Bibles in All Lands

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Apr 5, 1906

Bibles in All Lands

Story of Colporteurs in the British and Foreign Bible Society

THE hundred and first report of the British and Foreign Bible Society is a fascinating story of a British organization spreading Bibles by the million all over the world.

During the past year the society has issued a total of 5,857,645 Bibles, New Testaments, and portions of Scripture. In the course of its existence it has sent out 192,537,746 copies of the Holy Scriptures complete or in parts.

To carry the Scriptures from door to door, the society employed last year 950 colporteurs at a cost of over $200,000. “If our eyes could trace these ‘humble Bible sellers up and down the world,’” says the report, “we should see them busy among Indian rice-fields and along the Chinese waterways, across the Canadian prairies, and through the Australian bush, and beside the great African lakes; we should watch them sheltering in native huts in the snowy defiles of the Andes, and threading their path under trails of purple orchids through the forests of Brazil.” Stories of the colporteurs at their work provide interesting reading.

Petrenko, a Siberian colporteur, writes: “Between the villages of Berenovia and Kemarichi the driver and I nearly perished in a bad blizzard. We were on the steppes, some twenty versts from our destination. Thank heaven, we managed to get through; our horses were good ones.”

Sabrikin, also in Siberia, tells of how one of the Russian soldiers, on his way to the front, saw a New Testament being offered to some one else. He pulled out his purse, and counted out the money, and then, seizing the book in his hands, reverently kissed it.

Arequipa, “the city of the Sacred Heart,” in Peru, is a place where the Bible has been banned and burned, and where the colporteur has never been able to stay more than a few days. Two colporteurs went there, and were defended by a few liberal-minded men. Persecution followed, and Arequipa, as the following quotation from the report shows, was soon in an uproar:—

“The controversy between liberals and clericals in Arequipa became acute. The colporteur, Espinoza, while selling Bibles, was brutally attacked and badly mauled in the streets by the ‘secret police,’ and marched off as a prisoner. Once in the police office, Espinoza protested against this outrage, claimed protection, and asserted his rights in the circulation of the Bible, whereupon he was set free.”

Last year the colporteurs sold over 2,250,000 of the Scriptures.—Selected.