§ 41. WYCLIB^'S TEACHINGS. 331
body of the elect, — living, dead and not yet born, — whose head is Christ. Scarcely a writing has come down to us from Wyclifs pen in which he does not treat the subject, and in his special treatise on the Church, written probably in 1378, it is definedjiiore briefly as the body of all the ele^t — congregatio omnium predesUnatorum. Qf this body^ Christ alone Js the head. The pope is the head of a local church. Stress is laid upon the divine decree as determining who are the predestinate and who the reprobate. ^
Some persons, he said, in speaking of " Holy Church, understand thereby prelates and priests, monks and canons and friars and all that have the tonsure, — alle men that han cro wnes, — though they live ever so accursedly in defiance of God's law." But so far from this being true, all popes, cardinals and priests are not among the saved. On the contrary, not even a pope can tellassuredly tliat h& is-predestiaat&c— This knows no one on earth. The pope may be a prescitus, a reprobate. Such popes there have been, and it is blasphemy for cardinals and pontiffs to think that their election to office of itself constitutes a title to the primacy of the Church. The curia is a nest of heretics if its members do not follow Christ, a fountain of poison, the abomination of desolation spoken of in the sacred page. Gregory XI. Wyclif called a terrible devil — horrendusdiabolus. God in His mercy had put him to death and dispersed his confederates, whose crimes Urban VI. had revealed.^
Though the j^nglish Reformer JuaxjajLUSecLthe terms visible and invisible Church, he made the- €li*tin^ti©n. The Church militant, he said, commenting on John 10 : 26, is a mixed body. The Apostles took two kinds of fishes, some of which remained in the net and some broke away. So in the Church some are ordained to bliss and some to pain, even though they live godly for a while. 3 It is significant that in his English writings Wyclif uses the term Christen men — Christian men — instead of the term the faithful.
1 De dom. civ., I. 368. Ecclesia cath. sive apost. est universitas predesUnatorum. De ecdes., ed. by Loserth, pp. 2, 5, 31, 94, Engl. Works, III. 339, 447, etc. 2 2)e eccles., 5, 28 sq., 63, 88, 89, 355, 358, 360.
3 Engl. Works., I. 50.
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332 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
As for the papacy, no one has used more stinging words against individual popes as welTasa^gainst the papacy as an institution tlTah did Wyclif. In the treatises of his last years and in his sermons, the pope is stigmatized as anti-christ. His very last work, on which he was engaged when death overtook him, bore the title, Anti-christ^ meaning the pope. He went so far as to call him the head- vicar of the fiend, ^ He saw in the papacy the revelation of the man of sin. The office is wholly poisonous — totum papale officium venenosum. He heaped ridicule upon the address " most holie fadir." The pope is neither necessary to the Church nor is he infallible. If both popes and all their cardinals were cast into hell, believers could be saved as well without them. They were created not by Christ but by the devil. The pope has no exclusive ri^ht to declare what the SfripturffFi teanljj^r proclaim what is the supremelaw. His absolutions are of no avail unless Christ has absolved before. Popes have no more right to excommunicate than devils have to curse. Many of them are damned — multi papce sunt dampnati. Strong as such assertions are, it is probable that Wyclif did not mean to cast aside the papacy altogether. But again and again the principle is stated that the Apostolic see is to be obeyed only so far as it follows Christ's law.^
As for the interpretation of Matthew 16 : 18, Wyclif took the view that " the rock " stands for Peter and every true Christian. The keys of the kingdom of heaven are not metal keys, as popularly supposed, but spirftualpdwer, and they were commttted not only toPeter, but to all the saint-s, " for^alle men
1 The condemnatory epithets and characterizations are found in the Engl. Works, ed. by Matthew, Depapa, pp.458-487, and The Church andher Members, and The Schism of the Horn. Pontiffs, Arnold's ed., III. 202 aqq., 340 sqq., the Trialogus, Dialogus, tlie Latin Sermons, vol. II., and especially the Opus evangelicum, parts of which went under the name Christ and his Adversary, Antichrist. See Loserth's introductions to Lat. Serm., II. p. ivsq., and Op. evang., vol. II.; also his art, WicUfs Lehre, vom loahren, undfalschen Papsttum. Hist. Ztschri/t, 1007, and his ed. oithe De potestate papcB. In these last works Loserth presents the somewhat modified view that when Wyclif inveighed against the pai)acy it was only as it was abused. The De potestate ■was written perhaps in 1.379. His later works show an increased severity.
2 jMt. Serm., IV. 95 ; De dom. rjy. , .3G0-.394 ; Dever. scr., II. 5(5 sqq.; Dial., p. 25 ; Op. evang., I, 38, 92, 98,382, 414, II. 132, IIL 187 ; Engl. Works, II, 229 sq., etc.