The Popes and the Printers.
ABOUT 1525 A. D. there began a remarkable contest between the Romish Church and the Bible—between the printers and the popes. For many centuries the Scriptures had been hidden in a dead language, guarded from the public eye by the anathemas of the priests, and so costly in manuscript form as to be accessible only to the wealthy. A Bible cost as much as a landed estate; the greatest universities, the richest monasteries, could scarcely purchase a single copy. Its language and its doctrines had long been forgotten by the people, and in their place the intellect of the Middle Ages had been fed upon extravagant legends and monkish visions, the fancies of idle priests, the fables of the unscrupulous. The wonders worked by a favorite image, the virtues of a relic, the dreams of a dull abbot or a fanatical monk, had supplanted the modest teachings of Peter and the narrative of Luke. Men saw before them only the imposing fabric of the Church of Rome, claiming supremacy over the conscience and the reason, pardoning sins, determining doctrines, and had long ceased to remember that there was a Redeemer, a Bible, even a God. A practical atheism followed. The pope was often a skeptic, except as to his own right to rule. The church and the monasteries teemed with the vices depicted by Rabelais and Erasmus. Then, in the close of the fifteenth century, a flood of light was poured upon mankind. The new art of printing sprung into sudden maturity, and great numbers of Bibles were scattered among the people. They were sought for with an avidity, studied with an eagerness, received with an undoubting faith, such as no later age has witnessed. Arrayed in the charm of entrancing novelty, the simple story of the gospels and the noble morals of the epistles, translated for the first time into the common dialects, descended as if newly written by the pen of angels upon the minds of men. Every honest intellect was at once struck with the strange discrepancy between the teaching of the sacred volume and that of the Church of Rome. No religion, indeed, seemed less consistent with itself than that of mediæval Romanism. The Mohammedan of the fifteenth century still clung with tenacity to the minute requirements of the Koran; the Jew obeyed in every particular the injunctions of the decalogue; the Greeks and Romans had suffered few alterations in the rituals of Jupiter and Diana. But it was found, upon the slightest inspection, that there was no authority for the Romish innovations in any portion of the Scriptures. There was no purgatory, no mass, no papal supremacy, no monasteries, no relics working miracles, no images, no indulgences to be found in the book that contained the teachings of Christ and his apostles. The inference was at once everywhere drawn that the theories of the Roman Church were founded upon imposture; and when, at the same time, the shameless lives of its priests and popes were brought before the public eye by satirists and preachers, its gross corruption was believed to be the necessary result of its want of truthfulness; its cruelty and violence seemed the offspring of its unhallowed sensuality and pride. The Bible alone could now satisfy the active intellect of France; the Bible awoke anew the simple church of the apostolic age. To the Bible the popes at once declared a deathless hostility. To read the Scriptures was in their eyes the grossest of crimes; for they confessed by their acts that he who read must cease to be a Romanist. Not murder, robbery, nor any other offense was punished with such dreadful severity. The tongues of the gentle criminals were usually cut out; they were racked until their limbs parted; they were then forced to mount a cart, and were491jolted over rough streets, in agony, to the stake. Here they were burned amidst the jeers of the priests and the populace. Yet the Bible sustained them in their hour of trial, and they died ever with hymns of exultation. Great wars were undertaken to drive the sacred volume from schools and colleges. The Inquisition was invested with new terrors, and was forced upon France and Holland by papal armies. The Jesuits were everywhere distinguished by their hatred for the Bible. In the Netherlands they led the persecutions of Alva and Philip II.; they rejoiced with a dreadful joy when Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent, the fairest cities of the working-men, were reduced to pauperism and ruin by the Spanish arms; for the Bible had perished with its defenders. "There are above forty thousand Protestants in this town," wrote Sir Thomas Gresham from Antwerp in 1566, "which will die rather than that the word of God shall be put to silence." A few years later their heroic resolution had been fulfilled; they had nearly all perished by famine, disease, and the sword of Alva. To burn Bibles was the favorite employment of zealous Catholics. Wherever they were found the heretical volumes were destroyed by active inquisitors, and thousands of Bibles and Testaments perished in every part of France. Yet the fertile press soon renewed the abundant fruit, and the skillful printers of Germany and Switzerland poured forth an incessant stream of French, Dutch, and English Bibles, besides an infinite number of tracts and treatises by eminent reformers. The demand for these books could never be sufficiently supplied. At Nuremberg, Mentz, and Strasburg there was an eager struggle for Luther's smallest pamphlets. Of his catechism one hundred thousand