Our Belief in Books by Agnes Repplier — Read

What pleasantness of teaching there is in books, -- how easy, how secret! How safely we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to books, without feeling any shame! They are masters who instruct us without rod or ferule, without angry words, without clothes or money. If you come to them, they are not asleep; if you ask and inquire of them, they do not withdraw themselves; they do not chide if you make mistakes; they do not laugh at you if you are ignorant. O books, who alone are liberal and free, who give to all who ask of you, and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully. -- RICHARD DE BURY, Bishop of Durham, A. D. 1459.

Enough has been written in praise of books to fill a library. It is not always so eloquently worded as is the Bishop of Durham's benediction; but the same general truths -- or fallacies -- are repeated with more or less pride and persuasiveness. At the same time, a lesser library might be compiled of the warnings uttered by the anxious ones who hold that the power of books is more potent than benign, and that if one half of the world's readers are being led gloriously to high and noble truths, the other half is being vitiated by an influence which makes for paltriness and degradation. Under all circumstances, we are asked to believe that we are dominated by the printed page. It is this conviction which induces so much of austerity -- not to say of censoriousness -- in our counsellors, whose upbraidings are but the echoes of those sterner protests with which church and state were wont in earlier days to direct the reading courses of the public. That books have always been deemed formidable antagonists is proven by their frequent condemnation. The fires that were kindled for sorcerers and for heretics flamed just as fiercely for the stubborn volumes which passed the border-land of orthodoxy. Calvin burned all the pamphlets and manuscripts of Servetus at the same time that he burned their author; in consequence of which thoroughness, "Christianismi Restitutio" is said to be one of the rarest dissertations in the world.