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To All People

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 29, 1910

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 87, No. 39.

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To All People

By Walter Prichard Eaton

THE world’s best-selling book is the Bible. The total sales of the works of all the most popular authors of the day would not equal the yearly sale of the Holy Scriptures. Each year there are printed seventeen million Protestant Bibles, Testaments, and “portions,”—such as the Psalms or the separate Gospels,—in more than five hundred languages and dialects.
Of these Bibles, ten millions are published by Bible societies, are sold far below cost, and return no financial profit to anybody. The remaining seven millions are printed commercially, and yield a profit to the publishers. Of the ten million Bibles and parts of Bibles printed and distributed by charity, almost two millions are issued by the American Bible Society, and over seven millions more by similar organizations in Great Britain and Ireland.
These millions of Bibles and Testaments, sold at a nominal price so that charity is called on to supply the funds for printing them, go to every part of the world. They are issued in every language. They are sold among followers of every faith, and of no faith.
Western civilization has frequently been represented as advancing upon the heathen with the Bible in one hand and a sword in the other. As a matter of fact, the Bible has quite as often gone on ahead, far in advance of Western civilization. In the mystic recesses of China, in the mountains of the Philippines, in the wilds of Africa, the missionary comes to find that the Bible has preceded him.
In this work of pushing out the frontiers of Christendom by means of the printed Word, the actual workmen are almost always natives, who have been first converted to Christianity. They are Biblical book-agents, with a mission. Often they are heroes. And the stories of their work, of their labors and hardships and humiliations, make the annual reports of the Bible societies read like a romance. They are Siamese, Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Armenians, Turks, Slavs, Mexicans, natives of Cuba, of the Philippines, of Peru, of the islands of the sea. They are also Americans, working among the immigrants, in city slums, at the mines.
They are called always by the same name,—colporteurs. And the story of colportage is a story of faith, devotion, and tireless labor.—Walter Prichard Eaton.