Your ShelfYour Projects

The Bible in Rome

25%

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 31, 1871

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 37, No. 7.

Read the full edition

The Bible in Rome.

By Editor

SURELY something has happened to the pope’s power, when such scenes as described below can take place in Rome:
It may not be uninteresting to say one word with regard to one of the most liberal institutions that entered through the breach made at the Porta Pia. This institution is world-famous under the title of the Bible Society. It has begun its labors; it has become an establishment here; it has opened a shop in the Corso, where Bibles of all sizes, of all prices, may be had. You may read the Scriptures in Chinese and in four volumes for six francs; you may become acquainted with the Old and New Testaments in Syrian-Chaldaic for a mere trifle. If you are poor and half-blind, the largest of print, and the cheapest of books, are at your disposal. If you can see well, and can afford to pay, you can have a Bible here that you can easily put in your waistcoat pocket, where it will seem to the ignorant gazer nothing more than an extensive snuff-box. If you will neither buy large nor small Bibles, you may get portions of the Scriptures for nothing. Every one who passes are occasionally treated to these little books, containing, by a curious selection, the Gospel of St. John, and the Epistle of St. Paul, to the Galatians—and these you get for nothing! Cabmen, flower-dealers, passers-by, models for painting, and all the queer personages that form the population of a Roman street, are treated to these little portions of the Bible,—homeopathic doses of the Sacred Scriptures. These are published in choice Italian, and printed in the Crystal Palace, London. Every one gets them—except priests! I suppose these propagators of the Bible-in-bits, think the priests are too far gone in Catholicity to be moved by such measures.
The above is from the special correspondent of the Pilot, at Rome, and was not written for Protestant readers, but we take it as a proof from Rome and from a Roman Catholic authority that old things are passing away, and the truth, even in bits, is circulated in the city of the popes.