Luther had never seen a Bible until he was twenty

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Brian Jacques.

I purchased this book probably four or five years ago. It has travelled with me to the beach a couple of times and not been read. It has made it from my library to my bedside several times and resided in the stacks of books to be gotten to. Finally, this past week, I read enough of the first pages for the kindling to catch. What an enjoyable read. New information, new perspectives, artful articulation of familiar thoughts. And I haven't yet finished the first chapter.

Here is Barzun on some of the consequences of the Protestant Reformation with a particular focus on the consequences to reading, communication, and thinking. Page 27. I note the common culture message in the final paragraph and the implications of deep reading in the first.

Another discard: the mumbling in Latin to uncomprehending ears by an absentminded priest. Clear words in everyday language carried the homily, now called sermon. It has shrunk in size over the years, but when it first became the main part of the Evangelical service, and particularly when it celebrated public events, it could last three hours. Well into the 19C the "lesson" expounding a sentence or two from the Bible still needed an hour, and attendance at two services on one day was no uncommon habit. "The English Sunday" came to signify a peculiar division of human time. Lacking relics and images, Protestants go to church only for services (children for Sunday school), instead of at any hour of the day for prayer or recollection, as Catholics still do.

The Evangelicals made the sacraments less awesome. No rites for the dying, and the others ceremonial rather than magical. Communion—earlier, the Eucharist—was celebrated less often than the Mass had been; Luther thought four times a year was enough; and it could no longer help the dead or relatives and friends. Other emancipations: a Protestant could marry a first cousin and, if really "advanced," could refuse to take oaths or serve as magistrate.

The change of greatest consequence, a cultural step comparable to Mohammed's gift of the Koran to his people, was making the new life find its mental and spiritual food in the Bible. Luther had never seen a Bible until he was twenty. His very thorough religious education had been based on a selection from the church Fathers. But more than one thinker before him had wanted to bring the word of God to the people and a dozen translations into the common tongues had been made. Once again, it was Luther who compounded these efforts and made the Bible The Book for all Protestants (bible means book) and even forced it into the Catholic consciousness.

The results for Protestants were remarkable. To start with, it gave whole populations a common background of knowledge, a common culture in the high sense of the term. A 19C incident makes the point vivid: when Coleridge was lecturing in London on the great English writers, he happened to mention Dr. Johnson's finding on his way home one night a woman of the streets ill or drunk in a gutter. Johnson carried her on his broad back to his own poor lodging for food and shelter. Coleridge's fashionable audience tittered and murmured, the men sneering, the women shocked. Coleridge paused and said: "I remind you of the parable of the Good Samaritan" and all were hushed. No amount of moralizing could have done the work of rebuke and edification with such speed and finality.