Friar Pacificus.-It is growing dark! And then my work for to-day is o'er. -The Golden Legend. THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. CHAPTER I. EARLY MANUSCRIPTS. A. D. 1384. THE history of the English Bible falls naturally into two periods, the era of manuscript being the first, while the second follows the progress and shares the triumphs of the art of printing. With each of these periods one great name is inseparably connected. Almost a hundred years before William Caxton set up his rude press at the sign of the Red Pale in Westminster, John Wycliffe crowned a laborious life by giving to the English people the Bible in their own tongue. He represents the highest achievement of the manuscript period. Almost fifty years after Caxton started his press, William Tyndale, driven from England and forced to do his work by stealth on the Continent of Europe, succeeded in issuing the first printed English New Testament. To him belongs the honor of consecrating the new art to what has since proved to be its largest as well as its noblest use. A. D. 1525. In the days of Wycliffe, the English tongue had attained a force and beauty which have scarcely been excelled. He is the father of our own best prose. But back of Wycliffe lie at least seven hundred years of the language, and it is possible to find traces in all these centuries of translations from the Scriptures. It is with this earliest manuscript period that we are interested now. Possibly the uncouth tongue to which Cæsar listened when he landed on the shores of Britain became before long familiar with the truths of Christianity. Gildas, who merits too well the sneer of Gibbon, that he presumed to exercise the office of historian,” affirms that when, during the persecuA. D. 303. tion under the Emperor Diocletian, English Christians went to their death, "all the copies of the Holy Scriptures which could be discovered were burned in the streets." What is certain is that when Alaric took Rome, a century later, Christianity found full employment for all its energies in disciplining the savage hordes that might otherwise have destroyed it; and as a consequence "the task of the translation of Scripture among the Northern nations was suspended." A. D. 410. -The oldest manuscript in existence is an English 1 Westcott, "A General View of the History of the English Bible,' P. 5. Psalter, partly in prose and partly in verse, preserved in the National Library at Paris. This translation was made by Aldhelm, who died bishop of Sherborne in the year 709. But of course versions of parts of the Bible may have been made earlier than this. The missionaries who found their home among the rugged moors of Northumbria, no doubt gave to the people in the vernacular the truths which they taught them. The ruins of Lindisfarne Abbey on Holy Island, ✅ off the northeast coast of England, D., A. D. 651. "the solemn, huge, and dark-red and learning the Scriptures. Ead- D., A. D. 721. |