MISSIONARY LABOR IN BIBLE TRANSLATION.
By Judson Smith
[Judson Smith, D. D., Corresponding Secretary of American Board of Foreign Missions, in Christian Work.] In not a few instances the missionary has first to reduce the language to written and lexical forms, to make the grammar and vocabulary of the language, before he can begin to use it in translation. Who can measure the time and effort required for such a task? In what other field of labor has anything like this been attempted? Hiram Bingham goes to the Gilbert Islands in the mid-Pacific, and finds the people with no literature, with no written language, with no one to teach him. Little by little he gathers the words of common usage from the lips of the natives, and learns how they are combined in phrases and sentences. Constantly he must compare what he has written down with what he hears, must correct mistakes, must acquire new words, must fix, if possible, the better usage. And at last he ventures to put the Golden Rule, the Lord’s Prayer, a Psalm, into the vernacular; then a Gospel, an Epistle; until at last, after many years, the whole Bible is rendered into this island tongue, and every one admires the great achievement. Between those first words taken from the lips of the unlettered people, and the finished Gilbert Islands Bible, what years of toil, what patience of soul, how vast and glorious the contrast! And this is perhaps the simplest form of the problem. Burma’s debt to Judson is to be measured by all that he did for the uplifting of her people in character and habits, in knowledge and aspirations. But that which works deepest and most incessantly, which makes him to-day, fifty years after his death, the greatest benefactor that nation ever had, is the Bible which he gave them in their own tongue, the celestial guide of childhood, the solace of age, the fortress of manliness, and purity, and truth. Morrison broke the path to the Christian renovation of China in many ways, but in none more signally or with more lasting benefit than by opening to that people the treasures of God’s Word, and giving the Bible a chance to be heard by the side of Confucian classics. Carey puts the scholarship of the world under a measureless obligation by his studies in Sanscrit, and his translations of the Bible, or portions of it, into more than thirty of the tongues of India. When as yet the work of evangelization could not be freely pursued, this dauntless spirit seized the occasion to make his message intelligible to the millions who should later come within its reach. No single missionary has ever wrought on so wide a scale for the Christian enlightenment of India; and thus “he, being dead, yet speaketh.”