[438] These articles are more or less numerous according to the sources whence they are derived.
[439] State Papers, i. p. 496.
[440] Ibid. p. 497.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE DEATH OF THE GREAT REFORMER OF ENGLAND.
(From 1535 to October 1536.)
Most of the reformers, Luther, Zuingle, Calvin, Knox, and others have acquired that name by their preachings, their writings, their struggles, and their actions. It is not so with the principal reformer of England: all his activity was concentred in the Holy Scriptures. Tyndale was less prominent than the other instruments of God, who were awakened to upraise the Church. We might say, that knowing the weakness of man, he had retired and hidden himself to allow the Word from Heaven to act by itself. He had studied it, translated it, and sent it over the sea: it must now do its own work. Is it not written: The field is the world, and the seed is the Word? But there is another characteristic, or rather another fact, which distinguishes him from them, and this we have to describe.
=TYNDALE'S CHARACTERISTIC.=
While the new adversaries of Henry VIII., Pole and the papistical party, were agitating on the continent, Tyndale, the man whom the king had pursued so long without being able to catch, was in prison at Vilvorde, near Brussels. In vain was he girt around with the thick walls of that huge fortress. Tyndale was free. 'There is the captivity and bondage,' he could say, 'whence Christ delivered us, redeemed and loosed us.[441] His blood, his death, his patience in suffering rebukes and wrongs, his prayers and fastings, his meekness and fulfilling of the uttermost point of the law broke the bonds of Satan, wherein we were so strait bound.' Thus Tyndale was as truly free at Vilvorde, as Paul had been at Rome. He felt pressed to accomplish a vow made many years before. 'If God preserves my life,' he had said, 'I will cause a boy that driveth a plow to know more of the Scriptures than the pope.' True Christianity shows itself by the attention it gives to Christ's little ones. It was time for Tyndale to keep his promise. He occupied his prison hours in preparing for the humble dwellers in the Gloucestershire villages and the surrounding counties, an edition of the Bible in which he employed the language and orthography used in that part of England.[442] When near his end, he returned lovingly to the familiar speech of his childhood; he wrote in the dialect of the peasantry to save the souls of the peasants, and for the first time put titles to the chapters of the Scripture, in order to make the understanding of it easier to his humbler fellow-countrymen. Two other editions of the New Testament appeared during the first year of his captivity. He did more: he had translated the Old Testament according to the Hebrew text, and was going to see to the printing of it just when Philips betrayed him. The fear that this labor would be lost grieved him even more than his imprisonment: a friend undertook the work he could no longer do himself.
=ROGERS AND TYNDALE.=
At that time there lived at Antwerp, as chaplain to the English merchants in that city, a young man from the county of Warwick, named Rogers, who had been educated at Cambridge, and was a little more than thirty years old. Rogers was learned, but submissive to the Romish traditions. Tyndale having made his acquaintance, asked him to help in translating the Holy Scriptures, and Rogers caught joyfully at the opportunity of employing his Greek and Hebrew. Close and constant contact with the Word of God gradually effected in him that great transformation, that total renewal of the man which is the object of redemption. 'I have found the true light in the Gospel,' he said one day to Tyndale; 'I now see the filthiness of Rome, and I cast from my shoulders the heavy yoke it had imposed upon me.'[443] From that hour Tyndale received from Rogers the help which he had formerly received from John Fryth, that pious martyr, whose example Rogers was to follow by enduring, the first under Mary, the punishment of fire. The Holy Scriptures have been written in English with the blood of martyrs—if we may so speak—the blood of Fryth, Tyndale, and Rogers: it is a crown of glory for that translation. At the moment of Tyndale's perfidious arrest, Rogers had fortunately saved the manuscript of the Old Testament, and now resolved to delay the printing no longer. When the news of this reached the Reformer in his cell at Vilvorde, it cast a gleam of light upon his latter days and filled his heart with joy. The whole Bible,—that was the legacy which the dying Tyndale desired to leave to his fellow-countrymen. He took pleasure in his gloomy dungeon in following with his mind's eye that divine Scripture from city to city and from cottage to cottage; his imagination pictured to him the struggles it would have to go through, and also its victories. 'The Word of God,' he said, 'never was without persecution—no more than the sun can be without his light. By what right doth the pope forbid God to speak in the English tongue? Why should not the sermons of the Apostles, preached no doubt in the mother-tongue of those who heard them, be now written in the mother-tongue of those who read them?' Tyndale did not think of proving the divinity of the Bible by learned dissertations. 'Scripture derives its authority from Him who sent it,' he said. 'Would you know the reason why men believe in Scripture?—It is Scripture.—It is itself the instrument which outwardly leads men to believe, whilst inwardly, the spirit of God Himself, speaking through Scripture, gives faith to His children.'[444] We do not know for certain in what city Rogers printed the great English folio Bible. Hamburg, Antwerp, Marburg, Lubeck, and even Paris have been named. Extraordinary precautions were required to prevent the persecutors from entering the house where men had the boldness to print the Word of God, and from breaking the printing-presses. Tyndale had the great comfort of knowing that the whole Bible was going to be published, and that prophets, apostles, and Christ himself would speak by it after his death.[445]