nders as, on the actual firm Earth, some
Books have done! What built St. Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of
the matter, it was that divine Hebrew BOOK,--the word partly of the man
Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thousand years ago,
in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the strangest of things, yet nothing
is truer. With the art of Writing, of which Printing is a simple, an
inevitable and comparatively insignificant corollary, the true reign
of miracles for mankind commenced. It related, with a wondrous new
contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the
Present in time and place; all times and all places with this our actual
Here and Now. All things were altered for men; all modes of important
work of men: teaching, preaching, governing, and all else.

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable,
respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too is modified,
to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose
while there were yet no Books procurable; while a man, for a single
Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when
a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should do it by gathering
the learners round him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If you
wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard.
Thousands, as many as thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and that
metaphysical theology of his. And now for any other teacher who had also
something of his own to teach, there was a great convenience opened:
so many thousands eager to learn were already assembled yonder; of all
places the best place for him was that. For any third teacher it was
better still; and grew ever the better, the more teachers there came.
It only needed now that the King took notice of this new phenomenon;
combined or agglomerated the various schools into one school; gave it
edifices, privileges, encouragements, and named it _Universitas_,
or School of all Sciences: the University of Paris, in its essential
characters, was there. The model of all subsequent Universities; which
down even to these days, for six centuries now, have gone on to found
themselves. Such, I conceive, was the origin of Universities.

It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility of
getting Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottom
were changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Unive