in instructing in the Dialogue, could hardly believe that the formal Provincial Constitution meant nothing more than this, and thereupon, as Sir Thomas says: "I set before him the Constitutions Provincial, with Lyndwood upon it, and directed him to the place under the title De magistris. When he himself had read this, he said he marvelled greatly how it happened that in so plain a matter men were so deceived." But he thought that even if the law was not as he had supposed, nevertheless the clergy acted as if it were, and always "took all translations out of every man's hand whether the translation was good or bad, old or new." To this More replied that to his knowledge this was not correct. "I myself," he says, "have seen and can show you Bibles, fair and old, written in English, which have been known and seen by the bishop of the diocese, and left in the hands of laymen and women, whom he knew to be good and Catholic people who used the books with devotion and soberness." He admitted indeed that all Bibles found in the hands of heretics were taken away from them, but none of these, so far as he had ever heard, were burnt, except such as were found to be garbled and false. Such were the Bibles issued with evil prologues or glosses, maliciously made by Wycliffe and other heretics. "Further," he declared, "no good man would be so mad as to burn a Bible in which they found no fault." Nor was there any law whatever that prohibited the possession, examination, or reading of the Holy Scripture in English.1

1 English Works (ed. 1557), pp. 233-4. This positive declaration of Sir Thomas More is generally ignored by modern writers. In a recently published work, for example (England in the Age of Wycliffe, by George Macaulay Trevelyan), it is stated that "we have positive proof that the bishops denounced the dissemination of the English Bible among classes and persons prone to heresy, burnt copies of it, and cruelly persecuted Lollards on the charge of reading it" (p. 131). In proof of this statement the author refers his readers to a later page (p. 342) of his volume. Iere he culls from Foxe (Acts and Monuments) the depositions of certain

In reply to the case of Richard Hunn, who, according to the story set about by the religious innovators, had been condemned and his dead body burnt "only because they found English Bibles in his house, in which they never found other fault than because they were in Eng. lish," Sir Thomas More, professedly, and with full knowledge of the circumstances, absolutely denies, as he says, "from top to toe," the truth of this story. He shows at great length that the whole tale of Hunn's death was carefully examined into by the king's officials, and declares that at many of the examinations he himself had been present and heard the witnesses, and that in the end it had been fully shown that Hunn was in reality a heretic and a teacher of heresy. "But," urged his objector, "though Hunn were himself a heretic, yet might the book (of the English Bible) be good enough; and there is no good reason why a good book should be burnt." The copy of this Bible, replied More, was of great use in showing the kind of man Hunn really was, "for at the time he

witnesses against people suspected of teaching heresy. Amongst these depositions it is said by a few of the witnesses that some of these teachers were possessed of portions of the Scriptures in English. Mr. Trevelyan assumes, because witnesses speak to this fact, that it was for this they were condemned, or, as he puts it, "cruelly persecuted," by the ecclesiastical authorities. Had he examined his authority, Foxe, more carefully, he would have found the actual list of articles formulated against these teachers of heresy. These alone are, of course, the charges actually made against them; and the mere depositions of witnesses in those days were not, any more than they are in ours, the charges upon which the accused were condemned. In the articles or charges we find no mention whatever of the English Bible, and, according to the ordinary rules of interpretation of documents, this absence of any mention of Bible-reading in the indictment, formulated after the hearing of the evidence, and when witnesses had testified to the fact, should be taken to show that the mere possession of the vernacular Scriptures, &c., was not accounted an offence by the Church authorities. The real charge in these cases, as in others, was of teaching what was then held to be false and heretical, teaching founded upon false interpretations of the Scripture text, or upon false translations.

1 Ibid., p. 235.

was denounced as a heretic, there lay his English Bible open, and some other English books of his, so that every one could see the places noted with his own hand, such words and in such a way that no wise and good man could, after seeing them, doubt what 'naughty minds' the men had, both he that so noted them and he that so made them. I do not remember the particulars," he continued, "nor the formal words as they were written, but this I do remember well, that besides other things found to support divers other heresies, there were in the prologue of that Bible such words touching the Blessed Sacrament as good Christian men did much abhor to hear, and which gave the readers undoubted occasion to think that the book was written after Wycliffe's copy, and by him translated into our tongue."

