for the illiteracy of the masses.  It was considered a remarkable achievement even for a nobleman to be able to scribble his name.  Among those who possessed the ability few had the inclination and persistency necessary for the effort to transcribe the Bible.  The cloisters of those days were the chief seats of learning and centers of lower education, but even these asylums of piety sheltered many an ignorant monk and others who were afflicted with the proverbial monks’ malady—­laziness.  It is to the credit of the pious members of the Roman Church in that unhappy age that they manifested such a laudable interest in the Bible.  The achievement of copying the entire Bible with one’s own hand in that age is so great that it palliates some of the glaring evils of the inhuman system of monasticism.  But if every monk in every cloister, every priest in every Catholic parish, every professor in every Catholic university, could have produced twenty copies of the Bible during his lifetime, how little would have been accomplished to make the Bible available for the millions of men then living!

Reading is the correlate of writing.  The person who cannot write, as a rule, cannot read.  For this reason the Bible must have remained a sealed book to many who had ample opportunity to become acquainted with it.  The wide diffusion of Bible knowledge which Catholic writers would lead us to believe always existed in the Roman Church is subject to question.  It is true that in the first centuries of the Christian era there was a great hunger and thirst for the Word of God.  But that was before the Roman Church came into existence.  For it is a reckless assumption that the papacy is an original institution in the Church of Christ, and that Roman Catholicism and Christianity are identical.  It is also true that in the early days of the Reformation the people manifested a great desire for the Word of God.  It was as new to them as it had been to Luther.  They would crowd around a person who was able to read, and would listen for hours.  At St. Paul’s in London public reading of the Bible became a regular custom.  But between the early days of Christianity and the beginning of the Reformation lies a period which. is known as the Dark Ages.  No amount of oratory will turn that age into a Bright Age.  “From the seventh to the eleventh century books were so scarce that often not one could be found in an entire city, and even rich monasteries possessed only a single text-book.” (Universal Encycl., 2, 96.) These conditions were not greatly improved until printing was invented.  Luther had to do with people who were emerging from the sad conditions of that age, the effects of which were still visible centuries after.  He writes:  “The deplorable destitution which I recently observed, during a visitation of the churches, has impelled and constrained me to prepare this Catechism, or Christian Doctrine, in such a small and simple form.  Alas, what manifold misery I beheld!