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 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