AN open Bible was unknown in our country in former days, and only by hardship, suffering, and death, was the privilege we now all may enjoy of reading the word of God in our own tongue, won for us by our forefathers.
Long, long ago, portions of the word of God it is true were rendered into the tongue of the people. Over one thousand years since, Cædmon, a monk, who died in 680, composed Bible histories in verse. This he did at the instigation of Hilda, the abbess of the fine old abbey of Whitby, the ruins of which still stand in their glory on the hill over the harbor of that town.
The Venerable Bede, who died in 735, “for the advantage of the church,” translated into the language of the country, the Gospel by John, and that this work was most dear to that good man’s heart, the touching story of his death shows: — “When the morning dawned, he told us,” says one who was with him, “to write diligently what we had begun. This being done, one of us said, ‘There is yet, beloved master, a chapter wanting; will it be unpleasant to ask any more questions?’
“He answered, ‘Not at all. Take your pen and write with speed.’ He did so.
“At the ninth hour, he said to me, ‘I have some valuables in my little chest; fetch them, that I may distribute my small presents.’
“He addressed each, and exhorted to prayer. We wept.
“In the evening, his pupil said, ‘Dear master, one sentence is still wanting.’
‘Write it quickly,’ exclaimed Bede. When it was finished, he said, ‘Support me while I go to the holy place, when I can pray to my Father.’
“When he was placed there, he repeated the Gloria Patri, and expired in the effort.”
After him, King Alfred translated portions of the word of God into the tongue of the people, and this brings us to the year 900.
A century later, an archbishop of York, Ælfric by name, wrote, “Whoever would be one with God, must often pray, and often read the Holy Scriptures. For when we pray, we speak to God, and when we read the Bible, God speaks to us. The whole of the Scriptures are written for our salvation, and by them we obtain the knowledge of the hereafter.” He translated portions of the Scriptures into the then language of England, the Anglo-Saxon.
These are instances sufficient to show that from very early times the people of England had at least parts of the word of God in their own language, and that it was not among them only in Latin, nor in the hands of the religious orders alone. They show also, that holy men of all ages have one thought as to the people at large having the word of God in their hands and hearts.
The Bible was read, more or less, at least in Latin, in the centuries gone by, as is evident from the numerous quotations made from it, and the allusions to its stories found in old writings, and it is equally evident that the religious powers of those old times did their, best to keep the people generally in ignorance of what God says to us.
Without obedience to the Bible, religion—though it be called Christian religion—becomes very much what men like to make it, and, in the old times we are now contemplating, the Christian religion became so utterly unlike that which God proclaims and teaches in His word, that in very large districts of so-called Christian countries it was little better than paganism.
The religious authorities— popes and bishops— were often more powerful than kings and nobles, and they did very much as they pleased. They formed a system of horrible tyranny in the sacred name of Christ, enslaving men’s spirits, and making them really their serfs. Were such popes and bishops not known by religious titles, they would be regarded as monsters of cruelty and wickedness, but there is a foolish notion that a man’s office gives sanctity to his character.
However, in the face of the growth of darkness, there were men and women bold enough to walk by the light they had received either from the small portions of the Scriptures that had come into their hands, or from the words of these Scriptures repeated to them by pious people. These were called heretics, and the religious powers of 1229 sought to set them down altogether. Archbishops, bishops, and priests were bound together by oath to search them out, to bring them to punishment, and to destroy their houses, and the lay people were also sworn to have nothing to do with heretics, which oath was to be repeated every two years. The same council ordered also that no layman should be in possession of the Bible, Old or New Testaments, written in Latin, and it commanded the suppression of translations into the tongue of the people: “We also forbid,” said these servants of God, “the common people to possess any of the books of the Old and New Testaments, except, perhaps, the Psalter.... Having any of these books translated into the vulgar tongue we strictly forbid.”
Thus did the religious leaders of Christendom, and the men, who stood before God on earth as the servants of Christ, treat His word and those who longed to read it. A man who dared to keep and to read his few written verses of the Bible was a heretic, and destruction or penitence his choice. If he would hold to his faith in God, death was his doom; if he became penitent, he was obliged to wear a cross on his right and left side, and, until the pope, or his legate, thought fit to attest the purity of his faith, the unhappy man remained an outcast.
These decrees were obeyed in great part, as the scarcity of the manuscripts of portions of the Bible, in the language of England of those days, proves.
Some one hundred and fifty years after this decree, God ordered that the whole of His Word should be given to England in the plain language cf her people, and of this great act we will now speak.
England was then entirely Roman Catholic, it must be remembered, and the man who translated the Bible from the Latin into the English tongue lived and died a Catholic. This great and learned man was John Wiclif, and his work was accomplished long before the art of printing was discovered. He had copies of the Scriptures, which he had translated into English, written, and, by the help of faithful men, circulated in the country. Thus, despite popes and councils, and the dread of fire and bonds, the whole of the Scriptures entered England.
