and back of the Septuagint to the original Hebrew
wherever he could do so. Fourteen years he
labored, settling himself in Bethlehem, in Palestine,
to do his work the better. Barely four
hundred years (404 A.D.) after the birth of
Christ his Latin version appeared. It met a
storm of protest for its effort to go back of
the Septuagint, so dominant had the translation
become. Jerome fought for it, and his version
won the day, and became the authoritative Latin
translation of the Bible.

For seven or eight centuries it held its sway
as the current version nearest to the tongue of
the people. Latin had become the accepted
tongue of the church. There was little general
culture, there was little general acquaintance
with the Bible except among the educated.
During all that time there was no real room for
a further translation. One of the writers[1] says:
"Medieval England was quite unripe for a Bible
in the mother tongue; while the illiterate majority
were in no condition to feel the want of
such a book, the educated minority would be
averse to so great and revolutionary a change."
When a man cannot read any writing it really
does not matter to him whether books are in
current speech or not, and the majority of the
people for those seven or eight centuries could
read nothing at all. Those who could read anything