Page:Gospel of Saint John in West-Saxon.djvu/17



Anglo-Saxon literature precedes by centuries of years the layman's possession of vernacular Scripture. But no literature of so much excellence and extending over so long a period of national life surpasses that of the Anglo-Saxons in its dependence upon Scripture, liturgy, and hagiography. Learning and literary authorship were then almost exclusively ecclesiastical. That there was something - we cannot know how much - in these conditions that must at times have brought the scholar near to a conception of the desirability of supplying the people with Scripture in the native tongue is attested by the account of Bede's endeavor to translate the Gospel of St. John, by surviving texts glossed in the vernacular, by a notable translation of the Psalms, by Ælfric's translations of other portions of the Old Testament, and especially by the West-Saxon Gospels. On the other hand, a knowledge of the conditions of popular education must have arrested such speculation, and relegated the possible use of vernacular Scripture to an exclusive clergy.