"1

More then goes on to state his own mind as to the utility of vernacular Scriptures. And, in the first place, he utterly denies again that the Church, or any ecclesiastical authority, ever kept the Bible in English from the people, except "such translations as were either not approved as good translations, or such as had already been condemned as false, such as Wycliffe's and Tyndale's were. For, as for other old ones that were before Wycliffe's days, they remain lawful, and are in the possession of some people, and are read." To this assertion of a plain fact Sir Thomas More's opponent did not dissent, but frankly admitted that this was certainly the case," although he still thought that the English Bible might be in greater circulation than it was. Sir Thomas More considered that the clergy really had good grounds not to encourage the spread of the vernacular Scriptures at that time, inasmuch as those who were most urgent in the matter were precisely those whose orthodoxy was reasonably suspected. It made men fear, he says, "that seditious people would do

more harm with it than good and honest folk would derive benefit." This, however, he declared was not his own personal view.1 "I would not," he writes, "for my part, withhold the profit that one good, devout, unlearned man might get by the reading, for fear of the harm a hundred heretics might take by their own wilful abuse. Finally, I think that the Provincial Constitution (already spoken of) has long ago determined the question. For when the clergy in that synod agreed that the English Bibles should remain which were translated before Wycliffe's days, they, as a necessary consequence, agreed that it was no harm to have the Bible in English. And when they forbade any new translation to be read till it were approved by the bishops, it appears clearly that they intended that the bishop should approve it, if he found it to be faultless, and also to amend it where it was found faulty, unless the man who made it was a heretic, or the faults were so many and of such a character that it would be easier to re-translate it than to mend it." 2

This absolute denial of any attitude of hostility on the part of the Church to the translated Bible is reiterated in many parts of Sir Thomas More's English works. When, upon the condemnation of Tyndale's Testament the author pointed to this fact as proof of the determination of the clergy to keep the Word of God from the people, More replied at considerable length. He showed how the ground of the condemnation had nothing whatever to do with any anxiety upon the part of ecclesiastics to keep the Scriptures from lay people, but was entirely based upon the falsity of Tyndale's translation itself. "He pretends,' says Sir Thomas More, "that the Church makes some (statutes) openly and directly against the Word of God, as in that statute whereby they have condemned the New Testament. Now, in truth, there is no such statute made. For as for the New Testament, if he mean the Testament

of Christ, it is not condemned nor forbidden. But there is forbidden a false English translation of the New Testament newly forged by Tyndale, altered and changed in matters of great weight, in order maliciously to set forth against Christ's true doctrine Tyndale's anti-Christian heresies. Therefore that book is condemned, as it is well worthy to be, and the condemnation thereof is neither openly nor privily, directly nor indirectly, against the Word of God."1

Again, in another place, More replies to what he calls Tyndale's "railing" against the clergy, and in particular his saying that they keep the Scripture from lay people in order that they may not see how they "juggle with it." "I have," he says, "in the book of my Dyalogue proved already that Tyndale in this point falsely belies the clergy, and that in truth Wycliffe, and Tyndale, and Friar Barnes, and such others, have been the original cause why the Scripture has been of necessity kept out of lay people's hands. And of late, specially, by the politic provision and ordinance of our most excellent sovereign the king's noble grace, not without great and urgent causes manifestly rising from the false malicious means of Wycliffe and Tyndale," this has been prevented. "For this (attempt of Tyndale) all the lay people of this realm, both the evil folk who take harm from him, and the good folk that lose their profit by him, have great cause to lament that ever the man was born." 2

The same view is taken by Roger Edgworth, a popular preacher in the reign of Henry VIII. After describing what he considered to be the evils which had resulted from the spread of Lutheran literature in England, he says: "By this effect you may judge the cause. The effect was evil, therefore there must needs be some fault in the cause. But what sayest thou? Is not the study of Scripture good? Is not the knowledge of the Gospels and of