THE GREAT MANIFESTATIONS OF THAT PROVIDENCE WHICH PRESERVES THE ORACLES OF GOD, RENDERING IT VISIBLE ON THREE OCCASIONS IN THE STORMY TIMES OF DIOCLETIAN, OF CHARLES V., AND OF NAPOLEON I.

631. WE may see from time to time in history, both before and since the coming of Jesus Christ, some of those splendid dispensations in which, if I may venture to use the language of Isaiah, “Jehovah makes bare his holy arm in the sight of all the nations,” (Is. lii, 10,) and forces all the ends of the earth to acknowledge that He takes in hand the cause of His written Word, and, after having given it by the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven, He will shake the whole world, if need be, in order to preserve it from age to age for His elect, to restore it to them when it seems lost, and finally to spread it over all the earth.

Without speaking of the great things accomplished under the old covenant, we shall confine ourselves te those that have been done under the new, and of these latter we shall specify three. We grant that all three do not apply, like the preceding, to the details of the canon; but all three alike strikingly exhibit that watchful power which guards the Scriptures. It has changed the world, it has created the Church, it has regenerated the elect to the life of God, and it is no strange work to expect from Him when the point in question is to preserve it for them.

SECTION FIRST.

682. Fact the Twelfth — The first of these three great divine interventions is the wonderful preservation of the Scriptures at the end of the unheard of persecutions which marked the beginning of the fourth century, in the days of Diocletian, and which preceded the triumphs of Christianity.

All the potentates of the earth were at that time combined with the same fury against the people of God, and all of them having alike recognised that what gave them energy, and life, and powerful unity, was the Holy Word, they manifested the same fury against the Bibles of Christians as against their persons, in order to give them to the flames and to destroy them.

This unparalleled crisis, which shook the whole known world, and deluged it with the blood of the saints, began on Good Friday in the year 303.

It remains unparalleled in history for its extent, its duration, its intensity, and its means of success. Its extent was what was then called the whole world; there appeared to be a general combination for the ruin of Christianity and its sacred books. Its duration was for ten long years. All kinds of punishment were employed; there was a deluge of Christian blood; the two empires of the East and the West devoted themselves at once to it under the united efforts of all their Caesars and all their emperors — Diocletian, Maximian, Maxentius, Galerius, Maximin, Licinius — all joined in the work, as well as the vast empire of the Persians under the cruel Sapor. While the Holy Scriptures were everywhere committed to the flames in public places, the blood of all who persisted in avowing the Christian name — men, women, and young children — flowed by horrible punishments at the same time ' in Armenia, in Egypt, in the Thebais, even to Mauritania, in Mesopotamia, at Tyre, at Gaza, in Cappadocia, in Pontus, in Gaul, in Pannonia, in Spain, in the island as far as Britain, In Egypt alone a million victims were computed to have lost their lives.

The imperial edicts were first published in the city of Nicomedia on the morning of the 28th of March, in the nineteenth year of Diocletian, and were immediately sent to the Eastern and Western empires. They enjoined first of all that in every place the Sacred Books should be burnt, — that all the bishops and priests should be east into prison, — that every Christian should be immediately deprived of every public office, — and that all should be required, under pain of death, to deny Jesus Christ, to give up their copies of the Scriptures, and to sacrifice to the gods. These edicts were immediately put into execution in all quarters, beginning at Nicomedia, where twenty thousand believers were put to death, and were the occasion everywhere else of unheard of cruelties. “We have seen with our own eyes the inspired and Sacred Scriptures delivered to the flames in the public places,” says the learned Eusebius.¹ He was at that time in Egypt, and tells us as an eyewitness² of the punishments of all kinds with their horrible details, to which multitudes of believers were subjected who were resolved not to give up the Holy Word, but to confess their Master to their last breath. After being scourged, they were delivered up to ferocious beasts, and to tortures of all kinds. If any one would wish to form an idea of these infernal crueities let him read the letter of Phileas, bishop of Thmois, in which he describes them to the people of his charge.³ In Mesopotamia the martyrs were hung with their heads downwards over a slow fire; in Cappadocia they dislocated their limbs; in Syria they drowned them; at Tyre they were thrown to wild beasts; in Arabia they were beheaded; in Phrygia they burnt them alive by whole families in their houses, In Rome, during the games in the circus, all the people were heard to cry out a dozen times, “Let the Christians be put to death!” and the emperor as often replied, “There are no more Christians.” The abjurations, in all places, in sight of the tortures prepared for them, were innumerable; and the emperors themselves might hope, like Louis XIV. in the time of the dragonnades, that they had destroyed for ever those whom they persecuted. The number of the παραδόται or traditores (as those were called who gave up their Bibles) appeared immense, and their cowardice gave birth in Africa after a while to the Donatists. ‘Hosts of bishops, priests, and deacons, were seen to waver when they beheld the instruments of punishment, and thousands of men and women, of rich and poor, all alike terrified, threw on the altar of the gods the grain of incense which had been forced into their hands.

633. The evil-doers might believe that they had attained their object; but while the Church by this sifting of fire got rid of a multitude of unconverted professors, and came forth purified, the Holy Scriptures were also seen, thrown into the flames with a great number of religious books that have never been recovered, and of which the greater part probably were an encumbrance rather than an advantage, the Holy Scriptures we say issued from these flames more efficacious, more valued, and better understood, than ever.

The persecutors would not thus judge. Reckoning, on the one hand, the crowd of bishops and their flocks, whom the prospect of a cruel death had caused to apostatise, and on the other the great number of invincible martyrs who had been utterly destroyed by capital punishments, they took no account of a concealed but immense multitude of persons, on whom their examples, as well as the secret testimonies of the Holy Word, had operated in silence, and who were preparing in their turn to stand up for their Redeemer. Their enemies might think they had annihilated the Church, and finished the Word of God from the earth. Christianity seemed for a time to have no footing in the world. The emperors frequently congratulated themselves upon it, from the height of their thrones, and in the solemn assemblies of the Senate. They flattered themselves with having so completely annihilated it that they caused medals to be struck (which are still extant)⁴ in commemoration of their triumph over the odious superstition, and erected monumental columns, which have been discovered recently even in Spain, with this inscription, “EXSTINCTO NOMINE CHRISTIANORUM,” “the name of the Christians being everywhere extinguished, and their superstition banished from the world.”

634, Such at that time was the almost total destruction of our sacred books, that, at the present day, there scarcely a copy can be found in the whole world, of a date anterior to those bloody days, or even contemporaneous. Among all the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, amounting to eleven hundred, that sacred criticism has been able to recover in all the libraries of Europe, Egypt and Asia, not a single one can be met with that goes back to the time of this persecution. All have disappeared; and our most ancient Greek manuscripts are only very late transcriptions of a small number of copies that escaped the imperial fury.

The Alexandrian manuscripts in the British Museum, (A of Griesbach) is not earlier, Michaelis⁵ says, than the end of the fourth century, because it contains the epistle of Athanasius to Marcellinus on the Psalms. The Vatican manuscript (B of Griesbach) is also not earlier than the same epoch; Montfaucon and Bishop Marsh even believe it to be of the fifth or sixth century, and Dupin of the seventh. The Cambridge manuscript, or Beza’s,⁶ (D,) is referred to the sixth century by its warmest partisans; that of Clermont, (D,) to the sixth century by Griesbach; that of Ephrem, (C Palimpsest,) to the seventh by Marsh; and that of Oxford, or Laud’s, (E of Griesbach,) to the same century. These are the most ancient.⁷

635. But.in the midst of this dreadful tempest, destined to glorify the Church by purifying it, and the Holy Word by raising it as from the sepulchre, Heaven was at last seen to interpose by a succession of rapid and severe judgments; all the persecutors were smitten by God; and Lactantius had to write his famous book De Mortibus Persecutorum. The Caesar Severus, so cruel towards the Christians, was betrayed and strangled; the Emperor Maximian strangled himself; the Emperor Galerius, arrested in his career of blood by a manifest stroke of Divine vengeance, felt himself obliged to acknowledge the hand of Divine retribution. Seized with an ulceration which spread over his whole body, and transported with rage, at first he ordered all his physicians to be put to death; but soon, devoured by so many worms that they seemed inexhaustible, and unable to doubt that his condition bore the marks of Divine wrath, he revoked on his death-bed his edict of persecution. The Emperor Maxentius, put to the rout at the gates of Rome, fell with all his armour on into the waters of the Tiber; and shortly after, the people of that capital, so often the witnesses of his cruelty, saw his head, hitherto so dreaded, carried into Rome at the end of a lance, and paraded from place to place with shouts of joy. Diocletian, obliged to see at last with his own eyes the hated triumph of Christianity, poisoned himself at Salona; Eusebius, who was then living, assures us that his body, which was falling to pieces, struck him with horror, and the finger of God seemed as if visible in his dreadful death. But a still stranger malady seized the cruel Maximin, and shewed to every one that God had smitten him; for a burning fire, obstinate and deeply-seated, which increased in spite of all remedies, and in its violence deprived him of eyesight, consumed him in such a manner, that his parched body seemed, Eusebius tells us, nothing better than a skeleton, or an infected sepulchre in which his soul was buried.⁸ He himself saw that an avenging God was the cause of his torments; he called for death, and it came not. Lastly, the cruel. Licinius, defeated and dethroned, but pardoned by Constantine, attempted a fresh conspiracy, and was strangled.

Yet while God thus visibly smote all these persecutors of Christianity and the Holy Scriptures, He caused His word of truth to triumph, He honoured it by the most noble martyrs; He overthrew for ever the gods of Olympus. Those false divinities — adored and feared over all the earth from a remote antiquity, — fell before the Holy Scriptures like Dagon before the Ark; and, though adored from time immemorial in ten thousand temples, they vanished, even from the imaginations of men, like so many forgotten diseases. In a short time they would be spoken of only in games and fables,

636. At the same time, honour was everywhere rendered to the written Word. It was disinterred as from sepulchres in which it had been concealed. It was re-copied in every country with the greatest care, in order to circulate it in all directions, It was like Noah and his three sons coming forth from the ark after the deluge to repeople the earth. And only twelve years after this tremendous storm had ceased, the Emperor Constantine was seen, in the first general council of Christendom, placing the Bible on a throne in the midst of the assembly, to signify that it is, and must ever be, the sovereign rule of conscience, and the sole infallible judge of divine truth.

637. In vain had all the powers of earth set themselves in array against the Church and against the Scriptures of God, “imagining vain things, and taking counsel together against Jehovah and against his Anointed;” “He that sitteth in the heavens laughed; Jehovah had them in derision; He spake to them in His wrath,” (Ps. ii. 2, 4;) and all their rage only served more fully to display the Divine origin both of His Church and of ° His Word. This living and abiding Word has ever reappeared to change and to govern the world.

“How is it,” exclaims the pious Le Sueur, in his History of the Church and the Empire, “how is it that an immense number of other books,-and even the works of the greatest men, and the most learned authors of antiquity, — those of the Chaldeans, of the Egyptians, the Arabians, the Greeks, and the Romans, — those writings which men studied with so much care, — have utterly perished; and, on the contrary, the Holy Scriptures, the very memory of which so many tyrants have exerted themselves to annihilate, have come down to us entire and uninjured? How is it, again, that the very histories of the most powerful empires have disappeared, while that of the despised people of Judea, and that of the establishment of the Church, more despised still, in its beginning as ancient as the world, has remained in its complete ness? Must we not,” he adds, “acknowledge in all these facts that God, because this Holy Scripture proceeded from Him, has resolved, in spite of so many obstacles, to preserve it miraculously, not by arms or by human means, but by almost constant sufferings, and by His adorable providence?”

