MANY of us have been interested in hearing or reading of the travels of Dr. Livingstone, Stanley and others, but no traveler has visited so many countries, or found himself at home amongst peoples of so many strange languages as the Bible.
If we could take a peep into the printing and publishing department of the "British and Foreign Bible Society," Queen Victoria Street, London, we should, I think, be surprised to see the amount of work that is always going on. When the scriptures have been translated into the languages of China, Africa, or India, and most of the translations have, as we already know, been the work of missionaries, then the real work of the printer begins. A great many different kinds of type are required, and the work requires great skill and care; the first, or proof sheets, are, when it is possible, sent to the translator to be read, and if needs be corrected. When they are returned the work of printing goes steadily on. But the printed sheets are not ready for binding until they have been folded and sewn; this part of the work is usually done by women and girls.
From the hands of these busy work-women, the books will go to the binding department. But all is not yet done; the packing-case makers, who knew just what would be required, have been hard at work, and the packing rooms are busy places. Many of the cases have to be lined, or strongly cased with metal, to protect the books with which they are to be filled from the ravages of white ants and other destructive insects, and though the cost of the wood and labor has increased so greatly during recent years that many of the cases cost three times as much as they did a few years ago, still, in the goodness of the Lord, the work of the Bible printing and circulation has not been allowed to stop.
Shall we follow one or two of these cases on the long journey that lies before them? Here is one, ready packed and addressed to a mission station in Central East Africa. The portions of scripture it contains will be wanted and welcomed there. In the early spring the missionary in charge wrote to say that he had already received two thousand copies each of the Gospels of Mark, Luke and John, which, though he had not been giving them away, but selling at a low price to the people among whom he worked, were all gone, and many had been greatly disappointed at not being able to buy even a single copy; he should be most grateful for a grant of five thousand copies of each gospel.
Not only gospels, but even New Testaments are often found in unlooked-for places, hundreds of miles away from the mission station to which they were sent. Only a year or two ago a party of Dutch missionaries wished to explore a part of the country that had not been visited, as far as they could learn, by any messenger of the gospel. After traveling for many days they camped one evening near a native village, and as was their usual custom, decided to seek the hut of the chief and ask his permission to remain for the night.
On entering the village they saw a man sitting on a stool outside his hut reading. As they drew nearer they saw it was a New Testament printed in one of the many languages of West Africa. It was the chief! who in answer to their surprised questions, told the story of his long journey on foot to work in the mines of Johannesburg, and how while there he heard of a wonderful book, "a talking book, that could speak to people in their own language." Really anxious to know more, he learned to read in an evening school, and better still, learned to know and love the Lord Jesus Christ. Buying a New Testament in his own language from a colporteur, he took it with him to his home; where the visitors found him reading it eighteen hundred miles from the place where it had been bought. He gave the missionaries a warm welcome, and set native food before them. To-day his village is the headquarters of a new mission station, from which the light is spreading far and wide among the tribes of Central West Africa.
A Negro sailor, who had been badly wounded during the war by a shell fired from a submarine, was landed in Ireland, and at once taken to hospital, where he was nursed. He could not speak or understand half-a-dozen words of English. His native speech was Yoruba; he had been taught to read in a mission school, and to his great delight a New Testament in his own language was got for him by a friend who wrote to the offices of the Bible Society.
In Egypt alone during the Great War, in one year, nearly twenty thousand New Testaments were sent to the various hospitals to be distributed among the sick and wounded.