Notes on Important Eras of Fulfilling Prophecy
By William A. Spicer
The Hand of God in History — No. 22
Notes on Important Eras of Fulfilling Prophecy
The Era of Bible Circulation
It is roughly estimated that already ninety-five per cent of the earth's inhabitants might be reached by the gospel in the tongues in which some portion of the Bible has been translated. This is the Book that speaks for all mankind. "It claims no climate, shuns no race;
While centuries depart,
It finds a home in every place,
And speaks to every heart.
"Time's finger can not dim its page,
No foe can cloud its light;
The ages pass; from age to age
It shines more clear, more bright." Dr. Henry van Dyke has given us this beautiful paragraph:— Born in the East, and clothed in Oriental form and imagery, the Bible walks the ways of all the world with familiar feet, and enters land after land to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak in hundreds of languages to the heart of man. It comes into the palace to tell the monarch that he is a servant of the Most High, and into the cottage to assure the peasant that he is a son of God. Children listen to its stories with wonder and delight, and wise men ponder them as parables of life. It has a word of peace for the time of peril, a word of comfort for the day of calamity, a word of light for the hour of darkness. Its oracles are repeated in the assembly of the people, and its counsels whispered in the ear of the lonely. The wicked and the proud tremble at its warnings, but to the wounded and penitent it has a mother's voice. The wilderness and the solitary place have been made glad by it, and the fire on the hearth has lighted the reading of its well-worn page. It has woven itself into our deepest affections, and colored our dearest dreams; so that love and friendship, sympathy and devotion, memory and hope, put on the beautiful garments of its treasured speech, breathing of frankincense and myrrh. Above the cradle and beside the grave its great words come to us uncalled. They fill our prayers with power larger than we know, and the beauty of them lingers on our ear long after the sermons which they have adorned have been forgotten. They return to us swiftly and quietly, like birds flying from far away. They surprise us with new meanings, like springs of water breaking forth from the mountain beside a long-forgotten path. They grow richer, as pearls do when they are worn near the heart. No man is poor or desolate who has this treasure for his own. When the landscape darkens and the trembling pilgrim comes to the Valley named of the Shadow, he is not afraid to enter: he takes the rod and staff of Scripture in his hand; he says to friend and comrade, "Good-by; we shall meet again;" and comforted by that support, he goes toward the lonely pass as one who climbs through darkness into light.—Century Magazine. The preaching of the gospel is the preaching of the word. "And this is the word," said Peter, "which by the gospel is preached unto you." The Word of God has done the transforming work in all the missionary enterprise that has marked the last century. And the missionary has been the translator. Some of our own Seventh-day Adventist missionaries have had a small part in this work at this late day. It is a wonderful thing when a tribal tongue begins to utter for the first time the words that are spirit and life.8 An Indian veteran missionary, William Arthur, pays this tribute to the noble army of missionary translators of the Holy Scriptures:— To a student fresh knowledge is always sweet; to a linguist a new word is always musical; . . . but to a missionary, as he consciously surmounts the difficulties of a heathen tongue, all the pleasures of gain, of improvement, and of learning are fused into one feeling of ardent happiness. His acquirements are not hailed by the noisy admiration of the crowd, nor by the stately approval of academic tribunals; but they are hailed by the warm voice of the angel who hath the everlasting gospel to preach. In gaining every additional word, or phrase, or idiom, he grows richer; and seems to draw nigher to the ascending Redeemer, that he may hear again his last command, that command which is at once the missionary's warrant and the world's hope. In conquering every difficulty, he uncoils golden wires; and in securing each new word, he sets another string necessary to complete the tones of the harp on which, before the heathen, he will celebrate Him who loved him and washed him from his sins in his own blood. . . . I can not utter, nor yet repress, the veneration with which such a boon to mankind inspires me. He that benefits his species is greater than he that pleases or astounds them. But to be the benefactor of millions, and that to the end of time, is a dignity conferred on few. Let others pay their honors where they will. The profoundest reverence, the liveliest thanks I may offer to creature, shall be reserved from genius, grandeur, heroism, but cheerfully rendered to him by whose godly toil a wide-spoken tongue is first made to utter the words whereby my Redeemer may be known, my fellow sinners may be saved. The deed is too vast for the chronicles of earth, too pure for the praise of men. Every letter of its record will be a regenerated soul, every stone of its testimonial a redeemed family, every note of its paean an angel's joy. He who can pursue the sunbeams, and trace, without one omission, every lineament of beauty they pencil on tree, and flower, and living thing, may tell the blessings that accrue when the light of life is flung on the pathway of millions, whom the darkness bewildered and destroyed.—'A Mission to the Mysore.' In many instances the translator has had first to reduce the language to written form, only a spoken language being known among the people. More than two hundred languages have been thus put into writing for the first time, during the century, in order that the Bible might speak its message of salvation. In 1804, when the first Bible society was founded, "there was not in any language a chapter of the Word of God which the blind could read for themselves." Now thirty-three different languages have portions of the Scriptures, printed in the embossed, or raised-letter, style, which the blind can read with the fingers. The reports of a hundred years and more supply many appealing stories of the way the Bible came to peoples and tongues that had been without it. It has come into communities like the arrival of a visitor from heaven. The first issue of the British society—appropriately enough—was the Welsh New Testament. The first shipment of five hundred was ordered sent to Mr. Charles, of Bala, the place where Mary Jones had wept her tears of grief and then of joy. The news that the books were coming spread through the valleys:— By the Thursday week, the whole country was wild with excitement, and people began to pour into Bala from the neighboring villages and hill slopes at an early hour. When the time came for the carrier to be at no great distance from the town, the people went out in crowds to meet him; the old mare, which had ever before been obliged to struggle with her load as best she could, was now relieved of it, and muscular farm servants pushed themselves into the shafts. Ropes were adjusted and manned and maidened, and the cart was literally swarmed on all sides; then the joyful procession proceeded toward the town, where they were hailed by crowds which blocked up the streets.—'Life of the Rev. Thomas Charles,' Vol. III, page 68. In 1810 the Moravian missionary, Benjamin Kohlmeister, returned to the bleak coast of Labrador, with the first Scripture portion, the Gospel of John. The little kayaks, or canoes, filled with men, women, and children, crowded about the ship, and with tears and shouts of joy the missionary and his Book were welcomed home:— The books were distributed in the winter, when all had come home from their hunting excursions; and as they were given only to those who could read, considerable progress was made by scholars of all ages. The people took 'St. John' with them to the islands when they went out in search of fish or game, seals, wild geese, or berries; and in their tents or snow houses they spent the evenings reading by the glimmer of the moss in their lamps of soapstone. But most they liked to gather in some large dwelling at nightfall, when they returned from the sea or the hunting-ground, and hear the Word of God read by some one, child or adult, who had been taught in the schools of the mission.—W. Canton, in 'Little Hands and God's Book,' page 44.