It was a number of years before the dread of the use of the printing-press for the spread of heretical doctrines and of a consequent undermining of the authority of the Church assumed such proportions in the minds of the popes in Rome and with the bishops elsewhere, as to cause the influence of the Church to be placed against the interests of the world of literature. As a result of this early acceptance by the Church of the printing-press as a useful ally and servant, the first Italian presses were supported by bishops and cardinals in the work of producing classics for scholarly readers, while at the other extremity of the Church organisation, and at a distance of a thousand miles or more from Rome, the Brothers of Common Life were using the presses in their Brotherhood homes for the distribution of cheap books among the people. Berthold von Henneberg, Elector of Mayence, speaks of “The Divine Art of Printing.”[433] The Carthusian monk, Werner Rolewinck, writes, in his _Outline History of the World_ (_Fasciculus Temporum_): “The art of printing which has been discovered in Mayence is the art of arts, the science of sciences, by means of which it will be possible to place in the hands of all men treasures of literature and of knowledge which have heretofore been out of their reach.” Joh. Rauchler, the first Rector of the Tübingen High School (later the University of Tübingen), rejoices that through the new art so many authors can now be brought within the reach of students in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, authors who are witnesses for the Christian faith, and the service of whose writings to the Church and to the world is so great, that he can but consider “this art as a gift directly from God himself.”[434] Felix Fabri, Prior of the Dominican monastery in Ulm, says, in his _Historia Suevorum_, issued in the year 1459, that “no art that the world has known can be considered so worthy, so useful, so much to be esteemed, indeed, so divine as that which has now, through the Grace of God, been discovered in Mayence.” The first printing work done by the Brothers of Common Life dates from 1468. They appear to have promptly utilised their scribes as compositors and their illuminators as designers for the new form in which their books were produced. Many of the Benedictine monasteries which had for so many centuries led the way in the preservation and the multiplication of literature at once associated presses with their monasteries and had their monks trained in the art of setting type and of printing sheets.