  History is rich with examples of kings who, wittingly or unwittingly, lose sight of their ministerial position and wield secular authority in their own interests, cruelly using the land and church for their own gain. Such tyrants cause Wyclif some problems, for in many cases it is difficult for the subjects to determine whether their lord is acting viciously as a crowned brigand, or sternly, as a physician purging a patient. For the same reason that Wyclif denies the suitability of popular elections, he is cautious regarding tyranny: it is impossible for human minds to gauge the absence of grace in another. What may look like cruel persecution of a subject may in fact be just punishment, while what may appear to be benign, permissive rule may in fact be the lassitude of misrule. Certainly no priest is in a position to assess the justice of a civil lord, given his dedication to apostolic ideals foreign to civil dominium. In some cases, Wyclif advises that one must suffer tyrannical rule as a divine punishment, particularly when a king deprives His subjects of material wealth. In other cases, especially when a civil lord fosters ecclesiastical decay by not persecuting heretics or regulating the Church's goods, Wyclif suggests that resistance to tyranny may be justifiable: better to focus on the greater danger of priestly tyranny; after all, a tyrannical civil lord can only do damage to one's material well-being, but a tyrannical priest can endanger one's eternal soul. The guardian against priestly tyranny must be the civil lord, whose responsibility to the Church requires him to monitor the clergy's execution of its spiritual duties. Those who argue that a civil lord has no business interfering with spiritual concerns overlook the fundamental relation holding between just civil law and divine law: because the civil lord's responsibility is to God, his first concern must be to ensure that nothing will impede obedience to divine law. The canon law that has built up over the centuries like barnacles on a ship's hull is held up as the means by which the Church regulates spiritual affairs, but this, Wyclif explains, is a superfluous creation of priests, ultimately hindering the Church by introducing material structure to what should be a purely spiritual enterprise.  