God, then, watches over His written Word. This is all that we wish to infer from this first dispensation in the days of Constantine.

But there is a still more striking dispensation which changed afresh the face of the world in the times of the powerful Charles V. and of the brilliant Leo X. This was destined to manifest more than ever to the whole world the holy jealousy of God for His written Word, I refer to the blessed Reformation.

SECTION SECOND.

THE REFORMATION.

638. Fact the Thirteenth — The blessed Reformation, in all the regions where its voice could make itself heard, raised the Bible from the-sepulchre in which, for 900 years, the traditions of men had held it entombed.

In restoring it to the nations, it accomplished in a very few ‘years, by means of this very Bible rescued from the tomb, the most powerful, the deepest, and the holiest of the religious revolutions which have agitated the world since the establishment of the gospel, and shewed, by most conspicuous signs, the care that God ~ takes of His sacred canon. That revolution which placed Christianity on the throne of the Caesars in the days of Constantine the Great was no doubt powerful, but rather as a sovereign act of Providence than as a work of the Holy Spirit; while the Reformation was eminently a work of the Holy Word, and was accomplished, above all, in the interior and spiritual government of the house of God. I do not refer to the human conflicts which followed it; I refer to its origin, its primary characteristics, and the spiritual grandeur of its operations,

We may denominate this unparalleled event the resurrection of the Scriptures by a Divine Power. That Power drew them from the sepulchre in spite of all the great ones of this world; and when it had thus restored them to open day by a strong hand, it immediately renewed, by means of them, the wonder of ancient days. That divine Word regenerated millions of souls to the life of faith; it sustained even in the hour of punishment the multitude of martyrs who were dragged to the scaffold for the sole crime of having read it in the vulgar tongue; it freed the half of Europe from the yoke of Rome; it changed the face of the world. So that, to every serious person who studies closely the origin and primary development of this holy revolution, it became very evident that God had placed Himself at the head of this vast movement, because He meant to maintain a Church on earth, and, in order to maintain it, it has been needful to restore from age to age His word of truth.

639. This event is too well known in our days, even in its details⁹ to require us to recall the history of it. But it is necessary that we should clearly understand all the force of its testimony in favour of the canon, and, for this purpose, we wish to point out the two principal facts that characterise it. First of all, it must be shewn to what extent the written Word, when the Reformation took place, had disappeared from the face of the earth, and that for 900 years. Then it must be considered with what power, evidently divine, I would say with what majestic unity, with what superhuman rapidity, with what holiness, with what an outstretched arm, the holy Reformation, from the moment it had drawn forth the written Word from its catacombs, and replaced it in a conspicuous position in the house of God, brought forth its most precious fruits, like those of ancient days. In a few years this Word, but just come forth from the sepulchre, and by means apparently the feeblest, was seen to rise like the sun in the firmament of the Reformed Churches, in order to become their supreme rule, and to prepare for the promised day when it shall govern the whole world, and all the tribes of the earth shall walk in the light of it. This twelfth proof does not refer; it is true, any more than the one before it, to the sixty-six books in detail which compose the canon, as is the case with the other proofs; but in giving the testimony of God to the Bible as a whole, it obliges us to acknowledge once more with what jealousy He sovereignly preserves from age to age the venerable collection of His sacred oracles.

640. The Scriptures had at that time disappeared almost entirely from the face of the earth. This fact is perhaps not sufficiently known in our days.

Ever since the year 400 of the Christian era, the invasions of the barbarians had occasioned in Europe that fatal forgetfulness of the Holy Word, which, of course, rapidly impoverished the spirituality of all the Western churches. The admirable Augustin, who had been their most brilliant light, and who was always distinguished among them as the man of the Scriptures, drew his ‘last breath at the approach of the Vandals, already masters of Africa, and encamped under the walls of Hippo. Already, within a quarter of a century, Alaric: and his Goths had invaded Gaul, Spain, and Italy, and had burnt the city of Rome. Attila, with his Huns, only seventeen years after the death of Augustin, having laid waste Eastern Europe, as far as Thermopylae, passed on to the West. Then, immediately after him, the Vandals, under Genseric, crossing over into Sicily with 300,000 men, in their turn ravaged the imperial city. Only a quarter of a century later, Odoacer, coming from Pannonia with his Heruli, in 476, put an end to the empire of the West, was proclaimed king of Italy, and took possession of Rome. After him came the Lombards and the Franks.

It will be readily understood that, in the midst of these commotions, secular learning and the study of the Scriptures were almost lost, even among the priests. The Latin Breviary, the Missal, traditions, and human rites had taken their place. We may form some idea of what brilliant Italy had become in 680, when we read the answer of Pope Agathon to the Emperor Constantine Pogonatus, who had addressed to him an imperial injunction to send his deputies to the great oecumenical council which he himself had called in the capital of the East.¹⁰ Agathon could not find in all Italy any theologian sufficiently versed in the Sacred Scriptures to undertake this office. “I beg you, my lord,” he said, “to accept our deputies, though indifferent scholars, and not sufficiently versed in the Holy Scriptures. And I do not conceal from you that to obtain a theologian, it would be necessary tc seek for one in England, on account of the frequent incursions we have suffered from the barbarians.”¹¹

But later still matters became worse, as human traditions multiplied; for, henceforward, this ignorance of the Scriptures was succeeded by the most vivid distrust, and very soon by the most violent opposition against any use whatever of the holy book in the vulgar tongue.

641. The use of the Scriptures, we have already seen, was severely interdicted; through some ages it was forbidden under pain of death. Among the Vaudois, the Paulicians, the Albigenses, the poor men of Lyons, the Lollards, and the Bohemians, its powerful action upon their consciences had been recognised; for, “as the loadstone always attracts iron, so,” says Theodoret, “the Holy Scriptures will always and everywhere attract pious souls.” And when it attracts them, it leads them to Jesus Christ, and makes them seek, at any price, eternal life. They no longer fear any menace of men; and the reproach of Christ appears to them of far greater value than all the treasures of this world.

The Bible in the vulgar tongue was become in the eyes of the priests a dangerous book; “by perverse interpretations of which,” as Leo XII. said, “the gospel of Christ is converted into the gospel of the devil.”¹² . Consequently it was everywhere prohibited; it vanished, as it were, underground; it descended into the tomb. We shall not resume the consideration of those decrees of death promulgated first of all by the Council of Toulouse, and followed for five hundred years by innumerable punishments, in which the blood of the saints flowed like water.¹³

But, that every one may form a correct idea of what this death of the Scriptures was in Europe, and of that Divine power of the resurrection which delivered them from it, all must see at what cost the Bible issued from its tomb — issued, translated into all the vernacular languages of Europe, and came forth unveiled for all nations.

For the men whom the Lord engaged first in this sacred conflict, this was at the cost of unheard-of privations, of constantly recurring dangers, and often, at last, of cruel punishments. See them in their places of exile, and in the most concealed retreats, suffering from hunger and cold, from reproach and poverty. It was by the light of funeral-piles that they studied that recovered Word, that they translated it in secret, that they printed and circulated it.

Certainly, for such men it required a mighty influence from above, to choose such a life, and to prepare for such deaths. That Reformation which went forth to change the world, needed first of all to begin its holy work in their own hearts, by regenerating them, and establishing in them, by means of faith, that spiritual reign of righteousness, peace, and joy by the Holy Spirit, which alone renders the Christian capable of undertaking everything and suffering everything in the cause of his Redeemer.

Follow these great men of God in their career for the first quarter of the sixteenth century. The hour prepared from above is arrived at once for many countries; behold! the Reformation is begun! Very soon you will hear its mighty voice, like that of a roaring lion; and in a few years the aspect of the world will be changed. “Send forth thy spirit, O Jehovah, they are created: thou renewest the face of the earth . . . . it is satisfied with the fruit of thy works,” (Ps. civ. 30,13.) See Zwinglius in Switzerland! See Luther in Germany! In spite of his safe-conduct, he came forth from Worms alive, but menaced with a thousand deaths: for thirtysix years after, and on the point of breathing his last, Charles V. declared that he repented of having respected his safe-conduct, and of having allowed him to live. See the reformer in his prison of the Wartburg: he has already translated the New Testament there, and very soon all the German population will be able to read it, from one end of Germany to the other. See Le Fevre, in the following year, translating it into French for the French.¹⁴ See, again, in France, the poor but learned Olivetan, Calvin’s cousin; and see him with the poor Vaudois, who, in their extreme poverty, assist him with the means of publishing a cheap edition of his translation of the Bible; and, apparently rich by their liberality, church after church, they tax themselves with the expenses of this great work, and proceed to have it printed in the principality of Neufchatel, in Switzerland,¹⁵

See at the same time Tyndal, in England, fleeing from his native country never to return, concealing himself first in one city and then in another on the banks of the Rhine, from his persecutors, till at last he was enabled, according to his heart’s desire, to give to the English, in English, the Word of their God. See him till the day when, for having done this work, he will, by order of the king of England and the emperor of Germany, be hunted out, betrayed, thrown into prison, strangled, and burnt! See his two fellow-labourers, Bilney and Frith, seized for the same crime, and burnt alive in England! All three had been prepared by God for this task; they were learned in the sacred languages; with secular knowledge they had also faith; and all three took their life in their hands to offer it to their Redeemer. But at last, behold the angel of the Reformation, who only waited till they had ended their work, to commence his own, and who made his mighty voice resound through all Europe like the roaring of a lion. Very soon thousands of confessors and martyrs will shew themselves in France, in Germany, in England, in Italy, in Flanders, in Belgium, in Holland, in Spain, in Poland, in Transylvania, in Bohemia, in Hungary, in Denmark and Sweden, and the world will appear shaken to its foundations.

I confess that nothing has made me discern more vividly the Divine grandeur of this dispensation, and the profound interment from which the Scriptures then came forth, than to trace the labours and sufferings of these men of God in order to give His Holy Word to their generation. Trace Tyndal’s career, and from him judge of all the rest.

642. Having left the English universities, this young and learned scholar lived in peace, happy and respected, in the noble mansion of Sir John Walsh, where he discharged with credit the double office of chaplain and tutor. Sir John and Lady Walsh placed confidence in him, and took delight in hearing him speak of the gospel, with which he had been power fully impressed by reading the Greek New Testament, which the learned Erasmus had just published at Bale in 1516, and brought it to England in 1519. No sooner was he converted than this heroic young man felt a resolution formed in his heart to renounce everything in order to translate and give to his countrymen the Scriptures of his God in English. “I will consecrate my life to it,” he said, “and if necessary, I will sacrifice it;” and when an English priest at Sir John Walsh’s pointed out to him the danger from the laws of the Pope and the artfulness of the priests, he had the holy imprudence to reply, “For this I will set at defiance the Pope and all his laws; for I vow, if God spare my life, that in England, before a few years are gone by, a ploughman shall know the Scriptures better than I do.”¹⁶ He had preached the gospel fervently in the neighbourhood where he resided; but seeing his labours too often rendered fruitless by the opposition of the priests, he said, “Assuredly it would be quite different if this poor people had the Scriptures. Without the Scriptures it is impossible to establish the laity in the truth.”

