We are more concerned with the men who made the versions; but we must think a moment of the others.One of his contemporaries, Knighton, may speak for all in his saying of Wiclif, that he had, to be sure, translated the Gospel into the Anglic tongue, but that it had thereby been made vulgar by him, and more open to the reading of laymen and women than it usually is to the knowledge of lettered and intelligent clergy, and "thus the pearl is cast abroad and trodden under the feet of swine"; and, that we may not be in doubt who are the swine, he adds: "The jewel of the Church is turned into the common sport of the people."But two strong impulses drive thoughtful men to any effort that will secure wide knowledge of the Bible.One is their love of the Bible and their belief in it; but the other, dominant then and now, is a sense of the need of their own time.It cannot be too strongly urged that the two great pioneers of English Bible translation, Wiclif and Tindale, more than a century apart, were chiefly moved to their work by social conditions.No one could read the literature of the times of which we are speaking without smiling at our assumption that we are the first who have cared for social needs.We talk about the past as the age of the individual, and the present as the social age.Our fathers, we say, cared only to be saved themselves, and had no concern for the evils of society.They believed in rescuing one here and another there, while we have come to see the wisdom of correcting the conditions that ruin men, and so saving men in the mass.There must be some basis of truth for that, since we say it so confidently; but it can be much over-accented.There were many of our fathers, and of our grandfathers, who were mightily concerned with the mass of people, and looked as carefully as we do for a corrective of social evils.Wiclif, in the late fourteenth century, and Tindale, in the early sixteenth, were two such men.The first English translations of the Bible were fruits of the social impulse.
Wiclif was impressed with the chasm that was growing between the church and the people, and felt that a wider and fuller knowledge of theBible would be helpful for the closing of the chasm.It is a familiar remark of Miss Jane Addams that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.Wiclif believed that the cure for the evils of religion is more religion, more intelligent religion.He found a considerable feeling that the best things in religion ought to be kept from most people, since they could not be trusted to understand them.His own feeling was that the best things in religion are exactly the things most people ought to know most about; that people had better handle the Bible carelessly, mistakenly, than be shut out from it by any means whatever.We owe the first English translation to a faith that the Bible is a book of emancipation for the mind and for the political life.
John Wiclif himself was a scholar of Oxford, master of that famous Balliol College which has had such a list of distinguished masters.He was an adviser of Edward III.Twenty years after his death a younger contemporary (W.Thorpe) said that "he was considered by many to be the most holy of all the men of his age.He was of emaciated frame, spare, and well nigh destitute of strength.He was absolutely blameless in his conduct." And even that same Knighton who accused him of casting the Church's pearl before swine says that in philosophy "he came to be reckoned inferior to none of his time."But it was not at Oxford that he came to know common life so well and to sense the need for a new social influence.He came nearer to it when he was rector of the parish at Lutterworth.As scholar and rector he set going the two great movements which leave his name in history.One was his securing, training, and sending out a band of itinerant preachers or "poor priests" to gather the people in fields and byways and to preach the simple truths of the Christian religion.They were unpaid, and lived by the kindness of the common people.They came to be called Lollards, though the origin of the name is obscure.Their followers received the same name.A few years after Wiclif's death an enemy bitterly observed that if you met any two men one was sure to be a Lollard.It was the "first time in English history that an appeal had been made to the people instead of the scholars." Religion was to be made rather a matter of practical life than of dogma or of ritual.The "poor priests" in their cheap brown robes became amighty religious force, and evoked opposition from the Church powers.A generation after Wiclif's death they had become a mighty political force in the controversy between the King and the Pope.As late as 1521 five hundred Lollards were arrested in London by the bishop.[1] Wiclif's purpose, however, was to reach and help the common people with the simpler, and therefore the most fundamental, truths of religion.
[1] Muir, Our Grand Old Bible, p.14.
The other movement which marks Wiclif's name concerns us more; but it was connected with the first.He set out to give the common people the full text of the Bible for their common use, and to encourage them not only in reading it, if already they could read, but in learning to read that they might read it.Tennyson compares the village of Lutterworth to that of Bethlehem, on the ground that if Christ, the Word of God, was born at Bethlehem, the Word of Life was born again at Lutterworth.[1] The translation was from the Vulgate, and Wiclif probably did little of the actual work himself, yet it is all his work.And in 1382, more than five centuries ago, there appeared the first complete English version of the Bible.Wiclif made it the people's Book, and the English people were the first of the modern nations to whom the Bible as a whole was given in their own familiar tongue.Once it got into their hands they have never let it be taken entirely away.
