whatever
honest work he could find that would help keep body and soul together.
Through all these years, every moment of the day that could be saved
from bread-winning toil, and much of his night-time, went into the
herculean task to which he had dedicated himself--the complete
translation of the Bible from its original languages into both Latin
and French.[5] Being himself one of the common people he always had
the interests and needs of the common people in view, and he put the
Bible into current sixteenth-century speech. His French translation
has the marked characteristics of the Renaissance period. He makes
patriarchs, prophets, and the persons of the New Testament live again
in his vivid word-pictures, as the great contemporary painters were
making them live on their canvases. But that which gave his
translation its great human merit and popular interest was a serious
defect in the eyes of the theologians. It was vivid, full of the
native Oriental colour, true in the main to the original, and strong in
its appeal to religious imagination, but painfully weak in its support
of the dogmas and doctrines around which the theological battles of the
Reformation were centring. Still less were the theologians pleased
with the Preface of his Latin Bible, dedicated to the boy-king of
England, Edward VI. Here he boldly insists that the Reformation, {93}
wherever it spreads, shall champion the principle of _free conscience_,
and shall wage its battles with spiritual weapons alone. The only
enemies of our faith, he says, are vices, and vices can be conquered
only by virtues. The Christ who said if they strike you on one cheek
turn the other, has called us to the spiritual task of instructing men
in the truth, and that work can never be put into the hands of an
executioner! "I address you, O king," he concludes, "not as a prophet
sent from God, but as a man of the people who abhors quarrels and
hatred, and who wishes to see religion spread by love rather than by
fierce controversy, by purity of heart rather than by external methods.
. . . Read these sacred writings with a pious and religious heart, and
prepare yourself to reign as a mortal man who must give an account to
immortal God. I desire that you may have the meekness of Moses, the
piety of David, and the wisdom of Solomon."[6]

Two years after this appeal to the new Protestantism to make the great
venture of spreading its truth by love and persuasion, there ca