He was well aware that his life was in peril, and he was not willing that his noble friends should share those dangers which he was ready to brave alone. He resolved to leave. Only three years before, the same year in which he left Cambridge, the pious Thomas Mann had been burnt alive for having professed the doctrine of the Lollards, which had now become his ‘own; so also a lady named Smith, the mother of several young children, for having been convicted of making use of a parchment on which were found written in English the Lord’s Prayer, the apostle’s creed, and the ten commandments. Moreover, everybody in England ‘recollected that, one hundred and forty years before, the pious Wyckliffe, for having attempted the same task of translating the Bible into English for the English, had been constantly persecuted; that the House of Lords, and the Convocation of the Clergy in St Paul’s, London, had strictly prohibited the use of that book; and such was the horror they had of a Bible in the vulgar tongue, that they not only burnt it when they discovered it, but burnt also, with the Bible hanging from their neck, the men who had read it; and better to express in what abhorrence this work was held, they had ordained, forty-four years after his death, that the corpse even of Wyckliffe should not have a secure grave on the soil of England, — that his bones, disinterred, should be burnt, and their ashes thrown into the river Swift.¹⁷ The venerable Lady Jane Boughton, eighty years old, was burnt for reading the Scriptures; her daughter, Lady Young, had to undergo the same punishment. John Bradley, shut up in a chest, was burnt alive in Smithfield before the valiant Henry, then Prince of Wales; and the noble Lord Cobham was burnt on a slow fire in St Giles’s.

Tyndal having quitted his protectors, betook himself to London, to seek there, in a more secret retreat, the means of pursuing his sacred work, but soon had reason to fear that punishment would interrupt his task. “Alas! Isee it!” he exclaimed, “all England is closed against me!” And as there was then in the Thames a vessel about to sail for Hamburgh, he got on board, having only his New Testament, aud for the means of living only £10 sterling. He quitted his native country, and was never to see it again. Nevertheless he left it with a holy confidence. “Our priests,” he said, “have buried God’s Testament, and all their study is to prevent its being raised from the tomb; but God’s hour is come, and nothing henceforward shall prevent His written Word, as in former times nothing could prevent His incarnate Word, from bursting the bonds of the sepulchre, and rising from among the dead.”¹⁸ Tyndal augured rightly; but it was the work of God alone.

We must follow this martyr of the Scriptures in his agitated and suffering life, pursued from city to city; first of all to Hamburgh in 1523, where he had to endure every species of privation, poverty, debt, cold, and hunger, with his young and learned friend John Frith, his son in the faith, who had accompanied him to labour in the same work. Yet he had already the satisfaction of sending secretly to his friends in England the Gospels of Matthew and Mark; but he was soon obliged to flee to Cologne to conceal himself again. We must follow him there, especially in his new troubles, where a priest, who had pursued his track, unexpectedly discovered at a printer’s the first eighty pages of his book, and hastened to give information of it, both to the senate of Cologne and the King of England. “Two Englishmen who are concealed here, sire,” he wrote, “wish, contrary to the peace of your kingdom, to send the New Testament in English to your people. Give orders, sire, in all your ports, to prevent the arrival of this most pernicious kind of merchandise.”¹⁹ With admirable promptitude, Tyndal, forewarned, anticipates the prosecution of the council of Cologne, runs to his printer, and throws himself, with the first ten sheets already printed, into a vessel that was going up the Rhine, and takes refuge in Worms! To disconcert the proceedings of his enemies, he changes the form and size of his book from a quarto to an octavo. In vain the Bishop of London had already assailed this work, which was so odious in his eyes, and denounced it in England. Tyndal, after so many exertions and prayers, had the happiness to finish the whole about the end of 1525, and intrusted its conveyance to England to some pious Hanseatic merchants, who could not bring it to London but at the peril of their lives. Let us listen to the man of God thus expressing his pious joy: “Now, O my God,” he exclaims, “take from its scabbard, in which men have kept it so long unused, the sharp-edged sword of Thy Word; draw forth this powerful weapon, strike, wound, divide soul and spirit, so that the divided man shall be at war with himself, but at peace with Thee.” And we may see the same bishop secretly commissioning a merchant to purchase the whole edition, in order to give it to the flames, and Tyndal at a distance receiving the money, which will enable him to pay his debts, and prepare immediately another edition better printed and more correct. Lastly, we have to see this faithful man settled at Antwerp, always in danger, always concealed, always suffering innumerable privations, but already at work, commencing his translation of the Old Testament, with his pious friend, John Frith. Nevertheless, for each of them, their labours were soon to end, and their rest in God was to begin. The king of England sent. secret emissaries to discover Tyndal’s retreat, and to secure his person. These persons, it is said, were not able to see him close at hand without being almost gained over to his sentiments, At last he was surprised and betrayed, and ‘the officers at Brussels were prevailed upon to seize him and throw him into prison. There he remained two years, during which time he wrote those admirable letters which we still possess, addressed to his young fellow-labourer, Frith, who having returned to England, was destined very soon to be a martyr before him. On the sixth of October 1536, fastened to a stake in the public square of Augsburg, Tyndal gave up his life for the Holy Word. In his last moments, he was heard to raise his voice, and exclaim aloud, “Lord! open the King of England’s eyes!” It was on the application of Henry VIII., and by order of Charles V., that he was taken from Brussels to Augsburg, to undergo the punishment of death. He was strangled, and his body committed to the flames. His son in the faith, and fellow-labourer, the amiable Frith, had been burnt alive at Smithfield, in 1533, for having been engaged in the same work, as also had been, in 1528, the affectionate Thomas Bilney, the friend of his youth, with whom he had so devoutly commenced his labours.

643. In this manner the Holy Scriptures were brought back to England in 1525. They returned moistened with the blood of their translators and martyrs, at the same time when other faithful ren of God, exposed to similar conflicts, and braving similar dangers, translated them into the language of their respective countries, and restored them equally to the Church of God.

Other affecting recitals of the same kind might be given, relating to those struggles out of which the Scriptures made their way as from the tomb, to render the first calls of the Reformation audible to God’s chosen ones. For, independently of the translations which were then made of the New Testament, the whole Bible was translated into Flemish in 1526,²⁰ into German, by Luther, in 1530; into French, by Olivetan, in 1535;²¹ into English, by Tyndal and Coverdale, in 1536; into Bohemian, by the United Brethren, ever since 1488; into Swedish, by Laurentius; into Danish, in 1550; into Polish, in 1551; into Italian, by Bruccioli, in 1532, and by Teotilo in 1550; into Spanish, by de Reyna, in 1569; into French-Basque, by order of the Queen of Navarre, in 1571; into Sclavonian, in 1581; into the language of Carniola, in 1581; into Icelandic, in 1584; into Welsh, by Morgan, in 1588; into Hungarian, by Caroli, in 1589; into Esthonian, by Fischer, in 1589. Thirty versions may be counted, it is said, for Europe alone.

This universal resurrection of the holy book, and of its sacred canon, in the face of such obstacles, presents us no doubt with an impressive proof of the protection which guards it from age to age; but we shall recocognise this protection far better, if we come to consider the prodigious effects of this book, whence once laid open to the sight of the nations.

Those effects were immediate; they were holy; they were everywhere the same; they were similar to those witnessed in the most glorious days of the Church; they were of a power evidently Divine, by their moral grandeur in the spiritual world, and by their external grandeur in the political world, or on the general destinies of humanity.

644, Those effects were immediate. Scarcely had the Flemish Bible, Luther’s Bible, Tyndal’s Bible, Olivetan’s Bible, issued from the tomb, but directly the angel of the Reformation made his powerful voice from God heard through all Europe. It came from heaven sudden, unexpected, by the most humble instruments, and at once the astonished world felt itself shaken to the foundations. Everything indicated an agency from on high. At the end of a few months, in Germany, in Switzerland, in France, in Flanders, in England, in Scotland, and soon afterwards in Italy, and even in Spain, the sheep of Jesus had heard His voice and followed Him. Great emotions had agitated them. Consciences were awakened by the Holy Word. A deep and powerful work had been effected in men’s souls; and very soon their idols were overthrown, and their traditions were cast away. They turned to the living and true God, and, like the Thessalonians, “received the Word in the midst of great tribulation, with joy of the Holy Ghost.” Their hearts were softened; righteousness, peace, and joy, had descended into them. ‘The face of the world was changed, and, after 900 years of slavery, half of Europe appeared already delivered from Rome. Would it then be too daring, in describing this vast movement, so visibly originating from above, to speak of it as the excellent and learned Mr Elliot²² has done in his exposition of the Prophet of Patmos, and to say with him, that this was the “mighty angel” that John saw “come down from heaven clothed in a cloud.” “A rainbow was upon his head,” a symbol of the peace of God, “and his face was as it were the sun,” for he brought to the world the sublime illuminations of faith. His progress was irresistible, “his feet were as pillars of fire.” But whence came the power of his progress, its promptitude, its unity, its Divine security? Hearken! He had in his hand a book, a little book, (βιβλιαρίδιον,) but an open book, open and not closed, open to all nations, — the everlasting gospel. Very soon he “placed his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the earth,” for he had to carry beyond the ocean the good news of grace, to lead nations in both hemispheres to the most glorious destinies, and to make known God’s salvation to the utmost ends of the earth, — his action was powerful, and “he cried with a loud voice.”

We said that this great movement which restored the gospel to the earth came evidently from heaven; and we said that it could be judged at once by its effects, for they were immediate, rapid, holy, everywhere the same, and from a power evidently Divine.

645. They were immediate. Scarcely had the Word of the kingdom been restored to light, and the great “sower had gone forth to sow”²³ in the field of this world, when this seed of God was seen to reproduce its fruits of past times. It happened to this Word, after 900 years of sepulture, what we have seen happen in our day to those peas of ancient Egypt which Sir Gardiner Wilkinson,²⁴ while examining the mummy-pits of the Pharaohs, found hermetically closed in a vase, and deposited in the British Museum; or like those grains in the Celtic tombs of Bergerac, enclosed 2000 years ago by the superstition of the Druidical priests under the heads of the dead, and both of which, very carefully sown, have reproduced, under the rays of our spring, in all their primitive freshness, the pea from a hundred pods of the ancient Egyptians, with its white blossoms streaked with green, and the heliotrope, the trefoil, and the centaury of the ancient Gauls from the days of Julius Caesar.

In a very few years, the work shewed its power by its extent, its organisation, and its energy. Thousands and thousands of souls had hastened to the Divine Word; cities, republics, kingdoms, and whole countries had been won over to the Gospel; some in great numbers by the direct power of the Holy Spirit; others, perhaps, in still larger numbers, by a conviction of the errors of Popery, and by the impulse of a universal movement. Altogether, it was a number that no man could number. ‘The world, and Christians themselves, were astonished at it. “Who are these,” they said, “that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?” Isa, lx. 8.

Scarcely had the Bible reappeared, when numerous Christian societies were formed and constituted in the midst of persecutions and exposure to death; and the most admirable martyrs sealed their testimony to the gospel with the blood of the saints.

And if we wish, from a different point of view, to make the idea more impressive of that powerful and marvellous rapidity with which the light of the Scriptures was propagated, and souls were released from traditions and priests to give themselves to the living and true God, let us rapidly recall some dates of this astonishing revolution.

