Lewis Sergeant

“ The strength of feudalism had begun to wane; for a long time there was the name of empire without an imperial .head or bond. All that was not German, but only conventionally Roman, tended to separate from the solid core, whilst the true Germany and the Teutonic spirit remained, as they had always been, the chief rival and obstacle of the Papacy on the continent. ”

“ The vast possessions of the clergy and religious Orders, especially after the new corporations of friars had forsworn their original vows of poverty, excited the alarm, not to say the cupidity of the monarchs, and whetted the edge of their hostility to Rome. England, France, the Empire, and Castile had at different times taken measures to curtail the growing evil. ”

“ Philip was determined to lose nothing for want of audacity. He sent his avocat-royal, with the two Cardinals Colonna who had previously taken refuge in Paris, to seize the person of the Pope at Anagni; and, though Boniface was rescued and conveyed to Rome, he died a few days later from the shock of his humiliation. And so the saying of the ex-Pope Celestine, whom Boniface had compelled to resign, and afterwards imprisoned, was fulfilled: "This cardinal, who stole like a fox into the chair of St. Peter, will have the reign of a lion and the death of a dog." ”

“ After the breaking up of the vast empire of Charles the Great, the continent of Europe had come to be parcelled out into a large number of kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and republics, few of them possessing any exceptional importance, whilst the majority were quite insignificant. ”

“ It must therefore greatly assist us to arrive at a fair understanding of the problems in which John Wyclif was concerned if we ask ourselves in the first place what was the condition of Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, what were the relations between the Papacy and the different European governments, and especially what effect our constant wars with France would naturally have upon our relations with the popes at Avignon. ”

“ Edward III. proposed it to the French king, and Pope John proposed it to more than one of the monarchs; but it was too late. The seething of Europe had begun. The seventy years' exile of the popes at Avignon, 'the hundred years' war between England and France, the desperate civil wars in both those countries, were already fore-doomed and inevitable. The establishment of the new order in western Christendom could not come to pass—as the history of the world was being developed—save at the cost of liberty and civilisation in the Eastern Empire. ”

“ Essentially throughout his life a secular English clergyman, still his early mental standpoint was on the continent of Europe rather than in England. Rome had so long been the metropolis of religion, as the French universities had been the capitals of scholastic theology and law, that many if not most of Wyclif's predecessors in the long struggle for the emancipation of human thought had lived and died on the continent. The time was at hand for the English Church and the English State to break away from their foreign trammels ”

“ The story of the Papacy itself in the fourteenth century is as important and striking as that of any of the larger European States. The State of the Church had been built up by successive papal assumptions on the basis of religious authority perverted into secular feudalism, and by means of extravagant tolls levied upon the religious devotion of Christendom. ”

“ And if the popular mind, and the minds of a few scholars and preachers here and there, were outraged and alienated by the spiritual usurpations of the Papacy, its temporal and political assumptions were resisted in each successive generation, however intermittently, by the monarchs and statesmen of the day. ”

“ The Church, he declared, is one holy and undivided body, having but a single head. "The spiritual and the temporal sword are alike under the control of the Church; the latter must be employed by those who wear it on behalf of the Church, and the former by the Church itself—the former wielded by a priestly hand, the latter by the hand of monarchs and soldiers, though only at the summons and under the sanction of the priest. Moreover, the one sword ought to be subject to the other, and the temporal to the spiritual authority. ”

“ JOHN WYCLIF.
(FROM BALL'S "SUMMARIUM.")
CHAPTER II.
THE SEETHING OF EUROPE.
ERHAPS the fairest test of the true greatness and importance of any man who has played his part in the shaping of history may be found in the disposition of his admirers to consider, not merely what he did for his country and his age, but also what his circumstances and antecedents had previously done for him. It is a truism to say that every man, great or small, is a product of the conditions which surround him ”

“ Their chief effect was to seal the doom of Boniface, and to explode the claim of Rome to any kind of temporal sovereignty outside the States of the Church. In the course of a few months Philip was excommunicated, Boniface was arraigned before the French Estates, the legitimacy of his election was solemnly impugned, his heresies were denounced, appeal was made from him to a new and legitimate Pope, and this appeal was endorsed by the States-General, by a majority of the secular clergy, by the religious Orders, and by the University of Paris. ”

“ Furthermore" [or perhaps "from henceforth," porro] "we declare, state, lay down and pronounce, that it is an indispensable article of faith for every human being that he is a subject of the Roman pontiff." ”