enure and all men sin. But, as Wyclif urged it, the theory is a purely
ideal one. In actual practice he distinguishes between dominion and power,
power which the wicked may have by God's permission, and to which the
Christian must submit from motives of obedience to God. In his own
scholastic phrase, so strangely perverted afterwards, here on earth "God
must obey the devil." But whether in the ideal or practical view of the
matter all power and dominion was of God. It was granted by Him not to one
person, His Vicar on earth, as the Papacy alleged, but to all. The king was
as truly God's Vicar as the Pope. The royal power was as sacred as the
ecclesiastical, and as complete over temporal things, even over the
temporalities of the Church, as that of the Church over spiritual things.
So far as the question of Church and State therefore was concerned the
distinction between the ideal and practical view of "dominion" was of
little account. Wyclif's application of the theory to the individual
conscience was of far higher and wider importance. Obedient as each
Christian might be to king or priest, he himself as a possessor of
"dominion" held immediately of God. The throne of God Himself was the
tribunal of personal appeal. What the Reformers of the sixteenth century
attempted to do by their theory of Justification by Faith Wyclif attempted
to do by his theory of Dominion, a theory which in establishing a direct
relation between man and God swept away the whole basis of a mediating
priesthood, the very foundation on which the mediaeval church was built.

[Sidenote: England and Aquitaine]

As yet the full bearing of these doctrines was little seen. But the social
and religious excitement which we have described was quickened by the
renewal of the war, and the general suffering and discontent gathered
bitterness when the success which had flushed England with a new and
warlike pride passed into a long series of disasters in which men forgot
the glories of Crecy and Poitiers. Triumph as it seemed, the treaty of
Bretigny was really fatal to Edward's cause in the south of France. By the
cession of Aquitaine to him in full sovereignty the traditional claim on
which his strength rested lost its force. The people of the south had clung
to their Duke, even though their Duke was a foreign ruler. They had
stubbornly resisted incorporation with Northern France. While preserving
however their traditional fealty to the descendants of Eleano