Artillery of Heaven

Artillery of Heaven names the book’s image of knowledge and communication as weapons in a providential struggle: inventions and practical skills become the means by which Scripture is carried to readers and the claims of the gospel reach further. The metaphor turns technologies of making, copying, understanding, and distributing texts into a coordinated arsenal, whose significance lies not in warfare itself but in the religious purpose the author assigns to it.

The Image and Its Purpose

The image first gathers paper and printing into a single sequence. The author describes the inventions as agents that bring the means of Scripture’s diffusion to the place of conflict, casting the resurgent light of divine truth as something conveyed into battle. Paper makes books more attainable; printing multiplies them. Together, the arts prepare the material ground on which, in the book’s interpretation, the gospel can circulate widely and oppose the power of Babylon.

This martial language is part of a broader account of Providence. The argument is not simply that useful technologies happen to benefit religious readers: their timing and effects are presented as signs that God governs human invention toward the good of the Church. Skill, machinery, and means of communication can serve that purpose even when the people who develop or use them do not intend it. The artillery metaphor gives that historical claim a concentrated form: inventions become equipment in a struggle whose outcome the author understands theologically.

Paper, Printing, and the Reformation

Paper is presented as a necessary precondition for wider access to books. The author places its invention in the eleventh century and contrasts it with an earlier world in which writing materials were scarce and costly. After communication with Egypt was interrupted following the Saracen conquest in the seventh century, papyrus could no longer be obtained in Europe, leaving parchment as the material for books. Manuscripts could be so expensive that private ownership was uncommon; the author cites a countess who paid two hundred sheep, grain, and other produce for a copy of sermons. Such scarcity, he argues, made the spread of Scripture among ordinary people impracticable.

Printing supplies what inexpensive materials alone cannot: books that can be reproduced without each copy being written by hand. The account places the invention of printing in Germany or Flanders around 1420, followed about thirty years later by the development of movable type. Within less than a century, the art had reached a high degree of refinement in France. The author emphasizes the resulting change in scale: a Bible that once required the expense of building an ordinary country church to copy could become available in many households. The later improvement of stereotyping is treated as a further reduction in cost, especially apt, in the author’s view, to the era of Bible societies.

The timing makes the metaphor explicitly historical. Paper is described as the harbinger of a revival of learning; printing, perfected in the century before 1517, becomes the harbinger of The Reformation. In the author’s account, printing carries the renewed light of Scripture into the conflict with religious error. Its military force is thus both figurative and material: it multiplies texts, while those texts furnish the means by which readers can encounter and defend the claims of the Bible.

Learning as an Arsenal

The image extends beyond printing to the revival of learning. The author argues that Europe’s recovery of scholarship before the beginning of the sixteenth century equipped readers to examine religious claims and contend with superstition. He presents the date as providentially significant: had the ignorance associated with earlier centuries continued, the efforts of Martin Luther would have been fruitless. Learning becomes a train of artillery directed against the walls of the antichristian city, and continuing human improvements to that intellectual equipment are expected to persist for as long as Babylon remains standing.

The artillery is not only the printed volume but also the ability to read, interpret, and communicate its meaning. The book recalls how widespread illiteracy had been, including among people of high rank and members of the clergy, and contrasts that condition with efforts to educate the population. It also treats alphabetical writing as a providentially useful means of preserving revelation and transmitting explanations of it. Through writing, Christians can teach, correct, and encourage one another across great distances; interpretations can circulate, errors can be challenged, and shared understanding can deepen. These communicative powers, the author acknowledges, can spread error as well, but he argues that the contest over interpretation can also sharpen believers’ understanding of Scripture.

Roads, Ships, and the Reach of the Image

The metaphor ultimately includes the systems that move books through the world. Commerce supplies ships and trained sailors that missionary or Bible societies could not readily provide on their own. In the author’s account, commercial vessels carry Bibles with little or no additional expense, while commercial intercourse helps convey Scripture into the interior of countries. Roads, mail coaches, canals, and improvements in navigation belong to the same providential apparatus because they make communication faster and wider.

Steamships and railroads are accordingly described as carrying the ordnance of Heaven to the field of battle. This extends the image from the production of books to their distribution: print is the weapon only insofar as routes and transport can put it within reach. The metaphor binds together technologies that arose for different purposes, interpreting their combined effects as instruments for spreading the gospel. Across paper, printing, scholarship, literacy, commerce, and transport, Artillery of Heaven expresses the book’s central claim that ordinary human arts and infrastructures can become means of a religious history whose direction, the author contends, is governed by God.