Just at this period the Lord was making "all things work together for good" in a most remarkable way. Two silent agents of immense influence and power were ordained to precede the living voices of His gospel-preachers—the invention of printing and the manufacture of paper. These harmonious inventions were brought to great perfection during the latter half of the fifteenth century, for which we can lift up our hearts in praise and thanksgiving to God.
We have now reached a turning point in our history; and not only in the history of the church, but of civilization, of the social condition of the European states, and of the human family. It is well to pause on such an eminence and look around us for a moment. We see a divine hand for the good of all gathering things together, though apparently unconnected. The falling of an empire, the flight of a few Greeks with their literary treasures, the awakening of the long dormant mind of the western world, the invention of printing from moveable types, and the discovery of making fine white paper from linen rags. Incongruous as "linen rags" may sound with the literature of the Greeks, and the skill of Guttenberg, both would have proved of little avail without the improved paper. Means, the most insignificant in man's account, when used of God, are all sufficient. By miraculous power, a dry rod in the hand of Moses shakes Egypt from center to circumference, divides the Red Sea, and gives living water from the flinty rock: a smooth pebble from the brook, or an empty ram's horn, accomplishes great deliverances in Israel. The power is of God, and faith looks only to Him.
It is a deeply interesting fact to the Christian, that the first complete book which Guttenberg printed with his cut metal types was a folio edition of the Bible in the Latin vulgate, consisting of six hundred and forty-one leaves. Hallam, in his Literary History beautifully observes: "It is a very striking circumstance, that the high minded inventors of the great art tried at the very outset so bold a flight as the printing an entire Bible, and executed it with great success.... We may see in imagination this venerable and splendid volume leading up the crowded myriads of its followers, and imploring, as it were, a blessing on the new art, by dedicating its firstfruits to the service of heaven."
Although it scarcely falls within the line of our "Short Papers" even briefly to sketch the history of the great discovery, yet for the sake of some of our readers who may not have such histories at hand we must mention a few particulars, as it was one of the most powerful agents of the Reformation.
From an early period the mode of printing from blocks of wood had been practiced. Sometimes the engravings, or impressions, were accompanied by a few lines of letters cut in the block. Gradually these were extended to a few leaves and called block-books. An ingenious blacksmith, it is said, invented in the eleventh century separate letters made of wood. The celebrated John Guttenberg, who was born at a village near Mentz, in the year 1397, substituted metal for the wooden letters; his associate Schaeffer cut the characters in a matrix, after which the types were cast, and thus completed the art of printing as it now remains.
Parchment, preparations of straw, the bark of trees, papyrus, and cotton had sufficed for the printer and transcriber, till the fourteenth century. But these preparations would have been utterly inadequate to supply the demand of the new process. Happily, however, the discovery of making paper from rags coincided with the discovery of letter-press printing. The first paper-mill in England was erected at Dartmouth by a German named Spielmann, in 1588, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.