“The Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.”
- John Wycliffe
Americans are familiar with the closing words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
What many Americans don’t know is that these words are not Lincoln’s own, but he was quoting John Wycliffe from the prologue of his English translation of the Bible.
Wycliffe, often called the Morningstar of the Reformation, lived and wrote at a time when the Roman Catholic Church and the nobility allied with Rome considered it subversive to translate the Scriptures into the common language of the people. Rome and its royalist supporters believed in a government of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite and ruthlessly enforced this teaching. One of the ways of enforcing their tyranny was to keep the people ignorant of the Bible, feeding them instead on a diet of doctrinal fables dispensed by the Church of Rome.
But keeping up the ruse took a lot of effort. Access to the Word of God had to be forbidden. For if people learned what the Bible actually taught and compared it to what Rome said the Bible taught, Rome’s lies would be exposed and her government of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite would be in danger of overthrow.
Lux Lucet 