646. In Switzerland, where the German was spoken, for example, the Reformation commenced at the same time as in Saxony. Zwinglius arrived at Zurich in 1518. We find churches established and constituted there as early as 1522;²⁵ then, four years later, the republic, by a decree of its senate, abolished first of all the worship of images, and in the following year, 1527, the mass with all its accompaniments.

Haller preached the gospel at Berne in 1521; and in 1527 the general edict in favour of the Reformation was passed in that warlike republic, through the medium of all its municipalities.

In Switzerland, where the French language was spoken, Farel, returning from the valleys of Piedmont, appeared for the first time at Geneva in 1532, and began to preach the gospel in that city. Froment arrived there a few days after, and delivered his first public discourse in the open air in the Place du Molard, which at that time bordered the lake, on New-Year’s Day 1533. Farel, in the middle of the same year, printed, at Neufchatel, his first liturgy of the newly-formed churches, and returned to Geneva to preach for the first time in the convent of Rive, in 1534; and, in August of the following year, 1535, the senate of the republic abolished the mass.

This was a reformation; it was soon to become a transformation. The following year, 1536, was marked by the arrival of Calvin, who was for twenty-nine years the most brilliant light of the churches that used the French language.

In Germany, Martin Luther, in 1520, burnt the bull of Leo X. and the Decretals in the public square at Wittemberg; four months after, in 1521, he made his appearance at the diet of Worms, before the emperor and all the princes of Germany; the same year, 1521, he began his translation of the New Testament, in the Castle of Wartburg, where the Elector had concealed him to save his life; he finished it on the third of March 1522; printed it in September 1522, and the whole Bible in 1530. The Augustin monks of Wittemberg had suppressed the low masses, and began to administer the cup to the laity, from 1522. By that time the free cities of Germany were converted; Frankfort-on-the-Maine one of the first. Bucer was converted in 1521, and very shortly after Strasburg with him; the kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark in 1523; Prussia, under Albert of Brandenburg, in 1525. In the same year, 1525, John, the new Elector of Saxony, successor of his brother, Frederick the Wise, placed himself in the gap for the

Reformation, and declared himself without reserve in favour of Page Luther. Rome, says Mr Morrison, felt struck in her vitals.²⁶ The noble and pious Hamilton, a young man of royal blood, on returning from his travels, preached the gospel in Scotland in 1528; and this man of charity and prayer, at the early age of twenty-four, underwent in the following year a cruel but blessed martyrdom.

In 1529, the diet of Spire passed a decree against the Lutherans, as they were called; and then the Elector of Brandenburg, and many princes of the empire who followed him, had the courage to protest, and to form immediately, for their common defence, the treaty of Smalcald.:

The Brethren of Bohemia, and the Vaudois refugees in Hungary, had excited an increasing thirst for the milk of the Word; and the Scriptures made so rapid a progress in Transylvania, that before 1530 a very large number of churches were reckoned in that distant country which had completely separated from Rome. The Bohemians, having united with the Swiss in their declaration of faith, published their Confession in 1533.

Lastly, in the same year, 1533, the Parliament of England passed a resolution which withdrew that powerful kingdom from allegiance to the Pope.

Many princes of the Germanic Confederation followed, as we have mentioned, the noble example of the Elector. The six princes of the empire who signed that celebrated PROTESTATION were — the Elector of Saxony, the Marquis of Brandenburg, Ernest and. Francis, Dukes of Luneburg, the Landgrave of Hesse, and the Prince of Anhalt. The deputies of fourteen free cities of the empire had the glory of joining in this evangelical demonstration; and henceforward those princes and cities were the first to be distinguished, in the face of all Europe, by the noble name of PROTESTANTS.

“We cannot study these proceedings,” Mr Morrison remarks, “without admiring their sublime character. It was the triumph of conscience over all worldly interests; it was an illustrious example of the courage with which the power of the Most High invests His people when, with an honest and good heart, they resolve to sacrifice everything in order to oppose that which is opposed to Him.”

Such, then, in the work of the Reformation, was the rapid and irresistible progress which that Holy Word‘ made in the world; and this is one of the marks which demonstrate, with the greatest evidence, that the cause was God’s, and that the Lord operated then with His witnesses as in the days of the apostles,²⁷ “bearing testimony to the word of His grace by the signs which accompanied it.” A single generation had been sufficient. The Bible, restored to the earth, had spread its beams like the rising sun; everywhere pious souls rejoiced in its light; and this light had not only rendered visible to all eyes the evils of the Church of Rome in their most hideous depths, and forced all men to acknowledge that this Church was corrupted in its head as well as in its members, but it had awakened their consciences, and powerfully moved their hearts, by revealing the free gifts of God. From that time, the truths of Christ and His Divine promises, being rendered evident as the light of day, responded to all the aspirations of the souls that thirsted after righteousness, that were the most sanctified and the most loving,

If the effects of the Holy Word at the Reformation were divinely rapid, they were also divinely holy; and this second feature attests more than all the rest the heavenly origin of that vast movement,

647. The men whom Divine grace had put at the head of this return to the sacred canon of the Scriptures were, in every country Christians of deep piety, of exemplary life, and of apostolic zeal; while, as to the great multitude that followed them out of all the nations of Europe, they were in general people whose sincerity, elevated views, and living faith were unquestionable; for it was in the path of self-denial, of suffering, and of humility, that they followed Jesus Christ. They thirsted after the Divine Word, and were ready to make every sacrifice for it. They had washed their robes in the blood of redemption. The objects they sought for, at any cost, were His truth, His peace, His life in their souls. They were not concerned merely to escape from the yoke of Rome, nor to protest against the errors of the priests; they thought not of their rights, but of their duties. They resolved to obey and to follow Jesus, carrying their cross — acknowledging no other mediator but Him, no other guide, no other righteousness, no other name whereby they could be saved!

Like Abraham, they quitted their country and their kindred, their houses, their honours, and their goods, going forth to seek in a foreign land a country possessed of the gospel, preferring the hardships of exile and poverty, prison, reproach, and often death, to all the comforts of their former condition. How often they might be seen arriving at the cities of refuge God had opened for them, despoiled of everything, harassed, but yet happy in having quitted all for Jesus Christ; and esteeming this wandering life, with all its uncertainties, its humiliating circumstances, and its painful toils, as far happier and more valuable than all the treasures of earth, because “they had respect to the recompence of reward,” (Heb. xi. 26.) Like the Hebrews to whom St Paul wrote, “they took joyfully the spoiling of their goods, knowing that they had in heaven a better and more enduring substance,” (Heb. x. 34.) They might be seen in the different countries of the Reformation passing through the trial of mockeries, of scourging, of bonds and imprisonment, “wandering about, destitute, of all things, afflicted, tormented: (of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts and in mountains, and concealed themselves in dens and caves of the earth,” (Heb. xi. 37, 38;) dying by the sword, by the fire, or by strangulation, but dying with psalms, and hymns, and prayers for their persecutors.

648. And let it be borne in mind that, in using this language, I mean to speak only of the first generation which heard the great voice of the Reformation, — that generation which was first aroused. by the brightness of the Holy Word, and which, having consented to suffer for this recovered and proclaimed truth, constituted the first churches. I do not speak of the generations that followed, and which afterwards formed in different countries of Europe, under very different influences, our Protestant populations.

A revival coming from God lasts only for one generation of men — that is to say, for thirty or forty years, according to what has been said by the illustrious Jonathan Edwards, the greatest theologian, probably, of modern times, who had such abundant means of studying the subject. The divine phenomenon can be reproduced, no doubt, by fresh effusions of the Spirit; but then it is a new work. In proportion as the generation which has experienced it disappears by death, the phenomenon also disappears, and the generations that come after will gather only its indirect fruits by the natural influences of education and example. God can bless individually these means of grace to the children, but their effects will not have the same extent nor the same intensity as the revival itself; for the new birth “is not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man;” it is of God, whose Spirit “bloweth where it listeth.”,

We must not, then, judge of what has been a religious revival by what the generations are that succeed it.

And it is not an exception to this rule that we have seen, in the religious history of Geneva, the remarkable and vital piety of that city perpetuated after the Reformation for 150 years. This singular fact is accounted for by the continual influx of refugees and martyrs, which year after year, for more than a century and a half, never ceased to flow thither.

649. Now if — to demonstrate the intervention of God in that Reformation which restored to the world the canon of Scripture — we give as an additional proof the eminent holiness which marked its effects throughout, in doing this we do not arbitrarily indulge our personal predilections. Very possibly they might be disputed, and we might be thought prejudiced. But we shall appeal to the most incontestible, the most exact, and the most authentic testimony. ‘These men of the Reformation, “though dead, yet speak,” (Heb. xi. 4;) we can follow them; we can listen to them in their life and in their last conflict; they still speak by their faith, their hope, and their love. I refer here to the History of the Martyrs, by Crespin, an inestimable book, and now very scarce; the most interesting monument which has been left us of the sixteenth century, the most noble of that incomparable epoch, and, I venture to say (having studied it attentively, and found it always tend to the edification of my soul and the confirmation of my faith) that, taken as a whole, it is the noblest monument of Christianity since the days of the apostles. It narrates, for sixty-nine years, the life, the doctrine, the heart and mind of the martyrs of the Reformation, and you behold them in their sufferings and last hours. Far more familiar, more authentic, and more instructive than what has been left us as memorials of the first ages, or the narratives of ~ Eusebius respecting the martyrs of his times, or the affecting accounts of the death of St Ignatius, written by eye-witnesses, or the beautiful letter from the church at Smyrna on the death of Polycarp, — is this folio of more than 3000 pages. And you find in it not only, as in the ancient writings I have just named, an account of the heroic death of martyrs, but their examinations, their answers at length, their confessions on all the points of faith, their trials of various kinds, their familiar letters to the friends who prayed for them, and sometimes the letters addressed to them in their confinement by Christians, such as Calvin, Viret, Farel, and Beza, who held, at Geneva, or elsewhere, social meetings on their behalf. You read in this volume their consolations, their trials, their devotions. Nothing could better exemplify the piety of an epoch than such a volume as this; for you see the martyrs in their doctrine, in their worship, in their habits of prayer, in their brotherly union, and in their last conflict. It is a most living picture of contemporary Christianity; it is the most ingenuous expression of their heroism and their sanctity. We follow them day by day, we appear with them before their judges, we associate ourselves with their testimony, we suffer with them, we weep with them, we join our voices with their hymns, we triumph with them. In a word, it is the realisation of the Christian life of those times in the most energetic and devoted members of _the Church; and it is impossible not to recognise in such Christian heroism the transcendent agency of the Holy Spirit. We cannot recommend too highly this rare work to every believer, assuring him that he will find there a continual and impressive lesson of what it is to live in Jesus Christ.

650. The learned and pious Crespin, a friend of Calvin, but younger, was, like him, a refugee from France to Geneva, and he had already rendered himself useful to the churches by his numerous writings, when all the Christians of reformed Switzerland were roused on the subject of the martyrdom of five young Frenchmen, students of theology, who had come to the academy of Lausanne to prepare, under Theodore Beza, for the preaching of the gospel. On returning to Lyons, they were seized, thrown into dungeons, subjected to the rudest tests, and at last condemned to be burnt to death. Their examinations, their noble confessions, their affecting letters sent daily to Geneva, suggested to Crespin the first thought of applying himself to that great work to which he consecrated the rest of his life. “My whole aim,” he says in his preface, “has been to write the life, the doc' trine, and the happy end of those who have furnished testimony of having sealed by their death the truth of the gospel.”

