When the mind pauses to reflect on this doing to death of men because their faith did not square with that of those in high places, and succeeds in freeing itself from the numbing influence which its very familiarity causes, the amazement and horror of the practice help us to measure the criminal folly of it. One must make an effort indeed to shake off that deadening influence; and then, and only then, the arrogance and impiety of claiming injustice, torture, judicial murder, as a service to God, make one shudder as at blasphemy. Yet what awful pages of history in every part of Christendom record the deeds of this sanguinary orthodoxy. How hard has mankind found it to learn that persuasion and forbearance are the real solvents of dissent; for the faith in force is hardly shaken to this day. Forcible suppression is in high favor still. It may not, dare not, perhaps, work by the same crude and sanguinary tools, although the disclosures of the Great War, or of Soviet Russia, may give the lie to that caveat: but little observation is needed to show how in subtler forms, alike in politics and in religion, there is the same impatience with disagreeing opinion, and the same self-assurance that does not hesitate to silence a disputant by death or shame. Wherever it lifts its head, it is the head of Anti-Christ. CHAPTER II. THE MAKING OF TINDALE In such an atmosphere the formative years of Tindale's life were spent. So much can be said: but little more than that is known with any certainty. Indeed the story of his youth can be put in a single paragraph. He was a native of Gloucestershire. He was sent very young to Oxford. There he entered Magdalen Hall, attached to Magdalen College, the College of Wolsey and Lily. After graduation he went for a period to Cambridge, attracted there probably by Erasmus, who had occupied the Greek chair. It was about the time when Erasmus gave his Greek Testament to the world. He was fulfilling his own daring ideal, very daring in those days. "I totally dissent", Erasmus said in his Exhortation, "from those who are unwilling that the Sacred Scriptures, translated into the vulgar tongue, should be read by private individuals, as if Christ had taught such subtle doctrines that they can with difficulty be understood by a very few theologians or as if the strength of the Christian religion lay in men's ignorance of it. The mysteries of kings it were perhaps better to conceal, but Christ wishes His mysteries to be published as widely as possible. I would wish even all women to read the Gospel and the Epistles of St. Paul. And I wish they were translated into all languages of all people, that they might be read and known, not merely by the Scotch and the Irish, but even by the Turks and the Saracens. I wish that the husbandman may sing parts of them at his plough, that the weaver may warble them at his shuttle, that the traveller may with their narratives beguile the weariness of the way."