William Barrett Cooper

“ For all that it is possible to set out the features of the man, realize the massive qualities he possessed, recall his surroundings, the atmosphere he breathed, the hostility he aroused, the victory he won at the cost of his life ”

“ The paradox is elsewhere resolved by him when he says: "I care less for the whole course of a man's life than for his own distilling of its essence."
The distilled essence of Tindale's life comes to view again and again during these brief years; which were crowded with events, dramatic and of age-long significance, and which passed from drama to tragedy in the martyr fires he had long foreseen. ”

“ TRANSLATING THE NEW TESTAMENT TINDALE'S life upon the Continent of Europe can be traced in no more than broken outline. Gaps of space and time are frequent; for, as already indicated, whatever letters or other documents there may have been have long ago disappeared, and we have little more than knowledge of extended residence at certain important points, Hamburg, Cologne, Worms, and shorter visits to the Wartburg, Wittenberg, Antwerp, etc. As Froude aptly says: "His history is the history of his work, and his epitaph is the Reformation." ”

“ Erasmus, More and Colet were the men of letters conspicuous in ability and influence during Tindale's boyhood. The three men were in intimate sympathy with one another; and each in his own fashion, exponents of the new learning, gave the country whole-hearted service. All were men of outstanding talent, and labored unceasingly for the ends they had in view. ”

“ Lying, while engaged in that great office, under the shadow of death, the sword above his head and ready at any moment to fall, he worked, under circumstances alone perhaps truly worthy of the task which was laid upon him,—his spirit, as it were divorced from the world, moved in a purer element than common air. ”

“ To no Cambridge student of the time had the book come more opportunely and more appropriately than to the ex-Oxford student, whose classical attainments fitted him to take from it the very fullest advantage. One of Tindale's sayings amid these surroundings was, "he had perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth unless the Scriptures were plainly laid before their eyes in the mother tongue, that they see the process, the order, and the meaning of the text: which things only", he says, "moved me to translate the New Testament." ”

“ The tempestuous soul of the German could not fail to influence the more phlegmatic Englishman. Traces of Luther's influence abound in Tindale's work; but have never {27} overlain the independence and original energy of the latter. It is one of the great merits of the English reformer, that, man of original power as he was, he laid under contribution all available knowledge and experience in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, Spanish, Italian, in determining what his own translation must be. ”

“ The Bible was for scholars, not for others. A fine instance is in the case of the Complutensian Polyglot. Complutum was the Latin name of Alcala. In 1502 Cardinal Ximenes, the founder of Alcala University, decided on the issue of a Polyglot edition of {6} the Bible wherein the Vulgate should be placed alongside of the best Hebrew and the best Greek manuscripts. "Every theologian", he said, "should also be able to drink of that water which springeth up to eternal life at the fountain head itself.... Our object is to revive the hitherto dormant study of the Sacred Scriptures". ”

“ If ever Papini's paradoxical dictum be credible, it is in a life like this: "The most highly educational biographies are those of men of whom little or nothing is known. {xx} Those are the books that set forth the human ideal, that tell us what a man ought to be." ”

“ In the United States of America, soon after the formation of the British and Foreign Bible Society, in 1816, the American Bible Society was established. Noble service has been rendered by it. It has aided in the translation and circulation of the Scriptures in 175 languages; some of which are included in the total, 570, given above.
Translation seldom fails to exact great sacrifice. Often life itself succumbs. The roll of honor is a long one, nearly every language taking its toll in one form or another. Tindale's was the first English sacrifice. ”

“ Study of the Vulgate and of the originals he worked on has not indeed to be overlooked as a possible source; but there is a gift, native-born, or acquired in secret toil, which, with those tides of devout feeling we find swelling in the man himself, stamps the style as the organ utterance of his consecrated manhood.
Tindale's rendering of 1 Cor. 13, with the parallels for comparison of Wyclif and the Authorized Version of 1611, illustrates both the style of the great translator and the permanence of his translation in the version current for four hundred years. ”

“ God, into whose hands he threw himself, self-condemned in his wretchedness, only knows the agony of that hour. Let the secret rest where it lies, and let us be thankful for ourselves that we live in a changed world. ”

“ They simulate seeing he is no longer alive and dangerous, but a hero dead: and they join the chorus of universal praise. The effect is {xxi} to emphasize the deadness of the past, not to rekindle glorious life—this is rekindled only where there is eagerness to be in or near the succession of the great, where there is sympathy with admiration, where there is in fine some kinship of spirit. ”

“ Yet what awful pages of history in every part of Christendom record the deeds of this sanguinary orthodoxy. How hard has mankind found it to learn that persuasion and forbearance are the real solvents of dissent; for the faith in force is hardly shaken to this day. ”

“ Thus, the disintegration and dissolution of the overawing authority of the Church, though she retained for decades sufficient power to strike down her foes; the splintered social unity which resulted from the decadence of the Feudal Order, with class suspicion and hatred ensuing, combined to throw men off their moral balance: and then into this moral confusion came rumours of literatures, unknown and ancient, which opened to the startled minds of teachers and students knowledge that at once widened and made more wondrous the world which men thought they knew. ”

“ If such occasions serve only for the display of erudition and platform vanity, and fail to lead us to seek the essential message and the continuing inspiration of the great men they celebrate, what riches of the past remain sealed to us! There have been celebrations loudly acclaimed by men who would have bayed at the heels of the brave revolutionary whom they now eloquently praise. ”

