Liber tertius

INTRODUCTION.XIIIAnd, adds Wyclif, I do not know that that was wrong. Money maybe taken away from the clergy also if they accumulate it in an avariciousmanner, but let the poor, for whom the money was intended, hunger.Nor must such property intended for tlie poor be used for costlybuildings.i For what purpose does the Church want these riches? If shecould get on in poverty in the days of Sylvester and Constantine she cando so now. No emperor had a right to make the church rich. Whenthe church was endowed it was done in order at the same time to renderservice to the state. How is that to be reconciled with the presentmisuse of those endowments? Even if one were to say, not all monksare bad: the just are punished with the unjust, if they belong to thesame genus. Just as the king, and every other secular dignitary, loseshis office if he fall into sin, remaining king only in name, so also thePope. At the moment when he wrote that — 1377 — Wyclif was stillfar from condemning the papacy in principle;^ that is a later phasebeginning only in the eighties; but as in the first book, now also in the9*^^ chapter of the second book, he emphatically states that under somecircumstances it is allowed to punish even the pope, and so why shouldnot the sinful clergy be subject to the secular courts? The fact that thepope crowns emperors must not lead him to the conclusion that hestands higher than a monarch; certainly he would do so were he afterthe coronation to wash the emperor's feet. It is evident that emperorshave the right to punish and depose popes. He who asserts that thepope may not be punished is a wicked man, attributing to the popeinfallibility Hke to God.In England there exists the right to punish the clergy under certaincircumstances, and that right is not in opposition to the Bible.Christ did not wish to found a temporal government, either forhimself or his apostles; therefore it is not allowed to contend for earthlythings such as temporals. Strife is in contradiction to the Christian lawof loving one's neighbour, and least of all may the pope seize the1 Sumptuositas in . . . edificiis facit torpeiites in religione Christi . . . Herebegins the fight against the monks' palatial buildings. The end was the storming ofthe cloisters by the Hussites.2 De Civ. Dom. 11, il. Non intendo . . . in dehonoracionem vel dedecussiatus papalis quicquam asserere.