At an early age William Tyndale was sent to Oxford, where he was entered at Magdalen Hall. Here we can perhaps picture him from the words of Thomas Lever, who in a sermon which was preached later describes the University life of his day. With some modifications, it may perhaps stand for Tyndale’s experience:-- “There are divers there which rise daily between four and five o’clock in the morning, and from five until six o’clock use common prayer, with an exhortation of God, and in a common chapel. From six until ten o’clock they use either private study or common lectures. At ten of the clock they go to dinner, whereat they be content with a greasy piece of beef amongst four, having a few pottage made of the broth of the same beef, with salt and oatmeal, and nothing else. After this slender dinner, they be either teaching or learning until five of the clock in the evening, when they have a supper not much better than their dinner. Immediately after which they go either to reasoning in problems or unto some other study, until it be nine or ten of the clock, and then, being without fire, are fain to walk or run up and down half an hour, to get a heat in their feet, when they go to bed.” With some few modifications, this description may stand for the student life of Tyndale, and it is certainly a picture of hard living and of stern training. In the year 1512 William Tyndale received his degree of B.A., and in 1515 he was licensed M.A. For some reason which cannot very clearly be discovered, Tyndale afterwards left Oxford for Cambridge, where Erasmus was at that time lecturing. It has been pointed out by Demaus, in his admirable and exhaustive biography, that Tyndale’s famous sentence was merely a re-echo of what Erasmus had said long before. In the exhortation prefixed to one of his works Erasmus wrote: “I totally dissent 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 Gospels 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._”