excommunicating subjects being employed by Christ or his disciples, especially for temporal matters, but the contrary.
(12) The disciples of Christ have no power of compelling the payment of temporalities by ecclesiastical censures [Wycliffe quotes Luke xxii. 25, 26, and adds that the payment may be so enforced ‘accessorily to the punishment of the injury to God Himself’].
(13) It is not possible, even by the absolute power of God, that if the pope or any other should pretend in any way whatever to bind or loose any one, he by that very fact binds or looses any one [i.e. no one can be damned by an unjust excommunication. To deny that an excommunication may be unjust, says Wycliffe, would involve the impeccability of the pope or prelate].
(14) It ought to be believed that he then only looses or binds when he conforms himself to the law of Christ.
(15) This ought to be believed, as part of the catholic faith, that any priest whatever, rightly ordained, has sufficient power to confer any sacraments whatever, and by consequence to absolve the contrite from any sin whatever [directed against the Roman theory of jurisdiction and the system of reserved cases].
(16) Kings may take away temporalities from ecclesiastical persons habitually abusing them [Wycliffe here cites the Decretum of Gratian in support of his views, pt. ii. cause xii. 7. c. 31, and i. dist. xl. p. iii].
(17) Whether it was temporal lords or holy popes, or Peter, or the head of the church, which is Christ, who endowed the church with the goods of fortune or of grace, and excommunicated those who take away its temporalities, it is still lawful, on account of the implicit condition [under which they were given] to despoil it of its temporalities proportionally to its wrongdoing.
(18) The ecclesiastical ruler, and even the Roman pontiff, may legitimately be corrected or even accused by subjects and laymen.
These doctrines of Wycliffe may be looked upon from two points of view. On the one hand, as abstract speculations they are the outcome of the long development of scholastic thought which at this time had its most active centre in Oxford; on the other hand, they may be looked upon as the views of a practical reformer, inspired by a statesmanlike outlook upon the present position of the mediæval church and the political necessities of the English state. From the speculative point of view, we can trace in them the influence of Bradwardine's predestinarian doctrine of grace, of whole centuries of controversy about the source of temporal power, and especially of the Ghibelline apologists whose left wing passed into the heresies of Occam, Marsilius of Padua, and John of Jandun, and most directly of the doctrine of dominion taught by Richard FitzRalph, archbishop of Armagh (in De Pauperie Salvatoris, published by Dr. Poole in his edition of De Dominio Divino), the prelate who conducted both the literary and the diplomatic crusade of the English seculars on behalf of the bishops and curates against the encroachments of the mendicants. From the practical point of view, these propositions imply that Wycliffe had become a determined opponent of the secularity of the mediæval church; that he was convinced of the injury done to the spiritual influence of the clergy by their vast wealth, by the abuse of excommunication for political, and indeed purely commercial, purposes, and by the exemption of ecclesiastical persons and property from lay control. It is this latter point that differentiates him from the ordinary preachers, pamphleteers, and reformers of the middle age. All agreed as to the abuses. Wycliffe was the first to see that no effectual church reform would be possible unless it were undertaken by the lay power, and the first to suggest the enormous social and political advantages that might be obtained were the wealth of the monastic idlers and the superfluous possessions of the secular clergy placed at the disposal of the state. It is true that late in life he assumes that the confiscated lands should be given to ‘poor gentlemen’ (Select English Works, ed. Arnold, iii. 216–17); yet even so, they would be held subject to military service and other feudal incidents. But it is clear that the relief of the poor from ever-growing taxation was one of the foremost of Wycliffe's practical aims. On the purely theological or speculative side there was little in his present ‘conclusions’ which could not boast very respectable ecclesiastical authority. Even the pope calls them only ‘errors,’ not heresies, though once they are alleged to ‘savour of’ heresy. Only on the single point of the right of the secular power to interfere in the purely spiritual region could Wycliffe's ‘conclusions,’ when fairly interpreted, be identified with anything that had been condemned by the church. What made these ‘conclusions’ a new thing in the mediæval world was that here for the first time a bold and accredited academic thinker was prepared to call upon the state to reform an unwilling clergy.
Wycliffe's trial at Lambeth apparently passed off without any formal judgment or sentence. He was more or less formally commanded or requested by the bishops not to
