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THE MERITED EULOGY
of a Roman Catholic, in the Dublin _Review_, of June, 1853: "Who will
say that the uncommon beauty and marvelous English of the Protestant
Bible is not one of the strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives
on the ear like music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of
church-bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its
felicities often seem to be things rather than mere words. It is part of
the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. Nay, it is
worshiped with a positive idolatry, in extenuation of whose gross
fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of
letters and the scholar. The memory of the dead passes into it The
potent traditions of childhood are
STEREOTYPED IN ITS PHRASES.
The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath the
words. It is the representative 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 forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred
thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. It
has been to him all along as the silent, but oh! how intelligible voice
of his guardian angel; and 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."
WHAT A PANEGYRIC
from an avowed opponent of this translation! And to whom are we
principally indebted for this lovely poem of God? To William Tyndale.
Says Froude, the historian: "The peculiar genius, if such a word may be
permitted, which breathes through the Bible, the mingled tenderness and
majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the preternatural grandeur unequaled,
unapproached, in the attempted improvements of modern scholars--all are
here, and bear the impress of one man, and that man William Tyndale."
AND WHO WAS WILLIAM TYNDALE?
He was a gentle clergyman of great piety and learning. He was born in
Gloucestershire, England, in 1477. He endured great persecution and was
forced to quit England. He visited Luther in Germany. He printed his New
Testament at Antwerp. Its beauties were at once recognized in England,
although to read it was illegal and punishable with death. Cardinal
Wolsely did his best to entice the translator to England, to destroy
him. An assistant in the work, named John Frith, was lured back and
burned to death. Finally He
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