“ Paul's Epistles were scarcely less notable than his sermons in London. Sir {3} Thomas More was witty, intense, versatile, broad-minded, gifted with imagination and courage; but when he encountered the violence of Luther suddenly changed to the recusancy of the bigots and the bishops. Erasmus, the greatest of the three, never altered his plans. He held on his way alike in all weathers undeterred, enlightening his time with the treasures he had found in the New Testament. It was in the year 1516 he issued his Greek Testament, with a Latin version alongside, correcting errors in the Vulgate ”

“ He resolved to move to London, and hoped that he might be enabled there to accomplish the task he had set himself as his life work. His hopes were centred on the then Bishop of London. Tunstal was a friend of the new learning. He was able, ambitious, liberal, and a Prelate of rising power. If he gave his countenance to Tindale's enterprise, its completion and publication were assured.
Even with introductions it was not easy to gain an audience. An unknown university man was easily overlooked by this busy man of the world. ”

“ When four hundred years ago the Low Countries of Europe, Holland and Belgium, passed by inheritance to the reigning Spanish Sovereign, Charles I, these lands became the theatre of long and devastating warfare. Siege and sally, slaughter and suffering brought misery on the people like a flood. ”

“ To spell out, in the tongue they understand, to those sitting in the land of the shadow of death the tidings of Truth {53} and Grace; to set men free in the liberty of Christ; and to widen the bounds of His kingdom so that all nations may become His inheritance—what mission can be named so worthy of the uttermost devotion? ”

“ It may well be that the daring of the Dutch man of letters smote a responsive chord in the breast of the brave Englishman. If the younger catches the torch from the hand of his precursor, must we disparage the courage with which the torch is carried forward and kept ablaze? ”

“ That resolve to recapture for the world of to-day a courage and a consecration of which the world of his day was contemptuous, and to devote these invaluable virtues to the opportunities of our time—that is the soul-stirring aim in revivifying the past ”

“ One must make an effort indeed to shake off that deadening influence; and then, and only then, the arrogance and impiety of claiming injustice, torture, judicial murder, as a service to God, make one shudder as at blasphemy. ”

“ Among the inhabitants were men who welcomed Tindale and who gave him assistance in various ways. But he was soon aware that for his work one essential was lacking. Not a single printing press had been set up {32} in Hamburg as yet. His acquaintance with Hamburg, however, was of enduring value. The friends he made there he retained, and later visits were a solace and encouragement in days when friends were friends indeed.
He proceeded to Cologne, where there was every facility for printing. He had the first parts of the New Testament in 4to. ready for the press. ”

“ One wonders whether it was to Tindale that Luther, realizing sadly how each of them had been forced by circumstances to do his work in lonely peril, declared "Interpreters and translators should not work alone, for good et propria verba do not always occur to one mind:"—or again: "My counsel is that {28} we draw water from the true source and fountain, that is, that we diligently search the Scriptures ... one single verse, one sentence of the text, is of far more instruction than a whole host of glosses and commentaries, which are neither strongly penetrating nor armour of proof." ”

“ Such far-reaching consequences afford the best measure of the immense significance—much greater than he could foresee—of Tindale's toil that he might open the eyes of England to the message he succeeded in {40} turning into imperishable language under-standed of the people. ”

“ I did pay him when he made his exchange to Hamburg."
We are to remember that in 1384, a hundred and fifty years before the time of which we are speaking, Wyclif had translated the Bible into English. It was not until 1477 that the invention of printing was introduced into England: but manuscript copies were made in considerable numbers. There were many willing copyists. Nearly two hundred copies survived in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Yet in Tindale's time there is not a sign that any such translation was in existence. Many English people must have had them in possession ”

“ To obtain his release he made an appeal to Wolsey. That appeal has been preserved. In simple matter of fact terms it narrates his intercourse with his whilom guest. It enables us to see the reformer through another's eyes. "I heard (Tindale) preach," he writes, "two or three sermons in St. Dunstan's in the West in London, and after that I chanced to meet him, and with communication I learned what living he had. He said he had none at all, but he trusted to be with My Lord of London in his service ”

“ Wherever it lifts its head, it is the head of Anti-Christ.
{11} CHAPTER II.
THE MAKING OF TINDALE IN such an atmosphere the formative years of Tindale's life were spent. So much can be said: but little more than that is known with any certainty. Indeed the story of his youth can be put in a single paragraph. He was a native of Gloucestershire. He was sent very young to Oxford. There he entered Magdalen Hall, attached to Magdalen College, the College of Wolsey and Lily. After graduation he went for a period to Cambridge, attracted there probably by Erasmus, who had occupied the Greek chair. ”

“ B. R. Brooker; and to the Religious Tract Society for kind permission to reproduce illustrations from their standard Biography of Tindale.
It is offered to the public under the tolerant aphorism: "So long as a man says sincerely what he thinks, he tells us something worth while." ”

“ Though that prophesyinge fayle, other tonges shall cease, or knowledge vanysshe awaye, yet love falleth never awaye.
For oure knowledge is vnparfect, and oure prophesyinge is vnperfect. But when that which is parfect is come, than that which is vnparfect shall be done awaye.
When I was a chylde, I spake as a chylde, I vnderstode as a chylde I ymagened as a chylde. But assone as I was a man, I put awaye childesshnes. Now we se in a glasse even in a darke speakynge: but then shall we se face to face. ”

“ They were conveyed with the same success to English ports. In less than five years six editions had been published, three of them surreptitiously. They numbered perhaps fifteen thousand copies in all, and were distributed {36} to eager purchasers by the same formidable organization of colportage. ”