a small and simple form. Alas, what manifold misery I beheld! The common
people, especially in the villages, know nothing at all of Christian
doctrine; and many pastors are quite unfit and incompetent to teach. Yet
all are called Christians, have been baptized, and enjoy the use of the
Sacraments, although they know neither the Lord's Prayer, nor the Creed,
nor the Ten Commandments, and live like the poor brutes and irrational
swine." (Preface to the Small Catechism.) Remember, these people lived
in that age when Luther was born and grew up, which Catholic writers
picture to us as a Bible-knowing and Bible-loving age.

The invention of printing wrought a mighty change in this respect. This
glorious art became hallowed from the beginning by being harnessed for
service to the Bible. But even this invention did not at once remove the
prevailing ignorance. We must not transfer modern conditions to the
fifteenth century. In 1906, one of the many Protestant Bible Societies
reported that it had disposed in one year of nearly 80,000,000 Bibles
and parts of the Bible in many languages. The Bible is perhaps the
cheapest book of modern times. It was not so in the days of Gutenberg,
Froschauer, Luft, and the Claxtons. Even after printing had been
invented, Bibles sold at prices that would be considered prohibitive in
our day. When the Duke of Anhalt ordered three copies of the Bible
printed on parchment, he was told that for each copy he must furnish 340
calf-skins, and the expense would be sixty gulden. (Luther's Works, 21b,
2378.) But even the low-priced editions of the Bible, printed on common
paper (which was not introduced into Europe until the thirteenth
century), cost a sum of money which a poor man would consider a fortune,
and which even the well-to-do would hesitate to spend in days when money
was scarce and its purchasing power was considerably different from what
it is to-day. At a period not so very remote from the present a Bible
was considered a valuable chattel of which a person would dispose by a
special codicil in his will. For generations Bibles would thus be handed
down from father to son, not only because of the sacred memories that
attached to them as heirlooms, but also because of their actual value in
money.

Everything considered, then, we hold the argument that the Bible was a
widely diffused book in the days before Luther to be historically
untrue, because it implies physical impossibilities. With the