It is the obvious fact, then, that, in an age of the world's history when the printing-press with its almost limitless capacity for extending and preserving literature was yet unknown, all literary productions of all kinds--including the Bible--must have been meager in the extreme as compared with the present rapid increase of the printed page when steam and heat and electricity are motive powers. A present-generation occurrence will fitly and forcefully illustrate this proposition: It will be recalled to mind that the Revised New Testament was issued simultaneously by the Oxford Press in both London and New York on a designated day of 1881; it may not be remembered, however, that an enterprising Chicago daily had the entire New Testament telegraphed from New York, immediately at its issue in that City, in order that it might be secured and printed in Chicago in an enormous edition a few hours in advance of the mails and express, put into circulation and sold to the financial advantage of that newspaper. Compare that achievement of printing hundreds of thousands of the New Testament, accomplished within a few hours' time, with the transcription of a single copy of a book, and you must have a new sense of the importance of the printing-press in relation to all literature. And contrast, if you will, the slow and inadequate composition and dissemination of intelligence by the laborious process of handwriting with the present-day marvelous facilities for publication when the linotype is mostly employed in setting the type-plates for periodicals and books, and when a single press will print and fold about thirty thousand copies of a metropolitan journal in one hour's time, and, from both _comparison_ and _contrast_, you must have a higher appreciation for the printing-press as an instrumentality for the spreading of intelligence and the progress of civilization.