Of far greater weight than that of the Franciscan leader was the authority of William of Ockham in recommending the device of a General Council. Only, unlike the former, William of Ockham discerned infallibility in neither Pope nor General Council. All human beings are liable to err, whether individually or collectively, but the ultimate power in the Church must be the Church itself, the whole body of the faithful.[125] In his enormous work, his ‘Dialogus,’ there are contradictions and qualifications which indicate that the author was perplexed by the manifold practical difficulties of the problem of how to reunite Christendom.[126] But as a Spiritual Franciscan he was clear that the Pope had no right to secular property, and as a philosopher preferred the Church Universal itself to its pontiff as the repository of truth. Of much less influence and reputation in his own lifetime than Ockham, yet of infinitely greater originality, penetration and width of view, astonishingly farseeing and modern in his standpoint, was Marsiglio of Padua. The central argument of his ‘Defensor Pacis’ is that the cause of all the turmoil and disturbance of the world has been the bid for temporal power made by the clergy, and especially the papacy.[127] Christ had definitely stated, ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’; yet the clergy had become utterly immersed in affairs of the earth. Marsiglio equally combatted two sacerdotal contentions—the right to intervene in secular matters in despite of the spiritual office, on the one hand; on the other hand, the right of exemption from the ordinary payments and obligations of citizens in virtue of the same spiritual office. He held that the clergy had one duty only, and that a spiritual duty—to attend to the welfare of the souls of their flock. They had no legitimate claim whatever, in his opinion, to special treatment from the lay authority.[128] Their spiritual character was relative only to their performance of spiritual functions; in so far as they performed any others they were on exactly the same footing as laymen. Their tenure of land should be on precisely the same conditions as that of the laity; the civil obligations of the layman were incumbent upon them also. Similarly, they had no right to special jurisdiction, involving the infliction of the same sort of penalties—fines and imprisonments for example—as appertained to the secular courts. Such jurisdiction was abhorrent to the spirit of the Gospel.[129] To counsel and to warn was within their province; to go beyond that was not. This, according to Marsiglio, applied even to heresy. If a heresy were dangerous to society, it was for the civil authority to deal with it. Merely as wrong opinion it was not punishable at all in this world.[130] While he thus restricted and narrowly defined the functions of the priesthood, Marsiglio in no wise narrowed the conception of the Catholic Church, but rather broadened it. For his outstanding argument is that the