sweetness. The jailer, his daughter, and other members of his household, were converted to Christ by the saintly prisoner's life and doctrine. His friends put forth the utmost exertion to save him, but without avail. In August, 1536, he was arraigned before the ecclesiastical court for having infringed the imperial decree forbidding any one to teach that faith alone justifies. The accusation was true, and Tyndale's doctrine was also true. The imperial decree was utterly antichristian and indefensible. Tyndale defended himself with such scriptural logic and touching eloquence as to win the minds and hearts of the court that tried him. "Truly," exclaimed the procurator-general, "truly this was a good, learned, and pious man!" But that was the very reason why the Romish priests, like the murderers of our Lord, thirsted for his blood.

Tyndale was declared guilty, was solemnly deprived of his clerical character, expelled from the Church of Rome, and delivered to the secular power for capital punishment. Can such things be possible on this beautiful earth? What a mystery of iniquity is Roman Catholicism! The secular authorities delayed his execution for two months. Full of faith, peace, and joy, he waited the hour when he should step into the chariot of fire, and ascend far up above all worlds to be forever with the Lord. "Well," said one who observed him closely at Vilvorde, "if that man is not a good Christian, we do not know of one upon earth.”

Rome, "drunken with the blood of the saints," was bent on burning him. Friday, October 5, 1536, brought release from all sufferings. In the ripeness of his knowledge, love, and usefulness; his eye yet bright, and his natural strength not abated, William Tyndale passed, for the last time, beyond the outward walls, and halted without the fortifications. A crowd is gathered to witness his death. They behold not the punishment of a heretic, but the triumph of a martyr. Memory is vivid and accurate in this awful hour. But it is not of childhood days in the sunny fields and leafy woods of the Severn vale; not of student years at Oxford, nor of the heavenly light that there streamed into his soul through the pages of Erasmus' Greek Testament; not of pleasant conferences with fellow-heroes at Cambridge; not of the generous hospitalities

of Sodbury, nor of the sojourn at Hamburg, the flight from Cologne, the printing of the Gospel at Worms; not of the labors of Marburg, and the toils of Antwerp; not of the traitor Phillips, nor of the Vilvorde jail, that he thinks now. It is of the dissemination of the Bible in England, the rescue of his people from the slough of superstition and vice, and the glorious liberty of the children of God into which the written word should lead them. Henry Tudor barred the way. Of him the sufferer thinks, and for him he prays. While the executioner fastens him to the post, he cries in suppliant voice, "Lord, open the king of England's eyes!" Like his Lord, like the proto-martyr Stephen, his last prayer is for his murderers. Who shall say that that prayer was not answered? He is strangled, and then burned.

Scarcely had "the apostle of England in this our later age -as John Foxe termed him-ascended to his celestial home, when Richard Grafton, the printer, went to London, presented Tyndale's Bible to Archbishop Cranmer, and begged him to procure its free circulation. Cranmer examined it, and was delighted with it. Fidelity, clearness, strength, simplicity, unction-all were combined in this admirable translation. sent the book to Cromwell, "the hammer of the monks," and requested that statesman to present it to his Majesty, and to obtain permission for it to be sold, until such time as the bishops should put forth a better translation, which, he added, "I think will not be till a day after doomsday."

He

Henry ran over the book. Tyndale's name was not in it. The dedication to himself was well written. He saw that it would help him to emancipate England from papal thralldom, and unexpectedly came to a very astounding decision. He authorized the sale and the reading of the Bible throughout the kingdom. Verily, William Tyndale had not lived in vain.

The people received the Bible with enthusiasm. Those who knew its history saw that it was printed with the blood of the apostolic translator. All who could bought and read it; or had it read to them by others. Aged persons learned their letters in order to study its pages. savings together, and purchased turns to the crowds around them. from the limbs of England.

Poor people clubbed their copies which they read by

The fetters of popery fell Tyndale had prayed that he

might see it on fire by his Master's word, and from his throne in the new Jerusalem beheld the answer to his prayer. "Of the translation itself, though since that time it has been many times revised and altered, we may say that it is substantially the Bible with which we are all familiar. The peculiar genius-if such a word may be permitted-which breathes through it-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 the mind of one manWilliam Tyndale." * All judicious critics are unanimous in praise of this immortal work.

Notices and biographies of the great translator are numer ous. Tanner, Bliss, Wood, Foxe, Walter, Offor, Wordsworth, Dryden, Newcome, Johnson, Lewis, Cotton, Anderson, Townley, Horne, and many others have kept his memory green. A monument marks the spot on Nibley Knoll where he is supposed to have first seen the light.

