Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/58

 Aquinas, declared that the Supreme Pontiff, in the plenitude of his power, might lawfully dispense with the law—a claim which is not set up for the Deity himself, nor by nature, as interpreted by their works. Obstructions may divert the spiritual and physical laws, but only as proceeding from a different source, and from a cause external to the law. When the authority which had promulgated the law of right and wrong was found dispensing with the right and selling indulgences for the wrong, it was no longer regarded as a lawgiver. Of necessity, and with an impassioned conviction of truth, devout men considered it as an obstruction to moral law.

Before the fourteenth century dawned this conviction had penetrated many a thoughtful mind, and the wonder is that such a clear and cogent truth, put forward by Wyclif and his friends with logical completeness, should not have won the battle of reformation at least a century and a half before it was actually won. But, in point of fact, the reformation of religion, in England as in Germany, passed through several phases. The awakening of the popular conscience was one of these phases; but it could not reach its full development apart from the political rejection of the papal assumptions, the arbitrary suppression of the monastic Orders, and the legislative conversion of the national Church. All these things were on their way, and Wyclif brought them as near to realisation as any man could have done in the fourteenth century. But the hour had not struck, and the instruments were not all ready to hand.