St. Paul says: Avarice is the root of all evil. We experience such a saying in our shameful, evil time so powerfully as one does not find much of the same in all histories.
For just look at the horrible, terrible nature and evil that avarice drives through the wretched usurer, that even some fine, sensible, brave people are so possessed with this avarice devil and usury devil that they knowingly and with a well-considered mind drive the recognized usury, and thus willingly and with good sense worship the idol Mammon, with great, horrible contempt for divine grace and wrath, and run and walk over it into the hellish fire and damnation seeing and hearing alike.
This same cursed avarice, among all the other evils that it drives, has also set about our work to practice its malice and harm. For after the merciful God has given us His unspeakable grace here in Wittenberg, that we have brought "His" holy Word and the holy Biblia brightly and loudly into the German language, we have (as any reasonable person can well think) done great work (but all by God's grace):
So avarice takes hold, and does to our printers this mischievousness and trickery, that others print soon after, and so the
Robbing us of our work and food for their profit, which is a real, great, public robbery, which God will also punish, and which no honest Christian person would consider good. For my part, I have received it for nothing, I have given it for nothing, and I ask nothing in return. Christ, my Lord, has repaid me a hundred thousand times over.
But I have to complain about the avarice, that the stingy guards and robber reprinters deal unfaithfully with our work. For because they seek only their avarice, they ask little about how rightly or wrongly they print it afterwards. And it has often happened to me that I have read the reprints and found them so falsified that I have not known my own work in many places and have had to improve it again. They make it rips raps; it is money, so [they] nevertheless (if they were otherwise right printers) well know and should have experienced that no diligence can be sufficient for such work as the printing press is, of which give me testimony who has ever tried what diligence belongs to it.
Therefore, if anyone desires to have this newly improved Biblia for himself or for another library, he is hereby faithfully warned by me to see what and where he buys, and to take care of this printing, which is corrected by ours and
*This warning is in the Bible edition of 1545, p. 3a and is missing in Walch. (Erlangen edition.)
hie ausgehet. For I do not intend to live so long that I might run over the books again. Even if I had to live that long, I am now too weak for such work.
And I wish that everyone would consider that no one else is easily as serious about the Biblia as we are here in Wittenberg, as we were the first to be given the grace to bring God's Word back to the day in an unadulterated and well-purified form. We also hope that our descendants will apply the same diligence in their reprinting, since
with our work pure and completely resounding.
And so we have faithfully and abundantly offered and shared it with all Christians without all avarice, benefit and enjoyment (which we can boast of in Christ). And what we have suffered, done, and applied to it, let no one know, for these are the gifts, and He who has wrought these things through us unworthy, wretched, poor instruments 1). To Him alone be glory, praise and thanksgiving forever and ever, amen.
1) In the original: Work tools.