/lit/ - Literature

>>23274210
>>23274180
I didn't say anything about the Gutenberg Bible (which was in Latin) and yet you're bringing it up anyway; and of course no one claimed the printing press itself as some uniquely Protestant invention. When will internet Catholics get tired of acting dense? The world won't end if you recognize the role Martin Luther, with his translation of the Bible into German, his calculated exploitation of the printing press in spreading his treatises and pamphlets, and the rallying cry he sent forth to all Christians to read the Bible themselves and self-educate, played in the spread of literacy throughout Europe. Even further, he condemned the idiots who would pull their children out of school and refuse to teach them anything more than arithmetic and German.
>How do you think you will stand then? You will not be tainted by little drops of sin, but inundated by whole cloudbursts of it – you who now give no heed but just go nonchalantly along as if you were doing well in keeping your child from an education. But then you will have to say that you are justly condemned to the abyss of hell as one of the most odious and vile men who ever lived. Indeed, if you were to consider these things even now, while you are living, you would be truly horrified at yourself. For no conscience can bear to be found guilty of even one of the things that have been mentioned; how much less can it bear it if suddenly all these things, more than can be numbered, fall on it all at once? Your heart will then have to cry out that your sins are more than the leaves and the grass, indeed, greater than heaven and earth; and you will say with Manasseh, king of Judah, “The sins I have committed are more in number than the sands of the sea; my transgressions are multiplied” [Pr. of Man. 9]. Even the law of nature tells you that he who is able to prevent injury but does not do so is guilty of the injury because he certainly desired and willed it and would have inflicted it himself if he had had occasion or opportunity. These people, therefore, are certainly no better than the devil himself because they are so angry with both God and the world that they help to ruin both heaven and earth, and serve the devil faithfully. In a word, if we cannot adequately denounce the devil, neither can we adequately denounce these people who hinder the work and office of God, for they are the devil’s servants.
But I'm sure, since this is /lit/, everyone will just take it for granted that they'd have been literate regardless of the age they were born in, regardless of circumstances — wait, but of course everyone would have been an aristocrat (in the Evolian tradition).