IN EXILE; (1) INTERCOURSE WITH LUTHER
Exile by force of circumstance is a sorrow many have endured. To the
ardent patriot who sees with far-seeing eye his country's destiny, and
who feels he could and will make some contribution to the general good,
it is an endless sorrow. Tindale's intense love of country, his high
fortitude in the mission he had accepted for himself, his clear vision
of the blessing to England the Bible in the native tongue must bring,
the unintelligent opposition and hostility obstructing and thwarting his
work, in the end menacing his life, made existence for him a prolonged
martyrdom. The pathos of his last words echoes all that he endured:
"Lord open the King of England's eyes."
Tindale and Luther were contemporaries. Their resemblances were as
pronounced as their contrasts. Both were apostles of the Word of God.
Their own discoveries of its experimental power made reserve or silence
impossible. Of their native speech they had so perfect a mastery that it
is not too much to say of each of them that their translations were the
moulds which determined the ultimate development of their native
tongues; and each felt so powerfully the vital value of the revelation
as to stamp their translations indelibly with the fire of their own
faith. Life-blood flowed in their versions. It was the surge of this
personal emotion in their versions which made them the possession not
merely of their own generations, but of the four centuries that have
followed.
They differed in manner more than in spirit or in purpose. There was a
violence in Luther uncontrolled, whose outbursts gave such mortal
offence to Sir Thomas More as to swing him from his humanistic
broad-mindedness to a spirit of intolerance hardly less fiery than
Luther's violence. Fires probably of equal intensity burned in Tindale:
he could say things that scarified—many of his "pestilent glosses" stung
and burned beyond endurance; but Tindale was always master of his
powers.
Controversy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries was carried on in
language laden with poison. The fumes of it got into the heads of all
protagonists, the noblest not excepted. Humor, the best of antidotes,
did not completely save Erasmus from its venom. The ink of Luther's pen
often spluttered with it. Tindale himself was not immune. In some of his
glosses there are phrases that burn and blister.
The reader of these modern times cannot help feeling that this flaws
noble character; but judgment cannot overlook the manner of the times,
nor demand that Tindale be unaffected by a malady that was then
everywhere endemic.
The tempestuous soul of the German could not fail to influence the more
phlegmatic Englishman. Traces of Luther's influence abound in Tindale's
work; but have never overlain the independence and original energy of
the latter. It is one of the great merits of the English reformer, that,
man of original power as he was, he laid under contribution all
available knowledge and experience in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German,
Spanish, Italian, in determining what his own translation must be.
That these outstanding reformers met together, more than once, is duly
recorded; but descriptive account of their intercourse there is none. So
far as their history is concerned, they are to us like "Ships that pass
in the night." They speak one another and pass in the dark.
If we could recover their table talk, we should prize it, not only for
its own sake, but for the revelation it must make of both men. One
wonders whether it was to Tindale that Luther, realizing sadly how each
of them had been forced by circumstances to do his work in lonely peril,
declared "Interpreters and translators should not work alone, for good
et propria verba do not always occur to one mind:"—or again: "My counsel
is that we draw water from the true source and fountain, that is, that
we diligently search the Scriptures ... one single verse, one sentence
of the text, is of far more instruction than a whole host of glosses and
commentaries, which are neither strongly penetrating nor armour of
proof."
Luther's country had proved a safe asylum for the English translator.
Cochlaeus was one of many of their enemies in common; but his battery
had been unmasked. The friends surely drew together as they found
themselves facing similar dangers day by day, and both of them rode on
those tossing seas confidently anchored in the promises of God.