gathered together in secret places to hear them read.[1] The timid and irresolute, alienated from the church, and deterred from frequenting prohibited associations, set up altars of the most unpretentious character within their own houses. Too poor to buy books, and perhaps too ignorant to read them, they sought from the formschneiders and image-makers the emblems they needed as visible symbols of their faith. In this hungering after the instruction or consolation afforded by religious pictures, we see the origin of the block-books. A growing fondness for pictures is a marked peculiarity in the intellectual development of the age. It was not confined to the buyers of printed images: it was manifested in the paintings on the walls and windows of magnificent churches, in the pictorial playing cards then in the hands of all people, gentle and simple, and more than all in the fearful pictures of the Dance of Death upon the walls of convents, in the arcades of burying-grounds, and in market-places and town halls. In these hideous paintings, the saint saw the necessity of preparation for death; the sinner interpreted them as an assertion of the equality of all men and the final punishment of the
- ↑ It is a noteworthy fact that the first complaint of an unauthorized reading of the Bible came from the city where the Bible was first printed. Pope Innocent iii, alarmed at the consequences of this innovation, and writing at the beginning of the thirteenth century, says he had been informed by the bishop of Mentz that:
No small multitude of laymen and women, having procured the translation of the Gospels, Epistles of St. Paul, the Psalter, Job and other books of Scripture to be made for them into French, meet in secret conventicles to hear them read and to preach to each other, and having been reprimanded for this by some of their parish priests, have withstood them, alleging reasons from the Scriptures why they should not be so forbidden. Some of them, too, deride the ignorance of their ministers, and maintain that their own books teach them more than they can learn from the pulpit, and that they can express it better. Although, Innocent proceeds, the desire of reading the Scriptures is rather praiseworthy than reprehensible, yet they are to be blamed for frequenting secret assemblies, for usurping the office of preaching, for deriding their own ministers and for scorning the company of those who do not concur in their novelties. He presses the bishop and chapter to discover the author of this translation, which could not have been made without a knowledge of letters. He wished to know what were his intentions, and what degree of orthodoxy and respect for the holy see those who used it possessed. In another letter Innocent complains that some of the members of this association continued refractory, and refused to obey either the bishop or the pope. Hallam, Middle Ages.
