=2. Luther.=--It is with the work of Luther that there begins to be a large production and a wide distribution of books in German. Up to this time the undertakings of the German printers had been restricted almost exclusively to books in Latin. The immediate distribution, however, of the writings of Luther and his associates, not only among the trade folk and working people of the towns, but through the rural districts, constitutes an evidence that the general intelligence and the education of the mass of the people had reached a much higher development than the Protestant historians of the time have been willing to admit. It is to be remembered that the readers whom Luther was reaching belonged to the generation which had depended for its education exclusively upon the monastery schools, or upon schools which were entirely under the direction of the priests. The work of the reformers was essentially a work of argument, and it could have been carried on successfully only with people who were intelligent enough to understand arguments whether presented orally or in print. That the community was as intelligent and as receptive as proved to be the case, shows how exaggerated and ill-considered are the conclusions presented by Protestant historians represented by D’Aubigné, Robertson, and others in regard to the absolute ignorance in which the Catholic teachers had left their followers. Kapp reports that of Luther’s treatise on German theology no less than seventy editions were printed between the years 1518 and 1854. Of the _Address to the German Nobility_, four thousand copies were sold in five days. Of the first edition of the New Testament, printed in Wittenberg in 1522, five thousand copies were sold within three months. There seems to have been no question that the emphasis given by the imperial and ecclesiastical censorship to the importance of Luther’s writings constituted an important factor in bringing these to the attention of the public, and in securing for them the largest possible circulation. Luther realised that, with hardly an exception, the scholarly divines of the university were antagonistic to him and to his work. He writes February 8, 1516: _Nec cessant universitates bonos libros cremare et damnare, rursum malos dictare, imo somniare_.[224] In 1519, the doctors of Louvain published an edict ordering the burning of all copies that could be secured of the writings of Luther. A similar order was issued in 1520 by the divines of Cologne. Both orders were printed in Wittenberg, in 1520, by Melchior Lottherus. In 1521, the theological faculty of Paris issued an edict entitled _Determinationes Theologicae Facultatis Parisien. super Doctrina Lutheriana_. The edict, which was printed in Wittenberg in the same year, condemns a number of propositions from the treatise _De Captivitate Babylonica_. The theological facility of Cologne issued, in 1532, a censure against the _Epitome of Abuses by a Reformed Monk_.[225]