The book reaches from the reign of Nero to the death of Henry III. of Valois in 1589. “And that no one may doubt,” Crespin says in his preface, “of the fidelity which I have preserved in these collections, since God granted me the favour of sketching the first outlines, I have protested and still protest that I have endeavoured to write as succinctly and simply as possible what concerns the attacks made upon the churches. And as to writings and confessions, I have inserted nothing without the written testimony of those who are dead, or without learning by word of mouth from those who have asked them, or without having extracts from public records, or without having seen faithful witnesses, or writings so well authenticated that they could not be contradicted. I have sometimes found obscure passages, as if written in dark places of concealment, and often with their blood, which the poor martyrs were obliged to use for want of ink, As to their examinations and answers, which have been some times taken from records, everything is generally so confused, and set down as suited the taste of ignorant or malicious clerks, that it was necessary to give a summary extract, preserving the substance of the questions and answers.”

Crespin died full of days. Pious men sent to him at Geneva, from Belgium and Chambery, Italy and Turin, and from all the cities in France, everything they could discover relating to martyrs; and he consecrated his long life to collecting reverentially all these precious remains. He himself did not leave this world till 1587, twenty-three years later than Calvin. Yet, after his decease, the number of the martyrs having much increased, a pious and able man added fresh books to his collection, and Eustace Vignon, his son-in-law, published at Geneva, in 1608, first a fourth edition, composed of ten books, and then a fifth, containing twelve.²⁸

651. After having narrated in his first book the persecutions and martyrdoms of the fourteen first centuries, to the days of the great Wyckliffe, in 1371, in the second he narrates the sufferings of the witnesses of Jesus Christ who died for the truth in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the lamp of the gospel, as the author says, had passed from the English to the Bohemians, and John Huss and Jerome of Prague made a stand against the whole world at the great Council of Constance, then a great many martyrdoms in France, England, Holland, Germany, amongst whom those of the first literary men of Meaux, who had enlightened France — Jacques Pavannes, Louis de Berquin, Denis de Rieux, Castelain, Wolfgang, Schuch; next, in Scotland, Patrick Hamilton, of royal blood; next, J. de Castuce, burnt at Toulouse, Alexander Canus at Paris, and Jean Pointet at Savoy. “Then, as at this time,” said Crespin, “the light increased in brightness, believers multiplied by great. numbers in different places.” And thus he comes to his third book, which begins with the great persecution that occurred at Paris in 1534, on the subject of the placards.

That furious storm, which caused such sufferings to numbers of believers in that city, was of advantage not only to other cities in France, but to foreign countries. “Geneva,” he says, “derived advantage from the excellent persons whom God withdrew thither to open afterwards the great school for His people. That city,” he says, “saw in the same year, 1535, by the martyrdom of Peter Goudet, burnt at a slow fire by the Peneysans,²⁹ what would have been done to the whole city if the adherents of its bishop had gained the upper hand.”

The Vaudois endured unspeakable sufferings. You see the rage of the Spanish inquisitors in the death of Roch of Brabant, and in the death of many martyrs burnt at Tournay. You see also the admirable fruits of the labours of Peter Brully, French pastor at Strasburg, when visiting the Low Countries. You have, again, the persecution of Metz, visited by Farel, as well as the afflictions of Flanders and Hainaut.

The fourth book begins with the fourteen martyrs of Meaux. You see in England the fury of Henry VIII. falling on the noblest persons in his realm. In France, Dauphiny, Normandy, Burgundy, L’Auvergne, Limages, La Touraine, present, in turn, bloody witnesses of the grace which is in Jesus Christ. In the Low Countries there are also some eminent martyrs. In vain the parliaments of Dijon, Chambery, exert themselves to stifle the doctrine of the gospel. In vain Canino and Casanove are put to death in Italy; the gospel will continue to spread more and more. Here again appear the five students of Lausanne burnt at Lyons; their noble confession, their admirable martyrdom.

The fifth book is devoted entirely to the horrible persecutions which followed in England the accession of Mary, who re-established throughout her kingdom the service of the mass and image-worship. During the same period the fires of martyrdom were kept burning in all parts of France.

The sixth book opens with a beautiful and affecting spectacle. Five respectable men setting out from Geneva to make use of the admirable gifts God had imparted to them are stopped on their road towards the valleys of Piedmont and taken to Chambery. There they sealed with their blood their doctrine, and the precious writings that were taken from their prison.

“The diversity of nations and of minds,” Crespin remarks, “excites our admiration of one effect of the Divine agency — namely, the holy harmony of doctrine which was everywhere seen to be gloriously maintained among the Lord’s witnesses of every country and of every rank.” Besides the English, who appear here in great numbers, you see learned men of Italy; brethren of the Low Countries executed at Malines; some English bishops, true bishops, such as Glover, Ridley, Latimer, Philpot, Cranmer the primate of England, and other personages equally attached to the glory of the Son of God, and all rendering the same testimony even unto death.

The seventh book is full of a variety which renders the work of God in reference to His people more striking. A great number of believers of every rank in France and in England are seen shedding their blood under the most cruel punishments, and nobly sealing the doctrine of salvation. The Low Countries, Champagne, Béarn, Normandy, Touraine, Angoulême, Poitou, in like manner furnished heroic examples of believers in their respective provinces; and “the light,” Crespin here remarks, “spread so far by the preaching of the gospel that it reached as far as Brazil in America, a country lately discovered, which, as soon as the truth made itself heard there, was watered also by the blood of martyrs.”

Spain in its turn came to be winnowed by dreadful persecutions, and the tragical misdeeds of the Inquisition are here reported. This horrible institution was on the point of being introduced into France, and yet, in spite of the plots of their most malicious adversaries, the assemblies of believers in that country increased daily. It was then that, in spite of all obstacles, and in the midst of dreadful tempests, an invincible power, fortifying so goodly a number of martyrs, the truth advanced, and the pastors, the faithful deputies of the churches, met in 1559 in Paris itself, as if by the light of funeral piles, to publish their confession of faith, and the articles of their ecclesiastical discipline. The tragical death of King Henry II. suddenly dispersed the schemes of a conspiracy by which it was proposed to exterminate all the reformed. ‘The parliaments, astonished at the multitude of believers, seemed to moderate their fury, but very soon Anne du Bourg, a member of the parliament, had to shew by his courage and death the holiness of the cause he had so nobly defended.

Then the eighth book, the last that Crespin wrote himself, and which ends in 1562, two years before Calvin’s death, describes the dreadful sufferings of the faithful in the different provinces of France. The miserable state of Poland, Belgium, and Spain, is also briefly exhibited.

652. We must follow during the long years which the Reformation includes in Crespin’s narrative, this multitude of every country, persecuted, thrown into prisons, condemned to the flames, and dying for Jesus Christ, if we wish to form a just idea of the holiness which for such a length of time characterised this vast movement. What patience! what charity! what heroic gentleness! what glorious faith! Above all, we must see this powerful people of the French Reformed Church, persecuted, deprived of their property, deceived, betrayed, tracked, slain in the very act of worship, like sheep led to the slaughter; or obliged to leave the kingdom, thrown into prisons at the instance of the priests, given up to tribunals, loaded with insults, and burnt alive in public places, without their patience and gentleness being disturbed, and without their being reproached in any province, during forty years, with a single act of resistance or revolt. _ What power then restrained this great French people? It was not the fear of man. In many places the Reformed were in the majority; they were trained to arms; they had in their ranks the better half of the nobility, the choicest part of the military, the most illustrious captains of the age. What restrained them for forty years was holiness; it was the fear, not of man, but of God; it was reverence for His written Word, which forbade Christians to rebel against “the powers that be,” even those of a Nero. Let us not forget that thirty-five years passed from the cruel and affecting punishment of John le Clerc ‘at Meaux in 1524 to that of the noble counsellor Anne de Bourg, whom the king caused to be strangled and burnt for the sole fact of his having respectfully but nobly avowed before him that he was a partisan of the persecuted faith. I know not if in all history we can find a more singular and beautiful spectacle than these five-and-thirty years of Christian long-suffering and gentleness among a whole people. Certainly, for any one who knows this nation, such heroism, so long, so patient, and so humble, cannot be explained but by the influence of the Holy Spirit and of the written Word upon the 2150 churches of which that great people of the French Reformed then consisted.³⁰

653. But in the effects of the Reformation, which the sacred canon of the Scriptures gave to the world, what above all shews the Divine agency, is not only their extent, nor the rapidity of their progress, nor their admirable holiness; it is rather, as we have said, their marvellous unity.

Everywhere you see these new men come forth from the same school; all have for their instructors only the written Word and the Holy Spirit; all are of the same family, and children of the same Father; they have the same elder Brother — He who in heaven “is not ashamed to call. them brethren.” In Transylvania, in Poland, in Sweden, in Denmark, in Germany, as in Scotland or in England, or in Holland or in France; at Bale, at Berne, at Geneva, as in Spain or in Italy — everywhere, if you examine what the Holy Word, when brought again to light, produced in the souls of these martyrs, you will be struck with admiration; for always, and in every quarter, you hear the same language. There is the same faith, the same sensibility, the same experiences, the same adoration. Everywhere there is the same Saviour, saving sinners by the same free grace, without any other price than His blood, without any other merit than His merits, without any other hand for laying hold of this grace but the hand of faith, without any other condition but of receiving it without condition, with no other guide, no other mediator, no other priest than Jesus Christ received into the heart by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

654, To establish this interesting fact, I would say, Read the conflict and the end of each of these thousand martyrs. But perhaps I shall make it more clear and impressive by appealing to another monument of the Reformation — one of the most admirable, and most worthy of being studied. I refer to the harmonious collection of the “Thirteen great Confessions of Faith,” which the restoration of the Scriptures in Europe caused to be solemnly published in the most distant and different countries. There was not, first of all, any concert between one nation and another; all were separately made, and under the most agitated state of things; yet you will be obliged to admire their holy agreement. Different collections of them have been published, better to shew their majestic unity; but we prefer citing here one of the most approved, published at Geneva in 1612, and entitled, “The Body of the Confessions of Faith,” which, authentically drawn up in different kingdoms, nations, or ‘republics of Europe, in the name of their churches, were at last presented in the most celebrated assemblies, and sanctioned by public authority.³¹

We have here, then, not the writing of a particular author, — it is the voice of the Reformation making itself solemnly heard by all nations, through the great bodies of the church which represent it. It is the Reformed body asking audience of the whole world.

You will be able, then, to see in detail, in the thirteen principal confessions, which are as follow, the admirable and powerful agreement of which we speak: —

655. There is, first of all, the celebrated Helvetic Confession. A former Swiss Confession had already been made at Bale, in German, in 1532. (It was adopted later by the civic authorities of Mulhausen.) But, in 1536, the so-called Helvetic Confession was made first of all at Bale, at the request of the senate of that republic, who had convoked the evangelical cities of Switzerland, for the object of agreeing with them in an exposition of their common faith. The cities, therefore, sent to Bale their most respected magistrates, with Henry Bullinger, Oswald Myconius, and Simon Gryneus, doctors of Zurich and Bale, who had also taken care to send for Bucer and Capito from Strasburg, that they might concur in preparing the document, and thus better attest the holy agreement of the churches.

