WE have cited the happy epigram of the historian that Tindale's work is his history and his epitaph is the Reformation. This is just and felicitous. When he seeks a telling phrase to set forth the personality of Tindale, however, he is not happy.
He calls him "a young dreamer". As if he were dissatisfied with this, he calls him elsewhere "a fiery young enthusiast." The second is no truer than the first.
Tindale had the dream of England's greatness if her people had the Bible in their mother tongue: and to use his own words, "he encountered poverty, exile, bitter absence from friends, hunger, thirst and cold, great dangers and innumerable, hard and sharp fightings, to make his dream come true."
But "dreamer" is not the word for a life like that.
"Enthusiasm and fire", yes, these undoubtedly Tindale possessed. When copies of Tindale's Testament were bought and burnt in Antwerp, London and Oxford, his remark was: "They did none other than that I looked for; no more shall they do if they burned me also. If it be God's will it shall so be."
At one of the burnings, Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, preached against Luther. Tidings of the scene having reached Tindale, he wrote some time afterwards: "Mark, I pray you, what an orator he is, and how vehemently he persuadeth it. Martin Luther burnt the Pope's decretals; 'a manifest sign', saith he (Fisher) that he would have burned the Pope's Holiness also if he had had him.
A like argument which I suppose to be rather true, I (Tindale) make: The Pope and his holy brethren have burned Christ's Testament: an evident sign verily that they would have burnt Christ Himself if they had had Him."
But this vehemency was only part of the man. The whole man kept these inner fires aglow year after year until he had finished the work assigned to him. Even by an adversary he was called "a learned, pious, good man": his keeper, and his keeper's daughter, and others of his keeper's household were won over by him to his belief.
His was a personality rich and brave, capable of great endurance because aglow with zeal that many waters could not quench, vehement indeed against the enemy, yet a very perfect knight; with a sympathy and tenderness and faith that brought him the trust and affectionate esteem of those who came to know the man himself.
Reduced Facsimile of the only known letter of William Tindale.
No, neither "dreamer" nor "enthusiast" holds the mirror up to this man. He was both dreamer and enthusiast, and a great deal besides. He was a man who loved. He deliberately gave his life to the accomplishing of one great task. He sacrificed everything to that. That nobleness of purpose, that fortitude in toil, that undeviating devotion to his single aim until he triumphed, call for some ampler phrase in bronze:
Lofty designs must close in like effects
Loftily lying
Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects
Living and dying.