Wiclif’s greatest work was his translation of the scriptures into English; but his version was not one that we would accept to-day for our guidance. It was the translation of the translation of a translation. Let us look a little into its pedigree: Some years before the birth of Christ, the old testament was translated into Greek. This version is called the Septuagint, because, according to the legend, seventy-two learned doctors were shut up in seventy-two separate cells and set to making seventy-two separate translations of the Hebrew scriptures. They accomplished the task in seventy-two days, and when they came to compare notes their seventy-two versions all agreed word for word letter for letter. There could be no doubt of the inspiration of a work so miraculous; and such was the authority of the Septuagint that the citations of the old testament in the new, are taken from it. The Church of Rome at an early day translated the Septuagint and the Apocrypha into its adopted tongue the latin, and this version is known as the old Vulgate. In the course of ages, and they were dark ages, by careless transcription and by the foisting in of strange theological ideas, the Vulgate had become corrupt, and such was its condition when Wiclif translated it. Two hundred years later the Council of Trent revised it and brought it into its present form. It is now the ultimate Bible of the Church Catholic Apostolic and Roman, from which there is no appeal: the original Hebrew and Greek go for nothing when they differ from it. Do you ask why? I answer that the Church is inspired as well as the Bible, and inspiration for inspiration, the later must supercede the earlier. You protestants have merely gone back and picked up the exhausted material of the Church, and made out of it a sort of Bible of your own, instead of accepting the better provision she offers you; and it distresses me to add that the Council of Trent has consigned you all to perdition for rejecting the Apocrypha. Scripture in Wiclif’s day was a new revelation for the people, and the reading of his Bible was eagerly listened to; but some enthusiastic writers dilate upon its wide spread circulation, forgetting that the art of printing was then unknown, and that every copy was in manuscript, and that too not in the facile running hand of the present era, but in _black-letter_ printed out, so to speak, with the pen. Le Bas estimates that a New Testament alone cost the equivalent of thirty pounds sterling money of his day which was early in this century--say two hundred dollars of our time, at which rate the whole Bible would cost say one thousand dollars. There were but few persons in the fourteenth century who could buy such books and but few who could read them.