—- 
“ WISTORY OF THE REFORMATION. 203 
the ten commandments, pater noster, ave Maria, and the creed, in 
English ; and were forced to abjure their doing so, to save their 
liberty. Now surely this abjuration were unnecessary, if their 
learning the ten commandments in English involved in itself no 
crime. Collier does not presume to assert that any authorized 
translation of the decalogue into English then existed. True it is, 
that the Evangelic or Gospel Doctor—for that was the distinguished 
appellation given to the renowned John Wiclif* by his contempora- 
ries—had appeared as a glorious benefactor to his spe_ies, by trans- 
lating the Bible into our vernacular idiom ;t yet the Scriptures, 
thus opened by him, were only to become again a fountain sealed 
and a spring shut up, since, by a constitution of Archbishop Arun- 
del, prefaced by the declaration that it is a perilous thing, as St. 
Jerome testifieth, to translate the text of Holy Scripture from one 
idiom into another, it was enacted and ordained that thenceforth no 
one should translate any text of Sacred Scripture, by his own autho- 
rity, into the English or any other tongue, in the way of book, tract, 
or treatise ; and that no publication of this sort composed in the time 
of John Wiclif, or since, or thereafter, to be composed, should be 
read, either in part or in whole, either in public or in private, under 
the pain of the greater excommunication, until such translation should 
be approved by the diocesan of the place, or, if the matter should re- 
quire it, by a provincial council: every one who should act in con- 
* Mr. Baber, in the prefatory memoir to his valuable reprint of our pro- 
to-reformer’s Translation of the New Testament, informs us that his name has 
been spelt in sixteen different ways. One of his recent biographers, Mr. 
Vaughan, chooses the name of de Wycliff, which he derives from the village 
where he was born, in the northern district of Yorkshire; and he adds, that, 
in documents prior to that cited by Mr. Baber, y appears, in almost every 
instance, in the first syllable, and ff in the second. Mr. Le Bass, however, 
in his powerfully written volume of the life of this great teacher of the 
truth, deems it “‘“expedient to adopt that orthography of the name which 
has the smallest number of letters,” and, therefore, after this high autho- 
rity, much as it may offend some antiquarian eyes, we write the name as 
above. 
+ We learn from Sir Thomas More “that the whole byble was, long be- 
fore Wiclif’s days, by virtuous and well-learned men, translated into the 
English tong, and by good and godly people, with devotion and soberness, 
wel and reverently red.”—_Dialog. iii, p. 14. But of these versions, could any 
of them be read at this day in our churches; as that of Wiclif’s might, and 
even his translation, from an excessive desire to render it strictly literal, is 
frequently obscure to those who are not conyersant with the idiom of the 
Jatin. Upon this point, see Lewis’s Life of Wiclif, p. 121; and History of 
English Translations, by the same author, p. 22. 