Their work was approved in their respective States; it even received the approbation of the theologians of ener and that of Luther.

But subsequently, this Confession, drawn up‘with greater fulness, was published in 1566, and received the successive adhesion of the churches of Zurich, Bienne, Schaffhausen, St Gall, the Grisons, Mulhausen, Bienne, and Geneva; and, later still, the public and official approbation of the churches of England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, and a great number of the German churches.

2. The Confession of the Churches of France, drawn up at Paris by a national synod, secretly assembled in the midst of the most terrible persecutions. Two years later, Theodore Beza, in the name of the churches of France, presented it solemnly to King Charles IX., in the conference of Poissy. Afterwards read at the national synod of Rochelle in 1571, three copies of it were carefully made on parchment, which received the signatures, with their own hand, of the Queen of Navarre, Henry of Navarre, her young son, Henry of Condé, Louis of Nassau, Admiral Coligny, as well as all the pastors or elders deputed to the synod by all the churches of the provinces of France.

One of the three copies was sent to Geneva, and is there in the archives of that city.

3. The celebrated Confession of the Anglican Church, accepted by the synod of London in 1562. It was amended and printed in 1571.

4, The Confession of Scotland, framed in 1568, was subscribed in parliament by all the estates of the realm in 1580.

5. The Belgian Confession, written the first time in French in the year 1561, to express the common faith of the churches in Flanders, Artois, and Hainaut, which were then suffering such cruel persecutions. It was confirmed in 1579 bya Belgian synod.

6. The Polish Confession, presented and proclaimed by common consent in the synod of Zamosc, (in synodo Czengerina,) and printed at Debreczin in 1570.

7. The Confession of the Four Imperial Cities, namely, Strasburg, Constance, Memmingen, and Lindau, written in 1538, and presented to the Emperor Charles V. by the deputies of those four cities, at the same time that the Confession of Augsburg was presented to him,

8. The celebrated Confession of Augsburg in 1530, drawn up on the spot, Philip Melanethon the writer tells us, while the diet held its sittings in that city. It was presented to the emperor by some of the most illustrious princes of Germany. It was acknowledged afterwards, and presented afresh to the Emperor Ferdinand in 1558 and 1561.

9, The Saxony Confession in 155],

10. The Wurtemberg Confession, presented to the Council of Trent in 1552 by the deputies of the Duke of Wurtemberg.

11. The Confession of the Elector Palatine.

12. The Confession of the Bohemian Church, and of the Vaudois refugees from Piedmont in a foreign land. This is one of the most ancient. Approved publicly by Luther and Melanethon in 1582, and by the Academy of Wittemberg, it was at last adopted by the free barons of the kingdom of Bohemia, and the rest of the nobility, and presented in 1535 to King Ferdinand.

13. Lastly, The general Consensus passed in the assembly at Thorn, by the Polish churches of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and of Great and Little Poland.

656. Let it suffice us to have pointed out these thirteen confessions, and the remarkable books which, by bringing them together, only make us admire the unity that exists amidst the diversity. “It is a good thing,” said Augustin, “to have many orthodox expositions of Holy Scripture, expressed in different terms, provided they agree in the same faith; for this diversity serves for the better understanding of the truth, since it is not contrary to it.”³²

Thus, while that admirable unity of the people of God in their faith is exhibited in so beautiful and affecting a manner, by the innumerable martyrs of the Reformation, summoned apart before their judges and executioners, and yet all giving the same testimony either in the dungeon or on the scaffold; it is also a beautiful spectacle to see it also proclaimed by the synods, and on the most solemn occasions by whole churches, and by their most eminent doctors.

657. But we have said enough to shew the hand of God in that great dispensation which, after nine centuries of obscurity, restored to the world the sacred canon of the Scriptures. Everything, in fact, reveals that hand; the inveterate greatness of the obstacles — the extreme feebleness of the means — the unparalleled nature of the effects — their suddenness, their rapid and powerful progress, their extent, their action on nations, and on consciences — their singular holiness, and their magnificent unity.

It now only remains to speak of the last intervention of Providence, and the splendid testimony it bears to the canon of the Scriptures.

This is perhaps the most remarkable of the three dispensations, though it appeared at the dawn of the nineteenth century, without noise or previous expectation, — rising like another sun upon the world, to enlighten it with a new light, and, in a short time, to enrich the most distant nations with the beneficent fruits of its agency.

Moreover, there is this great point of superiority in this dispensation to the preceding ones — that while they gave to the canon only a collective testimony, splendid and valuable, no doubt, yet indistinct, this of which we are about to speak refers distinctly, exclusively, and by name, to each of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, as well as to each of the thirty-nine books that compose the Old Testament. All our readers will understand that we are here speaking of the great institution of the BIBLE SOCIETY, the wonder of this age — an institution without parallel for its magnitude — oecumenical and fraternal, generous and powerful — carrying the everlasting gospel over the whole earth, accomplishing in silence such great things, while it quietly prepares, as we have said, for greater things.

SECTION THIRD.

THE BIBLE SOCIETY.

658. Fact the Fourteenth — The Bible Society appeared on the earth when no one expected it, in order to begin an entirely new era of universal evangelisation.

In rapidly reviewing its first operations, and comparing them with what God has caused it to become, we hope we shall make all our readers comprehend how much the hand of the Lord has been revealed in this wonderful creation; so that every one may better estimate the full force and extent of the testimony which this institution bears among all nations, and in all the languages of mankind, to the sacred canon of the Scriptures.

659. It would be interesting to recall the humble circumstances of its birth, when the first conception of a Bible Society entered the heart of Mr Charles, the minister of Bala, while that apostolic man was exercising his ministry among the poor inhabitants of Wales; but these details are so well known in England, and especially by recent works on the subject, that we omit them in this translation.

660. On March 7, 1804, the very year when, in France, Napoleon I, seized the imperial sceptre, and when in England all men seemed occupied only with his threatened invasion, and with victorious conflicts by land and sea, this important institution, destined to effect such great things in the kingdom of God, was constituted in London, unostentatiously, before an assembly of 300 persons, mostly Dissenters.³³

661. The society thus formed seemed at first like an obscure and weakly infant, for nothing could be more unpretending than its birthplace and its first friends, But God, who intended to make it one of the most powerful instruments of His mercy for the whole earth, was pleased, as usual, to render His agency more manifest, by the very lowliness of its beginning. Whenever He prepares great things for His Church, He takes care to keep back at first the powerful and the influential of this world, that all the honour of what is done may redound to Himself alone. Moses was taken from the river in an ark of bulrushes, and when an angel came to announce to men a Deliverer as far superior to Moses as the Creator to the creature, “Behold!” He said, “this shall be a sign unto you: you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger,” (Luke ii. 12.)

Around the cradle of the Bible Society were found at first none of the great ones of the earth, because God had in reserve for it the highest destinies.

The same year in which Pope Pius VII. came to Paris to inaugurate the first Bonaparte with so much pomp in Notre Dame, a few private persons met at the London Tavern to inaugurate an association destined to produce to the very ends of the earth results a thousand times superior — I do not say only in duration, nor only in excellence, but in grandeur — to all the traces that extraordinary man was able to leave behind of his genius and his victories.

On the 7th of March 1804, at the inauguration of the society, not a single influential person either in the State or the Church was present; the. only Episcopal minister who had condescended, though with reluctance, to attend, the Rev. John Owen, tells us himself the astonishment and uneasiness he felt at first, when he found himself seated near three Quakers, so novel at that time were such associations. But the excellent Owen could freely afford to make these confessions, after the zeal he had so long displayed in this holy cause, and the eminent services he had rendered it.³⁴

662. Yet nothing can better shew the divine hand in this institution, as God made it, than to consider what men at first wished to make it.

By a divine arrangement, this infant, so obscure and feeble on its first entrance into the world, but for which, without those who had the charge of it being aware, so grand a future was reserved by God — this infant received into its constitution an organism and laws of existence in pre-established harmony with its glorious destiny. This society, as men at first planned it, would have had neither the aim, nor the mode, nor the simplicity, nor the catholicity, nor the grandeur which have characterised it; and when we consider the long-cherished prejudices of church and sect which had preceded its birth, we venture to say that no man would have been equal to conceiving a plan at once so simple and so magnificent. This great epoch, which we venture to call the biblical era in the history of the Church, really inaugurated a period altogether novel of fraternal breadth and true catholicity; so that, in the unthought-of manner in which it was formed, it at once revealed to us that it was of God as its immense and continual progress will very soon shew us.

Let us now state its constitution; let us also state its immense progress; and we shall then be in a position to appreciate the value of the testimony it renders at the present day in all the languages of mankind to the sacred canon of the Scriptures.

663. What is its constitution? The British and Foreign Bible Society exists only to spread among all nations, and to the ends of the earth, one book, the written Word of God in the Old and New Testaments.

It prints and circulates it without any note, explanation, or comment.³⁵

It delivers it pure from all human alloy; it admits no apocryphal book; and when it gives it to societies on the continent, it takes care not to deliver it into their hands till it is bound, that there may be no temptation anywhere to associate any other book with the oracles of God.

It gives the written Word in all the languages of mankind, making use, as far as possible, of the most faithful and accredited versions,

Where versions are wanting, it seeks to obtain them, and for ‘this end contributes by donations, directly or indirectly.

The Bible Society, as a society, belongs to no particular Church, to no section of the universal Church, to no party.

From its birth, in order to maintain its catholicity, and to be of service to all men who search the Scriptures, it was placed under the direction of a large committee, composed of thirty-six laymen, taken from every denomination of Christians. Six of these members must be chosen from foreigners who reside in London or its neighbourhood, half of the remaining must belong to the Church of England, the other to Dissenting churches. This is still its constitution, and it is striking to see how, from that day, this creation of so novel a kind has inaugurated for our age, and for the majority of our existing churches, a new era of true catholicity, of fraternal association, and of evangelical alliance.

It has been better than ever before understood that, beyond the distinctions, often too stringent, of our ecclesiastical denominations, there exists before God a holy and universal Church of all the true worshippers of Jesus Christ.

The committee, which meets regularly on the first Monday in every month, is composed, we have said, of laymen; but to complete the description of its government, we must add this clause, that every minister of whatever church, if he is a member of the society by his annual subscription, has a right to take a part every month in the deliberations of the committee, and even to give his vote. Moreover, the British and Foreign Bible Society accepts the co-operation of every other society, at home or abroad, which is disposed to pursue the same object under the same conditions.

Its grants to societies on the European Continent have always been liberal. They were remarkably so during the first ten years of its existence narrated by Owen. For before the end of the terrible wars of England against Napoleon, forty-eight independent Bible societies in Germany, Hungary, Sweden, and Switzerland, in Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Courland, and Russia, had received from its generosity 99,000 Bibles and 127,000 New Testaments.

And if the society, thus associated in all regions of the globe with so many thousand societies of the same kind, may be considered as forming an imposing body of which it is the model and head, it has always been without domineering, or being responsible for their acts. It has never pretended to put itself at the head of this vast union; it maintains with these ten thousand associations only the relations of holy co-operation and Christian brotherhood.

Lastly, The society has never received and never sought the aid of any government. It has never conveyed its agents or its Bibles on board government vessels, — it has had no transactions with the great powers of this world, and never has had the thought of gaining by the sale of its books; for the entire receipts it has obtained from that quarter has not amounted to one-half of its grants. And to carry on its liberal donations to so many other societies, it draws from the offerings of piety, of rich and poor, but chiefly from the latter. It has but one object, the extensive circulation of the Scriptures. This is all its gain.

