be held common.[1] He expounds the rules of charity laid down by saint Paul (charity with Wycliffe is the correlative term to grace), and interprets the sentence, Charity seeketh not her own—seeketh not to be a proprietor but to have all things in common. Any objections to the doctrine he dismisses as sophistical, Those adduced by Aristotle hold, he says, only in regard to the community of wives proposed by Plato; but this application may be proved to be logically fallacious.
Such are in brief the fundamental principles of the treatise Of civil Dominion: the righteous has all things; the wicked has nothing, only occupies for the time that which he has unrighteously usurped or stolen from the righteous. Dominion, in a word, is founded in grace; and grace, or, from another point of view, the law of the Gospel, being alone essential to it, it follows necessarily that human ordinances are accidental or indifferent. These, Wycliffe maintains, are in fact the mere consequence of the fall of man: they originate in sin, in the lust of dominion; and for the most part they betray their origin evidently enough by the opportunities they offer for wrong-doing and tyranny. When therefore we require, in addition to the natural dominion which is that of the Gospel, an inferior sort of dominion, civil dominion, the latter, it is clear, must not pretend to any absolute or essential character; it is transitory and liable to modification according to the changing conditions of human society; above all it is entirely subordinate to that natural dominion from which it draws whatever claim it may have to righteousness.[2] Accordingly,
- ↑ Omnis homo debet esse in gracia, et si est in gracia est dominus mundi cum suis contentis; ergo omnis homo debet esse dominus universitatis: quod non staret cum multitudine hominum, nisi omnes illi deberent habere omnia in communi; ergo omnia debent esse communia.
- ↑ Wycliffe thus states the distinction between natural and civil lordship: Dominium quidem naturale est dominium divinitus institutum, in primo titulo iusticie fundatum, quotlibet divites ex equo compaciens, sed alienacionem dominantis, servata iusticia, non permittens: dominium autem civile est dominium occasione peccati humanitus institutum, incommunicabile singulis et ex equo multis dominis, sed abdicabile servata iusticia: Cap. 18 f. 40 d.
