not so general or complete, that
any additional help for its promotion can be deemed unnecessary.

New translations of the Scriptures are generally introduced with
apologies and received with caution and distrust. In many cases men
have resisted them as dangerous innovations, and attempted to
exterminate them with fire and sword. This was the case with the
translations of Wickliffe and of Tindal. But truth and the kind
providence of God were too mighty for their enemies, and these
translations lived to see their persecutors in the dust, and to laugh
them to scorn. Wickliffe's translation was published in 1380, in a dark
age. Many good men anticipated from it the greatest calamities, and
resisted it with the most intemperate zeal, and every species of
denunciation was used against it. It was made from the Vulgate, and not
from the Greek and Hebrew, and was imperfect; but it was a great
improvement on what existed before, and it proved a great blessing.

Tindal was contemporary with Luther, and undertook to give a new
translation of the Bible to England, as Luther did to Germany. He
completed his New Testament against the greatest opposition, and
published it in 1526, and was engaged on the Old Testament, when he was
arrested, imprisoned a year, and then brought to the stake and
strangled and burnt, at the age of fifty-nine, A.D. 1536. He was the
morning star of the Reformation in England, and became by his
translation of the New Testament and a part of the Old, and by the
interest he excited in the subject of improved translations in England,
one of the great benefactors of his race. He was a man of great
gentleness, kindness, simplicity of character, and benevolence, and his
life is without a stain. Coverdale translated the whole Bible, and
published it in 1535 while Tindal was in prison waiting for his crown
of martyrdom. Several other translations followed, and that of King
James last of all, in 1611.

King James's translation was made by forty-seven translators, divided
into six companies, and laboring on their work three years. The Douay
Bible was first translated and published complete in 1609, almost
simultaneously with the Bible of King James. It has the disadvantage of
having been made from the Latin Vulgate, and not directly from the
original Greek and Hebrew, but is a valuable version, and like the
Bible of King James, is one of the great monuments of the times which
produced it, as well as of the church