Some years before this translation of the Bible and its circulation, a strong spirit had arisen in the land against the iron rule of the popes, and their exactions of money by foreign prelates. The England of the earlier part of the reign of Edward III. was vigorous and great—a considerable portion of France had fallen to the English crown, and the people were in no mood to be commanded by foreigners, whether popes or priests. God paved the way for the determination to read His word by arousing the spirit of religious liberty in the land, and, as we shall see, He raised up protectors for Wiclif, thong h several of them worked only for political ends. The northern part of the country was especially imbued with this spirit of freedom, and Wiclif, who was a Yorkshire man, and of good Yorkshire fiber, stood with the politicians of his times who strove for liberty.
Wiclif went to Oxford in his youth, and was a student at one of its then five colleges. There he underwent the hardships common to the students of those days. The comforts of our times were not meted out to poor university students five hundred years ago; some had to herd together in “halls,” others to make shift in miserable and dirty lodgings, and others even had to beg for their subsistence. Oxford was a most unhealthy spot, but it was the center of the country’s learning, and hence the wisest and the most eager for knowledge flocked there, and faced all hardships to win the prize of knowledge. An unruly town it was also, and the students had their own pitched battles in a style very much to their list. Fierce, indeed, were these struggles, often ending in bloodshed and occasioning many deaths. In the ruder times of five hundred years ago, questions were fought out by sword as well as argued by the tongue, so that the students wielded their weapons and crashed through one another’s helmets in order to give force to or to gain victory for their opinions. These fights were often between the northern and the southern factions, the former being on the side of obtaining greater liberty in the country.
The circumstances of such days called up men of great courage to be leaders, or, shall we say, only men of great courage could be leaders in such stormy seasons. Hence we can see how university life trained John Wiclif not only in sciences and arts, in astronomy and moral philosophy, in music and language, but in courage and character, In nerve and vigor, and in a spirit that allowed no obstacles to quench its fire.
In the year 1348 the awful Black Death it appeared in England. This scourge swept away tens of thousands, and nearly one half of the population of England and under it.
Its contagious character was such that the breath, the clothes, and the very places touched by those seized with the plague, helped to spread the pestilence. People in their terror thought the Day of Judgment was at hand, and that God had sent the angel of doom to prepare men for Christ’s coming.
In 1349 it reached Oxford, where Wiclif was a student. We are told he devoted himself to God at this time, and prayed earnestly for divine direction as to his course in life.
Some ten years after this we find Wiclif in high honor in the university, his learning and his wisdom being unrivaled. He was a fellow of one of the colleges, and was an acknowledged master of the philosophy of the day. Now the wisdom of five hundred years ago, as that of our own century, relegated the study of the Bible to obscurity. The teachers of Scripture knowledge were called “bullocks of Abraham,” “asses of Balaam,” or by other uncomplimentary titles, and they had to procure rooms and audiences as best they might in the University; but John Wiclif, filled with the sense of what the Scriptures really are as the word of God, with God-given courage, devoted his talents and his learning to their cause, and, drawing large numbers of the students to hear his lectures, lifted up the study of the Scriptures from its current disesteem. One professor would be honored by one title, another by another. Wiclif became known as the Evangelical Doctor.
After this we see him a parish priest—a Roman Catholic priest we mean—a faithful man laboring amongst the sick and the poor of his parish, yet engaged with untiring zeal in the vast work of bringing the truth of God before the country at large. The low and careless state, into which the accepted teachers of religion had fallen, led him to collect about him earnest men, who should go forth as missioners, preaching the gospel and warning of the wrath to come. These men were evangelists, not committed to any one locality; but who went and who dwelt “where they should most profit, and for such time as might be convenient, after the moving of the Holy Ghost.” They were poor, wandering preachers, “burning with zeal for souls,” These men, “barefoot, with a staff in their hand, and clad in long russet gowns reaching down to their heels,” went about the country preaching daily, not only in churches and churchyards, but also in markets, fairs, and other open places. Rich and poor stood spellbound listening to Wyclif’s “poor priests” denouncing sin, proclaiming eternity, and telling them that papal indulgences were vain, confession to the priest useless, and invocation of saints and worship of images idolatry.
In these old days, as in apostolic times and in our own, the Gospel of God carried its own divine force with it. Wickedness, philosophy, religiousness fell before it.
Both great and small believed the word of God, and trusted Christ for salvation and for holiness. People then, as now, were divided, some siding with the truth, others fighting for their own error, so that on the arrival of a preacher into a neighborhood, might be seen assembling a body of armed men prepared to give him a hearing, and then, during his sermon, the crash of arms and the shouts of combatants, would announce the arrival of another party determined to drive the people away. Such congregations would have among them, as well as eager listeners, angry abbots and monks, rectors and curates, ill liking the plain truths of the preachers and their pious lives.
Thus it was God began to work in this country some five hundred years ago.