The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath the words. It is the representative of his best moments; and all that there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. It has been to him all along as the silent, but oh! how intelligible voice of his guardian angel; and in the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible."
WHAT A PANEGYRIC
from an avowed opponent of this translation! And to whom are we principally indebted for this lovely poem of God? To William Tyndale. Says Froude, the historian: "The peculiar genius, if such a word may be permitted, which breathes through the Bible, the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the preternatural grandeur unequaled, unapproached, in the attempted improvements of modern scholars—all are here, and bear the impress of one man, and that man William Tyndale."
AND WHO WAS WILLIAM TYNDALE?
He was a gentle clergyman of great piety and learning. He was born in Gloucestershire, England, in 1477. He endured great persecution and was forced to quit England. He visited Luther in Germany. He printed his New Testament at Antwerp. Its beauties were at once recognized in England, although to read it was illegal and punishable with death. Cardinal Wolsely did his best to entice the translator to England, to destroy him. An assistant in the work, named John Frith, was lured back and burned to death. Finally Henry the Eighth of England procured Tyndale's arrest at Antwerp. He was given a "trial," at Vilvoorden, near Antwerp, and pronounced guilty. In September, 1536,
THEY STRANGLED THIS INSPIRED SERVANT
of God, and then burned his body. At the stake he cried: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes!" Upon Tyndale's version of the Bible the King James translation is solidly based. "It is astonishing," says Dr. Geddes, a profound scholar, "how little obsolete the language of it is, even at this day; and, in point of perspicuity and noble simplicity, propriety of idiom, and purity of style, no English version has yet surpassed it." Of course our language has changed greatly in 400 years. Yet
THE LORD'S PRAYER
does not contain, in Tyndale's exact language, one unrecognizable word. It ran as follows: "Oure Father which arte in heven, halowed be thy name. Let thy kingdom come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as hit ys in heven. Geve vs this daye oure dayly breade. And forgeve vs oure treaspases, even as we forgeve them which treaspas vs. Leede vs not into temptacion, but delyvre vs from yvell. Amen."
THE MARKED POETICAL SUPERIORITY