FIRST PRINTED ENGLISH BIBLE

 

THE ARTICLE IS THE EXCERPT FROM THIS BOOK

1. GOSPEL IN ALL LANDS.- SEPTEMBER 1902.

THE ARTICLE IS PRESENTED AS IT WAS FOUND IN THE WEBSITE- GOOGLE BOOKS- SAME ORTHOGRAPHY.

BY LAURA M. LATIMER 

One Christmas day many years ago five merchants were unloading their goods in London. Now and then they cast quick glances up and down the street. They seemed anxious and troubled as though they feared some unseen danger.

It was the time when the city puts on her holiday dress; the season for festivals, and Christmas gayeties. But London was not gay. The five merchants stopped their work, and marveled at the stillness of the great city. They questioned the passers by, and they learned that a dreadful pestilence was sweeping through London.The King had fied from his palace. The court had suspended its sittings, for the judges and officers of justice had fled also.

As the men were relating to them the horrors of the scourge, and they saw the death carts, filling the streets the look of anxious care and worry suddenly disappeared from the faces of the five merchants.

In those great bales of merchandise were concealed hundreds of volumes of the Holy Scriptures, the first New Testaments ever printed in the English language. All the ports had been watched and guarded for many months to prevent the entrance of these Gospels into England. But all those who had been watching in order to burn the books had fled from the doomed city, and the Bibles were safely conveyed to the ware houses of the Christian merchants Thames street.

Before one month of the new year passed God's printed word was scattered throughout London, Oxford and Cambridge. 

When the Bishop of London heard of sale of these Testaments, he was very angry, and he bought all that remained unsold and burned them at St Paul's Cross. 

Up to this time there were no printed English Bibles in all the world. It was William Tyndale who gave to England the printed Bible. From his youth he felt he had this one thing to do, to translate the word of God into his native tongue, and print it.

In those days very few people ever saw a Bible. They were written by hand on parchment, by monks in monasteries. It took a skilful scribe ten months to copy one Bible. A copy of the Holy Scripture from a convent cost more than $300. 

At first they used for paper a substance called papyrus, which they manufactured from the tall reeds which grew along the banks of the Nile, The pens were also made from reeds. Afterward they used parchment made from the skins of sheep and goats. These Bibles that cost so much labor were chained to the walls of convents, and only a few learned men had the opportunity to see the Holy Scriptures.

Tyndale resolved to place the Bible within the reach of everybody. But all England was closed against him, and he was obliged to fly from his native land. Though driven from city to city by his enemies, yet his work of translation and printing went steadily on. "The one to whom we are so deeply indebted was living in painful and perilous hiding places, afflicted with cold and hunger and every privation."

 Hiding in garrets and cellars, and two years in prison; yet he succeeded in sending the fourth edition of New Testaments into England in the year 1527, just two years from the time he had distributed the first edition.

There was a famine for bread in London. But Christmas Day a fleet of ships appeared off the mouth of the Thames. They were relief ships filled with corn, and the precious Bibles were safely concealed in the sacks of corn. The bread that perisheth and the bread that endureth unto eternal life, were delivered together, from house to house among the starving poor. But those days of cruel persecution have passed away. London is the great Bible depository of the world. Thousands of Bibles in more than 400 different languages are sent daily to all parts of the world.

JOHN WICLIF.

JOHN WICLIF, noted as first translator of the entire Bible into English, and called "the morning star of the English Reformation," was born in Yorkshire, England, about the year 1324, and was educated at Oxford University, residing there for many years as student, or teacher. In 1361 he was made master of Balliol Hall (afterwards Balliol College), and rector of Fillingham. After ward he acted as the King's chaplain, "created doctor in theology" in 1372, and about 1376 was made rector of Lutterworth.

 The monkish orders preyed much the fears and the property of the people,and the king appointed a commission, of which Wiclif was a prominent member, to confer with the papal authorities, with the view having the evil removed. The of the subject led Wiclif to see other defects in the Roman Church, and to speak against them, which awakened an opposition that resulted in charges against him of heresy a controversy that continued until his death, in December, 1384.

Dr. A. W. Ward, writing of him, says: "How highly he valued the influence of spoken Word, and how anxiously he sought to bring it home to the people, is best by his institution of Poor or Simple Priests. Possibly what was in interested quarters resented and resisted as an endeavor both to supplant the existing mendicant orders and to ignore the authority of Pope, might under different circumstances have resulted in the establishment of a mendicant order, and in the beginning of new Catholic revival. At the same time, there must have been a combative element Wiclif's priests, even before his own attitude had become one of absolute revolt.

"They seem to have gone forth from Oxford, and more especially from Leicester (which is not far from Lutterworth),clad in long garments of red woollen, barefooted, and staff in hand. Their mission was teach simple truths in simple words, declaring 'God's law' in church or chapel when admitted to a pulpit, otherwise in the church yards or public streets and places. They must have tried the patience of many honest priest anxious to do his duty by his "parishioners" like Chaucer's Poor Parson a Town. Into the picture of whom is supposed to have introduced a feature two of the Wiclifite itinerant.

"Fettered so far as we know, by no rules or restrictions, Wiclif's mission-men may have often had little to distinguish them from the mendicant friars but the voluntary nature of their daily self-denial. Like the friars, they, no doubt, often became the confidential friends of the lowly, sharing their sympathies and very likely groaning with them over their grievances.

