obligation of the two ordained by Christ himself, he more and more strenuously insisted upon the supreme importance of spiritual religion—of obedience to the divine law in personal and social life—and the comparative unimportance of ceremonies. Enough has been said of his doctrine of the eucharist. It grew out of an opposition to the nominalistic doctrine of the annihilation of substance, which is to be found even in his Logic, though he long saved his orthodoxy by highly technical distinctions. Beginning in the simple denial of the scholastic doctrine that the accidents remained after the substance of the elements had been destroyed by the act of the priest, it gradually passed through a doctrine having some affinity to consubstantiation into a view which really made the presence of Christ a spiritual presence, and the sacrament a sign of a spiritual reality which depended upon the spiritual condition of the recipient. In so far as he still continues to use the language of the real presence, that presence is of a kind which does not depend upon the mechanical act of consecration. In the ‘Trialogus’ he suggests that the eucharist might under certain circumstances be consecrated by laymen, but holds that ‘it is decent’ that it should be consecrated by a priest, since it was to them specially that Christ's injunction was directed. The host may be adored ‘conditionally,’ but the body of Christ which is adored therein is the body which is in heaven.
Wycliffe assails the whole doctrine of a ‘treasury of merits’ dispensed by pope and prelate, and denies to the clergy all power—whether by excommunicating a good man or by absolving or indulging a bad man—of mechanically affecting the salvation of any one. Confession he held to be useful in many cases, but it should not be enforced, and priestly absolution was not a necessity. Bought masses, indulgences, or prayers are of no avail. Even when they are not bought, it is better to pray for all men than for particular persons. The doctrine of purgatory he leaves, but insists much on the limitation of our knowledge about it. Apart from the technical Reformation doctrine of justification, there is little in the general principles of the teaching of the sixteenth-century protestants which Wycliffe did not anticipate. He accepted quite as explicitly as they the supreme authority of scripture. It is perhaps chiefly in his mediæval principles of interpretation that he falls below the intellectual level of the Reformation. In the spirituality and the purely ethical tone of his teaching he is more thoroughgoing than his successors, while he is more moderate and statesmanlike in his attitude towards practical questions—such as the use of images or of indifferent ceremonies—though personally inclined to an austere condemnation even of elaborate music. His exaggerated opposition to clerical endowments, an exaggeration naturally provoked by the extreme secularisation of the mediæval church, is his nearest approach to fanaticism. It is strange that, while condemning the mendicancy of the friars, he should have advocated a system which would have practically reduced the secular clergy to the position of beggars; and his condemnation of wealthy ecclesiastics was too sweeping to bring his schemes within the limits of a wise and practical statesmanship. Even on the purely religious side, this extravagance—carrying with it the condemnation even of universities and colleges—ultimately destroyed the influence of the Wycliffite movement among the educated clergy, and reduced it to a struggling and almost illiterate sect. But if in his fundamental principle of lordship founded on grace there is some intellectual confusion (largely due to his acceptance of the feudal language by which political authority was identified with proprietary right), the confusion itself points to a truth in seeing which Wycliffe was before his time. The world has generally accepted Wycliffe's principle that political authority springs from its tendency to promote the material and spiritual good of society at large; it has hardly yet accepted with equal explicitness the principle that rights of property are no less in need of social justification.
Wycliffe's writings may conveniently be divided into three groups, of which the first belongs to his early life as a schoolman; the second to the period of his development in which his doctrine of dominion, with its consequences, constituted his chief departure from orthodoxy; the third, beginning with his denial of transubstantiation in 1379 or 1380 to the closing years of his life, in which he rapidly developed into complete antagonism to the whole mediæval system in theology and church government.
Wycliffe's works have for the most part remained unpublished until a few years before the quincentenary of his death. The only important exception is the ‘Trialogus,’ published under the title ‘Dialogorum libri quatuor’ at Bâle in 1525. The following is a list of the Latin works now in print; the dates must be looked upon as approximate and largely conjectural:
I. ‘De Logica,’ with a ‘Logicæ Continuatio’ (possibly finished in later life); ‘De Compositione Hominis;’ ‘XIII Quæstiones logicæ et philosophicæ;’ ‘De Ente Prædicamentali.’
