute lord, of whom each individual holds directly, and to whom alone every individual owes his service. But civil lordship, as Mr. Poole interprets his argument, is "transitory and liable to modification according to the changes of human society. It becomes therefore to Wycliffe a matter of slight importance what particular form of government be adopted in any given country, since its only claim to excellence depends upon its relation with 'natural lordship,' in other words with the precepts of religion."

Yet the Reformer's ideal is certainly not what we should understand under the name of theocracy. Logically followed out, his argument would land us in a sort of communism, practical enough, perhaps,