HE following remarks are taken from a letter by Mr. Gaussen, written to a friend. Mr. Gaussen is a Swiss gentleman of means, who, for the love of souls, is laboring in Belgium, as a volunteer colporteur, carrying with him the Word of God and selling it to the people.
“Just a line to let you know how I get on in the work of selling the Scriptures to the poor, ignorant, and for the most part godless, people of this Papal country. I say, godless—for it is a great exception to find those who do, after their own fashion, believe in God at all, the repeated question from all being," Have you seen Him?—for we have not. "This infidelity is the direct result of idolatry and idolatrous teaching, through which their intelligence has seen, and from which it has revolted.”
Mr. Gaussen then describes the mass of soldiers quartered near Liege. They are quartered in single rooms of large houses, and these he visits with much success. Speaking of the infidelity, he says: "It is very sad; but still there is another side of its bearing to a colporteur, and that is the absence of the hostile power of the priests. Thus the colporteur has the pleasure of knowing, when the sales have come off, the poor purchasers will have the benefit of their bargains....
“Last summer, in the rural villages of the Ardennes, I visited from house to house; and the priest interdicted the Gospels from the altar on the next Sunday. He said the books were immoral and wicked, and ordered them to be burned or delivered up to him upon pain of excommunication.... In one isolated village, where the priest is all-powerful, men and women preferred to suffer excommunication rather than give up their Gospels, which they had learned to love, even by a first cursory reading.... You may imagine the pleasure to these people of reading the Gospel for the first time.... I know no other way by which our great enemy can be harder hit by one poor tongue and two pairs of hands and feet than by Bible distribution.
“I have a license as a trader to sell all over Belgium during 1897. I have also to pay a daily tax in the town or township in which I may be operating. Subject to compliance with these conditions, one is as free as in England, notwithstanding that the religion of this country is Roman Catholic. My four months' work of last year resulted in the circulation—chiefly, though not entirely, by sale—of ten thousand six hundred copies of the Gospels, one hundred and thirty-five New Testaments, and thirty-three Bibles.”
May God prosper the work of His servant and support him in toil and self-denial! The work is to him indeed "a labor of love.”