were sold. The sheets of his tracts, often wet from the press, were hidden under the purchasers' cloaks and passed from shop to shop. The most hated and the most feared of all the agents of reform, in this remarkable period, by priest and pope, was the humble colporter or Bible-seller. Laden with his little pack of Bibles, Testaments, and Protestant treatises, the godly merchant made his way from Antwerp or Geneva into the heart of France, and, beneath the hot summer sun or in the snows of winter, pursued with patient toil his dangerous traffic. He knew that if detected he must die; he felt that the keen eyes of inquisitors and priests were everywhere watching for his coming. Yet, often disguised as a peddler of ribbons and trinkets, he made his way into the castles of the nobles or the homes of the working-men, and cautiously exposed his forbidden wares. They were bought with eagerness, and read by noble and peasant. But not seldom the daring missionary was discovered and punished; his little stock of Bibles was dragged forth and burned by rejoicing priests, and the humble Bible-seller was himself sacrificed, in fearful tortures, to the dreadful deity at Rome. Between the printers and the popes the war now began that has never ceased. The clank of the printing-press had to the ears of the Italian priesthood an ominous sound. "We must destroy printing," said an English vicar, "or it will destroy us." The Sorbonne of Paris denounced the printers in 1534, and burned twenty of them and one woman, within six months. A printer of the Rue Saint Jacques was condemned for publishing Luther's works; a book-seller was burned for having sold them. At last the Sorbonne, the council of the papal faction, in 1535, obtained a decree from the king for the total suppression of printing. Robert Stephens was one of the most eminent printers and scholars of the age. From his accurate press at Paris had issued Latin Bibles and Testaments of singular excellence and beauty. But he was a Huguenot, and even the favor and protection of the king and the court could not shield him from the rage of the Sorbonne. It was discovered that in the notes to his Latin Bible of 1545 he had introduced heretical doctrines. He was persecuted by the Faculty of Theology, and fled from France to escape the stake. His contemporary, the poet, printer, and scholar, Dolet, was burned for atheism, in 1546. Yet the bold printers in Protestant Geneva, Germany, and the Low Countries defied the rage of popes and inquisitors, and still poured forth an increasing tide of Protestant tracts and Bibles. The press waged a ruthless war upon the antichrist at Rome. It founded the republic of Holland, the central fount of modern freedom, a reformed England and the North. It filled the common schools with Bibles, and instructed nations in the humanizing lessons of history. From age to age it has never ceased to inflict deadly wounds upon the papacy; until at length even Italy and Spain have been rescued from the grasp of the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and have proclaimed the freedom of the press. In the city of Rome alone, under the tyranny of an infallible pope, the printer lay chained at the mercy of his ancient adversary until a recent period; from the dominions of Pius IX., the Protestant Bible, the source of modern civilization, was excluded by penalties scarcely less severe than those imposed by Pius V. And as once more the Italian priests prepare to renew their warfare against the printing-press and the Bible in the cities of free America, they will encounter, though with new arts and new arms, their successful adversary of the Old World. The printer once more defies the pope. He points to the ashes of his martyrs, scattered in the waters of the Seine or the Scheldt in the sixteenth century; to the prisons of Bologna or of Rome, so lately filled with the dying advocates of a free press in the nineteenth; to the crimes of Pius IX., no less than those of Pius V., as his gauge of battle. More than thirty years of ceaseless persecution, filled with scenes of horror, of flourishing seats of industry sacked and blighted, of holy men and women martyred with incredible sufferings, of dreadful atrocities perpetrated in every town and village by the emissaries of the popes, had passed over the patient Huguenots before they resolved to take up arms in self-defense. Their gentle pastors, with persistent magnanimity, inculcated theories of non-resistance. Calvin himself, rigid and severe, still urged upon them obedience to their merciless kings. He was content to meet the savage barbarism of the Inquisition with spiritual arms. From his stronghold at Geneva, he organized his Bible societies, and poured an incessant stream of reformed literature over every part of France. He cheered the martyrs with austere exhortations; his Bible-sellers were seen in every secluded path and by-way, stealing with fearless faith from congregation to congregation; his presses at Geneva were never idle; his "institutes" were scattered widely over his native land. During this period of suffering, the Huguenots continued to increase in numbers. Yet their congregations were often forced to meet in caves and forests, and to chant in subdued tones their sacred songs, lest their persecutors might break in upon them with fire and sword. Often the pious assembly was discovered in its most secret retreat, and men, women, and children were massacred by hordes of priests and brigands.—Historical Studies.