But whether writing, which has well been spoken of as “nearly divine,” is the invention of man, or is truly divine in its origin, its possession was a great step in human progress. By it speech became enduring and universal; it could be preserved, it could be diffused. Poetry, history, science, law, art, religion, thus found expression for all time. Through it we commune with the thinkers of antiquity. By its aid “the Book” has come down to us. Nevertheless, this mode of transmitting knowledge was slow, toilsome, costly, and not available to the masses. At the beginning of the eleventh century, for example, books were so scarce in Spain that one and the same copy of the Bible, St. Jerome’s Epistles, and some volumes of ecclesiastical offices, served several different monasteries. Books were the privilege of the wealthy and the powerful; and the common people had them not. “The head of society was in the light, the feet in the shade,” and “the progress of truth, science, letters, politics, arts, was slow, and suspended through long periods.” Some process was needed by which the written thoughts of the thinkers could be reproduced with greater rapidity, and thus placed within the reach even of the poor. This, John Gutenberg, in the good providence of God, gave mankind, in the discovery of printing. With the new art came a new era for the world. In a few years after Gutenberg’s death all the capitals of Europe had their printing-presses. France, England, Holland, Germany, Venice, Genoa, Rome, Poland, seized the invention, and spread abroad religious and secular works. In 1500 the Jews published tracts on Rabbinical literature in Constantinople. And Russia, in 1680, established a press in Moscow. The invention had its enemies, and printing its martyrs; but its glory could not be dimmed, nor its progress arrested. Kings and queens turned engravers and compositors, glorying to labor with their own hands in the wonderful art. The wife of Henry IV. designed and printed cuts for some royal publications, and engraving with her own hand a figure of a young girl, presented it to “Philip de Champagne.” Louis XV. in his youth, printed in his own palace a “Treatise on European Geography.” The chief printers of the times succeeding that of Gutenberg were often the artists, the learned men, the writers. They not only reproduced the buried works of antiquity, but were able to explain and interpret them.