There are nations in which thought is considered merely as an article of commerce, the operations of the human understanding being valued only at so much per sheet. If the bookseller happens to desire a privilege for his merchandise whether he is selling "Rabelais," or the "Fathers of the Church," the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book.
In another country the liberty of explaining yourself by books is one of the most inviolable prerogatives. There you may print whatever you please, on pain of being tiresome, and of being punished if you have too much abused your natural right.
Before the admirable invention of printing, books were scarcer and dearer than jewels. There were scarcely any books in our barbarous nations, either before Charlemagne or after him, until the time of Charles V., king of France, called the Wise, and from this time to Francis I. the scarcity was extreme. The Arabs alone had them from the eighth to the thirteenth century of our era. China was full of them when we could neither read nor write.
Copyists were much employed in the Roman Empire from the time of the Scipios until the irruption of the barbarians. This was a very ungrateful employment. The dealers always paid authors and copyists very ill. It required two years of assiduous labor for a copyist to transcribe the whole Bible well on vellum, and what time and trouble to copy correctly in Greek and Latin the works of Origen, Clement of Alexandria and all the others writers called Fathers!
St. Hieronymos, or Hieronymus, whom we call Jerome, says, in one of his satirical letters against Rufinus that he has ruined himself with buying the works of Origen, against whom he wrote with so much bitterness and violence. "Yes," says he, "I have read Origen, if it be a crime I confess that I am guilty and that I exhausted my purse in buying his works at Alexandria."
The Christian societies of the three first centuries had fifty-four gospels, of which, until Diocletian's time scarcely two or three copies found their way among the Romans of the old religion.
Among the Christians it was an unpardonable crime to show the gospels to the Gentiles; they did not even lend them to the catechumens.