It may safely be said that no greater service has been rendered at once to religion and to literature than the translation of the Bible into the English tongue. This achievement did not indeed, like that of Luther's German translation, come as it were by a single stroke. Luther's Bible caused him to be regarded as the founder of the present literary language of Germany--New High German--which his translation permanently established. The English Bible, on the other hand, was the growth of centuries. But to the contributions of able hands through many generations, during which the English language itself passed through a wonderful formative development, the incomparable beauty of King James' version owes its existence, and our literature its greatest ornaments. It is impossible to say when the first translation of any part of the Bible into English was made. No English Bible of earlier date than the fourteenth century has ever been found. But translations, even of the whole Bible, older than Wcyliffe's are, by at least two eminent witnesses, said to have existed. "As for olde translacions, before Wycliffe's time," says Sir Thomas More, "they remain lawful and be in some folkes handes." "The hole byble," he declares (_Dyalogues_, p. 138, ed. 1530), "was long before Wycliffe's days, by vertuous and well learned men, translated into the English tong." And Cranmer, in his prologue to the second edition of the "Great Bible," bears testimony equally explicit to the translation of Scripture "in the Saxons tongue." And when that language "waxed olde and out of common usage," he says, the Bible "was again translated into the newer language." There has never been any means of testing these statements, which were probably due to some inexplicable error. Abundant evidence exists relating to many Saxon and later translations of various parts of the Bible before the time of Wycliffe. Among the most notable of the early translators were the Venerable Bede and Alfred the Great. Some portions of Scripture were likewise translated into Anglo-Norman in the thirteenth century. Some of the early fragments are still preserved in English libraries. Three versions of the Psalter in English, from the early years of the fourteenth century, still exist, one of which was by Richard Rolle, the Yorkshire hermit, who also translated the New Testament. But so far as known, the first complete Bible in English was the work of John Wycliffe, assisted by Nicholas de Hereford--whom some would name first in this partnership, though the product of their joint labors is known as "Wycliffe's Bible."