This version had even a wider circulation than the first, and from its influence arose the Lollard movement. This was both a religious and a political revolution; it was an attempt to obtain reform both in the Church and in the State. It was a movement of all ranks, even among monks and nuns--alas! without success. In 1408 a Convocation at Oxford enacted a law which forbade a translation of Scriptures into English, and warned all persons against reading such books under penalty of excommunication. At this time a New Testament was worth £2, 16s. 8d., or about £45, 6s. 8d. of our money! At this period we are told that a decent, respectable man could live well upon £5 per year. Writing was tedious, slow, liable to error, and expensive, so that the number of copies were limited; but about 1440 A.D., or sixty years after Wycliffe, the printing-press was invented. One of the first books that were printed was a Latin Bible; one of this edition was sold some years ago for £3400; another realised £2000. In 1477 William Caxton brought this new art to England, and in Westminster Abbey he printed books under the protection of King Edward IV. We have thus sketched briefly the history of the previous versions, and have come in the order of time to Tyndale’s version of the Testament which Tyndale translated under so many difficulties. F. W. Faber (a Romanist) says:--“Who will say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the ear like music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. Nay, it is worshipped with a positive idolatry, in extenuation of whose gross fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of letters and the scholar. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its phrases. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments; and all that there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled. It has been to him all along as the silent, but oh how intelligible! voice of his guardian angel; and in the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible.”