The Indianapolis journal., 1903-03-29
THE SALES OF THE BIBLE
IN A DAY OF PHENOMENAL CIRCULA-
TIONs THIS HAS THE LARGEST.
1t Is Printed I'm All Tongues and
Goes All Over the World-Its Cir
culation Extending.

London Mail.
OF all the books that season by season
are poured out from the teeming presses of
the world to feed the voracious appetite of
the reading public, about one out of three
survives three years term of life. OF all
the books that have ever created a record
boom" few have reached a sale beyond
10000 copies. and that is enough to make
any publisher gasp with kind of unholy
joy. of a poor man who suddenly finds
himself In the presence of a gold mine.
Yet there is Cle book whose sales are re-
corded in figures which are almost greater
than the average human mind can grasp
without mental dizziness, which has cir
culated not by the ordinary thirteen to the
dozen, not by hundreds, not by thousands,
not by millions, but by hundreds of mill
lions, a book so popular that 1T is read in
the palace, in the manor, In the villa. in
the cottage, in the hovel. in the prison;
book so fascinating that men have given
their lives as the price of single copy, and
are giving their lives to sell copies to others
who have not yet read it.
1t is a book of no local interest, but 1t so
stirs the heart, whether II beat beneath
white black or yellow skin, that 1t
has been translated not only into every Eu-
ropean language, not only into the chief
families of languages spoken by the great
races of the East and West, but into
strange barbaric tongues which have never
before been crystallized into written shape,
into dialects spoken in the bush and in the
jungle, in the torrid zones and in the Arctic
regions.
A century ago 'about three hundred re-
spectacle persons of different denomina-
tons assembled in the old London Tavern
in Bishopsgate. Although the country at
that time was in a panic and arming itself
to the teeth at the prospect of a great
French invasion, these respectable per-
sons" were busy with work of peace. On
that day the British and Foreign Bible
Society came into existence. Granville
Sharp was in the chair, William Wilber-
force was the orator. and Zachary Macau-
brothers in arms who were to win the
greatest victory of peace in the annals of
our Countrywide emancipation of the slave
and who were equally Jealous in this
work of faith
IN THE WELSH LANGUAGE.
The first task of the Bible Society was
to issue a large edition of the Scriptures
in Welsh so that the Welsh people who
had hardly been able to obtain them in
their own tongue might now have the priv
ilege for which many pious people had long
yearned. An eyewitness has described the
reception of these Welsh New Testaments
when completed in the town of Bala
when the arrival of the cart which carried
the first load was announced the Welsh
peasants went out in crowds to meet it.
welcomed it as the Israelites did the ark
of old, drew it into the town. and eagerly
bore on every copy as rapidly as they
could be dispersed"
During the first years work of the Bible
Society they spent e69l and thought they
had done great thing. So they had, but
they were to do more. Last year they
spent G24l,143, and since the foundation of
the society they have expended 913,OO0 900.
Those are large figures, but when trans
lated into numbers of books they are bigger
still. The society last year issued over
100000 copies of the Scriptures, and since
Its commencement a total of 10000 600.
Think of it! Ponder over it! One hundred
and eighty millions! Seven thousand vol
umes sent out from London every day
of the week. through every week of the
year. The output from all the society
depots, including London, averages 10, ,0O0
copies per day. Pile up the issues of one
day and they would reach higher than the
cross on st. Pauls.
go? Who buys them? Who reads them
| Who pays for them? The answers to these
| questions are a chapter of modern romance
To know where they go, pay visit to the
| packing rooms of the society's depot on
| Queen Victoria street. 1t is a lesson i'm
| geography. The oblong wooden boxes lined
| and strongly bound with tin, are labeled
| with names of places ''over the hills and
| far away"-names which conjure up the
| glamour of the East names which bring
| faiths, names which call up visions of hor-
| rid bloodshed and dark fanaticism, names
| of the new world and the old, of the East
and of the West, of the civilized world and
| of savage lands.
A BABEL OF TONGUES.
| Look inside the covers of these books.
What babel of tongues is here! What
| strange and unfamiliar characters! Here
are pages that read from right to left,
from the last line upwards to the first.
from the top straight down in vertical col
umns. Here are sixty different alphabets
and two hundred different languages.
These little books. penny Testaments and
| tenpenny Bibles. represent the work OF
| hundreds of scholars and hundreds of mis-
| sionaries and hundreds of natives who
| throughout the course of a century. in the
/ service of the Bible Society and with tbe
| zeal of faith, have translated with painfuI
| labor the long tale of the Scriptures.
| And how are these books circulated how
| paid for? AS a rule Scriptures are granted
to foreign missions on missionary terms
| that is to say, the Bible Society sends
| out the books needed, free of cost and
carriage paid, to missionaries at their dis
! nit the Bible house any proceeds arisi,,p
| from copies which they sell after deductina
the expenses of circulation. Only small
proportion of the huge cost of productior
! is received back by sales. To take one in.
stance, each copy of the first Ganda Bible
for the people of Uganda, who now. number
| 10000 Christians, cost the society 6s Adj tC
| print and bind, and los 4d more to convey
from London TO Uganda-the Carriage fo,
hundreds of miles from the coast beine
on the heads of negro porters. The natives
| paid their fraction of the cost of thesf
| copies In cowrie shells-which do not %
very far when translated into English
| money!
The Bible Society goes on extending it,
| business, cheerfully piling up enormou,
losses. The greater the losses the more tn,
| society is pleased, because ii means tina
| Bibles are having q larger circulation
among very poor peoples. Nevertheless
the society does not encourage giving tn.
| volumes indiscriminately free OF charge ex
cept in cases of destitution or misfortune
The average man who makes a little self
! sacrifice to buy his Bible values it all tn,
4