The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art

AMONG all our national treasures the greatest is the English Bible. Its primary appeal, as every one would admit, is to our common Christianity; but it appeals also, and with scarcely less power, to our common patriotism. Transcending every difference and distinction of rank, and sect, and party, it unites us all as Englishmen. Historically it is interwoven with the growth of our political liberties, and Its successive versions are indissolubly linked with names forever memorable in our annals. In its moral and social influence it lies at the root of what is strongest and best in the national character. Unique among books in its unapproachable dignity and grandeur, it holds among us an undisputed pre-emiuence as the most splendid literary monument that we possess of the genius of our native tongue.

helm had made a version of the Psalter, King Alfred of the four Evangelists, Elfric of the seven first books of the Old Testament. But for our present purpose we may set on one side the merely fragmentary renderings that have come down to us. Adaptations rather than translations of the more familiar portions of the Vulgate, they are full of interest as witnessing to the continuity of our literature; but what with the costliness of early manuscripts, the tardiness with which copies were multiplied, and the absence of any reading public, their circulation must have been practically confined to circles of private friends or of brother ecclesiastics. It is not until we reach the fourteenth century that we find a really close translation of any one complete book of Scripture. Dating from the first half of that century we have two such translations of the Psalms, the one by William de Schorham, the other by Richard Rolle, the author of The Pricke of Conscience, and better known as the Hermit of Hampole. To the last half of the century belong two works whose widespread and lasting influence it would be difficult to exaggerate, and which, by their rapid dissemination among the common people, contributed in no inconsiderable degree to that great religious revolution in England which we call the Reformation. The one is Langland's Vision

For nearly eight hundred years the only Bible from which paraphrases or metrical versions could be made was the Latin Vulgate, the knowledge of Greek and Hebrew being during that period practically non-existent. In the famous abbey on the cliffs at Whitby, Cadmon had sung the scripture story of man's creation and of his fall, of Israel and of Christ. The dying hours of Bæde, the grand old monk of Jarrow, had been devoted to the completion of a translation into English of the Gospel according to St. John. Ald

NEW SERIES.-VOL. LXVIII., No. 1.

of Piers the Ploughman, the other is Wyclif's Bible (1380). The extent of his own personal share in it is not quite satisfactorily determined, but the greater part of the New Testament and part of the Old are from his pen. His friend Nicholas de Hereford is responsible for the first portion of the Old Testament as far as the book of Baruch, iii. 20. At this point his manuscript, now in the Bodleian Library, breaks off abruptly, owing no doubt to the peremptory action of the ecclesiastical authorities, for we know that in the summer of 1382 he was excommunicated. What remained to be done was most probably done by Wyclif. This first edition was soon seen to be in many ways defective, and Wyclif was still working at a revision of it in December, 1384, when he died from a stroke of paralysis. It was completed under the direction of his faithful friend and curate, John Purvey, with "myche trauaile, as he tells us, and with the aid of "diuerse felawis and helperis," not earlier, it is supposed,

than 1390.

Both the original and the revised version are reproduced in parallel columns in the splendid work of Forshall and Madden which issued from the Clarendon Press in 1850. Two short quotations will show how comparatively little our language has changed in the course of five centuries.

But in o day of the woke ful earli thei camen to the grave and broughten swete smelling spices that thei hadden arayed, and thei founden the stoone turnyd away from the grave. And thei geden in and founden not the Lord Jhesus-(Luke xxiv.)

And after these thingis he seide to his disciplis, Go we eft in to Judee. The disciplis seien to hym, Maister, now the Jewis soughten for to stoone thee and eft goist thou thidir?

- (John xi.)

Wyclif's Bible was indeed a notable beginning, but it could lay no claim to finality. As a translation it is a noble work, but it lacks uniformity of style and is of very uneven merit. The diction is homely, rugged, and primitive, for our language was only in process of formation, and the expressions are often of refreshing naïveté and quaintness. Furthermore, the whole version is at best but a translation of a translation. Yet with all its

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blemishes it is of imperishable interest. Many of its phrases, "the straight gate, the narrow way," "the beam and the mote," have passed forever into our language. It is, above all things, our first and oldest Bible. Even were it of less literary merit than it is, it would still be secure of immortality as an integral part of English history. It was born in an age of intense national excitement. It is the provocatio ad populum" of our first Reformer. It is the dying legacy to the people of England of the sturdiest fighter of his day. It is from the hand of the father of English prose. It embodies the great principle that the Bible is the people's book, and should speak the language of the people.

