time. It cannot be too strongly urged that the
two great pioneers of English Bible translation,
Wiclif and Tindale, more than a century apart,
were chiefly moved to their work by social conditions.
No one could read the literature of
the times of which we are speaking without
smiling at our assumption that we are the first
who have cared for social needs. We talk about
the past as the age of the individual, and the
present as the social age. Our fathers, we say,
cared only to be saved themselves, and had no
concern for the evils of society. They believed
in rescuing one here and another there, while
we have come to see the wisdom of correcting
the conditions that ruin men, and so saving men
in the mass. There must be some basis of
truth for that, since we say it so confidently;
but it can be much over-accented. There were
many of our fathers, and of our grandfathers,
who were mightily concerned with the mass of
people, and looked as carefully as we do for a
corrective of social evils. Wiclif, in the late
fourteenth century, and Tindale, in the early
sixteenth, were two such men. The first English
translations of the Bible were fruits of the
social impulse.

Wiclif was impressed with the chasm that
was growing between the church and the people,
and felt that a wider and fuller knowledge