Weekly journal-miner., 1911-05-03
Editorial Comment
THE BIBLE A SEALED BOOK.

At time when observers generally throughout the country have been forced to admit that the rising gen eratiOn is unacquainted with even the salient facts of Biblical history, and that the Bible is a sealed book to hundreds of thousands of an older growth. it is interesting, if nothing else, to note that the first copy ever printed from mOveable types, has just been sold from the Robert Hoe col lection to Henry F.. Huntington of California.
 He paid $5O,OOO for the work. which is the product of Guttenberg's press-that press the tale of whose conflict with the illuminators is one of the most fascinating of Medieval history. It slowly won the battle and the priceless heritage of litera- ture became the property of all the civilized world. Education became possible for the masses and this great book, slowly printed in cumbersome pages with rough, moveable types, was the first of the millions of sheets that have since come from the press of which the Guttenberg device was the beginning.
 The price of $5O,OOO is none too much for such a rarety. The work IS q monument to the advance of hu man knowledge, and that alone would make it of a value far in excess of what MT. Huntington paid for it. There is in it, too, sentimental in terest, for when this copy was still wet from the press, and its separate sheets were carefully and toilsOmely being sewed together, the only means the world had of knowing the learn ing of the aneients, to build upon such foundation the glories of sci entifie progress of today, was the mis- sals and rolls upon which the faith ful mOnkish copyists spent their days. Today, such missals are as rare, al most, as this Bible. the printing of which sealed their doom as dissemin- ators of knowledge. One of the most graphic pictures the world has of that period is in Charles Reade's "The Cloister and the Hearth, :" where Gerard meets on the road to Italy the pioneers of printing, bound thither, though they did not realize it, to dethrone forever the ancient art of the eopyists.
 And while MT. Huntington buys this rare volume, rich with its as- sOeiatiOns, venerable with age, and sybolieal of the progress of humanity and civilization, the great work there in contained receives less and less at tention. The story of the Patriarehs and the Prophets, the Judges and he Kings of Israel, grows less impressive to the people because it is less known. Children come into the world. grow into manhood and wOmanhood, marry and die, never knowing that beneath the covers of that ancient book are the truths upon which rest most of our knowledge of the ancient world, and that therein lies the story upon which is based the sublime facts which give to our era its name They know nothing.
 Our militant faith demands tLas we shall preach the Gospel in foreign lands, where "the heather in his blindness bows down to wood and stone" but it does seem that here among us, at home. there should be some way to teach our own families and our own people, if not what the Bible means, at least the story that it tells-'' how, in the beginning, the heavens and the earth rose out of chaos" If only as literature, there should be a wider and more intimate knowledge of the Bible, the sublimity of whose description has never been approached by the pen of man.