The First English Translation of the Bible presented to Benry viii.

THE

BIBLE CLASS MAGAZINE.

Miscellaneons Papers.

MY OWN BIBLE.

"Blest Book! that tells me how my sins may be forgiven,
Breathes o'er my spirit peace, and guides my steps to heaven,-
I call thee mine-all mine-Heaven's best gift to me;
Oh! Holy Book! I must and will be true to thee!"

THESE are days, young reader, when false priests in the
Establishment of our own land, deceiving agents of the
so-called Church of Rome, and barefaced infidels of all ranks
and grades in our country, are uniting to steal from your
hands the precious volume for which your fathers bled, and
by which our nation has become the great one that it is. It
behoves you to look well to it, that neither your love for, nor
your confidence in, this precious volume be disturbed. Pre-
served to you, as it has been, by a series of all but miracles;
bought for you by the labours, sufferings, and life-blood of
some of the holiest of men; bearing to you the knowledge by
which alone you can be rendered happy now and safe for
ever; and bequeathed to you as the best inheritance your
fathers could leave behind, it becomes you greatly to prize it,
nobly to contend for it, and carefully to guard it against all
who would rob you of it.
We pray that you may
do this; and in order to aid you in
it, we will bring before you in your Magazine, from time to
time, such facts relating to its history and character as we
hope shall interest you more than ever in it, and endear it
more than ever to you.

Our first paper will be about

ITS EARLIEST TRANSLATIONS.

Very early indeed in the Christian era did missionaries of the cross land upon our shores, bearing to our forefathers the

precious tidings of the gospel of Christ. With these, our first evangelizers, must have come the first portions that ever reached us of God's word. But these were not in the common people's tongue, and though, perhaps, quoted and translated by word of mouth by those who preached, to give authority to what they said, men read not, and had not the word of God in the tongue in which they had been born.

With the revival of Christianity under Augustine, at the close of the sixth century, Latin versions of the Scriptures became common amongst monks and ecclesiastics, with whom the copying of them was a favourite employment. The earliest translations of these Latin versions were those belonging to our Anglo-Saxon ancestors; and the first attempt at them with which we are acquainted appears to have been a sort of poetic paraphrase of certain scripture narratives, still preserved in a greatly mutilated manuscript at Oxford, and ascribed to one Caedmon, a monk of Whitby, in the seventh century. Its fragmentary and paraphrastic character, however, prevents its being properly ranked amongst translations of the Bible. Two versions of the Psalter in Saxon made in the century after, one, it is said, by Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne, and the other by Guthlar, a Saxon hermit, seem to have better claims as the first translations of parts of the Old Testament than Caedman's poetic paraphrase. Of the New Testament, the venerable Bede has the honour of giving to the people the first vernacular translation of the four gospels. His death-scene, just as his work was completed, deserves to be held in perpetual remembrance by us all.

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"We are transported in imagination to the monastery of Jarrow, in Durham, where we see the venerable ecclesiastic in his last hour intently engaged in dictating to his amanuensis. There remains now only one chapter, but it seems difficult for you to speak,' exclaims the monkish scribe, as his pen traces on the parchment the last verse of the twentieth chapter of John. 'It is easy,' replies Bede; 'take your pen, dip in ink, and write as fast as you can.' 'Now, master,' says the monk of Jarrow, after hastily penning down the sentences from his trembling lips; 'now, only one sentence is wanting.' Bede repeats it. 'It is finished!' says the scribe. 'It is finished!' replies the dying saint. 'Lift my head, let me sit in my cell, in the place where I have been accustomed to pray; and now, Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!' And with the utterance of these words his spirit fled.

"It was a noble distinction for Bede to die in the act of translating the Word of God."*

In the British Museum, amongst the Cottonian manuscripts, is to be found what appears to be the next attempt at a translation. It is called the Durham Book, and is a Latin version of the four gospels, with a Saxon translation interlined. The volume itself is one of the most beautiful specimens of ancient penmanship we have, and is adorned with curious portraits of the evangelists, and finely illuminated initial letters. A similar work, written about the same time, is preserved in the Bodleian Library, and called the Rushworth Gloss.

Of other early attempts at translations we may mention one by Alfred the Great of the book of Psalms, but which he was prevented finishing by death; some fragments of an interlineary translation of the book of Proverbs, preserved. in the British Museum; an Epitome of the Old and New Testaments, and some very incorrect and paraphrastic translations of the five books of Moses, Job, Judith, and the apocryphal history of Nichodemus, by one Elfric, a monk, in the reign of Ethelred; and a translation of the Four Gospels in the Bodleian Library, and that of Corpus Christi, Cambridge.

During the wars with the Danes but little was done towards translating the Word of God, and a few manuscripts of the Psalms are all that remain of the latter end of the Saxon age.

After the invasion of William the Norman, the English language underwent a change: but three manuscripts of the gospels produced during the time of the transition are yet preserved, showing that the translation of the Bible was still felt an important matter. Some poetic versions of passages of the Word of God are the next relics we possess, and seem to belong to the thirteenth century. The earliest English prose translations known to be in existence are the book of Psalms, the work of Richard Rolle, an Augustinian hermit, who lived close by the convent of Hampole, near Doncaster; a remarkable manuscript version of nearly the whole New Testament, in Corpus Christi Library, and which is believed

* Our English Bible, p. 14.

to belong to the thirteenth or early part of the fourteenth century; and following this, in the order of time, a version of the Dominical Gospels, with sermons.

These notices bring us down to the fourteenth century. So far only fragments of the book of God have been seen as given to the people. No doubt these were held as precious by those into whose hands they fell, but their expensiveness would keep them to but a few, and the great mass around would be still ignorant of the many glorious truths even these imperfect fragments might contain.

We now, however, approach a different era. The Bible is now to be given entire, in a tongue that can be understood, to all the people, and God is about to raise up an honoured instrument for the accomplishment of this great work.

That instrument is no other than the immortal WICKLIFFE. How long he was engaged in the work of translation is not known; some have said ten years, and others have given a much longer period; but he fully completed it in the year 1380.

"One loves to picture this remarkable man pursuing his biblical toils, now at his Lutterworth rectory, and then at his college at Oxford, working in the winter nights by his lamp, and early in the summer's morn as the sun beamed through his window. We see him, with his long gray beard, sometimes alone, bending over the parchment manuscript, carefully writing down some well-laboured rendering; and sometimes in company with 'Nicholey de Hereford,' whose name appears on an old copy of the version as the coadjutor of the rector of Lutterworth, and with others of his friends and associates." ""*

Wickliffe's translation was made from the Latin version, to which he very closely adhered, rendering it into the plainest and simplest Saxon-English that he could, that it might be read and understood by the commonest of the people. Of course at that early period it could only be diffused by the laborious process of transcription; but this was most eagerly done, entire and in parts, and as eagerly read by all who had the privilege of access to it.

Already had Wickliffe incurred the hatred of Rome by his exposures of the frauds, impurities, and sins of that monstrous system of deceit and wickedness, but now his publication of the sacred volume enraged the hierarchy beyond

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* Our English Bible, pp. 31-2.