Bloomington Herald

PRINTING,

Go into one of our city printing offices, from which is daily leaping forth the bright impress of the editorial mind in characters that shall never fade or die—Behold the swift winged Mercuries of the press visiting every Temple of Science, every edifice from which knowledge can impart its stores, gathering it together, and sending it forth anon to thousands of minds, in each of which it is immortal.—There is more to astonish the mind itself, much more, in one of these printing offices, than in the Catacombs of Egypt, the sable Magi of the East, the Sages of Antiquity, or the hidden oracles of Delphi—these morning and these evening sheets, going abroad into the world assimilating mind with mind, and making the neighbor of his fellow man, in spite of distance, mountains and intervening seas. Here, then, in the "art preservative of all arts," do we find the germ, the elements, the living material of earthly history, and the triumph of mind over matter.

God was the first printer! He gave from his awful hand, amid the blackness of Sinai, the Tablets of Stone, on which was printed the mind of God! The decalogue of all moral law, the claims of man upon man and God upon all.

Printing! the art that shall hand down to latest years, to remotest posterity, to innumerable millions, yet unborn of God, the thoughts of men who are living now; of men who lived centuries since; they defy time, and the printed transcripts of these men shall live, too full of soul to be put into the same grave with their perishable bodies. It was a bright thought of that author who, in his dying moments, was just able to ask if the proofs of his last work were corrected—'all corrected?'

Yes, all. Then I shall have a complete edition in glory.—Rev. J. N. Maffit.