The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

The book had a very wide circulation. While the Anglo-Saxon versions were confined for the most part to the few religious houses where they were written, Wycliffe's Bible, in spite of its disadvantage of being only manuscript, was circulated largely through the kingdom; and, though the cost a good deal restricted its possession to the wealthier classes, those who could not hope to possess it gained access to it too, as well through their own efforts as through the ministrations of Wycliffe's "pore priestes." A considerable sum was paid for even a few sheets of the manuscript, a load of hay was given for permission to read it for a certain period one hour a day,70 and those who could not afford even such expenses adopted what means they could. It is touching to read such incidents as that of one Alice Collins, sent for to the little gatherings "to recite the Ten Commandments and parts of the epistles of SS. Paul and Peter, which she knew by heart." "Certes," says old John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs, "the zeal of those Christian days seems much superior to this of our day, and to see the travail of them may well shame our careless times."

But it was at a terrible risk such study was carried on. The appearance of Wycliffe's Bible aroused at once fierce opposition. A bill was brought into parliament to forbid the circulation of the Scriptures in English; but the sturdy John of Gaunt vigorously asserted the right of the people to have the Word of God in their own tongue; "for why," said he, "are we to be the dross of the nations?" However, the rulers of the Church grew more and more alarmed at the circulation of the book. At length Archbishop Arundel, a zealous but not very learned prelate, complained to the Pope of "that pestilent wretch, John Wycliffe, the son of the old Serpent, the forerunner of Antichrist, who had completed his iniquity by inventing a new translation of the Scriptures"; and, shortly after, the Convocation of Canterbury forbade such translations, under penalty of the major excommunication.

"God grant us," runs the prayer in the old Bible preface, "to ken and to kepe well Holie Writ, and to suffer joiefulli some paine for it at the laste." What a meaning that prayer must have gained when the readers of the book were burned with the copies round their necks, when men and women were executed for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer and Ten Commandments in English, when husbands were made to witness against their wives, and children forced to light the death-fires of their parents, and possessors of the banned Wycliffe Bible were hunted down as if they were wild beasts!

Thus did Wycliffe, in his effort for the spread of the Gospel of Peace, bring, like his Master fourteen centuries before, "not peace, but a sword." Every bold attempt to let in the light on long-standing darkness seems to result first in a fierce opposition from the evil creatures that delight in the darkness, and the weak creatures weakened by dwelling in it so long. It is not till the driving back of the evil and the strengthening of the weak, as the light gradually wins its way, that the true results can be seen. It is, to use a simile of a graceful modern writer,71 "As when you raise with your staff an old flat stone, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, around it as it lies. Beneath it, what a revelation! Blades of grass flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling things; black crickets with their long filaments sticking out on all sides; motionless, slug-like creatures; young larvæ, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than in the infernal wriggle of maturity. But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let in on this compressed and blinded community of creeping things than all of them that have legs rush blindly about, butting against each other and everything else in their way, and end in a general stampede to underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green where the stone lay—the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole—the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.