Wycliffe was an idealist, and confessedly his entire conception of the Church and Society is an ideal conception. In spite of its curiously matter-of-fact feudal foundations, Wycliffe’s structure is not of the earth, but Utopian. His conclusions were indeed whittled down by certain important qualifications. Thus, although all men were ideally equal, the existing mode of society and government was sanctioned by God; and it was therefore unlawful to seek to gain by force the equality of possession which flagrantly did not exist—so that Wycliffe’s communism, in so far as it was not spiritual only, was purely anticipatory of a new order in the future; so also it was unlawful to challenge the right to rule of the civil lord on the ground of personal unworthiness, for his power also is sanctioned. As Wycliffe put it in a celebrated phrase, ‘God ought to obey the Devil.’[152] Thus while the ideal theory of dominion ‘founded in grace’ is suggestive of antinomianism and revolution, Wycliffe’s practical teachings were marked by devotion to the existing temporal order. On the other hand, it is not surprising that both opponents and followers should have tended to fasten upon the former aspects of his tenets and give to them a revolutionary interpretation. And indeed the truly significant part of Wycliffite doctrine is revolutionary in the emphasis that it lays upon the individual; and as time went on both the logic of events and the logic of the beliefs to which controversy drove him rendered Wycliffe more and more unequivocal in the essential radicalism of his attitude.