The Printed Page by Editor

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Feb 16, 1911

The Printed Page

By Editor

Editorial

The Printed Page. — As the publishing work was well established in the ’60’s, our brethren were urged to greater earnestness in scattering the printed page. We read, in our early volumes, of a brother who read himself into the truth in Canada, and came all the way to Battle Creek to learn further. The brethren started him home again with two wheat-sacks full of publications to scatter.

Broadcasting the Seed. — Writing from Monterey, Mich., in March, 1869, Elder Joseph Bates, who had published our first Sabbath tract in 1846, said of his methods of work:—

Mingling with fellow passengers on the highway, plank, and railroads, I find many who gladly receive and read the interesting tracts presented to them. And thus with railroad speed these little flying messengers are passing throughout our vast continent, and crossing the trackless ocean to other kindred, nations, and people.

A Watchful Providence — How one torn leaf, under a watchful Providence, was used to kindle a light in Wisconsin, was told by Brother John McMillan, of Saint Croix County, in the REVIEW of Feb. 15, 1870. Five years before, he says,—

I had seen part of a leaf of a tract on the Sabbath, which I picked up in an army hospital. The leaf had been torn diagonally; but there was enough left to cause me to search the Scriptures as I had never done before.

So he found the truth, and was scattering the publications in his home county. A bountiful harvest has come from those earlier times of seed-sowing.

Leading the Campaign. — The REVIEW of Nov. 9, 1869, opened a “Book and Tract Department,” edited by James White, to foster the missionary campaign. He wrote:—

The field is opening before us wonderfully. May God help us to take it, and labor in the harvest-field till the work be finished. At present the laborers are few. Much must be done by our publications.

And this campaign is still with us, more pressingly than ever. If the ministerial laborers have increased since those times, so has the field expanded, and the need of workers is just as pressing, and the scattering of literature just as imperative as a means of supplying the need.