BIBLE CLASS LECTURES.-No. 1. WILLIAM TYNDALE AND THE ENGLISH BIBLE. A Lecture DELIVERED IN CEMETERY ROAD CHAPEL, SHEFFIELD, BY THE REV. GILES HESTER, MINISTER OF THE CHAPEL. "SEARCH THE SCRIPTURES."-JESUS. "The history of the English translations of the Bible connects itself with many LONDON: W. KENT & CO., PATERNOSTER ROW; BIBLE CLASS LECTURES.-No. 1. WILLIAM TYNDALE AND THE ENGLISH BIBLE. A Lecture DELIVERED IN CEMETERY ROAD CHAPEL, SHEFFIELD, SEP. 27TH, 1865, AT THE OPENING OF HIS BIBLE CLASS, BY THE REV. GILES HESTER, MINISTER OF THE CHAPEL. "SEARCH THE SCRIPTURES."-JESUS. "The history of the English translations of the Bible connects itself with many points of interest in that of the nation and the Church. The lives of the indivi dual translators; the long struggle with the indifference or opposition of men in power; the religious condition of the people as calling for, or affected by, the ap pearance of the translation; the time and place and form of the successive editions by which the demand, when once created, was supplied;-each of these has fur nished, and might again furnish, materials for a volume."-DR. SMITH'S DICTION ARY OF THE BIBLE, ART. "VERSIONS." LONDON: W. KENT & CO., PATERNOSTER ROW; SHEFFIELD: D. T. INGHAM, 41, SOUTH STREET, MOOR; H. CATTERMOLE, 369, STANTON STREET, GLOSSOP ROAD. "For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization, science, law,-in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting, and often leading the way. Its very presence as a believed Book, has rendered the nations emphatically a chosen race, and this too in exact proportion as it is more or less generally known or studied. Good and holy men, and the best and wisest of mankind, the kingly spirits of history, enthroned in the hearts of mighty nations, have borne witness to its influences, have declared it to be beyond compare the most perfect instrument, the only adequate organ of humanity; the organ and instrument of all the gifts, powers, tendencies, by which the individual is privileged to rise above himself.”— COLERIDGE. "It is not in a chain of dry sentences that God reveals to us His will and the principles of His government; it is essentially by facts. In the Book He has given us everything is history or everything is connected with history. It is sometimes said that this antique and oriental book refuses to assimilate itself with the modern forms of our thought. Oh! in this book of the human race the local and the temporary disappear in the universal! Will you not believe the testimony of a child? Without one aid of archæology he understands the Bible as he does the talk of his playfellows. This language of the childhood of nations seems made for human children. But the child does better than understand; these exquisite narratives are his delight. Much is said about improving and explaining solemn truths; this is the favourite task of writers for children. But the Author of the Bible is their master in that as in all besides. Who could have so well spread honey on the edges of this cup offered to all men, at the bottom of which childhood finds nothing bitter? What more glorious stores? What more dazzling marvel? Where was there ever gravity tempered with more grace or grace accompanied with more gravity? Where was morality ever better exemplified in action? This whole book is the history of an education, a vast and sublime education-that of the human race; and the child receives it without need of being told so, as its own education."-VINET. "The Protestant Bible lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representation of his best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and penitent and good speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible." -QUOTED IN TRENCH'S ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT. Celilliam Tyndale and the English Bible. :0: THE sixteenth century, embracing one of the most eventful periods in the annals of Europe, is familiarly known to have produced in this country a number of conspicuous characters, and the lives of almost every one of them have been given to the world again and again. One however--and, in the proper sense of the term, as regards his influence on posterity-by far the most eminent has been hitherto all but overlooked. Often confounded or linked with other men of very inferior consequence, there has been no reader of English History who could possibly estimate the amount of his obligations to the modest and immortal William Tyndale. Independently of his ability as one of the most powerful writers of the age, when his name is connected with the Sacred Volume which he first translated from the original text into English, which he first put to the press and then sent into his native land, we have no other man to be compared with him at that time; and when to this is added, his unspotted personal christianity, his uncompromising spirit, and genuine patriotism, it is altogether unaccountable that every incident in his valuable life has not been gleaned and arranged into a distinct memoir, long before the present day. Such a work, including his noble convert, JOHN FRYTH, ought to have been a household book for many generations back."-ANDERSON'S ANNALS OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. "The work of Wycliffe stands by itself. Whatever power it exercised in preparing the way for the Reformation of the 16th century, it had no perceptible influence on the translations. By the reign of Henry VIII. its English was already obsolescent, and the revival of classical scholarship led men to feel dissatisfied with a version which had avowedly been made at second-hand, not from the original. With Tyndale on the other hand, we enter on a continuous succession. He is the patriarch in no remote ancestry, of the Authorized Version. With a consistent unswerving purpose, he devoted his whole life to this one work; and through dangers and difficulties, amid enemies and treacherous friends, in exile and loneliness, accomplished it. More than Cranmer or Ridley, he is the true hero of the Reformation. While they were slowly moving onwards, halting between two opinions, watching how the Court-winds blew, or at the best, making the most of opportunities, he set himself to the task without which, he felt sure, Reform would be impossible; which, once accomplished, would render it inevitable."-PROFESSOR PLUMPTRE IN SMITH'S DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE. In the historical developement of the Church of God there have been many remarkable and memorable Revolutions, and the most striking and distinguished of these great historical |