old, and the introduction of the new, faith.^739 But, human sin and imperfection enter into all great
movements of history. Wherever God builds a church, the Devil is sure to build a chapel close by.
The Devil is mighty; but God is almighty, and overrules the wrath and outwits the wit of his great
enemy. Nothing but the power of truth and conviction could break down the tyranny of the papacy,
which for so many centuries had controlled church and state, house and home, from the cradle to
the grave, and held the keys to the kingdom of heaven. It is an insult to reason and faith to deny
the all-ruling and overruling supremacy of God in the history of the world and the church.
§ 92. The Printing-Press and the Reformation.
The art of printing, which was one of the providential preparations for the Reformation, became
the mightiest lever of Protestantism and modern culture.
The books before the Reformation were, for the most part, ponderous and costly folios and
quartos in Latin, for limited circulation. The rarity of complete Bibles is shown by the fact that
copies in the libraries were secured by a chain against theft. Now small and portable books and
leaflets were printed in the vernacular for the millions.
The statistics of the book trade in the sixteenth century reveal an extraordinary increase
since Luther. In the year 1513, there appeared only ninety prints in Germany; in 1514, one hundred
and six; in 1515, one hundred and forty-five; in 1516, one hundred and five; in 1517, eighty-one.
They are mostly little devotional tracts, flying newspapers, official notices, medical prescriptions,
stories, and satirical exposures of clerical and monastic corruptions. In 1518 the number rose to
one hundred and forty-six; in 1519, to two hundred and fifty-two; in 1520, to five hundred and
seventy-one; in 1521, to five hundred and twenty-three; in 1522, to six hundred and seventy-seven;
in 1523, to nine hundred and forty-four. Thus the total number of prints in the five years preceding
the Reformation amounted only to five hundred and twenty-seven; in the six years after the
Reformation, it rose to three thousand one hundred and thirteen.^740
These works are distributed over fifty different cities of Germany. Of all the works printed
between 1518 and 1523 no less than six hundred appeared in Wittenberg; the others mostly in
Nürnberg, Leipzig, Cologne, Strassburg, Hagenau, Augsburg, Basel, Halberstadt, and Magdeburg.
Luther created the book-trade in Northern Germany, and made the little town of Wittenberg one
of the principal book-marts, and a successful rival of neighboring Leipzig as long as this remained
Catholic. In the year 1523 more than four-fifths of all the books published were on the side of the
Reformation, while only about twenty books were decidedly Roman Catholic. Erasmus, hitherto
the undisputed monarch in the realm of letters, complained that the people would read and buy no
other books than Luther’s. He prevailed upon Froben not to publish any more of them. "Here in
Basel," he wrote to King Henry VIII., "nobody dares to print a word against Luther, but you may
write as much as you please against the pope." Romish authors, as we learn from Cochlaeus and
(^739) Janssen dwells, we may say, exclusively on the lower motives, and by omitting the higher spiritual motives and aims utterly
misrepresents the Reformers and the Reformation.
(^740) For these figures and several facts in this paragraph I am indebted to the instructive work of Friedrich Kapp, Geschichte des deutschen
Buchhandels (published by the "Börsenverein der deutschen Buchhändler," Leipzig, 1886), vol. I. 407 sq. The statistics of Ranke (II. 56)
are taken from Panzer’s Annalen der älteren deutschen Literatur (1788 and 1802) and are superseded by the more recent and fuller
investigations of Weller, Kuczynski, and Kapp.