§ I.

You despise books; you, whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence, but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books. All Africa, to the limits of Ethiopia and Nigritia obeys the book of the Koran after bowing to the book of the Gospel. China is ruled by the moral book of Confucius, and a great part of India by the Veda. Persia was governed for ages by the books of one of the Zoroasters.

In a lawsuit or criminal process, your property, your honor, perhaps your life, depends on the interpretation of a book which you never read. It is, however, with books as with men, a very small number play a great part, the rest are confounded with the multitude.

By whom are mankind led in all civilized countries? By those who can read and write. You are acquainted with neither Hippocrates, nor Boerhaave, nor Sydenham, but you place your body in the hands of those who can read them. You leave your soul entirely to the care of those who are paid for reading the Bible, although there are not fifty of them who have read it through with attention.

The world is now so entirely governed by books that they who command in the city of the Scipios and the Catos have resolved that the books of their law shall be for themselves alone; they are their sceptre, which they have made it high treason in their subjects to touch without an express permission. In other countries it has been forbidden to think in print without letters-patent.

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.

When Lucian (insulting our religion of which he knew very little) relates that “a troop of beggars took him up into a fourth story where they were invoking the Father through the Son, and foretelling misfortunes to the emperor and the empire,” he does not say that they showed him a single book. No Roman historian, no Roman author whomsoever makes mention of the gospels.

When a Christian, who was unfortunately rash and unworthy of his holy religion had publicly torn in pieces and trampled under foot an edict of the Emperor Diocletian, and had thus drawn down upon Christianity that persecution which succeeded the greatest toleration, the Christians were then obliged to give up their gospels and written authors to the magistrates, which before then had never been done. Those who gave up their books through fear of imprisonment, or even of death, were held by the rest of the Christians to be sacrilegious apostates, they received the surname of traditores, whence we have the word “traitor,” and several bishops asserted that they should be rebaptized, which occasioned a dreadful schism.

The poems of Homer were long so little known that Pisistratus was the first who put them in order and had them transcribed at Athens about five hundred years before the Christian era.

Perhaps there was not at this time in all the East a dozen copies of the Veda and the Zend-Avesta.

In 1700 you would not have found a single book in all Rome, excepting the missals and a few Bibles in the hands of papas drunk with brandy.

The complaint now is of their too great abundance. But it is not for readers to complain, the remedy is in their own hands; nothing forces them to read. Nor for authors, they who make the multitude of books have not to complain of being pressed. Notwithstanding this enormous quantity how few people read! But if they read, and read with advantage, should we have to witness the deplorable infatuations to which the vulgar are still every day a prey?

The reason that books are multiplied in spite of the general law that beings shall not be multiplied without necessity, is that books are made from books. A new history of France or Spain is manufactured from several volumes already printed, without adding anything new. All dictionaries are made from dictionaries; almost all new geographical books are made from other books of geography; St. Thomas’s Dream has brought forth two thousand large volumes of divinity, and the same race of little worms that have devoured the parent are now gnawing the children.

écrive qui voudra, chacun a son métier

Peut perdre impunément de l’encre et du papier.

Write, write away; each writer at his pleasure

May squander ink and paper without measure.
§ II.

It is sometimes very dangerous to make a book. Silhouète, before he could suspect that he should one day be comptroller-general of the finances, published a translation of Warburton’s “Alliance of Church and State,” and his father-in-law, Astuce the physician, gave to the public the “Memoirs,” in which the author of the Pentateuch might have found all the astonishing things which happened so long before his time.

The very day that Silhouète came into office, some good friend of his sought out a copy of each of these books by the father-in-law and son-in-law, in order to denounce them to the parliament and have them condemned to the flames, according to custom. They immediately bought up all the copies in the kingdom, whence it is that they are now extremely rare.

There is hardly a single philosophical or theological book in which heresies and impieties may not be found by misinterpreting, or adding to, or subtracting from, the sense.

Theodore of Mopsuestes ventured to call the “Canticle of Canticles,” “a collection of impurities.” Grotius pulls it in pieces and represents it as horrid, and Chatillon speaks of it as “a scandalous production.”

Perhaps it will hardly be believed that Dr. Tamponet one day said to several others: “I would engage to find a multitude of heresies in the Lord’s Prayer if this prayer, which we know to have come from the Divine mouth, were now for the first time published by a Jesuit.”

I would proceed thus: “Our Father, who art in heaven —” a proposition inclining to heresy, since God is everywhere. Nay, we find in this expression the leaven of Socinianism, for here is nothing at all said of the Trinity.

“Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven —” another proposition tainted with heresy, for it said again and again in the Scriptures that God reigns eternally. Moreover it is very rash to ask that His will may be done, since nothing is or can be done but by the will of God.

“Give us this day our daily bread —” a proposition directly contrary to what Jesus Christ uttered on another occasion: “Take no thought............