his death. His immunity from personal attack is no doubt remarkable, and is a striking witness to the strength of his influence with all sorts and conditions—the Princess of Wales, the Duke of Lancaster, powerful nobles, wealthy citizens, poor peasants, undergraduates and graduates of Oxford; and it is probable enough that his opponents were wise in their generation when they determined that the recantation of his followers and the suppression of his books would be a greater and easier triumph than a martyrdom which would have brought with it no submission, and which would have reawakened the opposition of large numbers who were not prepared to sympathise with the fully developed Wycliffite doctrine.
A few words must be added to supplement the account of his doctrines which we have hitherto derived partly from the testimony of his enemies. Wycliffe was famous as a philosopher before he became a theologian at all, and famous as a theologian before he became a heresiarch. He was the last great realist of the mediæval schools, carrying on that tradition of resistance to the Parisian Thomism of which Oxford had always been the centre. He belongs indeed to the decadence of scholasticism—to the period when scholastic thought had become over-subtle, technical, and intricate, and its expression barbarous and uncouth even as compared with the latinity of the thirteenth century. Some of Wycliffe's works are among the most intricate and obscure of all scholastic writings. It is the more remarkable that amid such surroundings we should discover in him a real thinker who turned its own weapons against much of the scholastic absurdity of his day, and a profoundly religious mind which by sheer hard thinking—and not by the short cuts of Renaissance scepticism or Reformation dogmatism—fought its way to a conception of the Christian gospel which was above all things ethical and practical.
It is not necessary to say much of Wycliffe's philosophy, except that his doctrine of universals is a realism of a moderate and enlightened character which had profited by the criticism of Occam and the nominalists. He acknowledges that the universal ideas are only substances ‘in an equivocal sense’—that is to say, that they have merely an intelligible or possible ‘esse’ which is necessary and eternal. Their existence, in short, is only logically separable on the one hand from the particulars in which they are realised, or on the other from the mind of God in which they eternally exist. God is the ‘forma rerum.’
The connection of Wycliffe's philosophy with his theology is by no means an external or accidental one. Everywhere he discovers in nominalism the seat of all theological error. His conception of the nature of God is profoundly platonic. He fights against the idea of arbitrary divine decrees. The will of God is eternal and unchangeable, and is determined by the ‘rationes exemplares’ or ‘ideas’ (which together constitute the Second Person of the Holy Trinity) eternally immanent in his nature. It would be impossible for God Himself to grant the arbitrary and immoral privileges which Christ's vicar and his delegates undertake to confer in Christ's name. About his quite orthodox doctrine of the incarnation it is unnecessary to say more than that he has, for a mediæval, an unusually strong appreciation of the real humanity of Jesus Christ. His doctrine of the atonement seems largely founded on the teaching of St. Anselm, by whom he was in other ways greatly influenced. Although he insists much upon the necessity of divine grace, predestination is with him reasonable, directed to the highest good of all creatures, not arbitrary. He recognises that all moral impulses come from God, and has no objection to the doctrine that man's use of his will merits grace ex congruo, though objecting to the ordinary ex condigno doctrine, and denying the possibility of works of supererogation. In spite of his strong assertion that all that happens happens of necessity, and that the whole course of the world's history is the necessary outcome of the will—that is to say the essential and eternal nature—of God, he does appear, at least in his earlier writings, to assert human freedom in something more than the equivocal sense in which it is admitted by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. He was evidently trying to steer a mid-course between the indeterminism of FitzRalph and the thoroughgoing predestinarianism of Bradwardine. In early life (when he wrote the Quæstiones XIII) there could be no doubt about his libertarianism, and in the ‘De Dominio Divino’ he still maintained that sufficient grace is given to every man to enable him to fulfil the law of God, but the deterministic tendency grew upon him in later years. There is little of that insistence upon ‘faith without works’ which is characteristic of the reformation theology. Wycliffe's practical religious teaching is above all things ethical: the gospel is to him mainly a revelation of practical duty, and its essence is the law of charity.
The intricacy of a very technical philosophy and the directest and simplest inculcation
