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This discovery threw Harry Plantinga into a state of spiritual questioning: How could God do this to them?

In the course of his spiritual anguish, Plantinga discovered an electronic copy of Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ on the Internet. He saved this e-book to his laptop and took it with him for private devotion and reflection away from the distractions of his office.

"I found [the Imitation] to be wonderfully deep and sincere and challenging to the point of making me angry at times. It helped me a great deal," Plantinga wrote. "And I had found it on the Internet! I hadn't even heard of this book before, having no interest in dusty old theological books, but there it was, freely downloadable on the Internet."

That was the start of his vision for getting to know "dusty old theological books" better and to share them freely with others over the Net. That vision begin in 1993, and 12 years later, he is well past the half-way point in reaching his original vision of scanning, coding, and posting 1000 such works.

In a recent telephone conversation, I asked Plantinga which books of the many available on CCEL have meant the most to him. Without hesitation, he said that in addition to the Imitation of Christ, his top books were "Augustine's Confessions, the Revelations [of Divine Love] of Julian of Norwich, and the Theologia Germanica," an anonymous document that heavily influenced Martin Luther.

The current database draws about 500,000 hits per day from around 600,000 unique visitors per month. Many of these live outside the United States and have little access to theological libraries. Others are like me: I find it easier to use the searchable text of online databases than to drive a mile-and-a-half to the library at Wheaton College, or even to use the hard copies I own of some of these books. Since many of the works are coded as e-books for the Palm platform, I can carry them on my personal digital assistant.

According to Plantinga, the CCEL collection is heavily used by college and university teachers who want to assign classic spiritual reading without adding to their students' already hefty textbook bills. The other main users seem to be people preparing sermons or Bible studies and those who simply want to read for edification.

The CCEL Community
In closing, four updates:

First, Plantinga's next project is to enhance the site by adding community or multi-user capabilities to the library. These features will allow users to post comments and engage in multi-user discussions related to texts. In addition, he wants to add translations of key works in other languages. An unnamed benefactor has made a generous grant to make this possible.

Second, the site is in need of a technical upgrade. A message on CCEL's home page says colorfully, "Uuuunghx … The server is feeling rather sick. The CCEL will likely continue to be up and down until it is replaced, to the tune of $3208." Currently, Plantinga has raised $1273 toward that new server. (Scroll to the bottom of CCEL's home page for information on how to help.)

Third, Plantinga is weary. "I'm tired," he told me. "It was a labor of love. Now it's just a labor. And I still put a lot of time into it. It's not as easy as it was then." Fortunately, there have been volunteers. "Hundreds of people have contributed tens of thousands of volunteer hours in scanning, coding, and marking up text. One person has scanned and marked-up more than 100 volumes," he told me.

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May (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49