Oct. 1
With the current report, the title of which is borrowed for this article, the British and Foreign Bible Society now looks back on a hundred and twenty-five years of existence, And the progress it can record in the past quarter of a century: is out of all proportion greater, in some respects actually greater, than that noted in 1904 of its first hundred years. As a business organization continually expanding and throwing out roots in new directions the British and Foreign Bible Society is one of the wonders of the world, By the year 1811 it was issuing 100,000 copies of the Scriptures annually; by 1846 over a million; last' year the figures had reached the enormous number of 11,899,540.
To put it in another way (says the report) five years after ite foundation the Society sent out on fan average nine volumes every hour; fifty years after its foundation it sent out 156 volumes every hour; when it was 100 years old it sent out 650 volumes every hour in 1028 the issues reached the cord figure of 1,801 volumes every In some districts there has been occasional setback, Thus no one vill be surprised to hear that "Russia has been closed to our operations since the Revolution." In 1904 the Society had two flourishing agencies covering all Russia from the Baltic to the Pacific which circulated half a million books a year "in more than sixty Janguages"; but last year it could only send in a few parcels and supply the German-speaking Baptists of Odessa with sets of electros to print an edition of the Bible for themselves. But in the new republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Society's activities have greatly increased. Most remark. able has been the increasing circulation of the Bible in China.
'The report say In 1902, when the tide of Chinese opinion was flowing strongly in the new education and inning, the circulation and it was thought it' had been reached. In the centennial year the sales were still a good deal short of a million. In 1928 no fewer than 5,000,000 copies were issued to jon aries and colporteurs from. four depot at Shanghai, and of these 3,951,000 copies were actually' placed in the hands.of Chinese. This was an increase of over 300, 000 on the figures for 1927. Since the centenary our Society has circulated over 64 million books in China. The astonishing circulation has gone on in spite of enormous difficulties in recent years: civil war, with all its accompanying dislocation of transport, disorder, and brigandage, Two or three weeks ago a mass meeting of the Kuomintang at Canton included the teaching of Christianity among the "superstitious practices" which are to be suppressed. As the report notes, opposition in China has always come from the literati. But the present antagonism of some of the Chinese reformers to religious practice (in any form) suggests a new conflict, the issue of which will be awaited with interest. On the whole one rather thinks the Society will win.
The reference above to the "more than: sixty languages" ased in Russia brings us to the revelations made by the Society's work of the astonishing number of languages spoken in the world. "In the centenary year, some portion of the Scriptures had. been translated into 614 languages, That number has now grown to 886. We read that "over one hundred mutually unintelligible forms of speech are, it is said, to be heard in the Netherland Indies alone." As yet, of course, the Society cannot pretend to touch them all, though it is doing very satis factory work in this" region, Africa, perhaps, shows the most marked advance of any country in recent years and the Gospel are being read freely in parts of the Dark Continent which a quarter of a century ago were still unknown, while the eighty-eight versions of the Bible printed for Africa in 1904 have now risen to 1929, The report says:
The new translations have been representative of every part of the world. They include several Europen languages, or widely prevalent dialects, which for some reason had not previously been dignified in this way—Chuvash, example, spoken by some half a million of people living in the valley of the Volga; and Low Germans and two forms of Romany, or Gipsy speech. There is also Esperanto, in Which the whole Bible has been printed. Fifty-seven Asiatic langu-ayes have deen added to the list. Not only have standard versions in the great languages been completed, or revised, but some peoples who apeak minor tongues have also been given Gospels at least—the Todas of India, for example, and various aboriginal tribes of China, For indigenous peoples of North and South America seventeen versions have been added to the twenty-eight which were in existence in. 1904, These include three translations in dialects of the Quechuas—the descendants of the famous nation which the Spaniards found in Per and one in the form of Eskimo speech which is used in the far-of? north corner of Canada, on the frozen shoves of the Arctic Ocean, New versions in.thirty-eight additional languages of Oceania bring the total up to eighty-seven, Five of these were prepared for peoples of New Guinea; no fewer than eight for the polyglottic Solomon Islands; sand six for the New Hebrides. Apart from new tran: large staff of workers are employed by the Society in revising old editions as knowledge of the languages in which they are printed becomes more extensive, The majority of versions are printed in the familiar roman type, but tio fewer than sixty other alphabets are also employed. How many of these, one wonders, could even a well educated man so much as name?
The report contains some sug-festive pages on the changes in the world's habits, mechanical and social, which tell directly upon the Society's work. It is twenty-one years older than the oldest railway and when it was founded "the fastest thing on Jand was a galloping horse and on sea a sailing-ship." Now a message may be flashed from London to any part of the world in a few seconds, a man may fly to India in forty-nine hours, and Big Ben may be heard striking in Central Africa. It is possible that the almost' overwhelming change in the surroundings of every-day life which the present century has seen have had as much to do with the breaking down of old standards as the upheaval of the Great War itself. Historians point out that in previous ages epoch-making' discoveries, such as the use of gunpowder, steam and mechanized industry, followed each other slowly that society had time in which to digest and accustom itself to the consequent modifica tions of its existence. But in the past thirty or forty years we
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.