The Story of Liberty. Charles Carleton Coffin
angels sung above the pastures of Bethlehem. And this:
"We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory." It is the Gloria in Excelsis.
The smoke blinds him, the flames are circling above his head. Yet the voice goes on:
"Thou that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on me."
The flames wrap him round, his head falls upon his breast. The fire does its work, and a heap of ashes is all that remains. The executioner gathers them up, and casts them into the river. The winds and waves bear them away. The particles sink to the bottom, or are wafted on to the great falls at Schaffhausen, where the water foams over the granite ledges, and from thence are borne down the Rhine to the sea, as Wicklif s dust was borne on the current of the Avon and Severn to the ocean.
The priests and bishops and Pope have got rid of John Huss. Have they? By no means. It is only the beginning of their troubles with him, for the people of Bohemia resent his death. It is the beginning of a terrible war, which lasts many years, and drenches the land with blood.
The cardinals and archbishops do not forget that the man whom they have burned to death was made a heretic through reading Doctor Wicklifs books. The doctor has been dead a long while, so they cannot burn him, but it will be some satisfaction to let the world know what they would do to the doctor if he were only in the flesh, and they issue an order to dig up the bones and burn them. We have seen how it was done.
Through the monks have burned John Huss and the bones of Doctor Wicklif, they have not put a stop to their preaching. Do words spoken in behalf of truth, justice,and liberty ever die? We shall see by-and-by, after a hundred years have rolled away, how a poor boy — so poor that he will wander through the streets and sing for his breakfast, which the kind-hearted people will give him — how he will hear Doctor Wicklif and John Huss speaking to him across the centuries. We shall see what a mighty work he will do for truth and liberty.
CHAPTER IV
WHAT LAURENCE COSTER AND JOHN GUTTENBERG DID FOR LIBERTY
LAURENCE COSTER is a Dutchman, and lives in the old town of Haerlem, in the land of the windmills, where the people have built great dikes enclosing portions of the Zuyder-Zee, set the windmills to pumping out the water, and laid out the lands into farms. The whole country is interested with canals, where the boats come and go, bringing cabbages, cheeses, hay, and wood to market. The Dutchmen are very industrious. The boys and girls, as well as the men and women, work in the fields and gardens, or tug at the canal-boats. They harness their dogs into teams, and make them tug at the ropes.
Haerlem is a sleepy old town. The boats lie at the quays, and now and then a cart rumbles along the streets. The housewives nib and scrub their pots and pans in the canals before the doors. They keep their houses neat and clean, and wash the pavements every morning.
Laurence Coster lives in Haerlem with his family. He resolves to have a day with them in the country. He goes out on one of the canal-boats with the children, and sits beneath the trees, to hear the birds sing and to breathe the fresh air; and while the children are playing he canes their names in the bark of the trees with his knife! An idea comes to him, and this is what he says to himself:
"I might carve the letters of the alphabet, each letter on a separate block, ink them over, and then I could stamp any word in the language."
This is in 1433. He goes home, prepares his blocks, carves the letters, ties them up with strings, and prints a pamphlet. Up to this time all the books in the world have been written with a pen on parchment. How slow! Men have spent a lifetime in writing one book, beginning when they were young, working till they were old, and dying with their work unfinished. The Egyptians and Chinese, hundreds of years ago, carved letters on blocks and printed from the blocks; but this Dutchman of Haerlem is the first one to tie letters into words, and print from them. Laurence Coster succeeds so well that he employs John Guttenberg, a young man from Mentz, to help him. Laurence keeps his secret well. The people see pamphlets for sale; little do they imagine, however, that they were not written with a pen.
Coster dies, but his secret does not die with him. The apprentice, John Guttenberg, is not a boy to forget what he has been doing. He goes up the Rhine. We may think of him as being on a boat that slowly makes its way up the stream, past the old towns and castles. Rheinstein, with its battlements and towers and strongholds, secure from all attacks, looms far above the stream. He gazes upon the vineyards, sloping from the river up the steep hill-sides. In the autumn the peasants gather the purpling grapes, and sing their songs as they bear the baskets to the wine-press. He comes to Bingen, where the little old church with bells in its steeple looks down upon the peaceful river; but, not stopping there, he passes on to Strasburg, whose cathedral spire rises almost to the clouds, as it were. In that old city John Guttenberg begins to set up type on his own account. He thinks night and day, turning over a perplexing question. Wood wears out, and the types will not bear the pressure of the printing-press. They must be of metal. How shall he make them? To cut each type separately by hand is too expensive and too slow a process. He must make a mould and cast them, and, of course, must have a mould for each letter. That is expensive; but once getting the moulds, he can cast thousands of types. Of what material shall they be cast? Lead is too soft. He must experiment with different metals. Very soon his money is gone. He would like to keep his secret and his plans to himself, but that he cannot do. He must have money. There is a rich man in Strasburg — John Faust, a goldsmith, who knows about metals. He will go to him. The goldsmith sees the value of the invention, and supplies John with money, and the printer goes on engraving the letters for his moulds, experimenting with metals, meeting difficulties at every step, taking so much of John Faust's money that the goldsmith begins to think that he never will see it again. But perseverance surmounts all difficulties. One day Guttenberg shows the goldsmith his first proof. There it is — each letter as perfect as if done by a pen. It is in 1450 that they begin to print their first book, in an out-of-the-way chamber, where no one will be likely to find out what they are about.
Sixty-six years have passed since Doctor Wicklif died, and twenty-five since the monks dug up his bones. There is not much more liberty now than there was when he was alive, for kings do pretty much as they please, and the people are taxed as heavily as ever.
Charles VII. is King of France. He is a suspicious man. He is afraid that somebody will put poison in his food, and so makes his servants taste of it before touching it himself, and he eats so little that he will die of starvation by-and-by. One day a traveller, who has a valuable book which he would like to sell to the king, comes to the royal palace. It is the Bible on vellum, and contains six hundred and seven leaves. It is such a beautiful book that the king buys it, and pays seven hundred and fifty crowns for it. The man takes his money and goes away; the king puts the book in the royal library, and is greatly delighted to know that he has such a magnificent copy.
A traveller knocks at the archbishop's palace with a book which he would like to show his lordship — a beautiful copy of the Bible. The archbishop