The fourteenth century, if we stand back and endeavor to take a comprehensive view of it, may be best described as a time of transition. Mediævalism was slowly passing away, but the new world was not yet plainly in sight. We are reminded, as we watch the sweep of events, of a dissolving view where the picture that is departing is fading into indistinctness, while the lines of the picture that is to take its place have still to come into focus. We seem to be looking at a blurred image which is neither picture because it is both. Pope and Emperor are both there, but not the empire or the papacy as they were of old. The Emperor

has become a mere shadow of his former self. The Pope is a fugitive from Rome. Under many forms and in rest, be it social, political, or religious, many lands a spirit of disquiet and unis moving over the long stagnant waters, and ruffling their repose. Rome is confronted with rising nationalities impatient of her authority and claims. The long supremacy of the Latin tongue is threatened by the rivalry of modern languages, for it is the century of Petrarch, of Froissart, and of Chaucer. The old order and the new stand face to face. Over against the king stands the parliament, over against the mailed knight and the feudal lord stand the burgess and the merchant, the artisan and the peasant. Under the influence of great political thinkers and writers like Marsilius of Padua and William of Occam, there is dawning in men's

minds the idea of an orderly independent state organized with a view to the common weal. All along the line there is an awakening of the human spirit to a sense of individuality, a feeling not of the moral impotence, but of the moral dignity of man. The supernatural claims of a sacerdotal hierarchy from whom all spirituality and unworldliness seem to have died out are being challenged by an appeal to the instincts of the conscience and the heart. Everywhere great principles are in antagonism, Latin Christianity and Teutonic, tradition and Scripture, realism and nominalism, authority and experience, capital and labor.

In an age thus profoundly agitated John Wyclif's lot was cast, and it is his attitude toward the papacy, with its materialized oligarchy of luxurious and lazy ecclesiastics, which gives the key to his life. "I take it as a holesome counsell," he says, "that the Pope leeve his worldly lordship to worldly lords as Christ gave him and move all his Clerks to do so.

Half

ment. It was the last straw.
ruined by the awful ravages of the
Black Death, owing to which the popu-
lation had been reduced from five mil-
lions to two millions and a half, and
by the slow drain of the never-ending
wars with France, the Estates were
not unnaturally disposed to rebel
against sending out English gold for
the support of the liegeman of their
hereditary foe. "Ils resisteront," they
unanimously decided, "et contre ester-
ont ove toute leur puissance." This
decision was expanded and supported
by Wyclif, then one of the King's
chaplains, in a most vigorous and able
pamphlet. That he should have had
this task imposed on him by the Court
shows in what reputation he was held,
and how his anti-papal opinions were
even then notorious. In 1378 occurred
the Great Schism. The moral effect
on Wyclif was electrical. It was of
the very essence of the papacy that the
supreme Pontiff claimed to personify
the indivisibility of truth. In him
men saw the symbol and the guarantee
of religious unity. Suddenly to ex-
hibit to the world the seamless vesture
of Latin Christianity as rent in twain,
and the papacy as a self-advertised im-
posture, was to give to religious faith
a shock such as, at this distance of
time, we can scarcely realize. Torn
from its old moorings, spiritual obedi-
ence drifted away into a divided allegi-
ance, with no better bond of cohesion
than the mere accident of country.
Wyclif's impetuous spirit at once urged
him to the only logical inference. If
there could be two Popes why not
twenty? Why any Pope at all? The
whole system was a fraud. It was not
of God, but of man. It had no war-
ranty of Holy Scripture. It was Anti-
christ. They who should have been
the faithful shepherds of the sheep had
not only fleeced, but had deceived their
flocks. The accredited guide of Chris-
tendom had been tried and found want-
ing. Whither, then, in their bewilder-
ment of mind were men to turn?
Wyclif's answer was to translate the
Bible. When we remember that his
heretical tracts and pamphlets, written
in pithiest English, were being scat-
tered broadcast over England, and that
in 1381 he went on even to assail the

