They will tell him how infidelity made that splendid place a temple of the furies, how it laughed and yelled and applauded, as it amused itself with that spectacle of horror.  They will tell him how the underground passages served to keep and cage wild beasts, and how those who then hated Christianity starved the fierce lion until his eyes rolled in hot hunger and his teeth were sharpened with its agony.  They will tell him how the infidelity of that day put balls of fire on the backs of the lions, and how the madness of their passion was increased by scattering hated colors about, tearing the beasts with iron hooks and beating them with cruel whips.  They will tell how the Christian was made to fight these infuriated beasts without weapons, while infidelity was frantic with applause.  It said “no” to the torn body yonder, that was mangled and supplicating in blood for life.  I would have him stand there until, in after years, in a nobler strain than that of Byron, he could say: 

  And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
  All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
  Which softened down the hoar austerity
  Of rugged desolation.

* * * * *

  Till the place
  Became religion, and the heart ran o’er
  With silent worship of the great of old! 
  The dead but sceptered sovereigns who still rule
  Our spirits from their urns.

So long as I know what this book has been and done, so long as man’s history will not allow me to risk the interests of society with the infidelity which has so often demoralized it, so long will I yearn to get the Bible and its message to all men.  It has been our world’s best book.  With this book as inspiration and resource, William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale were so to continue and complete the task of The Venerable Bede and John Wyclif as to make an epoch in the history of that language to be used by Shakespeare and Burke—­an era as distinct as that which Luther’s Bible so soon should mark in the history of a language to be such a potent instrument in the hands of Goethe and Hegel.  For this very act of heresy, Tyndale was to be called “a full-grown Wyclif,” and Luther “the redeemer of his mother-tongue.”  With the Bible, Calvin was to conceive republics at Geneva, and Holbein to paint, in spite of the iconoclasm of the Reformation, the faces of Holy Mother and Saint, and in spite of the cruelty of the Church, scripturally conceived satires illustrating the sale of indulgences.  With that book Gustavus Vasa was to protect and nurture the freedom of the land of flowing splendors, while Angelo was transcribing sacred scenes upon the Sistine vault or fixing them in stone.  Reading this book, More was to die with a smile; Latimer, Cranmer, and Ridley to perish while illuminating with living torches, and the Anabaptist to arouse the sympathies of Christendom by his agonies.  With this book in hand, Shakespeare was to write his plays; Raleigh was to die, knight, discoverer, thinker, statesman, martyr; Bacon to lay the foundation of modern scientific research—­three stars in the majestic constellation about Henry’s daughter.  With this Bible open before them the English nation would behold the Spanish Armada dashed to pieces upon the rocks, while Edmund Spenser mingled his delicious notes with the tumult of that awful wreck.