Now consider for a moment how the mere existence of the Bible in our midst today is in itself a standing miracle.
As we have already seen, these oracles of God were committed to the Jews for safe keeping. But, although they abound in the severest denunciations of their ways and again and again foretell their destruction so that the most natural procedure would have been for the Jews to rid themselves of the whole thing, yet, instead of this, age after age they preserved these Scriptures with superstitious care.
The enemies of the Jews, moreover, have always been the enemies of the Bible. Indeed, in all the great and dreadful Jewish persecutions from Antiochus Epiphanes downwards, the chief aim of the persecutors has ever been to destroy the Book that made the Jews what they were. Unbelievers also have from time to time spent their strength in trying to destroy the Bible; while Rome has done her best to burn it and its readers out of existence.
And yet this very Book rises up today like a phoenix from the fire, with an air of mingled pity and disdain for its foes, as much unharmed by their puny attacks as were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego by Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.
Indeed, the Book is not unlike the Irishman’s wall which was built four feet wide and three feet high! When scornfully asked why he had been so foolish as to make a wall wider than it was high, the Irishman promptly replied: “Bedad! I built it that way so that if the storm should come and blow it over, it will be higher afterward than it was before!”
So with the Bible: in spite of all the storms of criticism and infidelity that have for ages beat upon this Sacred Book, it holds from every point of view a higher place today than ever it did before. One society alone (the British and Foreign Bible Society) since its formation in 1804 has issued over 229,000,000 Bibles; while in the year 1910 alone nearly 7,000,000 copies were issued in over four hundred languages. This represents on the average:
1 Copy every 4 or 5 seconds, day and night,
13 copies every minute,
800 copies every hour,
19,150 copies every day in the year.
While the record output for one day in 1904 was June 1St, when eighty-one cases were dispatched representing nine tons of Scripture, in twenty-eight different languages!
Now think what this means—that one average day’s output, if piled up one upon another, would make a column higher than the cross on the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral; think, I say, of these columns of light and truth, pouring forth every day in many different languages to all parts of the earth, and this from one society only!
Quite recently, also, 279,000 Hebrew New Testaments have been circulated amongst the Jews, who are reading them eagerly.
Voltaire, the noted French unbeliever who died in 1778, said that in one hundred years from his time Christianity would be swept from existence and passed into history. But what has happened? Only twenty-five years after his death the above society was founded. His printing press, with which he printed his literature, has since been used to print copies of the Word of God; and the very house in which he lived has been stacked with Bibles of the Geneva Bible Society. So mightily has grown the Word of God and prevailed.
Oh! how grandly true are Whitaker’s words:
Steadfast, serene,
Immovable, the same
Year after year
Burns on for evermore that quenchless flame;
Shines on that inextinguishable light.
As one has truly said, we might as well put our shoulder to the burning wheel of the sun, and try to stop it on its flaming course, as attempt to stop the circulation of the Bible.
And yet, in spite of all this, we shall do well to lay to heart the following appalling facts, as stated by Lord Northampton at the centenary meeting of the Bible Society in the Albert Hall, London, on March 7th, 1904—viz. “There are in India 74,000,000 of our fellow subjects, who have not yet seen a single text of the Bible in a language they could understand. There still remain 108 languages and dialects into which not a verse has been translated; and three-tenths of the world’s population are still without the Word of God!”