Centennial Pamphlets Author:American Bible Society Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE CALL ABROAD Bible work for the United States was to American Christians like the expenditures of a congregation for its own pulpit and Sunday school.... more » Warm devotion to Christ naturally urged the Society to work in foreign lands, also. The Board of Managers in its earliest years, as though in obedience to an audible command of the Master, began to make grants for Bible distribution abroad. Europe One of the earliest of these grants went to France to help pay for an edition of the New Testament in French. A little later the Bible Society of France received grants which have been continued almost every year up to the present time to help the printing operations of that struggling society. Other grants went to Russia, for the Lutherans of the Baltic provinces and for the exiles in Siberia. About 400,000 volumes of Scriptures in Esthonian, Finnish and Russian were circulated in that distant land up to 1886, when the Russian government stopped the distribution. One grant of $500 went to English missionaries who needed help in printing Scriptures in Mongolian for the Buriats of Lake Baikal. Another grant was sent to the Serampore Mission, where Carey, Marshman and Ward were printing their twenty-six versions for India. Small parcels of Scriptures were also sent by the hands of friends to the West Indies, Mexico, and different parts of South America. Latin America In the Society's first decade Latin America was adopted as a field for its neighborly solicitude. The South American republics were then struggling for independence from Spain. In 1825 Colombia, in the first joy of freedom, let two Bible societies be formed, one at Bogota and another at Caracas, both receiving grants of Scriptures from New York. A few years later two prominent statesmen of Bogota were elec...« less