We have heard that, out of every thousand books written, six hundred do not pay the cost of printing and only live a year, while only fifty last seven years. However, the Bible, which is centuries old in its complete form and probably over 3500 years old in its oldest portions, is still easily the “best seller” of all time.
It is printed in hundreds of languages and dialects, and millions of copies of the whole or part are circulated every year. Yet no book has ever been so persecuted!
Persecution has raged since the days of Jehoiakim, king of Israel, who “cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire” (about 606 B.C.). Antiochus Epiphanes (168 B.C.) destroyed all the copies he could find. Diocletian (303 A.D.) did the same, and many in later years made bonfires of the earliest printed New Testaments.
It has had to stand the attacks made upon it first by atheists and then by modernists, but it is still what a former Prime Minister of England called “the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture.”
Other books die a natural death, but this Book is possessed of indestructible vitality.