“What a stupid man!” exclaimed my young hearer. “That is not any prayer for a priest to say by a dying person; it’s a prayer for a happy death, and is it not a beautiful one?’” She was certainly right, and a Catholic child could teach many of these people.
[81]. To the same purport is this colophon on Bartholomæus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum, issued by Wynken de Worde about 1495:
“And also of your charyte call to remembraunce
The soule of William Caxton, first prynter of this boke,
In laten tongue at Coleyn, hymself to auance
That every wel disposyd man may theron loke.”
[82]. Stevens admits that there was no necessity for actually doing the printing of Bibles in England. “The educated of England, however, were not ignorant of the Scriptures, for Coburger, of Nuremberg, and probably other Continental printers, had established warehouses in London for the sale of Latin Bibles as early as 1480, and perhaps earlier.”
[83]. The Paulist Library in New York might have sent a fine copy of the ninth edition, printed in 1482, the very year Luther was born.
[84]. We have never seen the Latin Bible printed by Norton at London, in 1680, but think that the text of the Vulgate was not followed.
[85]. The natural history and topography of the 1611 Bible are ludicrously incorrect, because they abandoned the Vulgate and translated at random. Yet the Vulgate was translated from the Septuagint, and revised in the Holy Land by St. Jerome with the aid of Jewish scholars who knew the geography and natural history of the country. The Septuagint was made in Egypt, while Hebrew was still the language of the nation, by men thoroughly acquainted with their native country. Was it not sheer madness for gentlemen in England in the seventeenth century, with a mere smattering of Hebrew, to think that they could render geographical and zoölogical terms more accurately? Is not their presumption the real matter to be sneered at?