But the great pride of the exhibition was a series of Coverdale’s Bibles and Testaments, over which Mr. Stevens indulges in most rhapsodical eulogy. “Let no Englishman or American,” he exclaims, “view this (765) and the six following Bibles without first lifting his hat, for they are seven extraordinary copies of the Coverdale Bible, containing, with one important exception (the Marquis of Northampton’s copy), all the variations known of the most precious volume in our language.” We cannot altogether share his raptures over this Bible, “faithfully and truly translated out of Douche and Latyn into English.” Stevens sneers at the Rhemish Testament as “a secondary translation from the Vulgate,” but Coverdale’s, translated out of “Douche and Latyn” into English, elicits no such sneer. According to his theory, set forth at great length, this edition is due to “Jacob van Meteren, of Antwerp, printer and proprietor, and probably the translator, by whom Coverdale was employed to edit and see the work through the press,” and he gives Antwerp as the place of publication. The edition was bought by James Nicolson, of Southwark. Though Mr. Stevens elsewhere represents the English people at this time as hungering and famished for an English Bible, he admits “that the English printer and publisher seems to have had as much trouble in working off his books as Simmons had in selling Milton’s Paradise Lost, if we may judge by the number of new titles and preliminary leaves found in different copies.” It contains a long and fulsome dedication to Henry VIII. and his dearest just-wife, in some copies “Anne” (Boleyn), in others “Jane” (Seymour). The Bible bearing the name of Thomas Mathew as translator (London: Grafton & Whitchurch, 1537) he ascribes to the famous John Rogers, and maintains that it too was printed by Van Meteren at Antwerp.
The Latin-English Testament bearing Coverdale’s name (London 1538), which he repudiated on account of its errors, or perhaps the correction of some of his errors, and that really issued by him at Paris in the same year, were both in the exhibition, as well as that issued also in 1538 at London bearing the name of Johan Hollybushe as translator. These are very curious as being, we think, the only Latin-English Testaments ever issued, giving the Vulgate and a translation based upon it. No other has, to our knowledge, ever appeared in the lapse of more than three centuries since that year, 1538. As Caxton’s Psalter was perhaps the first book of the Vulgate printed in England, these Testaments of Nicolson were the last portion of the Vulgate printed there for more than two hundred and fifty years, when the edition printed for the exiled clergy of France made its appearance. Unfortunately we do not find a copy of that edition in the list of those included in the exhibition.[[84]]
The first Testament professing to be translated directly from the Greek is that numbered in the catalogue 864, issued by Gaultier, 1550; and the first Bible from the Hebrew and Greek is that printed at Geneva by Rowland Hall in 1560. This shows how the people in England clung to the Vulgate. On the Continent Luther had abandoned it for such Hebrew and Greek texts as he could find, and so led the way to the host of errors that prevail to this day; but in England the versions were all based on the Vulgate, occasionally represented as compared with the Greek. It was not, indeed, till 1611 that the Church of England, by the translation then issued, formally abandoned the Vulgate, as the Calvinists had previously done. Mr. Stevens’ sneer at the Rhemish Testament of 1583, as being a secondary translation, applies with equal force to nearly all the English Protestant editions then in the hands of the people. Now that the Greek and Hebrew texts have by the aid of the best manuscripts been restored to some degree of purity and accuracy, Protestant scholars are revising the translation of 1611, and the one remarkable fact appears constantly that every change made to bring them to correspond to correct texts brings them back to the early translations from the Vulgate.[[85]]
This fact of English adherence to the Vulgate shown in the collection of Bibles at the Caxton celebration goes far towards exploding another Protestant myth and legend; and that is that England welcomed the Reformation with open arms, that the whole nation went over to the new ideas, and that Catholicity was generally abandoned. This is inculcated in a thousand ways in all the histories and popular literature of the day, if not squarely asserted. The Caxton collection shows that for nearly a century the people of England clung to the old Latin Vulgate as a standard, and that translations from it alone were read officially in the churches. And to this day the Book of Common Prayer is based on the Vulgate. Although Henry VIII. broke off from Rome, he knew the temper of the people. The English nation was in a manner bereft of its wonted leaders. The civil wars of the Roses had swept away most of the old nobility, and had brought to the