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 magnificent printing and publishing facilities of our times, how many persons are still without the Bible?  How many parishioners in all the Catholic churches of this country to-day own a Bible?  The modern Bible societies are putting forth an energy in spreading the Bible that is unparalleled in history.  Still their annual reports leave the impression that all they accomplish is as a drop in the bucket over and against the enormous Bible-need still unsupplied.  Catholic writers paint the Bible-knowledge of the age before Luther in such exceedingly bright colors