The Publishing of the Scriptures

We didn't have Doctrine and Covenants this past week because 1)there was a holiday and 2)he gave us a day to visit the Crandall Printing Museum. I didn't visit the museum because I already had for his class last year. It is extremely interesting and I encourage anyone who can to go and check it out. They take you through the history of the printing press, beginning with the Gutenberg press, up until the present time. I had never realized how detailed a process it was to create the printing press in the begining--what with the casting of the letters and getting them to face the correct direction, the consistency of the ink, and the organization of the letters into pages, etc. Having grown up with printers hooked into computers I never appreciated the process of printing before. Aside from the invention of the printing press in all its complexity, it also never occured to me how perfectly everything worked out for the printing of the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine of Covenants. The church was lucky to have access to a printing press in the the places where it was needed in order to bring forth the scriptures. Because of the invention of the printing press, people all over the world have been able to read the words of the prophets, old and new. It made access to the scriptures affordable to the common person. Without it, the gospel would not have spread as it has and there would be people all over the world who would not have the joys associated with reading the scriptures.