But, as usual, the great enemies of truth and light and liberty took the alarm. The archbishop of Mentz placed the printers of that city under strict censorship. Pope Alexander VI. issued a bull prohibiting the printers of Mentz, Cologne, Treves, and Magdeburg from publishing any books without the express license of their archbishops. Finding that the reading of the Bible was extending, the priests began to preach against it from their pulpits. "They have found out," said a French monk," a new language called Greek: we must carefully guard ourselves against it. That language will be the mother of all sorts of heresies. I see in the hands of a great number of persons a book written in this language called, The New Testament;' it is a book full of brambles, with vipers in them. As to the Hebrew, whoever learns that becomes a Jew at once." Bibles and Testaments were seized wherever found, and burnt; but more Bibles and Testaments seemed to rise as if by magic from their ashes. The printers also were seized and burnt. "We must root out printing, or printing will root out us," said the vicar of Croydon in a sermon preached at Paul's Cross. And the university of Paris, panic-stricken, declared before the parliament, "There is an end of religion if the study of Greek and Hebrew is permitted."
The great success of the new translations spread alarm throughout the Romish church; she trembled for the supremacy of her own favorite Vulgate. The fears of the priests and monks were increased when they saw the people reading the scriptures in their own mother tongue, and observed a growing disposition to call in question the value of attending mass, and the authority of the priesthood. Instead of saying their prayers through the priests in Latin, they began to pray to God direct in their native tongue. The clergy, finding their revenues diminishing, appealed to the Sorbonne, the most renowned theological school in Europe. The sorbonne called upon parliament to interfere with a strong hand. War was immediately proclaimed against books, and the printers of them. Printers who were convicted of having printed Bibles, were burnt. In the year 1534, about twenty men and one woman were burnt alive in Paris. In 1535 the Sorbonne obtained an ordinance from the king for the suppression of printing. "But it was too late," as an able writer observes; "the art was now full born, and could no more be suppressed than light, or air, or life. Books had become a public necessity, and supplied a great public want: and every year saw them multiplying more abundantly."
While Rome was thus thundering her awful prohibitions against the liberty of thought, and lengthening her arm to persecute wherever the Bible had penetrated and found followers, at least all over France, God was hastening by means of His own word and the printing press, that mighty revolution which was so soon to change the destinies of both Church and State. But had the catholics succeeded in their wicked designs, we should still have been groping our way amidst the thick darkness of the middle ages. Rome has ever been hostile to new inventions and improvements; especially if they tended to the diffusion of knowledge, the promotion of civilization, the diminishing of the distance between the clergy and the laity, or in any way weakening the power of the priesthood. Ignorance, slavery, superstition, blind subjection to priestcraft, are the chief elements of her existence. Of all inventions, none has exercised a greater influence on society than that of printing; and not only so; it is the preserver of all other inventions. Thus no thanks are due to the catholics for our modern civilization, and for the privileges of our civil and religious liberties. But the living God is above all the hostility of Rome, and will accomplish all the purposes of His grace.
The darkness of the middle ages is rapidly passing away. The rising sun of the Reformation will ere long dispel the gloom of Jezebel's long reign of a thousand years. Her boasted universal supremacy is no more, and will never again return. The pillars of her strength are already shaken, and many causes are combining to hasten her complete overthrow. With these causes we shall soon become more familiar.