that one is led to believe that age surpassed ours.  They overshoot their aim.  Nobody finds fault with the Roman Church for not having invented the printing-press.  All would rather be inclined to excuse her little achievement in spreading the Bible during the Middle Ages on the ground of the poor facilities at her command.  Every intelligent and fair person will accord the Roman Church every moiety of credit for the amount of Bible-knowledge which she did convey to the people.  We heartily join Luther in his belief that even in the darkest days of the papacy men were still saved in the Roman Church, because they clung in their dying hour to simple texts of the Scriptures which they had learned from their priests. (22, 577.) But no one must try and make us believe that the Roman Church before Luther performed marvels in spreading the Bible.  She never exhausted even the poor facilities at her command.

Far from wondering, then, that Luther had not seen the complete Bible until his twenty-second year, we regard this as quite natural in view of his lowly extraction, and we consider the censure which superficial Protestant writers have applied to Luther because of his early ignorance of the Bible as uncommonly meretricious.  When we bear in mind the known character of the Popes in Luther’s days, we doubt whether even they had read the entire Bible.  Luther’s “discovery” of the Bible, however is not regarded by Protestants as a discovery such as Columbus made when he found the American continent.  Luther knew of the existence of the Bible and could cite sayings of the Bible at the time when he found the bulky volume in the library that made such a profound impression upon him.

And yet his find was a true discovery.  Luther discovered that his Church had not told him many important and beautiful things that are in the Bible.  He became so absorbed with the novel contents of this wonderful book that the desire was wrung from his:  heart:  Oh, that I could possess this book!  But this enthusiastic wish at once became clouded by another discovery which he made while poring over the precious revelation of the very heart of Jesus:  his Church had told him things differently from what he found them stated in the Bible.  He was shocked when he discovered that in his heart a new faith was springing up which had come to him out of the Bible,—­a faith which contradicted the avowed faith of the Roman Church.  Poor Luther!  He had for the first time come under the influence of that Word which is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow (Hebr. 4, 12), and he did not know it.  Some of the noblest minds in the ages before him have had to pass through the same experience.  With the implicit trust which at that time lie reposed in the Roman Church, Luther suppressed his “heretical” thoughts.  He said:  “Perhaps I am in error.  Dare I believe myself so smart as to know better than the