Drawn from his retirement in
Gloucestershire by the news of Luther's protest at Wittemberg, he found
shelter for a year with a London Alderman, Humfrey Monmouth. "He studied
most part of the day at his book," said his host afterwards, "and would
eat but sodden meat by his good will and drink but small single beer." The
book at which he studied was the Bible. But it was soon needful to quit
England if his purpose was to hold. "I understood at the last not only
that there was no room in my lord of London's palace to translate the New
Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England." From
Hamburg, where he took refuge in 1524, he probably soon found his way to
the little town which had suddenly become the sacred city of the
Reformation. Students of all nations were flocking there with an
enthusiasm which resembled that of the Crusades. "As they came in sight of
the town," a contemporary tells us, "they returned thanks to God with
clasped hands, for from Wittemberg, as heretofore from Jerusalem, the
light of evangelical truth had spread to the utmost parts of the earth."

[Sidenote: Translation of the Bible]

Such a visit could only fire Tyndale to face the "poverty, exile, bitter
absence from friends, hunger and thirst and cold, great dangers, and
innumerable other hard and sharp fightings," which the work he had set
himself was to bring with it. In 1525 his version of the New Testament was
completed, and means were furnished by English merchants for printing it
at Koeln. But Tyndale had soon to fly with his sheets to Worms, a city
whose Lutheran tendencies made it a safer refuge, and it was from Worms
that six thousand copies of the New Testament were sent in 1526 to English
shores. The king was keenly opposed to a book which he looked on as made
"at the solicitation and instance of Luther"; and even the men of the New
Learning from whom it might have hoped for welcome were estranged from it
by its Lutheran origin. We can only fairly judge their action by viewing
it in the light of the time. What Warham and More saw over sea might well
have turned them from a movement which seemed breaking down the very
foundations of religion and society. Not only was the fabric of the Church
rent asunder and the centre of Christian unity denounced as "Babylon," but
the reform itself seemed passing into anarchy. Luther was steadily moving
onward from the denial of one Catholic dogma to that of another; and what
Lut