Study of the King James Bible | Page 6

of
various parts of the Bible. Midway between Bede and Orm came
Langland's poem, "The Vision of Piers Plowman," which paraphrased
so much of the Scripture.
Yet the fact is that until the last quarter of the fourteenth century there
was no prose version of the Bible in the English language. Indeed, there
was only coming to be an English language. It was gradually emerging,
taking definite shape and form, so that it could be distinguished from
the earlier Norman French, Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon, in which so much
of it is rooted.
As soon as the language grew definite enough, it was inevitable that
two things should come to pass. First, that some men would attempt to
make a colloquial version of the Bible; and, secondly, that others would
oppose it. One can count with all confidence on these two groups of
men, marching through history like the animals into the ark, two and
two. Some men propose, others oppose. They are built on those lines.
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 the
Bible 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