Blum said another collection would have to be raised to erect a shed over the Bibles that were proposed to be placed at the town-pump and at the town-house and to pay for suitable chains and clasps to secure them from the depredations of the pilfering.
Esch was of opinion that another subscription could not be successfully taken up until their work had produced manifest fruit for good. The people have much faith, but when they find salt mixed with their drink instead of honey, credulity is turned into disgust. A Bible chained to the town-pump will be a sad realization of their extravagant hopes. Every man who subscribed five dollars expects to get a book worth five hundred, an illuminated Bible fit for a cathedral church. He warned them that they were getting into a labyrinth, and that they would have to resort to prayer yet to carry them through in safety. Werner thought it would be wisest to pursue a quiescent policy for some time, and to forego the indulgence of their anxious desire for palpable results until they should be in a condition to make an impression. He advocated the wisdom of delay. They also serve, he said, who only stand and wait, and it might prove an unwise proceeding to come out with their public exhibition just then. In a few months, when thirty or forty Bibles would be on hand, a larger number than could be found in any library in the world, they might hope, by the show of so much labor, to create enthusiasm.
“But still,” urged Heuck, “you will have the difficulty to contend with—who is to get them?”
“There will,” remarked Blum, “be a greater difficulty to contend with about that time: the settlement of obligations for parchment and the pay of the scriveners who are employed in transcribing. Our means at present, even if we pay the scriveners but one-third their wages, will not suffice to bring out twenty volumes. So we are just in this difficulty: in order to do something, we must have means, and in order to get means, we must do something. It is a sort of vicious circle projected from logic into finance. It will take the keen-edged genius of Brother Giestfacher to cut this knot.”
“The work,” said Giestfacher, “in which we are engaged is of such merit that it will stand of itself. I have no fears of ultimate triumph. If you all fail, God and I will carry it on. Heaven is in it. I am in it. It must succeed. I am a little oldish, I confess, but there is twenty years of work in me still. I feel my foot sufficiently sure to tread the perilous path of this adventure to the goal.”
“Let us,” interposed Schwartz, “stop this profitless debate, and give a cheer to Brother Giestfacher. He is the blood and the bone of this movement. We are in with him. We are all in the same boat. If we have discovered a pusillanimous simpleton among us, it is not too late to cast him out. I feel my gorge and my strength rise together, and I swear to you by S. Remigius, brethren, that I am prepared to sink or swim, and whoever attempts to scuttle the ship shall himself perish first.”
Two or three other brethren, feeling the peculiar inspiration of the moment, rose up and, stamping their feet on the floor, proclaimed their adherence to the principles of the society, and vowed to see it through to the end.
This meeting then adjourned.
There is no minute of any subsequent meeting to be found among the manuscripts that I have consulted, but I discovered a statement made by Heuck, dated six months later, who, being called before the municipal authorities to testify what he knew about certain transactions of a number of men that had banded themselves together secretly for the purpose of creating a panic in the vellum market, and of disturbing the business of the scriveners, said he was one of fourteen citizens interested in the promulgation of the Gospel free to the poor. That, after five or six meetings, he left the society in company with two others; that two of the members became obnoxious, and were expelled—the one, Dusch, for embezzling money collected for Scripture-writing and Scripture-diffusing purposes, the other, Werner, for having retained one of their volumes, and disposed of it to the lord of Drachenfels for four hundred dollars; that they did not pursue and prosecute these delinquents for fear of bringing reproach on the project; and then he went on to state: “I left the society voluntarily and in disgust. We had fourteen Bibles on hand, but could not agree about their distribution. They were too valuable to give away for nothing, and it was discovered that they were all written in Latin, and not in the vernacular, and they would prove of as little value to the great mass of people for whom they were originally designed as if they had been written in Hebrew. In addition to this I found, for I understand the language perfectly, that no two of them were alike, and, in conjunction with scrivener Schwartz, I minutely examined one taken at random from the pile, and compared it with the volume at the Cathedral. We found fifteen hundred discrepancies. In some places whole sentences were left out. In others, words were made to express a different sense from the original. In others, letters were omitted or put in redundantly, in such a way as to change the meaning; and the grammatical structure was villanously bad. Seeing that the volumes were of no use as a representation of the word of God, and being conscientiously convinced that the books contained poison for the people instead of medicine, I