Living and dying.
CHAPTER VIII.
CONCLUSION
ON issuing his translation, and again when sending forth his translation revised, Tindale solicited the aid of scholars in amending his version wherever they could. This was not a mere fashion of speech. It was the expression of his sincerity and his modesty. This one thing he desired, as he cared for nothing else, that the Bible in English be as perfect as possible.
Succeeding generations of scholars responded to his invitation; in a spirit like his they labored. The Bibles of Coverdale, Matthews, the Bishops; the Geneva Version and the Authorized Version, are mile-stones by the way—evidence with what ardor the work of revising and perfecting the English version was carried on age by age.
NORTH NIBLEY, TINDALE'S MONUMENT.
To find on the one hand this devotion in rendering the Bible into English, it is most strange on the other to find the larger vision completely disappear, the larger vision of Erasmus that it should be rendered into every language. It is as if no such ideal had been conceived.
Now, three hundred years had to pass by before we find it being recovered, or before men were moved with any degree of sympathy for the ideal which the Dutch scholar had so bravely ventured to describe.
The universal destiny of the book had stirred his heart and fired his imagination: but not until the Evangelical Revival had deeply moved the people of England, and the modern Missionary Movement had come in its train did any men catch the vision of the Bible for every nation in the native speech.