Nevertheless, those devoted men, the Christian Brothers, abated not a whit of their diligence; but availing themselves of their opportunities as merchants trading to Germany and the Low Countries, they brought over not only the New Testament in English, but other books and tracts in great numbers, which were carried throughout the whole of England, and eagerly caught up and read both by gentle and simple. Tyndale's prophecy, made years before in a dispute with a Romish priest, seemed in a fair way of being fulfilled: "Ere many years are past, the very plough-boys of this land shall know more of Holy Scripture than thou dost." In our days, when the Bible lies on almost every shelf and may be had by every man, woman, and child in the land, when we can hardly remember our first acquaintance with the sacred text, it is difficult for us to enter into the feelings of those who read the Bible for the first time. To us, it has become as familiar, and it is to be feared often as tedious, as a twice told tale; and it requires all our reverence for the book as the written and authentic Word of God, to fix our attention upon our daily lesson. To those who received the English New Testament from the hands of Tyndale and his followers, it possessed all the charm of novelty. They had heard at the best only short and garbled extracts from the Holy Book, and what little they knew was so overlaid and mixed up with legend and fable, that the whole gracious story was to them a new revelation, startling and arousing them alike from what it said and from what it did not say. The doctrine of purgatory, with all its tremendous consequences, fell at once to the ground. So did that of the invocation of saints; and especially the almost divine honors paid to the Blessed Virgin were seen to be wholly without foundation. To many an overburdened soul painfully striving by prayers and penances to escape from the wrath to come, the knowledge of justification by means of faith in the Son of God, of free forgiveness through His own oblation of Himself once offered, came with an overwhelming sense of relief from an intolerable burden; while to another it brought a feeling of deep humiliation and mortification that all the self-made sanctity for which he had perhaps been celebrated and held up as an example to his fellows was of no avail or value in the eyes of God, not worth so much as a cup of cold water given in the name of Christ to one of His little ones. Welcome or unwelcome, loved or hated, the Word of God went on its way. It was like the leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal. No man who received it could hide it wholly within his heart. Consciously or unconsciously, it affected his conduct and appeared in his conversation; and thus the new ideas spread from one to another, even among those who were the most bitterly opposed to them. CHAPTER VI. A FALL AND A NEW FRIEND.