706, Psalms, French (Polyglot). Paris, 1509.
725, Bible, French. Paris, Petit, 1520.
The language of Sir Thomas More leads us to believe that some one of the Catholic versions of the New Testament at least was printed; but if so, the copies were suppressed so completely that none has reached our times. The mere fact that no copy is now known does not prove that none ever existed, when we consider the wholesale destruction by law of all Catholic books of devotion.
These are not all the vernacular Bibles issued in that period, but, as they stood there in the South Kensington Loan Collection, they furnished an irrefragable proof that printing originated in Catholic times; that the church was the first to use and encourage it; that she multiplied editions of the Bible in Latin, the habitual language of the church, then the language of learning and science, as well as in German, Italian, Dutch, French, and Bohemian; she printed, too, as a copy here showed, the Bible, Pentateuch, and Psalms in Hebrew, the Bible and Psalter in Greek and Chaldee, and an Arabic Psalter. (See 682, 691, 706, 711, 718, 720, 721.) Catholic writers have frequently referred to these early-printed Bibles and portions of Scripture in the vernacular; but to cite Panzer or some other bibliographer is far different from referring to a copy of the book. Here in the Caxton collection the very volumes stood to speak for themselves, and the catalogue attests the fact that they were there, tells us who owns each copy, its condition and state. What as a Catholic argument seemed vague and hazy thus took solid form, and became too substantial to doubt.
Now, how does Mr. Stevens endeavor to elude the force of this array of solid proofs? It is absolutely comical to see to what straits he is put. The following platitude, false statement, and false deduction is about as curious as the Caxton celebration itself:
“As the discovery of America was the greatest of all discoveries, so the invention of the art of printing may be called the greatest of all inventions. But no sooner had Columbus reported his grand discovery through the press than the pope assumed the whole property in the unknown parts of the earth, and divided it (sic) all at once between the two little powers in the Peninsula, wholly disregarding the rights and titles of the other nations of Europe. The same little game of assumption has been tried, from time to time, with regard to this great invention, but the press has a protective power within itself which the church can smother only with ignorance and mental darkness.”
The figures are somewhat confused, and we cannot exactly picture to our minds the church, with the two pillows of ignorance and mental darkness which Mr. Stevens can doubtless supply from his well-furnished store, trying to smother a protective power. The smothering of the children in the Tower was nothing compared to it. As for the “little game of assumption,” we think the gentlemen of the Reformation have played it long and successfully. But we admit that we do not see what right and title the nations of Europe had in the unknown parts of the earth, or whence they derived any right and title. So far as we have read, no right or title was claimed except when based on discovery, and then it was in the known and not in the unknown. Spain and Portugal carried their rival claims to the Holy See as a recognized tribunal, and the line of demarkation in their attempts at exploration was a wise and peace-establishing provision. It did not operate, and was not intended, to exclude the subjects of the pope, France, Germany, Denmark, or England from exploring.
The whole question is foreign to the subject of printing—so foreign that none of the Columbus letters, or the bull of Alexander VI., was thought worth obtaining for the Caxton exhibition. We have looked carefully through the catalogue, and, if they are there, they have certainly escaped us.
The array of books presented here shows that Luther could not have received the education he really did in his monastery, making him conversant with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, without being aware of the existence in print of many of the more than a thousand editions in all languages that had already issued from the press. It is not pretended that Luther obtained his knowledge of languages by a miraculous gift; he acquired them in the monastic schools, and his attainments are a proof of the extent of their curriculum.
One of the great objects of the exhibition was to show the earliest English Protestant editions. Tyndale’s New Testament, supposed to have been printed at Worms by Peter Schöffer in 1526, was represented by the very imperfect copy owned by the dean and chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and by the Antwerp edition of 1534; by the London edition of 1536, which had also at the end the “Epystles taken out of the Olde Testament what are red in the church after the use of Salsburye upon certen dayes of the year.”