Listening to the Giants

C. S. Lewis, or Jack Lewis, as he preferred to be called, was born in Belfast, Ireland (now Northern Ireland) on November 29, 1898. He was the second son of Albert Lewis, a lawyer, and Flora Hamilton Lewis. His older brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis, who was known as Warnie, had been born three years earlier in 1895. Early Days Lewis's early childhood was relatively happy and carefree. In those days Northern Ireland was not yet plagued by bitter civil strife, and the Lewises were comfortably off. The family home, called Little Lea, was a large, gabled house with dark, narrow passages and an overgrown garden, which Warnie and Jack played in and explored together. There was also a library that was crammed with books—two of Jack's favorites were Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. A Painful Loss This somewhat idyllic boyhood came to an end for Lewis when his mother became ill and died of cancer in 1908....

I must admit this paragraph caught me off guard in Wycliffe’s latest biography. She writes, “No work in English which can be attributed with certainty to Wycliffe survives, nor is there evidence that he actively got the work of translating the Bible into English under way or was even directly involved in it.” Really? This man, who is known as the “morning star of the Reformation” and is bestowed the immortal honor of translating the Bible into the English language. So my question is, “Then why is Wycliffe highly regarded in the annals of church history?” For what I can gather there is one reason. The zealous words of John Foxe.  He wrote, “When Wickliffe recovered, he set about a most important work, the translation of the Bible into English. Before this work appeared, he published a tract, wherein he showed the necessity of it. The zeal of the bishops to suppress the Scriptures greatly promoted its sale, and they who were not able to purchase copies, procured t...