“I have translated, brethren and sisters most dear and tenderly beloved in Christ, the New Testament for your spiritual edifying, consolation, and solace, exhorting instantly, and beseeching those that are better seen in the tongues than I, and that have higher gifts of grace to interpret the sense of Scripture and the meaning of the Spirit than I, to consider and ponder my labour, and that with the spirit of meekness, if they perceive in any places that I have not attained the very sense of the tongue or meaning of the Scripture, or have not given the right English word, that they put to their hands to amend it, remembering that so is their duty to do. For we have not received the gifts of God for ourselves only or for to hide them, but for to bestow them unto the honouring of God and Christ, and edifying of the congregation which is the body of Christ.” Of Tyndale’s qualifications for his work there can be no doubt whatever. Buschius, a distinguished German scholar, speaks of him as “so skilled in seven languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, French, that whichever he spoke you would suppose it his native tongue.” The Greek text that he followed in his translation was, of course, that which Erasmus had given to the world, and although Tyndale was evidently more familiar with the second, he now and then uses the third edition. At the same time, it has been shown by Demaus that, “as he proceeded in his undertaking, Tyndale had before him the Vulgate, the Latin version of Erasmus, and the German of Luther, and that, in rendering from the original Greek, he carefully consulted all these aids; but he did so not with the helpless imbecility of a mere tyro, but with the conscious independence of an accomplished scholar.” At the same time, it is but justice to bear in mind that some of the alleged faults of our version are due to Tyndale. For example, the manner in which he translates the same Greek word differently in the same connection, and sometimes in the same verse, adds indeed to the beauty, but it diminishes the force of the book. But the most heinous offence in the eyes of the Papists, after his translating the Scripture at all, was the putting of notes in the margin. Of these we select a few examples:-- “Whatsoever ye bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;” Tyndale says, “Here _all_ bind and loose.” Beside the words, “If thine eye be single, all thy body is full of light,” he writes, “The eye is single when a man in all his deeds looketh but on the will of God, and looketh not for land, honour, or any other reward in this world; neither ascribeth heaven nor a higher room in the heaven unto his deeds: but accepteth heaven as a thing purchased by the blood of Christ and worketh freely for love’s sake only.” “All good things cometh of the bountifulness, liberality, mercy, promises, and truth of God by the deserving of Christ’s blood only.”