But the last manuscript translation of the English Scriptures is greater than any which preceeded it, and the only one which can be called a popular edition. The quaint old stone church of Saint Mary is still standing in Leicestershire, where John Wycliffe preached when in 1830 he completed his translation. He had long been the fiery lecturer at Oxford, and had come into sore conflict with ignorant priests of the papacy for his enunciations of religious liberty and his schemes for the better education of the masses of the people. So that when his translation was finished a strong hatred sought his life. He was cited to Rome, but being too feeble to go, he was buried in his own parish. Forty years afterward, however, the same council which burned John Huss exhumed the bones of Wycliffe, and having burned them, they gathered the ashes and scattered them into the river which had the significant name of “Swift,” down which they found their way through other rivers into the ocean, and were washed, it would seem, with the strength of Wycliffe’s spirit, upon every shore of the world. There were as many as one hundred and seventy copies of the Wycliffe version made with busy pens, and circulated secretly, but widely read, thus preparing the way for greater works thereafter, and confirming the propriety of calling their author “The Morning Star of the Reformation.” A few years since I stood long before the great bronze statue of Gutenberg in Mayence on the Rhine, a place now of over fifty thousand population. All citizens are eager to show any American that can make out to ask it, the site of the building where the invention of printing with movable type was made about 1450. The house still stands where Gutenberg lived, and another in which he did his first work with his press. Twenty-five years later printing began in England, and in another twenty-five years there were in the world over two hundred and twenty places where printing was done. I took a walk on the heights back of Bristol, in England, and was asked if I was seeking Sudbury, the old manor, which I was not, but accidentally had it pointed out to me where Sir John Walsh lived, when he employed for the instruction of his children a young priest, a fine scholar and a great reader. The fact that he devoted so much of his time and thought to the Scriptures, and even taught children to read it, produced some sensation in the community. In June, 1523, at a dining, the young priest suffered some rebuke for his liberal handling of the Scriptures by the pompous parish priest, who was present, and who, among other things, declared that it was better even to disobey a law of God than a law of the Pope. At this the opposition in the heart of the young priest became very decided, and his reply was almost in these words: “I hope to live to see even the ploughboys of England knowing more of the Word of God than either yourself or the Pope.” That young priest’s name was William Tyndale.