Chapter II: The Importance of the Printing Press

The printing-press, in many essential respects, is the most significant invention of all human history. It has touched and vitalized civilizations, countries, nations, languages, and dialects. As an invention it has contributed immeasurably to the currency and the perpetuity of all literature. It also sounded the doom of the written book. Hallam, the Historian of the Middle Ages, says: "Since the invention of printing the absolute extinction of any considerable work seems a danger too improbable for apprehension. The press pours forth in a few days a thousand volumes, which, scattered like seeds in the air over the Republic of Europe, could hardly be destroyed without the extirpation of its inhabitants." And, concerning the exposure to which the manuscript production of all previous history was subjected, he says: "In the times of antiquity manuscripts were copied with cost, labor, and delay; and if the diffusion of knowledge be measured by the multiplication of books (no unfair standard) the most golden ages of ancient learning could never bear the least comparison with the last three centuries. The destruction of a few libraries by accidental fire, the desolation of a few provinces by unsparing and illiterate barbarians, might annihilate every vestige of an author, or leave a few scattered copies, which, from the public indifference there was no inducement to multiply, exposed to similar casualties in succeeding times."[3] In a word, printing has the double advantage over writing of a more rapid multiplication of copies and their increased accuracy. But even with the increased accuracy of printing, few books of considerable size are issued in which errors are not to be found. It is said to be the fact that, after incredible care on the part of editors and professional proofreaders, the offered reward of a guinea for each detected error in the Oxford Revised Version of the Bible brought several errors to light. (International Stand. Bib. Encyclopedia.)

The invention of printing, through its associated process of proof corrections, has virtually exempted books from the mundane laws of decay and has greatly aided as well in their preservation and their widest circulation. This invention has made definite and immutable the records of the world since then and it has contributed also to the purification and renewal of the more ancient literary productions. Printing as an invention has given to an edition of a particular work a measure of importance hundreds or thousands of times greater in every respect save one, viz., the labor of transcription, than that which had previously attached to the production of a single book. The invention has therefore involved and necessitated a proportionately larger consideration in the making of a printed book, lest defects and errors in the type-plates from which the book is printed should become permanently fixed in a thousand or ten thousand impressions therefrom. (Isaac Taylor.) And it was printing that made uniformity of text possible. Guizot estimates the importance of this invention thus: "From 1436 to 1452, printing was invented:--printing, the theme of so much declamation, and so many commonplaces, but the merit and the effect of which no commonplace nor any declamation can ever exhaust."

The invention of printing has peculiar significance within the realm of religious life and knowledge; for, in relation to the scripture text, to the spread of religious intelligence and the progress of Christianity, and to the growth and stabilization of the individual character,--in a word, in relation to Redemption itself, who can apprehend, much less measure, the significance of this invention? Truly, the Bible which _en_folds the basis of our faith as the bud does the blossom and the fruit, as well as _un_folds the way of life as the guide-post directs the traveler on his journey, has come into the world for man, and has come to stay. For the great discoveries and inventions, in wide areas of human investigation, but brighten its pages and multiply its capacity to fulfill the purposes of God on the earth.