As yet indeed even Wyclif himself can hardly have suspected the immense range of his intellectual power.

It was only the struggle that lay before him which revealed in the dry and subtle schoolman the founder of our later English prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous politician, an audacious partizan, the organizer of a religious order, the unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of controversialists, the first Reformer who dared, when deserted and alone, to question and deny the creed of the Christendom around him, to break through the tradition of the past, and with his last breath to assert the freedom of religious thought against the dogmas of the Papacy.
[Sidenote: "De Dominio Divino."] At the moment of the quarrel with Pope Urban however Wyclif was far from having advanced to such a position as this.

As the most prominent of English scholars it was natural that he should come forward in defence of the independence and freedom of the English Church; and he published a formal refutation of the claims advanced by the Papacy to deal at its will with church property in the form of a report of the Parliamentary debates which we have described.

As yet his quarrel was not with the doctrines of Rome but with its practices; and it was on the principles of Ockham that he defended the Parliament's refusal of the "tribute" which was claimed by Urban.

But his treatise on "The Kingdom of God," "De Dominio Divino," which can hardly have been written later than 1368, shows the breadth of the ground he was even now prepared to take up.