THE WORLD’S BEST SELLER

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 291, 4 September 1937, Page 8

THE WORLD’S BEST SELLER

“Of making many books there is no end,” runs the familiar line from the Book of Ecclesiastes the Preacher. True as this saying was in the day of which the Old Testament speaks, it applies with even greater truth in this modern age of the printing press from which an unending stream of publications pours forth annually into the world. There are “books of the month” and this so-called “best seller” and that. Most have their little hour, some a day, and a handful may survive a generation. But the Bible outlives and outsells them all. It remains, as always, the “Book of Books” and is far and away the world’s best seller.

Year by year the Book of Books spreads its message to the uttermost ends of the earth. It penetrates into regions where no other book is seen or understood. This achievement is largely the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which during the year 1935, circulated no fewer than 11,686,131 volumes of the Scriptures —an unprecedented number—in more than 700 languages and dialects. The list of tongues in which the Bible may be read tells a story as romantic as it is astonishing. It represents at once a feat of distribution and the triumph of a permeative faith. The universality of the Bible’s appeal can be explained only by the obvious—that it contains between its covers something not possessed by any other book. Where in the vast field of literature is there another that can take an equal place alongside the Scriptures for beauty and breadth of expression, or so stir .the deepest emotions of men of every race and clime?

The influence of the Authorised Version on our own language and literature can hardly be over-estimated. Even a rationalist such as Lecky felt moved to admit: “A familiarity with the Sacred text seldom fails to do something to purify, elevate and regulate the character, to exalt the imagination, to colour the whole texture of a life. Even on its purely intellectual side its value is very great.” This, strangely, is the Book we exclude from our State schools.