We see, then, what it is. Let me shew, in few words, what it has done, or rather what God has done by it, silently, for half a century.

To give an idea of the progress of its work all over the earth, we shall attempt to shew the measure of it, by some facts and figures taken from its last report.

664. During these fifty-six years of daily increasing labour, the — British and Foreign Bible Society has caused the Scriptures to be printed and circulated in 188 versions. .

It has caused them to be translated, printed, and circulated in 158 different languages or dialects spoken among men.

Of these 158 different languages in which the Bible Society has caused the Scriptures to be translated, printed, bound, and circulated, for 109 it has charged itself directly with all the expense; and for the 49 others, indirectly by donations and grants to other societies. For example, by supporting for a time missionaries who left provisionally to their colleagues their daily task of ordinary ministration, to give themselves to the labour of a first translation of the Scriptures among people who never before possessed them,

Among these 158 languages in which the Bible Society has caused the oracles of God to be translated, printed, and circulated, 138 had never before been reduced to a written language.

Thus, then, during this half century alone so many new tribes, almost unknown to geography, but now evangelised, see their happy children come from the missionary schools with the Holy Word in their hands! They knew nothing of the wonders of reading, and of the printing press, — they had never seen books; and usually, like the father of king Moshesh among the Bassutos, they would have said to the missionary who brought them, under the form of a sacred volume, the good news of the grace of God, “No; I can never believe that a black can be ‘clever enough to make paper speak. A lie all this! — a lie! No one can make me believe that the word of man can become visible!”³⁶

665. To give a single example of the labour which must be undergone on behalf of each of these 188 tribes, it is sufficient to call to mind what was done for their most ancient station, the interesting island of Tahiti. In 1796, eight years before the formation of the Bible Society, the first English missionaries on board the Duff landed on this island. After sixteen year’s hard labour they had gained nothing; and it was only in the twenty-fourth year that the first-fruits clearly shewed themselves. In 1820, two Tahitan domestics, who had met to pray together, had succeeded in assembling round them, during the absence of the missionaries, a group of islanders desirous of seeking God, and longing after Him. “The spirit of grace and of supplication” at last descended on this people. Then the society hastened to supply these rising churches with three thousand copies of Luke’s Gospel in Tahitan, and soon after with ten thousand copies of the other Gospels and the Book of Acts. Schools multiplied, and the people advanced in the knowledge of God, until at last, in 1830, the whole New Testament could be supplied to them; and, in 1838, the Old Testament was printed for them under the superintendence of the venerable missionary Notts, who had resided in these islands for forty years. These two books were so eagerly sought for by the natives that they paid two dollars for them, and in order to purchase them, engaged in distant fisheries. Thus, after forty-two years, the whole Bible was at last gained for this people. “It is delightful,” the missionaries wrote in 1841, “to see their ardent thirst for the Holy Book. When they have obtained it, they leap for joy, they kiss it, and press it to their heart.” Alas! that this treasure should so soon become more precious to them than they ever imagined.

It became, two years later, their consolation and their safeguard against the attacks of the Jesuits, and the long oppression of the French Protectorate. It was on the night of the 9th of September 1843, that the Admiral Du Petit Thouars forced the unfortunate queen on board his vessel to sign the act of submission. But how wonderful it is that, in the seventeen years that followed, the possession of the Bible rendered this little people constantly firm in their faith, and inflexible against all that was done to frighten or to seduce them, since they had been separated from their English missionaries!³⁷

And what the society has effected in these islands, it has had to repeat among the 137 other tribes to whom it has carried the Scriptures.

Thus, then, as of late it has often been remarked, we may say that, by the sole fact of these pious labours, the Bible Society, and the missionaries associated with it, have more enriched literature during the last fifty years, than all the voyagers, philosophers, and linguists have done since the beginning of the world, whether as to the acquisition of new languages, or to the intercourse of nations with one another.

But it is our intention to exhibit its rapid and beneficent progress from another point of view; and for this purpose we must present other figures, which will enable us better to appreciate it, both as to the propagation of the knowledge of God, and to the testimony it has rendered all over the earth to the canon of the Scriptures. We take these details from its Fifty-sixth Annual Report, which reaches to March 31, 1860,

666. During the year its receipts amounted to £164,136, 68. 5d.; in subscriptions, donations, and legacies, to £80,526, 1s. 6d.; in receipts for the sale of books, £81,493, 15s. 11d.

It has expended more than £179,000. It has distributed more than two million copies of the Scriptures.³⁸

667. We may judge better of its most recent successes, and the increasing magnitude of its operations, if we say that this year its receipts have exceeded those of the preceding by more than £11,000 — its expenses by more than £25,000; if we say also that the society, which, in commencing its operations, found only fifty languages employed in versions of the Holy Scriptures, offers in the present day, as we have just said, 188 versions in 158 different languages; if we say, again, that during the five first years of its existence its distribution of the Scriptures amounted in all to 159,459 copies, while during the five last they have been fifty-one times greater — that is to say, more exactly, 8,038,321 copies.

And, lastly, if we add that it has distributed altogether since its foundation thirty-seven millions and a half copies of the Holy Scriptures,³⁹ and that it has expended during the same period nearly £5,000,000.

668. But we may give in figures another most striking measure of its progress — namely, the number of auxiliary Bible societies which it has formed by its example, and its grants in every land where the Word of God is honoured.

Among these thousands of associations there are some which, on account of their development and their labours, it will be necessary to mention apart.

The object of all these is the same as its own; but what distinguishes the parent society is the splendour of its example, combined with the grandeur and generosity of its operations, for among all these thousands of societies we know not one which it has not richly assisted by its grants.

Since March 7, 1804, it has associated to itself more than 5000, without reckoning the 4200 auxiliary associations of the United States, nor all those that were formed in Russia around the great Russian Society during the thirteen years of its existence.

The British and Foreign Bible Society counts, then, in Great Britain 3672 auxiliaries; in the Colonies, 877; and in the other British possessions, 453, — in all 5002.

669. But there are many others which we will content ourselves with simply mentioning. 5

The Hibernian and the Edinburgh Society; the French Society, which, since its formation, has received from the British and Foreign Bible Society 4,000,603 copies;⁴⁰ and many others in Germany, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, Sweden, Wurtemberg, and the Hanseatic towns. There is not one of the Protestant cantons of Switzerland which has not received very generous grants. Bale alone has received more than 442,365 copies of the Scriptures. And there are two more societies which must be mentioned separately.

670. The Russian, which had its bright days that may yet return, began in Finland in 1812, and in the following year was fully constituted at St Petersburg by an imperial ukase. It has translated the Scriptures into seventeen languages, in which they had never been known before. It has printed them in thirty different languages; it has circulated them in forty-five. In 1806, among the Russians there was not one man in a thousand who could read the Scriptures, and one must have travelled hundreds of versts to find a Bible; whilst, on the seventh anniversary of the Russian Society, Prince Galitzin described the ardour with which, even as far as Siberia and the Caucasian regions, the friends of the Holy Word were employed in translating it into the different dialects of the country.

But what an ukase of Alexander had authorised in 1813, another ukase of Nicholas abolished in 1826, and the society ceased to exist!

During its short and beneficent existence it had procured for Russia, in the Russian language, the New Testament, the Psalms, and the eight first books of the Old Testament. It had printed 324,000 copies of them; and, in the space of ten years, it had distributed 800,000 volumes.

671. The other Bible Society, which yields in importance only to the British and Foreign Bible Society, is that of the United States,

In 1854, at the jubilee of the British Society, its deputies declared that they counted 1400 auxiliary societies, and 2800 branch associations.

672. Neither the Church nor the world has ever seen anything comparable to the Bible Society for its universality and its grandeur. It is a majestic river, which has never ceased to increase, noiselessly, like the tides of the ocean, and which will increase until the times shall be accomplished, and “all the ends of the earth shall have seen the salvation of our God.” If this giant is to-day, as we have said, fifty-one times greater than he was in 1809, five years after his birth, what will he not be in forty-four years, at the next jubilee? And if, during this single half century, he has carried the Scriptures in 138 new languages among 138 new tribes of mankind, to how many other unknown nations will he have given them in fifty years more?

The pacific and powerful formation of this society is, then, an event of incomparable grandeur. It is the most important fact of the nineteenth century; everything conspires to shew the hand of God in it; everything tells us that He has prepared in this, His most powerful instrument for accomplishing the promised day, when “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea,” (Is. xi. 9.)

673. Are evangelical Christians, then, deceived, when they recognise in this great and beneficent institution the angel whom St John, during the visions of Patmos, beheld “flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach it unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people?” “Fear God,” he said with a loud voice, “and give glory unto him, for the hour of his judgment is come,” (Rev. xiv. 6-8.)

But our main object in tracing the progress of this institution was to recognise in it another manifestation of God’s watching over His written Word. We had therefore to shew that it came from on high, and with what constancy and with what fulness it bears the most splendid and absolute testimony to all the books of our canon. 674, Truly we may say that here is the historical triumph of the canon.

We are asked what are the sacred books of the Old Testament, and what are the books that ought to be excluded.

We are asked at the same time what are the inspired books of the New Testament.

Behold, as if to answer in the name of the universal Church, this twofold question, there arises on earth at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a holy, gigantic, powerful association, such as the Church had never before seen, comprising, without distinction of sect, all classes of Christians who reverence the Scriptures, and proposing, for the only end of its existence, to circulate their true canon in all the languages of men to the very ends of the earth.

Listen to it then, for it has every right to be heard. It labours for fifty years; it has more than ten thousand societies like itself, which assist it in its work; it has distributed in the two hemispheres more than fifty millions of the Sacred Volume in fifty-eight different languages of men, and it has girded up its loins not to cease its distributions of the canon till “all the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.”

Certainly it can be said of no other body than of this one, that it legitimately represents the Christian mind on this grand question. It is for all nations what the Amphictyonic Council was formerly among the Greeks, to whom the twelve Hellenic nations committed the charge of their temples. The Bible Society, the Amphictyonic Council of Christendom, appointed to guard the temple of the Scriptures, watches that nothing sacred shall be taken from it, and that nothing impure shall be admitted. Listen to it then.

675. First of all, as to the Old Testament, what is its first testimony?

It sends over the whole earth the oracles of the Old Testament such as they have always been acknowledged by the Jews, and such as they were always received and cited by Jesus and His apostles. Here are the twenty-two books as the Jewish doctors and their historians, and the ancient fathers of the Church counted them,⁴¹ — not one more — not one less, — and it sends them everywhere without any note, without any comment, without any Apocrypha, without any uninspired book.

In the thirty-seven millions of the Sacred Volume which England has circulated, and in the thirteen millions and a half which our American brethren have distributed, no Apocrypha has been inserted,

On the contrary, as the Amphictyonic Council of Christendom, and as appointed to guard the temple, they have cast out into the outer court these human books as unworthy of a place there, as Nehemiah cast out the “household stuff” of Tobiah, (Nehem. xiii. 7-9.)

But mark it well; this fidelity of the Bible Society in reference to the Apocrypha was not its own, but came of God, who watched over it almost in spite of itself.