made a motion in meeting to have them all burned. Schwartz opposed it on the ground that they were innoxious anyhow, there being none of the common people capable of understanding the language in which they were written, and, though they were a failure as Bibles, the vellum might be again used; and as the scriveners were not paid for their labor, they had a claim upon the volumes. The scriveners got the books, to which, in my opinion, they had no just claim, for the villanous, bad work they did on them deserved censure and not pay. I have heard since that some of those scriveners made wealth by selling the books to Englishmen for genuine and carefully prepared transcripts from authorized texts. The president and founder of the society, Giestfacher, is now in jail for debt, he having failed to meet his obligations for the vellum he purchased when he took it into his head to enlighten mankind—more especially that portion of it that dwells on the Rhine adjacent to the city of Bonn—by distributing corrupt copies of Latin Bibles to poor people who are not well able to read their own language. The ‘good work’ still occupies the brains and energies of three or four enthusiasts, who have already arrived at the conclusion that the apostles were in league with hell to keep the people ignorant, because they did not give every man a copy of the Bible. The founder sent me a letter two days ago, in which he complains of being deserted by his companions in his extremity. His creditors have seized on all his goods, and there is a considerable sum yet unpaid. He blames the Pope and the bishop in unmeasured terms for this; says it is a conspiracy to keep the Bible from the people. He sees no prospect of being released unless the members of the society come to his speedy relief. The principles, he says, for which he suffers will yet triumph. The time will come when Bibles will be multiplied by some cheap and easy process. Until then, the common run of humanity must be satisfied to be damned, drawing what little consolation they may from the expectation that their descendants a few centuries hence will enjoy the slim privilege of reading Bibles prepared with as little regard to accuracy as these were. I am sorry to see such a noble intellect as Giestfacher undoubtedly possesses show signs of aberration. The entire failure of his project was more than he could bear. He had centred his hopes upon it. He indulged dreams of fame and greatness arising out of the triumph of his idea. Esch has become an atheist. He says the Christian’s God would not have given a book to be the guide and dependence of man for salvation, and yet allow nature, an inferior creation, to interpose insuperable barriers to its promulgation. Every time a sheep-skin is destroyed, says Esch, a community is damned. The dearness and scarcity of parchment keep the world in ignorance. Braunn says the world cannot be saved except by a special revelation to every individual, for there is hardly a copy of the Bible without errors, so that whether every human creature got one or not, they would be still unsafe. One of the common herd must learn Latin and Greek and Hebrew well, and then spend a lifetime tracing up, through all its changes, transcriptions, and corruptions of idiom, one chapter, or at most one book, and die before he be fully assured of the soundness of one text, a paragraph, a line, a word. In fact, says Braunn, there can be no certainty about anything. Language may have had altogether a different meaning twelve hundred years ago to what it has now. Braunn and Schwartz and myself wanted to have a committee of five of our number appointed to revise and correct the text of each book that was produced by comparing it with such Greek and Hebrew copies as were represented of sound and correct authority; but Giestfacher laughed at us, saying we knew nothing of Greek or Hebrew; that we would have to hire some monks to do the job for us, which would be going back again to the very places and principles and practices against which we had revolted and protested. Moreover, continued Giestfacher, we cannot tell whether the oldest, most original copies that can be found are true in every particular. How can we know from any sort of mere human testimony that this copy or that is in accordance with what the prophets and apostles wrote. The whole Bible may be wrong as far as our knowledge, as such, is able to testify. We are reduced to faith in this connection and must rest on that alone.
“I thought, and so did Schwartz, that the faith of Giestfacher must be peculiar when it could accept copies as good enough and true enough after we had discovered hundreds of palpable and grievous errors in them. A book of romance would do a person of Giestfacher’s temper as well as the Bible—faith being capable of making up for all deficiencies. I saw that an extravagance of credulity, called faith, on the part of Giestfacher, led to monomania; and a predominance of irrational reason on the part of Esch had led to utter negation. I did not covet either condition, and I concluded to remain safe at anchor where I had been before, rather than longer follow those adventurers in a wild career after a fancied good—a mere phantom of their own creation. I lost twenty-five dollars by the temporary madness. That cannot be recalled. I rejoice that I lost no more, and I am grateful that the hallucination which lasted nearly a year has passed away without any permanent injury.”