Wicliffe and His Times - James Aitken Wylie

which bound the souls of his countrymen. In four
years from beginning his task, the Reformer had
completed it. The message of Heaven was now in
the speech of England. The dawn of the
Reformation had fairly broken. Wicliffe had
assistance in his great work. The whole of the New
Testament was translated by himself; but Dr.
Nicholas de Hereford, of Oxford, is supposed to
have been the translator of the Old Testament,
which, however, was partly revised by Wicliffe.
This version is remarkably truthful and spirited.
The antique Saxon gives a dramatic air to some
passages. Wicliffe's version of the Bible rendered
other services than the religious one, though that
was pre-eminent and paramount. It powerfully
contributed to form the English tongue, in the way
of perfecting its structure and enlarging its
vocabulary. The sublimity and purity of the
doctrines reacted on the language into which they
were rendered, communicating to it a simplicity, a
beauty, a pathos, a precision, and a force unknown
to it till then. Wicliffe has been called the Father of
English Prose, as Chaucer is styled the Father of
English Poetry. No man in his day wrote so much
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