In fact, till 1812, they had never given any part of the Apoerypha, but at that time their connexion with the relaxed churches on the Continent, and their desire to induce the Romanists not to refuse their Bibles, led them by degrees to descend to arrangements, in order to gain them.⁴² Without even printing the Apocrypha in England, they allowed themselves in 1821, silently to permit their insertion in a Bible printed at Toulouse, and later, in 1824, at the request of a Roman Catholic priest, in an edition which was printed at their expense in Germany, for the German Romanists. It was an ill-judged compliance, of which they did not at first perceive all the evil, and they only allowed it on the Continent in the deceptive hope of gaining some souls to the reading of the Bible. This was to do evil that good might come; the evil of profaning the Book of God by the introduction of false books; and the evil, not less great, of presenting themselves to the world, as if they called in question the authenticity of the Oracles of God, their canon, and their integrity. But in 1824 the goodness of God raised up in Scotland, to lead them back into the right way, eminent and faithful men,⁴³ who reproved the society to the face, as Paul at Antioch, and for a very similar reason, “withstood Peter, because he was to be blamed,” (Gal. ii. 11,) and because by his weakness he greatly endangered the interests of the truth.

Thus these faithful men led' the Bible Society back into the right path, as Paul led back the apostle Peter, and brought it to declare aloud, that henceforward it should withhold all grants to societies which joined the Apocrypha to the Sacred Volume. This controversy, which lasted twelve years, was very beneficial in all respects. By the issue to which God brought it, it was for the Bible Society a restoration; for the cause of the canon, a confirmation; for all Christians, a lesson of uprightness, and a fresh occasion for adoring the Providence that watched over the written Word, and that for thirty-three centuries has maintained, from age to age, and by various ways, the integrity of its canon.

Such then, as regards the Old Testament, is the important testimony rendered by the Bible Society to the canon; but as regards the New Testament, its answer is still more simple and more significant.

676. We are asked to state what is the mind of the Church on this canon after 1800 years of its existence.

To reply, we have had for half a century an advantage which our predecessors never had. This great Society, with its retinue of ten thousand societies freely formed in both hemispheres, is unanimous; it is so in every language; it is so all over the earth; it has never ceased to be so; and since its birth it has distributed more than fifty millions of sacred copies, always in harmony on this important point. Preceding ages have seen nothing like it; and this encouragement was reserved by the goodness of God for our days; because all are arrived at the age of missions. How greatly, indeed, is this fact suited to confirm our faith! How luminously does it shew us that God makes the same use of the Christian people for the testimony to His Scriptures, which He has made for three thousand years of the Jewish people, good or bad, with so striking an invariableness!

May we not say of the Bible Society, and of its ten thousand sister societies in the two hemispheres, that they are, as it were, the comitia of the whole Christian world, and give us its judgment on the important question of the Scriptures, as the comitia in the Campus Martius did for the great affairs of the Roman people assembled by curial, by centuries, or by tribes? What does this great body everwhere attest? It has but one and the same answer all over the earth; you never hear a single discordant voice in the ten thousand societies; never has a single page varied in its fifty millions of volumes.

“THE SACRED CANON,” it answers, “IS COMPOSED OF TWENTY-SEVEN BOOKS, AND THEY ARE THE FOLLOWING: — .

“THE FOUR GOSPELS, THE BOOK OF THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES, THE FOURTEEN EPISTLES OF PAUL, THE SEVEN EPISTLES OF JAMES, PETER, JOHN, AND JUDE, AND THE REVELATION OF JESUS CHRIST TO HIS SERVANT JOHN.”

This answer, we have said, is given by the representatives of the Christian world without one dissenting voice on its greatest affair, on the inspired Scriptures, on the books which the Christian - Church must regard as the Word of God.

677. No doubt it will be here objected, that what we are pleased to call the comitia of the Christian world — far from speaking on the part of all Christendom, — represents, after all, only the churches of every name where the use of the Holy Scripture is honoured; while, on the contrary, another moiety of Christendom marches under the orders of the Roman Pontiff, who, since the birth of the Bible Society, has always made it his first care, at the beginning of each reign, to anathematise it solemnly as the work of Satan.

It is true, we reply, that they have all anathematised it; Leo XII. in 1823, Pius VIII. in 1829, Gregory XVI. in 1831, and Pius IX. in 1848. But this fact only renders the unanimity of all the representatives of the Christian world more striking as regards the canon of the New Testament.

For while the comitia attest, on the question of the canon, the admirable unanimity of all Christian people where the use of the written Word is honoured, we are not ignorant at the same time that all these very popes and all their adherents HAVE FOR THE NEW TESTAMENT THE SAME CANON AS OURSELVES.

They vote therefore with the comitia.

They do not anathematise the societies for having a false canon; but only for the act of circulating the true canon indiscriminately over all the earth. For every one ‘perfectly knows that the popes receive absolutely the same catalogue of the New Testament as our Bible societies, without the difference of a single book, a single chapter, or a single verse.

Let us adore, then, that Divine Goodness which thus multiplies testimonies, that nothing may be wanting for the confirmation of our faith.

1) Hist. Eccl., viii., 2: — Τὰς δὲ ἐνθέους καὶ ἱερὰς γραφὰς κατὰ μεσας ἀγορὰς πυρὶ παραδιδομένας αὐτοῖς ἐπείδομεν ὀφθαλμοῖς.

2) Ibid., viii., 7: — Οἷς γιγνομένοις καὶ αὐτοὶ παρῆμεν.

3) Ibid., viii., 10.

4) “Nomine Christianorum deleto.” See Milner, Church History, 1816, p. 6,

5) Michaelis, Introduction, ii, 141. (French translation.)

6) So called because presented by Beza to the University of Cambridge in 1581.

7) In the month of April last year, (1859,) M. Tischendorf announced to the learned world, in the Augsburg Gazette, the rich discovery he had just made, at Mount Sinai, of a very beautiful and ancient Greek manuscript of the Old and New Testaments. He placed it without hesitation in the first rank, above all the manuscripts possessed in the present day, for its antiquity, careful execution, and perfect preservation. He believes it belongs to the first half of the fourth century, It has been deposited at St Petersburg, and a fac-simile is expected to be made of it within three years. It is written on 346 very large sheets of fine parchment, and the text is arranged on every sheet in four columns,

In our 43d Prop., mentioning the fifty copies of the Divine Scriptures, splendidly copied by the care of Eusebius of Caesarea, at the request and expense of the Emperor Constantine, I said how precious a prize it would be if, by one of those unforeseen occurrences reserved to the Church from time tc time by the Divine goodness, one of these manuscripts, more ancient than any it possesses, could be discovered in some retreat hitherto unexplored. I was far from suspecting that, when writing those lines in the first part of this work, this favour would be so soon granted by the discovery of the Sinaitic manuscript. Yet I cannot venture to believe that this is one of those copies due to the care of Eusebius and the zeal of Constantine. The Russian Government, the Record says, (May 1860,) has devoted 500,000 rubles to the printing of the manuscript.

8) Hist. Eccl., ix., 10.

9) Especially by the admirable labours of my friend M. Merle d'Aubigné, whose volumes are read with the same vivid interest in the New and in the Old World, and by all classes.

10) The sixth in Trullo, in 680,

11) Le Sueur, Histoire de l’Eglise et de l'Empire, part vi, p. 212; Genève, 1672,

12) See Prop. 558.

13) We have sufficiently referred to these acts and decrees in Propp. 552-557, 560-563.

14) In 1523. Luther’s Bible did not appear till 1530,

15) By Peter de Vingle, June 4, 1535, in the little village of Serrières. They taxed themselves for this heroic charity the enormous sum (for them) of 1500 gold crowns. (Leger, Hist. des Vaudois, p. 165.)

16) Our readers should follow Tyndal’s career as exhibited in the admirable work of Merle d’Aubigné, 1854. [The fullest account of Tyndal’s life and biblical labours is contained in Mr Anderson’s Annals of the English Bible; 2 vols, 8vo, London, 1847. A second edition condensed in 1 vol., 1861. — TR,]

17) The Book and its Story, pp. 128-131.

18) Ibid., p. 152.

19) Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation, v., 808, 309.

20) Reuss, Geschichte der Schriften N. T., §§ 470-477. Le Fevre had finished his translation of the New Testament in 1523.;

21) The College of La Tour in the Valleys possesses a copy of it. At the end of the volume the acrostic verses indicate to whom the edition was owing. Joining the initial letters we shall read —

Les Vaudois, peuple évangélique,
Ont mis ce tresor en publique.”

22) In his Horae Apocalypticae, vol. i, p. 39. London, 1851.

23) Matt, xiii. 4, 19.

24) The celebrated traveller. See the Christian Times, April 6, 1849, p. 574. he peas were shrivelled and as hard as a rock. Mr Grimstone sowed them very carefully on June 4, 1844, and at the end of the 30th he had the pleasure of seeing the pea spring up, which has from that time been named the mummy pea, not less prolific than the famous wheat of Egypt so admired by the ancients, Dr Plate has given lectures to the Syro-Egyptian Society on the mummy pea.

25) See Corpus et Syntagma Confessionum Fidei, (Genevi, 1654.) Sumptibus Petri Chouet, (Preface, 9999, iii.) — “Quampridem enim in Helvetia, per preedicationem evangelii, Ecclesiae fuerent instauratae et constitutae, praeter alia multa, de- monstrant Constantiensis Episcopi ad Tigurinos literae et Tigurinorum ad eundem responsiones, jam anno 1522 typis evulgatæ.”

26) History of the Reformation; translated by Burnier, p. 144, Paris, 1844,

27) Acts xiv. 8, 17.

28) We might have cited in the same manner the interesting English martyrology of John Foxe in 1563. This writer died in London at the age of seventy. He had educated the Duke of Norfolk, His son, it is said, republished his admirable collection in 1684, in folio.

29) The inhabitants of a fortified village which belonged to the bishop and his party.

30) According to an official return, besides the churches planted, of which the number is unknown, the number of regularly constituted churches (églises dressées) in 1561 amounted to 2150. (See Leitteroth, Réformation en France, Paris, 1859, p. 131.)

31) Sennebier, Hist. Littér. de Genéve, ii., 26: — “Corpus et syntagnia CONFESSIONUM FIDEI quae in diversis regnis et nationibus, Ecclesiarum nomine, fuerunt authentice editae, in celeberrimis conventibus exhibitae, publicdque auctoritate comprobatae.”

32) De Doctrina Christianâ, lib. ii. “Illa diversitas plus adjuvat, quam impedit intelligentiam, si modo legentes non sint negligentes.”

33) The Book and its Story, pp. 217-238. Owen’s History of the First Ten Years of the Bible Society.

34) The Book and its Story. London, 1854, p. 229, &c.

35) Excepting the various readings of the text and of the translation.

36) Casalis, Bassutos, pp. 86, 88, 118.

37) The Book and its Story, pp. 408, 409, London, 1854.

38) Including the circulation in India.

39) Exactly 87,527,827.

40) Archives du Christianisme, du 30th Avril, 1860,

41) Propp. 59, 484.

42) Lives of Robert and James Haldane; London, 1852, p. 513.

43) Among others, Dr Andrew Thomson, one of the greatest men of his time, possessing a colossal mind; but, still more, the faithful Robert Haldane, that man of God, to whom Geneva owes an eternal debt of gratitude for the admirable work he accomplished among the students in theology. He converted almost all of them to Jesus Christ by his powerful biblical instructions and his prayers.