Notes on Important Eras of Fulfilling Prophecy
By W. A. S.
The Hand of God in History — No. 22
Notes on Important Eras of Fulfilling Prophecy
The Era of Bible Circulation
AGAIN, one of the secretaries of the Bible Society tells of the arrival of a ship in the Society Islands, in 1816, bringing the paper from the society for the printing of the Gospel of Luke in Tahitian. The islanders had but turned from cannibalism within a few years, and “the stones which had been used in human sacrifices the missionary employed for his printing-press.” Mr. Canton says:— Now was not this a marvelous thing, that in 1800 a little barefoot girl went fifty miles over the Welsh hills for a Bible, and that in 1816 some portion, if not the whole, of that Sacred Book had reached the ends of the earth—that the Eskimo read it under the glow of the northern lights, and the Hottentot child spelled it under the pear-tree in the Clough of Baboons, and the Negro learned it by heart on the sugar plantations, and the Red Indian carried it in his breast as he threaded the forest or paddled on the Great Lakes, and that the society had sent it to the seaports of South America and the Australian settlements, and was having it translated into the languages of India and China and the Malay Archipelago?—“Little Hands and God’s Book,” page 49. When, in 1852, the missionary, Mr. Buzacott, returned to Rarotonga with the printed Bible for which the people had waited,— a rush was made for the boat when it approached the shore; the crew jumped out, and the boat, with all on board, was lifted onto the shoulders of the people, and carried up the beach toward the house—the men shouting, the women weeping, for joy. . . . The heavy packages were brought through the surf over the reef, and the happy “sons of the Word” lightened their labor with a song in their own tongue:— “The Word has come,
One volume complete!
Let us learn the good Word!
Our joy is great!
The whole Word has come!
The whole Word has come!”
“It is enough,” said Papehia, when the books were distributed,—Papehia, the old native teacher, who first landed on Rarotonga thirty years before, when the people were savages and cannibals,—“my eyes have seen what my heart has so long desired. I say with Simiona, ‘Now, Lord, let thy servant depart in peace!’”—Id., page 105. Space fails to tell of long journeys made through wildernesses to secure the precious book. “In the West Indies an old gray-headed slave trudged fifty miles to obtain a Bible in order that it might be read to many of his friends; and at the end of three months he returned, as he had promised, with the price of it, which had been collected among the slaves.” Thus to hearts in darkness in all parts of the world has come the blessed “dayspring from on high.” One of the treasures of the Bible House Library, in London, is the “buried Bible,” in the Malagasy tongue, from Madagascar. The wicked Queen Ranavalona I had turned against the Christians. It was in the year 1835. To be found with a Bible was punishable with death. Search was made for the books. How this copy now in London was saved by the Christians of one village is told by the organ of the society, The Bible in All the World:— A little to the northeast of their village was a hill, near the foot of which stood a cluster of large boulders. Inside that cluster from ten to thirty of the converts used to hold a service each Sunday. Underneath one of the largest of the boulders at the foot of the hill, the people had dug out a cave to serve as a smallpox hospital for the village; in a dark corner of this cave their Bible was hidden between two slabs of granite. The queen’s officers arrived at the village to search for the Bible and other Christian books which the queen and government believed, from the reports of spies, were to be found there. A search was made in vain in the huts of the suspected and in the rice-fields; and then the officers made straight for the cluster of boulders on the hillside. When they were actually on the point of entering the cave where the Bible lay, a villager said, “I suppose you know that this is the smallpox hospital.” “We did not,” they said, starting back in horror. “Wretch! Why did you not tell us sooner? Why did you let us come so near?” The officers beat a hasty retreat—and the Bible was safe. It was not the words of man about the Book, but the inspired words themselves that had the power to let the light into our dark hearts. Of the planting of one Bible in the heart of the Dark Continent, the late Henry M. Stanley, the African explorer, told the following story:— Janet Livingstone, the sister of David Livingstone, made me a present of a richly bound Bible. Not liking to risk it on the voyage round the Victoria Nyanza, I asked Frank Pocock, my companion, to lend me his somewhat torn and stained copy; and I sailed on my way to Uganda, little thinking what a revolution in Central Africa that book would make. We stayed in Uganda some time, and one day during a morning levee, the subject of religion was broached, and I happened to strike an emotional chord in the king’s heart by making a casual reference to angels. Kings and chiefs were moved as one man to hear more about angels. My verbal descriptions of them were not sufficient. “But,” said I, “I have a book with me which will tell you far better, not only what angels are, but what God and his blessed Son are like, to whom the angels are but ministering servants.” “Fetch it,” they eagerly cried, “fetch it now! we will wait.” The book was brought, opened, and I read the tenth chapter of Ezekiel, and the seventh chapter of the Revelation from the ninth verse to the end; and, as I read the eleventh and twelfth verses, you could have heard a pin drop; and when they heard the concluding verses, “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat,” I had a presentiment that Uganda would eventually be won for Christ. I was not permitted to carry that Bible away. Mtesa never forgot the wonderful words, nor the startling effect they had on him and on his chiefs. As I was turning away from his country, his messenger came, and cried: “The book! Mtesa wants the book!” It was given to him. To-day the Christians number many thousands in Uganda. They have proved their faith at the stake, under the knobstick, and under torture till death.—“Modern Mission Century,” page 95. The psalmist said: “He sendeth forth his commandment upon earth: his word runneth very swiftly.” Ps. 147:15. In this time of the end the printed Word has been running to and fro through all lands. The greatest circulation has been in Christendom, and by the whole army of missionaries abroad; but Bible colporteurs are carrying the book into thousands of the most remote corners of the earth. Last year’s report of the work by the eleven hundred colporteurs of the British Society says:— You meet these colporteurs along the highroads and foot-paths of the world, visiting lonely homes and scattered hamlets, and mixing with the crowds at markets and festivals. Last year, for example, they were selling the Scriptures on the slopes of Vesuvius, in railway stations and barrack-rooms of Siberia, in the banana plantations of Guatemala, in the diamond-mines at Kimberley, and in the rice-fields of Bengal. They were busy at Oberammergau during the passion-play, and at Nijni Novgorod during the great fair. They have offered their books among pilgrims to the holy places at Jerusalem, pilgrims10to the grotto at Lourdes, pilgrims to Buddhist shrines in Ceylon and in Japan. They have boarded hundreds of ships in the harbors of Port Said and Naples and Chefoo and Singapore. One colporteur finds shelter in a camp of Kirghiz Tartars. Another in south India is mistaken for a wizard, from whose magic words the people flee. Another in the Sudan crosses the desert with camels, and when he halts by the wells, must keep a fire burning all night to scare off lions. At a heathen festival in Upper Burma a colporteur was beaten, and his books thrown into the Irrawaddy. On the frozen river at Astrakhan a colporteur’s sleigh broke through the ice, both his horses were drowned, and he himself narrowly escaped. Last year these wandering Bible sellers sold more than three million copies of the Scriptures, spreading far and wide the revelation of God’s redeeming love.—“The Hundred and Seventh Report,” page 6. In the days of Cyrus, king of Persia, the angel said to the prophet Daniel:— “Shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” Generations and centuries ran on, until more than two millenniums had passed. Empires had risen and fallen; and the Papacy, the great apostasy of the prophecies, had built up its predicted kingdom of darkness. All the time that word to Daniel stood written on the page, waiting the hour. And when the hour came,—at the close of the prophetic period,—how wonderfully was the “sure word of prophecy” fulfilled in the spreading to and fro over the earth of the era of increasing light and knowledge. “The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.” Isa. 52: 10. W. A. S.