"THE first scholar and the first divine of his epoch"—the words stand true of William Tindale; but his personality is even more arresting, for only a man richly endowed with courage, sincerity, uprightness, the sense of duty and the love of country, could have served England so nobly as he did: yet England knows not the man.
Fifteen years, or sixteen at most, early in the Sixteenth Century, 1520-1536, enclose the immemorial labors of William Tindale. During that decade and a half there were for him experiences and enterprises which went to the making of the man, and show what manner of man he was: but which also set him forth as one of the greatest of his race.
Formative years preceded these; some thirty of them one conjectures; of which, however, we can discover little. We get glimpses of him and his doings; but they are like flashes of lightning in a dark sky. A narrative of this man's life would seem forever impossible: what letters there were, or other documents, disappeared long ago: and the path he trod with unfaltering step we can trace in patches only.
For all that it is possible to set out the features of the man, realize the massive qualities he possessed, recall his surroundings, the atmosphere he breathed, the hostility he aroused, the victory he won at the cost of his life; and so to recognize the valor, the magnanimity, and in a word the greatness of this too little known English worthy.
A biographic blank like this, where incidents of consequence must have transpired, is not altogether unknown in history.
History encounters the same difficulty in the life of Wyclif. The character of his parents is unknown. Not an anecdote of his boyhood remains. His life at Oxford, extending over forty years, yields but a single incident.
In one of Tindale's younger contemporaries in the northern kingdom, there occurs a similar desert stretch, where the silence is even more profound; and which the most diligent research has failed to break. John Knox was born in 1505; and of his inner life for the first forty years we know absolutely nothing. Then suddenly, against a background darker in Scotland than that in England, he emerges holding George Wishart's two-edged sword in his hand.
Of the crisis which lay behind, which changed him from a priest before the altar to the beloved disciple of this early martyr, we hear not a word. "In the solemn days of early faith", wrote the late Taylor Innes, "not a few men like him were in the desert until the time of their showing unto Israel. Not the polished shaft only, but the rough spear-head too was in the shadow of a mighty hand until the day when it was launched."
If ever Papini's paradoxical dictum be credible, it is in a life like this: "The most highly educational biographies are those of men of whom little or nothing is known. Those are the books that set forth the human ideal, that tell us what a man ought to be." The paradox is elsewhere resolved by him when he says: "I care less for the whole course of a man's life than for his own distilling of its essence."
The distilled essence of Tindale's life comes to view again and again during these brief years; which were crowded with events, dramatic and of age-long significance, and which passed from drama to tragedy in the martyr fires he had long foreseen.
Centenaries are apt to miscarry. If such occasions serve only for the display of erudition and platform vanity, and fail to lead us to seek the essential message and the continuing inspiration of the great men they celebrate, what riches of the past remain sealed to us! There have been celebrations loudly acclaimed by men who would have bayed at the heels of the brave revolutionary whom they now eloquently praise. They simulate seeing he is no longer alive and dangerous, but a hero dead: and they join the chorus of universal praise. The effect is to emphasize the deadness of the past, not to rekindle glorious life—this is rekindled only where there is eagerness to be in or near the succession of the great, where there is sympathy with admiration, where there is in fine some kinship of spirit.
The true aim of Centennials is more psychological than historical. Not so much the magnification of the subject as the discovery of what was his lofty purpose, his high endurance, his nobility of spirit: not even his success, but his endeavor; and this in order that in our admiration we may draw inspiration for ourselves and emulate his spirit in the altered circumstances of the time. That resolve to recapture for the world of to-day a courage and a consecration of which the world of his day was contemptuous, and to devote these invaluable virtues to the opportunities of our time—that is the soul-stirring aim in revivifying the past; and is not that the true heritage of all the ages?