[Sidenote: Multiplication of books.] But it was with printing as with other affairs of the market--an increased demand gave origin to an increased supply, which, in its turn reacting, increased the demand. Cheap books bred readers. When the monks, abandoning their useless and lazy life of saying their prayers a dozen times a day, turned to the copying and illustrating of manuscripts, a mental elevation of the whole order was the result; there were more monks who could read. And so, on the greater scale, as books through the press became more abundant, there were more persons to whom they became a necessity. [Sidenote: The mode of communicating knowledge changes.] But, secondly, as to the change which ensued in the mode of communicating information--a change felt instantly in the ecclesiastical, and, at a later period, in the political world. The whole system of public worship had been founded on the condition of a non-reading people; hence the reading of prayers and the sermon. Whoever will attentively compare the thirteenth with the nineteenth century cannot fail to see how essential oral instruction was in the former, how subordinate in the latter. [Sidenote: Injury to pulpit instruction.] The invention of the printing-press gave an instant, a formidable rival to the pulpit. It made possible that which had been impossible before in Christian Europe--direct communication between the government and the people without any religious intermedium, and was the first step in that important change subsequently carried out in America, the separation of Church and state. Though in this particular the effect was desirable, in another its advantages are doubtful, for the Church adhered to her ancient method when it had lost very much of its real force, and this even at the risk of falling into a lifeless and impassive condition.