“To the Poor the Gospel Is Preached!”
DURING the brief reign of Edward VI. a victory was won―a victory none the less real because it was accompanied by little outward show: the English Bible was, for the first time, given freely to the English people. At the beginning of his reign, as we have seen, a last effort was made to stop the circulation of the Scriptures; at the close―if those in the parish churches were included―it is reckoned that nearly two hundred thousand copies of the whole Bible or the New Testament in English were in circulation. The great boon of having God’s word in their own tongue had been granted to our countrymen, and from that day to this it has never been taken from them. It is true that early in the reign of Queen Mary the old law forbidding the public reading of the Scriptures in the churches, was again enforced: but a time had come when it was no longer possible to deprive the people of their rightful heritage. In the case of many, too, by God’s grace, the living truths of the Book, which had been making its way silently from populous town to quiet village and lonely hamlet, were, ere the time of trial for the word’s sake had come, safely hidden in their hearts, whence no power could pluck them. So dear, too, had those truths, by God’s grace, become to them, that, when that fiery trial did come, they were found ready, not only to give an answer concerning their faith in them, but to lay down their lives rather than deny them in any wise.
Time passed on, and brought with it the restoration of all those “rights,” as they ignorantly counted them, for which the poor folk of the west country had clamored and fought. Perhaps, if we pause to consider what those “rights” were, we shall be better able to understand the great struggle which continued during nearly the whole of the reign of the misguided and unhappy queen whose name is so miserably associated with the dark days of persecution, upon the history of which we are entering. Perhaps, too, we shall see more clearly than we have hitherto seen that it was in no mere wordy strife, no vague conflict, that the martyrs of Queen Mary’s time suffered and died. The struggle was a very real one; and, if we have at all closely followed the history of the preceding centuries with respect to the endeavor on the part of that church which claimed then, as she claims now, authority over the souls of men to keep from them the right to know for themselves what God had actually spoken for them in His word, we shall understand that the conflict, when it came, was of necessity a close and deadly one.
To the mere spectator, it might seem as if the victory was with the strong, but those actually engaged in the conflict had no doubt as to which side was really the winning one. To sight, indeed, their cause was a feeble and suffering one; but to faith it was the cause of God, and of His truth, and in the face of the persecuting powers which seemed to have their will, they could say with the Hebrew children, in the presence of the fiery furnace, “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us... but if not”―If no outward deliverance came, and we know that to these witnesses for the truth it did not come, they were able to commit the keeping of their souls to God, and to let the fire do its work upon their bodies. The Lord Himself whey on earth, did not put forth His power to shield John the Baptist from a cruel death; rather He spoke to His “friends” those blessed words which were to be the strength of many a faithful witness, “Be not afraid of there that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do... even the very hair: of your head are all numbered.”
One of the things which the rioters of the past reign had demanded was that the English Bibles should be no longer read; they wanted still to have the Latin word: which they had been accustomed to hear every Sunday and saint’s day, sounding with their familiar echo in their ears.
How little could Tyndale have thought, as he sat upon the hill-side in Gloucestershire so long before, and dreamed that dream which had now come true, that when the good day which should bring with it the free circulation of the Bible in a tongue “understood of the people,” dawned, those very people should be the ones to refuse the light, and desire to sink back into the darkness and delusion in which they had lived so long! Yet that it should be so was but the natural consequence of the state in which they were. To those who are accustomed only to darkness, light comes as a strange and painful thing, and if this be true naturally, how much more terribly true is it morally and spiritually!
In those times of which we have been speaking, the fact that God has spoken to us in His word was not questioned, nor was it denied that it greatly concerned the creatures of His hand to know what He had to say to them. But the point which had been disputed in the early times, when Wycklyffe wrote and his gospelers preached, was the same point which was argued in the reign of Queen Mary. The grand question was whether, since God had spoken, all men, the lowly and simple, high-born and learned alike, might receive His message, clear and pure as He sent it, or whether it was a message addressed to men indeed, but committed to the keeping of the church, by whose authority alone any one had a right to hear or obey it.
It would seem that if a man had any rights at all, the first of them would be the right of hearing the voice of God from heaven, speaking directly to him, for himself. About what we count the important affairs of our everyday life we like to have certainty, and, therefore, are unwilling to trust to hearsay. How much more should we desire certainty in matters which concern the soul, matters upon which there is no possibility of being assured, save by the word of God, that word which speaks with its own divine authority!
We have seen how this right to receive God’s message in His very words had been denied to the people. They were supposed to be quite too poor and ignorant to understand it for themselves. More than this, people so poor and ignorant could not be trusted to believe aright, even though it were God’s word which, through His grace, they believed. Therefore the church, in her care for their souls, had decreed what was and what was not to be believed.
It was deadly error for any man to presume to search the Book for himself, and see what God really had said. Men were to believe what they did believe, not so much because God had spoken it, as because the church, within whose bosom alone salvation could be hoped for, had bidden them have faith in it.
Alas! that church oftentimes did but mock with empty husks of doctrine those souls who were hungry for the bread of life, There were multitudes, doubtless, all through’, those dark and evil days who learned from God Himself, by the teaching of His Spirit, where to find rest for their souls: for God eves “satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness,” and His grace is above all the sin and folly of men. But although this is true, it does not lessen the guilt of those who sought to keep from the young, and poor, and unlearned the very words of Christ and His apostles, as well as those “holy Scriptures” of the Old Testament of which the Apostle Paul, writing to Timothy, says that they are “able to make wise unto salvation, through faith that is in Christ Jesus.”
We who live in a time when, and in a country where, the light of God’s word shines unhindered all around us, do well to remember that without faith the holy Scripture itself does not profit him who reads but rather the very fact of his having it in his hand condemns and judges him. The word is indeed “nigh” to all of us. Let us take heed that we be not as the multitude who were so near the blessed Lord that they were “thronging and pressing Him,” yet knew not―perhaps were so little aware of who He was, and of their own need of Him that they cared not to know―how to give that touch of faith, which alone would bring them into living contact with Him, and draw virtue from Him. The truth still remains that ‘faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God,” and how many can thankfully bear witness to that truth!
A touching little story is told of the effect which seeing even a few words of Scripture had upon a poor man in Ireland some few years ago. He picked up a torn leaf of a New Testament, and, as he tried to put the ragged edges together, his eye fell upon the words, often repeated, “And Jesus said”; “And Jesus answered, and said.” The thought that the blessed Lord when on earth had spoken words, and that he knew nothing of them, came to him with such a shock of painful surprise that he was never satisfied until he had bought a Testament, there to read for himself what Jesus had said. The words of Christ came with their own power to his soul. He did not need the authority of the church to tell him whether he might believe them or not, but received them simply as the message from God, that “He has given unto us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son.”
Many experienced a like shock of surprise and received a like blessing in the days when the Scripture first began to go abroad among the people in England. Those who were able to read found nothing there about any class of men to whom, by some mysterious authority, the word of God had been entrusted that they might deal it out, with niggard hand, indeed, to their fellows. On the contrary, as they read such words as these, “To the poor the gospel is preached,” their eyes were opened to see how they had been cheated, of what was in value far beyond any earthly treasure, by those to whose keeping they had so blindly entrusted their souls, vainly believing that they would answer to God for them. For this is what the priests, as empowered by the church, undertook to do, though it is written, “None can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him.”