In 1360 he was Master of Balliol, and waging unceasing war against the Mendicant Orders, whose shameless eavesdropping and brazen-faced beggary made them the target of poet and preacher and pamphleteer alike. It was in 1366 that, famous already as an Oxford divine, he came first into publie and political prominence. The papacy had fallen on evil days. It was the period of the Babylonish captivity. Exiles from Rome, the Popes at Avignon were at a threefold disadvantage. There had been a magic and a witchery in the very name of Rome. Avignon was only Avignon. But besides the loss of prestige there was the material loss of the Italian revenues, and, finally, there was the humiliating descent from the proud position of the world's umpire to that of a mere tool of the King of France. Still the Court at Avignon was prodigiously expensive, and England had long occupied the unenviable position of the milch cow of the papacy. Urban the Fifth accordingly preferred a demand on Edward the Third for all the arrears of the tribute to the Papal See annually due since the death of King John. The demand was referred to Parlia

central citadel itself, and to deny the doctrine of Transubstantiation so far as it included miraculous power in the consecrating priest, it is astonishing that he should have died in his bed.

It is because in Wyclif we have the embodiment and the representative of the great cause of independence, whether in Church or State or in the tribunal. of conscience, the champion of intellectual and spiritual freedom from the tyranny of foreign dominion, the voice that gave due form and utterance to what thousands of smaller minds were thinking, that his Bible, which is in a sense himself, is of such abiding interest to a nation to whom freedom and independence are as the very breath of life.

Let us briefly summarize the objects that Wyclif had in view in organizing his army of "poor preachers" to distribute the Scriptures among his fellow-countrymen. He was anxious in the first place that a fragmentary Bible should be superseded by a complete one. He was convinced that the best remedy for the sybaritism of the Church was to go back to the simplicity that was in Jesus Christ and in His apostles. He believed that a study of the Christian records would satisfy any honest mind that the papal claims, the position taken up by each and every grade of the Pope's representatives, the existing system of miracle-working priests, of compulsory penances, compulsory confessions, compulsory pilgrimages, and the like, had no Divine right behind them to support them. He hoped that the many-sided disorders of his age might in some degree be abated by bringing men face to face with the inspired source of purity and simplicity, of loyalty and justice. No doubt he was over-sanguine, was in no "wise master builder," not sufficiently alive to the revolutionary tendency of his abstract doctrine of Dominion.' But he was a brave, single-hearted, sincere man, and the keenness of his intellectual powers was happily allied with a character against which not even his enemies ventured to throw a stone. His influence, transmitted though it was through Huss to Luther, did not long retain prominence in England. He was before his day.

sense a

was

A reaction against, his opinions soon. set in, and the constitution of Archbishop Arundel was so far successful that no new translation of any book of Scripture was published in this country for a hundred years. But if the flames were extinguished the embers smouldered on. The prohibited tracts and pamphlets passed secretly in many a quiet parish from hand to hand, and when in 1529 a royal proclamation appeared against unorthodox books, it is not surprising to find "Lollardies" grouped with other "hereties and errors. With the reign of Henry the Eighth we come in sight of the second of our great translators, William Tyndale (1484-1536), perhaps the noblest figure among them all.

The times were fully ripe for a new national Bible. The English of Wyclif's version had become antiquated and out of date. Intellectual development in Europe had made great strides. Upon the Roman renaissance of the preceding centuries had followed the revival of Greek letters, and Greece, as it has been finely said," had arisen from the grave with the New Testament in her hand." No longer tied down to the Latin Scriptures of the Church, scholars were now qualified for the study of the original Greek and Hebrew. The Bible had been translated into all the principal languages of Europe. The printing-press, long since established throughout the continent, had been introduced in 1477 by Caxton into England. The stimulating revelations of maritime enterprise under the auspices of such men as Columbus, Magellan, and Vasco di Gama, had caused a great ferment in the human mind. The new learning was everywhere extending its influence. The world of the west was ringing from end to end with the name of Luther.

William Tyndale was born near Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, in or about 1484. His brief life of fifty-two years comprises a period of the first historical importance. Within it are included the breach of Henry with Rome, the rise and fall of Wolsey, the reign of terror under Thomas Cromwell, the dissolution of the monasteries, the fermentation all over England of the idea of impending religious revolu

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The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, Volume 68