clif, weakened by study and
asceticism, hardly promised a reformer who would carry on the stormy work
of Ockham; but within this frail form lay a temper quick and restless, an
immense energy, an immovable conviction, an unconquerable pride. The
personal charm which ever accompanies real greatness only deepened the
influence he derived from the spotless purity of his life. As yet indeed
even Wyclif himself can hardly have suspected the immense range of his
intellectual power. It was only the struggle that lay before him which
revealed in the dry and subtle schoolman the founder of our later English
prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous
politician, an audacious partizan, the organizer of a religious order, the
unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of
controversialists, the first Reformer who dared, when deserted and alone,
to question and deny the creed of the Christendom around him, to break
through the tradition of the past, and with his last breath to assert the
freedom of religious thought against the dogmas of the Papacy.

[Sidenote: "De Dominio Divino."]

At the moment of the quarrel with Pope Urban however Wyclif was far from
having advanced to such a position as this. As the most prominent of
English scholars it was natural that he should come forward in defence of
the independence and freedom of the English Church; and he published a
formal refutation of the claims advanced by the Papacy to deal at its will
with church property in the form of a report of the Parliamentary debates
which we have described. As yet his quarrel was not with the doctrines of
Rome but with its practices; and it was on the principles of Ockham that he
defended the Parliament's refusal of the "tribute" which was claimed by
Urban. But his treatise on "The Kingdom of God," "De Dominio Divino," which
can hardly have been written later than 1368, shows the breadth of the
ground he was even now prepared to take up. In this, the most famous of his
works, Wyclif bases his argument on a distinct ideal of society. All
authority, to use his own expression, is "founded in grace." Dominion in
the highest sense is in God alone; it is God who as the suzerain of the
universe deals out His rule in fief to rulers in their various stations on
tenure of their obedience to Himself. It was easy to object that in such a
case "dominion" could never exist, since mortal sin is a breach of such a
t