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The Printed Page an Aid to Foreign Missions

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 28, 1909

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 86, No. 43.

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The Printed Page an Aid to Foreign Missions

By A. J. S. B.

An account of the helpful relation of the printing-press to the advance of foreign missions would fill volumes. In the words of E. W. Gilman, “The nineteenth century presents to the twentieth printed copies of the Holy Scriptures in about four hundred languages.” By means of the press these translated Bibles have been distributed to the tribes in earth’s remotest bounds. The British and American Bible societies have generously sent millions upon millions of Bibles and Testaments to the countless heathen who know not the gospel.
Our English and American ideas of liberty, civil and religious, having been developed from a continued reading of the Word of God by the common people, it is but fitting that these nations should become the custodians of the Bible. In other words, the Anglo-Saxons, who first received, through Wickliff, the Scriptures in their own tongue, should, in the words of the historian Wylie, “put them into the hands of all the nations of earth, that they, too, might be guided to truth, order, and happiness.”
What better support, it may be asked, can the gospel possibly have than the powerful assistance, direct and indirect, of the printing-press? Surely thus far its equal has not been found.
A. J. S. B.