A college professor once said to his class that on a certain November day in 1863 his grandfather had stood on a Pennsylvania battlefield close to the speakers' platform where the sixteenth President of the United States of America uttered a few brief but immortal sentences. The grandfather told his grandson that Abraham Lincoln had emphasized the end of his Gettysburg Address thus: "That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
While the heart and intent of Lincoln's words sprang from the Constitution of his country, their ultimate source may have been another historic landmark, recorded almost five centuries earlier. In the late 1300's an Englishman, John Wycliffe, began to translate portions of the Latin Bible into his native language. He and his followers, who were lay preachers, carried handwritten copies of Scripture throughout towns and villages, reading to the people by wayside and hearth, teaching that the Word alone was adequate for salvation.
Imagine the effect on simple folk who could not read themselves: for the very first time the Bible spoke to them directly, not in an ancient foreign tongue but in their own everyday speech! It was a revolutionary awakening, this discovery that they could grasp the Word of God and make use of it right at the core of their daily lives!
