The Bible in Five Hundred Languages.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXV, Issue 10016, 5 December 1908, Page 3 (Supplement)

The Bible in Five Hundred Languages.

Despite the fact, which officers of the American Bible Society freely acknowledge, that the reading of the Bible has inm-h decreased among native born Americans, more Bibles are sold and read and more money is given for the work of the society than when everybody believed tb.2 Bible literally. Last Xew Year Mrs Kusseil Sage offered the society £IOO,OOO if it could raise an equal sum during the calendar year. The money is rolling in, and the society sees the million in hand by January 1." The day alter .Mrs Sage's offer was made public a New York business man called up the office and said: "You can put me down for £IO,OOO if you won't give my name." A couple of years ago another New York business man entered the office and said: "I believe in the Bible. I am also very much interested in the Mohammedan races. 1 will give you a piece of property if you will dedicate it to the end of time to the circulation of the Bible among the Mohammedan races." The offer was accepted and the . property, a New York office building worth £20.000, was turned .over to the society. The distribution of the Bible to the inhabitants of the earth's surface is a work of the last century only. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Bible existed in only 50 languages. To-day in round numbers it exists in 500. The Bible went into more languages during the nineteenth century tb-in in the eighteen previous centuries. A lew weeks ago an item appeared in tho papers to the effect that the American Bible Society had completed the publication of the Bible in Chamorro. the chief language of the island of Guam. Thus the natives got their first printed book, their first alphabet, a "written language and a literature all in one. All ever tfo

world men are doing the same thing. Scores of the world's languages have been supplied with an alphabet and a written form by the translators of the Bible. Last year, for instance, the society printed a Bible for Pleasant Island. Few persons know where to find Pleasant Island'on the map. It is a mere dot-in the Pacific 300 miles south of the Caroline Islands, with a population of 1500; the sort of islana one reads about in shipwrecked stories. For ten years one lone missionary and his wife have been living there. He learned the language by ear and then set it on paper phonetically. Then he translated the ~N"ew Testament into it. Then he begged and entreated the Bible Society to publish his Bible. The society replied: "We cari"t afford to publish the Bible in a language spoken by only 1500 people. 7 ' Then the tribe pledged itself to pay for the work if it could have time. So the society sent the missionary a printing press and he and his native helpers set up and printed the work. Then he sent it to San Francisco, the society paid for binding it, and one' more little South Sea island has a written language and literature. Philologists of the future wall study extinct languages by means of these Bibles. Already it is said that Mame, Matteo de Turner's version of the Gospel in Quichuea is the only key to the language of the Incas. Americans have translated the Bible or portions of it into thirty Eilj ropean tongues, forty-three Asiatic, eleven African, nine Oceanic and twelve Ameri- ■ can; .American women have made translations into fifteen languages, the names of which are unknown to the uneducated public. In many cases the Bible is all that will preserve native' American languages from extinction. Only last year •fhe society published the four Gospels in the Winnebago tongue. There are only 2000 Winneboags left. Their children are all learning to read English. In another generation the tribe will be extinct- or assimilated. But some one offered to pay for the work for the sake of a few old Indians who would never learn to read Enslish, and it was done. Two copies of the Gospels in the Seneca language were sold within the past- year; one in ATapahoe, four in Dakota, fourteen in Muskogee, twenty-five in Ojibway, 146 in CheroKee and 42 in Choctaw. In Oklahoma the rich Indians, the Cherokees and Choctaws, take a racial pride in preserving their language from oblivion through the use of it in their church life. Although most of the adults Tead English now, they prefer to use the Bibles in their tribal tongues, and only a few weeks ago a letter reached the Bible House asking if a hew edition of the Cherokee hymn book could not be got out uniform with the Bible. A notable instance of this tribal pride came within the past year in an order to print the Creek Bible, the expenses to be paid by the Greek Indians of Oklahoma- and. some of their white neighbors. Mrs' A. E. W. Robertson, a Congregational' missionary, made a version of the Scriptures in the Creek or Muskogee language: the labor of many years. The order came to publish it- after her death. The board wrote: '"Why do you go to such an expense as this when your children all read English ? It is foolish." The reply came back, "We want it as a monument to Mrs Robertson and the Creek language." One "year after its organisation, in 1817, the society be;ran the translation of the Gcs- - -- : = ~ t-. , •' i -.r I_l •_!_

pe:s into me .Delaware ana. jionawji tongues. In August, 1908, an order came into the Bible House from a Sew York Indian for a copy of that old Mohawk Gospel. It is a historical fact that in 1852. a little party of Indians entered the city of St. Louis, having walked 1500 miles from a region now included in Idaho. They said they had heard that the white man had a book which was given him direct by the Great Spirit and they had come to" learn about it. They were directed to Captain William Clark, the explorer and Indian Commissioner. He had no Bible to give them. The story when published resulted in the sending of Methodist and Catholic missionaries to the Xez Perce Indians and in the printing in 1871 of a }*ez Per6e Bible. A Cherokee worked out a Cherokee alphabetin 1821, and by 1831 the society had published most of "the Bible in that language. The greatest- of all the Indian translations was the complete Bible in Dakota, tho tongue of the Sioux, published in 1879. In the" ninety-one years of existence the nocietv contributed 80,420.382 copies of thei Bible. Last year it distributed 2,000,0C0. These Bibles "are paid for in queer circulating medium sometimes. Within its history "the society has accepted dried cocoa nuts, salt fish, knives, spoons, rugs, beads, cowrie shells, grass mats, bracelets, porEoiso teeth, rice, sugar cane, and South ea Island money for Bibles. In little native boats the colporteurs creep down among the islands. By dog sledge and! komatik in Alaska, by Buffalo cart in Borneo, camel in the Gobi desert, mule, train and llama packs in the Andes, by elephant and straw thatched cart in Siam and native junk on Chinese "rivers they push their wares. One white man and his wife floated 3000 miles down the Lena river on an open raft with half a ton of Bibles, selling gospels to the Yakuts in their own language. Colporteurs distributed Bibles in twenty-seven languages in the United States last year. __ TlTey found negroes in the South who had never heard of such a book. They were kicked down stairs in tenement houses by. freethinking immigrants. The society's colporteur among the Poles and Russians of the Chicago stockyards is Paul Glaser. who was a member of the first Russian Duma in 1906, and by reason of that fact was banished to Siberia—where he did not go.