surface the worst, most unscrupulous and grasping adventurers. What this class was who clustered around the spendthrift Henry VIII. we can easily see by a study of our times, after our experience of civil war. They were men to whom nothing was sacred; men determined to grasp and hold rank and wealth at any cost to the state or conscience. The people, bereft of their old leaders, of the time-honored noble families, could not effectively resist the set of new men. To these the church offered a splendid field for plunder. The ill-concerted insurrections against them were put down with merciless severity. Yet the attachment of the people to the old faith remained. Every step of Henry VIII. was gradual. In his reign the Mass and other offices of the church were maintained. Even in the reign of his boy son the unscrupulous men who coined a new faith and worship did not venture to go too far from the old forms. Like the Chinese emperor, they sought to destroy all trace of Catholic worship by committing to the flame every book in England that could keep it alive. What havoc they made we can learn and imagine from a view of the Caxton collection. Mary’s reign was too short to undo the mischief, and Elizabeth threw her whole influence into the scale against the church, and, against her own convictions, upheld the Anglican establishment as organized in her brother’s name, and finally gave it form and power; but even she did not dare to bring it to the standard of the French, Swiss, Dutch, and Scotch Protestants. The Church of England, in obedience to the old Catholic instincts of even those who submitted to force, retained much of the old form, and non-jurors, Puseyites, Tractarians, Ritualists are simply natural products of this old element.
Yet, with all the power of Henry, Somerset, Elizabeth, the mass of the English people had not become Protestant or ceased to be Catholic. One of Harper’s Half-Hour Series is not likely to over-state the Catholic side; yet Dr. Guernsey, in his Spanish Armada, says:
“At the middle of the reign of Elizabeth the population of England numbered something less than five millions. Of these, according to the estimate of Rushton, one-third were Protestants and two-thirds Catholics. Lingard, with less probability, thinks that about one-half were Catholic. The Italian Cardinal Bentivoglio reckoned the zealous Catholics at only one-thirtieth part of the nation, while those who would without the least scruple have become Catholics, if the Catholic religion should be established by law, were at least four-fifths of the whole; and Macaulay thinks this statement very near the truth. We think a more accurate apportionment would be that one-fourth of the population were decided Protestants, another fourth decided Catholics, while the remaining half—the majority of them with a leaning to the old faith—were quite content with whatever form of religion should be ordained by the civil authorities for the time being.”
If this was the state of England in the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, after all connection with Rome had been broken off for two generations, all Catholic books committed to the flames, the Mass and the priesthood outlawed, how impossible to believe that the English people went as a body into the Reformation! If only one-fourth were then decided Protestants, how many were Protestants when Coverdale’s Bible was issued?
If England became Protestant, it was simply because the English people were dragooned into it by penal laws steadily and persistently applied. The decided Protestants from choice were few and their descendants are comparatively few. The mass of English Protestants are the descendants of cowards who yielded up their faith and their convictions to save property, liberty, or life. The poorest Irish Catholic has a noble ancestry of men who suffered confiscation, imprisonment, hunting like wild beasts, death itself, rather than abandon the faith they sincerely believed, and it is certainly not for the sons of poltroons to despise them.
The Caxton collection thus, by showing the adherence to the Vulgate till a Presbyterian king came to the throne, shows how reluctantly England accepted Protestantism, and dispels many of the fine theories with which Mr. Stevens mystifies the subject.
The collection had some editions of special interest to us Catholics, yet it lacked many which we would expect to find in so pretentious a series of books. The Gutenberg Bible, that glory of the church, we have already noted. Few of our readers were or could well be present at the London exhibition, but when the Lenox Library opens in New York they will be able to see a fine copy of this first of printed books—proof that in Catholic times, when the church was undisputed mistress of Europe, the first work deemed entitled to the honor of being reproduced by the new invention was the Bible. A Catholic can point to it, and say: “That is the first book ever printed; it is our Catholic Bible, printed by the Catholic men who invented the art of printing.”