way the abstract necessity rather than the expediency of
the existing order of things.
The ultimate form which Wycliffe’s teaching assumed is a commonplace of religious history. We have here restricted our consideration of it to a time when it might still be regarded as a genuine product of catholic thought. Like the ferment of questions which filled the deliberations of the councils of Constance and Basle half a century later, they are still charged with the spirit of the middle ages. Like those debates they point forward also to an age that is yet to come. The full solution of the political problems of the church was left for the more strenuous struggle of the sixteenth century; but if Wycliffe's later career made him in spirit the precursor of the protestant reformation, he had already found out for himself the great secret of modern belief, a principle far more important than any of the special doctrinal details which afterwards roused his antagonism. He has not indeed the credit of having discovered the peculiar formula of justification by faith, which to superficial readers appears to constitute the kernel of reformation-teaching, but he has dared to codify the laws which govern the moral world on the basis of the direct dependence of the individual man on God.[1] In using the word individual we are indeed departing from the strict meaning of Wycliffe's words, and introducing an apparent contradiction to that doctrine of community which lies at the root of his exposition. Such is however the purport of his language, as we should now understand it: to Wycliffe himself the individual Christian was nothing save by virtue of his membership of the Christian body; but since he divorced the idea of the church from
- ↑ Deus . . . dat sua carismata cuilibet Christiano, constituens cum eo, tamquam membro suo, unum corpus misticum; ad millam talem influenciam requiritur persona hominis disparata; ergo nulla persona Romane ecclesie requiritur tamquam mediamen absolute necessarium ad regulandum ecclesiam: ibid., f. 123 b, c. Cf. f. 122 D: Quecunque ergo persona fidelis ecclesie, laycus vel clericus, Latinus vel Grecus, masculus vel femella, sufficit ad fidem instrumentaliter ac occasio- naliter gignendam. The entire argument of the chapter is highly instructive.
