Untouched by the classic air breathed by the humanists, he said all that could be said against the church from her own medieval standpoint.

He taught determinism; he maintained that the final seat of authority was the Scripture; he showed that such fundamental dogmas as the existence of God, the Trinity, and the Incarnation, cannot be deduced by logic from the given premises; he {36} proposed a modification of the doctrine of transubstantiation in the interests of reason, approaching closely in his ideas to the "consubstantiation" of Luther.

Defining the church as the congregation of the faithful, he undermined her governmental powers.

This, in fact, is just what he wished to do, for he went ahead of almost all his contemporaries in proposing that the judicial powers of the clergy be transferred to the civil government.

Not only, in his opinion, should the civil ruler be totally independent of the pope, but even such matters as the regulation of marriage should be left to the common law.
[Sidenote: Wyclif, 1324-84] A far stronger impression on his age was made by John Wyclif, the most significant of the Reformers before Luther.