of Erasmus. From that moment one thought was at his heart.
He "perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the
lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before
their eyes in their mother tongue."

"If God spare my life," he said to a learned controversialist, "ere many
years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the
Scripture than thou dost." But he was a man of forty before his dream
became fact. Drawn from his retirement in Gloucestershire by the news of
Luther's protest at Wittenberg, he found shelter for a year with a
London alderman, Humfrey Monmouth. "He studied most part of the day at
his book," said his host afterward, "and would eat but sodden meat by
his good-will and drink but small single beer." The book at which he
studied was the Bible. But it was soon needful to quit England if his
purpose was to hold. "I understood at the last not only that there was
no room in my lord of London's palace to translate the New Testament,
but also that there was no place to do it in all England."

From Hamburg, where he took refuge in 1524, he probably soon found his
way to the little town which had suddenly become the sacred city of the
Reformation. Students of all nations were flocking there with an
enthusiasm which resembled that of the crusades. "As they came in sight
of the town," a contemporary tells us, "they returned thanks to God with
clasped hands, for from Wittenberg, as heretofore from Jerusalem, the
light of evangelical truth had spread to the utmost parts of the earth."

Such a visit could only fire Tyndale to face the "poverty, exile, bitter
absence from friends, hunger and thirst and cold, great dangers, and
innumerable other hard and sharp fightings," which the work he had set
himself was to bring with it. In 1525 his version of the New Testament
was completed, and means were furnished by English merchants for
printing it at Cologne. But Tyndale had soon to fly with his sheets to
Worms, a city whose Lutheran tendencies made it a safer refuge, and it
was from Worms that six thousand copies of the New Testament were sent
in 1526 to English shores. The King was keenly opposed to a book which
he looked on as made "at the solicitation and instance of Luther"; and
even the men of the New Learning from whom it might have hoped for
welcome were estranged from it by its Lutheran origin. We can only
fairly judge their action by viewing it in the light