currendo. He was gaining the ears of the multitude, and was making proselytes not only among the highest nobles of the land, but among the masses of the common people.

Nor was it long before his preaching began to tell even upon the proceedings of the mayor and common council of the city. One of Wiclif's loudest complaints in the pulpit was directed against the corrupt remissness of the clergy, in the exercise of the discipline of the Church against adulterers and fornicators of both sexes. Transgressors of the seventh commandment had been long allowed to compound for their immoralities, and the clergy put money into their pockets by betraying the interests both of public and domestic virtue. The Reformer's indignation passed into the hearts of his London congregations. Many of the citizens resolved to take steps to reform so clamant a gocial disorder, and the Monkish Chronicler of St. Albans has handed down to us the following long-forgotten record of the roughhanded discipline which was brought to bear upon a batch of the most notorious offenders.

"Londonienses isto tempore cœperunt ultra modum insolescere in perniciosum exemplum urbium aliarum. Revera freti Majoris illius anni (1382), Johannis Northamptone auctoritate superciliosa, præsumpserant episcopalia jura, multas dehonestationes inferentes in fornicationibus vel adulteriis deprehensis. Captas nempe mulieres in prisona quæ vocatur Dolium apud eos primo seclusas incarcerarunt, postremo perductas ad conspectum publicum, descissa cæsarie ad modum furum quos appellatores dicimus, circumduci fecerunt in conspectu inhabitantium civitatem, praecedentibus tubicinis et fistulatoribus, ut latius innotescerent personæ earundem. Nec minus hujusmodi hominibus pepercerunt, sed eos injuriis multis et opprobriis affecerunt. Animati enim fuerant per Joannen Wyclife et sequaces ejus ad hujus modi perpetrandum, in reprobationem prælatorum. Dicebant quoque se abominari curatorum non solum negligentiam, sed et detestari avaritiam, qui studentes pecuniæ, omissis poenis a jure limitatis, et receptis nummis, reos fornicationis et incestus favorabiliter in suis criminibus vivere permiserunt. Dicebant se utique pertimescere, ne propter talia peccata in urbe perpetrata sed dissimulata, tota civitas quandoque, Deo ulciscente, ruinam pateretur. Quapropter velle se purgationem facere civitatis ab hujusmodi inquinamentis, ne forte accideret eis pestis aut gladius, vel certe absorberet eos tellus."-Chronicon Angliæ, p. 349.

I add the Monk-Chronicler's portrait of the Lord Mayor of the time, John of Northampton, by whose authority these disciplinary severities had been carried out. He was evidently a follower of Wiclif, and an admirer of his preaching; and the influence of this first Lollard Lord Mayor was, upon the Chronicler's own showing, of great account in the city.

"Erat autem Major eorum homo duri cordis et astutus, elatus propter divitias et superbus, qui nec inferioribus acquiescere, nec superiorum allegationibus sive monitis flecti, valeret, quin quod inceperat proprio ingenio, torvo proposito ad quemcumque finem perducere niteretur. Habebat plane totius communitatis

assensum ad nova molienda."

WICLIF AS BIBLE-TRANSLATOR, AND HIS SERVICE DONE TO

IN

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

SECTION I.-The Novelty of the Idea of an English
Translation of the whole Bible.

N the preceding chapter we have seen Wiclif laying down the principle, that in preaching, God's Word must be taught before everything else, because this Word is the wholesome and indispensable household bread, the seed of regeneration and conversion. Nor was it only in theory that he laid down this principle. How he knew to establish and elucidate it as a matter of doctrine we shall have opportunity to see by and bye when we come to represent his whole dogmatic system. But he also carried out the principle in life and action: first, in his own person as a preacher; and next, by sending out itinerant preachers to proclaim the Divine Word. But the same principle led him also to the work of Bible-translation. Wiclif was a character who had no love for doing anything by halves. When once he recognised a principle to be right, he knew how to carry it out completely on all sides; so here in particular. The principle that God's Word should be preached to the people, hbe expanded into the principle that Scripture must become the common good of all. And as a means to this end, he saw the necessity of the Bible being translated into the language of the country, with the view of giving it the widest possible diffusion among the population.