"These wandering preachers must have come less and less amenable to control, especially when (in imitation perhaps of example previously set by the Waldenses) even laymen were allowed to take part the labors of the mission. No wonder in the end the attempt was made (in May,1382) by Archbishop Courtenay to exguish the itinerants! The Lords consented to his proposal,but the Commons hesitated; and it was necessary to resort to an audacious manœuvre for giving statutory to a royal ordinance which had been against the preachers.

"This institution of Wiclif's connects itself with some of the most important er forts of his late career. From many points of view his translation of the Bible formed an indispensable complement of his previous activity, but it was above all, an invaluable aid to his endeavor to make the truth, in its unadorned and undisguised simplicity, known throughout the land. He had long been specially distinguished by his exposition of Holy Scripture at Oxford, where academical enthusiasm had bestowed on him the title of Doctor Evangelicus. 

"But the translation of the Bible into English was undertaken by Wiclif for the people at large, which at this time was any version of the Scriptures intelligible to it. The work was accomplished by him his Oxford helpers by the year 1382; and whatever may have been the influence of his labors upon Wiclif himself, their result can not but have helped to incline followers toward the principle by which was afterward content to abide: that  the Bible is the solitary and sufficient rule faith, and that this rule is to be with the help of God alone.

"Wiclif's interest in his itinerant preachers must have intensified his hostility toward the existing monastic orders, more especially the mendicants. It still remains an open question when this hostility first publicly declared itself, nor will it be possible to decide the point till, in course of  the time, all the writings of Wiclif shall have been made accessible and their dates have been ascertained."

Bishop Hurst in his History of the Christian Church says: "The New Testament was translated by Wiclif and completed 1382; the Old Testament was translated by Nicholas Hereford, one of the leaders of the Wiclif party at the University, and by others. Both translations were from the vulgate. The work of Hereford was suddenly interrupted by a citation to appear before a council in London, which he appealed the Pope, and by him he was imprisoned for years. Wiclif multiplied copies of the translation both of the Bible as a whole and parts, placed them in the hands of preachers,and thus England was saved from reign of ignorance and superstition which has cursed the Latin races of Europe. The Church tried in every way to destroy all copies of Wiclif's versions, but it utterly failed in this. Numerous manuscript copies exist in English libraries,and we infer that Wiclif's Bible was widely circulated. A thorough revision was undertaken by Wiclif's learned pupil and ministerial assistant, John Purvey, and completed about 1388. Bible and prose writings were the creactors of our modern English." 

In the summer of 1381, the relations between Wiclif and the Church underwent a sudden alteration by his own act. The twelve short theses concerning the eucharist which he now published were absolutely irreconcilable with the accepted doctrine of the existing Church of Rome: theologians must decide how far Wiclif was justified in asserting that doctrine itself to be a heresy on the part of the friars who defended it against him.

"His hostility toward Rome and the pa pacy now rapidly reached its climax. Antichrist was now no longer the concrete Antipope Clement or the concrete Pope Urban, but the pope as such, in so far as he contrary to Christ in life and doctrine. Such was Wiclif's argumentative position in his later days- a position which by no amounts to the absolute identification of pope and antichrist.

"In scattered passages of incidental invective, however, the effect cannot be said to fall short of this.The pope he declared owes his appointment to the Father of Evil, his office is poisonous; the prelates are changed into wolves, and their captain is a fiend in his life and antichrist in his work. Thus the hidden fire had broken forth at last and flamed fiercely and clearly in the eyes of all men.

On the 17th of May 1382m the synod which the new archbishop ('that strong pillar of the Church') had convoked for into consideration the heresies of Wiclif the sect of the so-called Lollards. with the bishops of the province of Canterbury, a select number of doctors of and law had assembled in the hall of famous Dominican monastery at Blackfriars, which was frequently the residence of English kings.

We may assume-for we have only results to judge from- that the synod passed, without a dissenting voice,  the substance the mandates afterward published by archbishop, which condemned, partly as heretical, partly as erroneous, a series of doctrines put forth at  Oxford or by preachers about the country, beginning with the Wiclif's theses concerning the eucharist, prohibited their further spread, under pain of the greater excommunication."

On December 28, 1384, he was smitten by a second stroke of paralysis in his church at Lutterworth,and three days afterward died, greatly mourned by many who acknowledged him as a great spiritual leader.

The Council of Constance, May 5,1415, condemned his doctrines, and in 1428 his re mains were dug up, reduced to ashes and cast into the River Swift, which conveyed them through the Avon and the Severn into the sea, a type of the progress of his Protestant faith over the world.

Wiclif anticipated the Reformation under Luther by one hundred and fifty years, and by his words and writings prepared in some measure the way for both the Reformation in Germany and in England. "He accepted unreservedly the principle of the sole and sufficient authority of the Holy Scripture as the only rule of faith and practice. He swept away all notions of merit and of works of superrogation. He denied utterly the idea of a treasure house of merit held in heaven to the credit of the pope-an idea which played such an important part in the Middle Ages and on which the doctrine of indulgences was founded. He held the necessity of repentance and conversion, and his ideas on both were quite satisfactory, but he did not grasp the simplicity and freedom of faith as taught by Paul and received by Luther, and given its rightful place and power by Wesley. With him faith was too much a belief with the intellect and not enough a trust of the heart."