The revision of the Authorized, or King James's, Version, of the Scriptures has recalled the memory and services of England's martyr-apostle, and suggested the idea of erecting a statue to his honor. A committee, with Lord Shaftesbury at its head, was formed for that purpose. A fine site on the Thames Embankment in London was obtained from the Metropolitan Board of Works. J. E. Boehm, a sculptor of the highest eminence, and famous for his statue of John Bunyan at Bedford, was requested to prepare a design for the work. Subscriptions to defray the estimated cost of $20,000 were invited from all lovers of the Bible. The clergy of the Established and Dissenting Churches; the universities, counties, towns, and societies of Great Britain; the clergy and laity of the British colonies, and of the United States, gladly poured in their contributions. The bronze statue, representing Tyndale in his doctor's robes, and holding an open New Testament in his right hand, is soon to be placed on its pedestal.

The fathers drove Tyndale out of the country with threats and curses; the sons eulogistically erect a monument in his praise. Noble and eloquent orations will accompany its inauguration. But that creation of art and love is not the principal *Froude's "History of England," vol. iii, pp. 86, 87.

monument of the holy translator. The Bible itself is his chief remembrancer. His version of "God's Word written " laid deep and firm the foundation of England's greatness. Baptized with the blood of Fryth and Tyndale and Rogers, it laid the foundations of a new and greater England on the American shores of the wild Atlantic, and of other Englands in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. In each and all it is the fountain of liberty, the guide of legislation, the guarantee of law, the glory of the Church, the strength of society, the comfort of the soul, the perennial principle of progress. Those great and growing commonwealths are component parts of one of the grandest monuments possible to the memory of man—a monument on which the instructed eye fails not to see, inscribed in letters of living light, the name of WILLIAM TYNDALE, THE FIRST TRANSLATOR OF THE HOLY BIBLE INTO THE PRINTED ENGLISH VERNACULAR.

OTHE

ART. III.-BISHOP HURST'S BIBLIOTHECA THEO

LOGICA.

Bibliotheca Theologica. A Select and Classified Bibliography of Theology and General Religious Literature. By JOHN F. HURST, LL.D. New York: Phillips & Hunt. 1883.

BIBLIOSOPHY is quite another thing from Bibliomania. The bibliosopher extracts wisdom from books, the bibliomaniac worships their bindings, even their deformities, knowing seldom more than the eccentricities and title-pages of his idols, sometimes not even that. "He know any thing about books!" exclaimed one of these victims of the delirium librorum, when told of the bibliographical attainments of a distinguished scholar; "Perhaps he may, of the insides of them!"

Nevertheless, the bibliosopher is sometimes a bibliographer too; he often knows books by heart and by title. Abundant in knowledge, he knows where more can be had; he can tell you what he knows, and also, what may prove more important, where he found it, where unworked beds of it lie yet undisturbed. Bishop Hurst, in giving us a list of titles, such as his "Bibliotheca Theologica" contains, has earned gratitude, if not glory. He has performed one of those services which, like

giving a cup of cold water, cannot lose its reward. Many a young man eager to become a master in some one department of theological literature will find in this book the beginnings of power, the suggestions for a comprehensive self-culture, which he might otherwise seek for years and, haply, not discover. For of the scores who are ready to advise him, not all are competent; he may run, as the German by-word goes, from Pontius to Pilate, receiving only confusion for all his seeking. But here is a classified list of all, or nearly all, the theological literature of any value in the English language. Let him de vote himself to what topic he may, he need but turn over these pages to find what is necessary to start him in his studies.

The young minister who is beginning a library must not, however, fancy that the "Bibliotheca" is to be used as the rustic used his bill of fare, that he is to eat his way through from A to Z. On the contrary, he must begin a simultaneous construction of the four great departments of Theology: the Exegetical, the Historical, the Systematic, and the Practical. Bishop Hurst has done well to build his library upon so simple a ground-plan, four walls and an entrance hall, four great departments and an introduction, into which he gathers Bibliography, Lexicography, Cartography, and the so-called Libraries of Theology. The student, also, will do well to build his libraries, the one in his study and the one in his brain, upon a ground-plan equally simple. For each of these departments supports and is necessary to the other. Even exegesis, which, at first blush, might seem to be merely a question of linguistic knowledge and skill, is of little value when sundered from historical fact and from practical acquaintance with the diverse forms of spiritual life and society as displayed in different countries and epochs. What he shall buy is also quite a different question from what he shall read. Bacon's maxim is the final word upon this point. Some books are to be tasted and some are to be chewed. It has sometimes occurred to me that our itinerancy needs an itinerant's library to make it complete. It would require no great contribution from each of us to build up a conference library containing every book in the “Bibliotheca Theologica," and many more, some of which might circulate freely among the members of the conference, while others remained at some central point to be consulted by the brethren