There was one great schoolman living against whom, despite the prolixity and barrenness of much of his logic, no charge of unreality or insincerity can be brought--John Wycliffe. Beneath the dialectical subtleties and sophistries common to all the works of the scholastic philosophers there was in his case a profound sense of the obligation to seek, and a zealous desire to discover, the absolute truth. As with all great thinkers who have left a permanent mark on the history of religious and political opinion, there was in Wycliffe a great moral earnestness, an honest hatred of shams and impurities and all that is ignoble. The scandals of Avignon and the Schism helped to form the creed of Wycliffe, as they did that of the most religiously-minded men of the fourteenth century. His teaching was the moral repercussion of a sensitive and powerful mind flung back from impact against the clerical abuses of the Church. Indeed, as in the case of Marsiglio, so in that of Wycliffe, his attack was primarily on the polity of the Church, only secondly on doctrine. Many of his writings are perfervid denunciations, in the violent language common to mediæval controversialists, of the ill-living, laxity and ostentation of the clergy. His diatribes against successive popes and the institution of the papacy became more and more unmeasured in the choice of epithets. The writings of Wycliffe cannot be taken as a true description of the Church of his time, so great is the allowance that has to be made for the hyperbolical language of furious partizanship.
The constructive doctrine of Wycliffe is derived from his idea of Lordship. His theology is given a feudal structure, which cumbrously overweights it with technicalities and analogies of interest only to a feudal age. The whole of human society is conceived as holding from God, the suzerain of all creation. The essential characteristic which Wycliffe ascribed to it brings out of this feudal nomenclature no mere analogy but a pregnant idea. Wycliffe postulated a fundamental distinction between spiritual and earthly tenure. The feudal system on earth was one of many gradations between the supreme overlord, the king, and the humblest holder of land. But between God and His subjects there were no such gradations: each man held directly of God.[137] The consequences of this statement were radical. For one thing it was reinforced by the contention that dominion was founded in _grace_ only (there was no other lawful claim to rule or possession) and that no man living in sin had any right to any gift of God, whether that gift be spiritual or secular in nature. For all other persons the right to such gifts was equal. Thus the only test to a man's right to possession was a moral test.[138] These principles and their applications, elaborated in a work of immense length, 'Of Civil Lordship,' lead logically, on their political side, to Communism: while, on the religious side, they involve a democratic theory of the spiritual equality of all Christians, which was subversive of the claims of the priesthood, for whom the belief in the absence of any 'mediation' between God and man left no function.[139]