This was a thought so great, so new, and so bold for that age, that we become eager to learn what were the preparatory middle stages through which Wiclif was conducted to that great plan and its execution. But in order to understand the undertaking in its peculiarity and greatness, we must first have before us a clear idea of what was the position of this matter before Wiclif took action in it.

Sir Thomas More, the well-known statesman under Henry VIII., repelled the charge laid against the hierarchy at the time of the Reformation, that it had withheld the Holy Scriptures from the people during the Middle Ages, by the assertion that it was not true to fact, and that Wiclif was by no means the first man who had undertaken a translation of the whole Bible into English for the use of the laity, for complete English translations of it had existed long before Wiclif's time. He had himself seen beautiful old manuscripts of the English Bible, and these books had been provided with the knowledge of the Bishops. Nor was More the only one who claimed to have knowledge of English translations of the Bible before Wiclif; several Protestant scholars of the seventeenth century were of the same opinion. Thomas James, the first librarian of the Bodleian, a very diligent and indefatigable polemic against the Papists, had held in his own hands an English manuscript Bible, which he judged to be much older than the days of Wiclif. Archbishop Usher followed in the same line, when he assigned this alleged pre-Wiclifite version to about the year 1290.3 And Henry Wharton, the learned editor and completer of Usher's work, even believed himself able to show who the author of this supposed translation was, viz., John of Trevisa, a priest in Cornwall,1

But all these suppositions rest upon error, as was seen

several years later by the last named investigator himself, who corrected both his own text and that of Usher.5 Those manuscripts of the English Bible seen by Sir Thomas More, and later by Thomas James, were, it is certain, nothing more than copies of the translation executed by Wiclif and his followers. There is documentary evidence to show that at the time of the Reformation there were several manuscripts of this translation in the hands of Roman Catholic Prelates. Bishop Bonner, e.g., was possessor of one which is now preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library of Lambeth, and a second copy is now in Magdalen College, Cambridge, which belonged in 1540 to a Knight of St. John, Sir William Weston. Besides, if the fact were correct, that there ever existed any older English translation of the whole Bible, some sure traces of it on the one hand would not have been wanting, and on the other we may feel very certain that, in that case, the Wiclifites would not have omitted to appeal to that fact in justification of their own undertaking. But it is quite clear from their writings that they knew nothing of any older translation; but, on the contrary, regarded their own version as the first English version of the whole Bible. Only in one solitary instance, in a tract of the years 1400-1411, is mention made, in defence of the right of possessing the Bible in the English tongue, of the fact that a citizen of London, of the name of Wering, was in possession of an English Bible, which many had seen, and which appeared to be 200 years old. Assuming that this statement of age was trustworthy, the translation in question could only have been one belonging to the Anglo-Saxon period. And how stands the case with regard to translations of that period?

All the attempts at Bible-translation and commentary

which are known to date from Anglo-Saxon times belong to that period which is called, by linguists and literary historians, the old Anglo-Saxon period, reaching down to A.D. 1100; while the new Anglo-Saxon or Half-Saxon period extends from 1100 to 1250. Now, the old Anglo-Saxon literature is comparatively rich in productions which treat of biblical subjects, both in verse and prose. To these belong the poems which go under the name of the monk Caedmon († 680, Beda, Hist. Eccl. gentes Anglorum, IV. 24), containing editions of several Old Testament passages.10 Bishop Aldhelm, of Sherborn, † 709, according to the testimony of Bale, translated the Psalter; and an Anglo-Saxon paraphrase of the Latin Psalter, which was discovered in the royal library of Paris at the beginning of the present century, is considered to be in part the work of Aldhelm. The Venerable Bede, also, while producing works for the learned, comprising all the erudition of the age, was not forgetful of the wants of the common people. We know, under his own hand, that he made a translation of the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer into Anglo-Saxon, and presented copies of it to the less educated among the priests with whom he was acquainted; indeed, his latest work was an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospel of John, which he had no sooner finished than he expired, in the year 735.11

The greatest of the Anglo-Saxon princes, King Alfred, is known to have entertained at least the design of making parts of Scripture accessible to his subjects in the mother tongue. Not long after his time there existed a Saxon translation of the Gospels, of which several MSS. have been preserved; and if the Psalter attributed to Bishop Aldhelm should not turn out to have been his work, its date, at least, cannot be later than the tenth century.