IV.
If one use of the many books in the world be our own edification, another use to be made of them is the spiritual welfare of others.
Although it follows as a necessary consequence that if Christian literature be available for the first of these purposes it is available also for the second, we find it very difficult to impress some minds with a due conviction of the value and importance of such instrumentality in promoting the highest interests of our fellow-men. There are many whom it is hard enough to inspire with zeal for the direct conversion of their friends and neighbours by means of circulating religious tracts; but there are more whom it is still harder to convince that spiritual benefit may be indirectly communicated to large classes of society by purifying the streams of general literature, and by promoting the issue and circulation of good books of various descriptions. Yet the former kind of zeal—zeal in circulating tracts for strictly religious ends—is supported no less by facts than by sound reasoning. A good man, Richard Knill, used to say in his own simple, emphatic, earnest style, “One tract may save a soul.” That simple saying he was wont to establish and illustrate by incidents which had occurred under his own notice; and incidents full of this evidential force, and fraught with heart-stirring influence, are accumulating every year. And as to zeal in the second direction, a conviction of the good which may be effected by the circulation and diffusion of works upon instructive and interesting subjects, imbued with a Christian tone and spirit, is deepened by a consideration of the present state of the world, with all its mental activity and inquisitiveness; the habit of reading now on the increase in all circles; and the instances frequently occurring, through the means just indicated, of the removal of prejudice, and the commenced preparation for something better in certain minds athirst for knowledge. I am perfectly sure, and my confidence is the result of long reflection and experience, that Christians have not yet paid one tithe of the attention which it deserves to this pressing claim of the present day. A great deal of money now injudiciously but benevolently frittered away with the hope of some immediate brilliant spiritual results, would, I am satisfied, be invested far more wisely, and, in the end, with a deeper and wider return of advantage, if devoted to the less imposing object of leavening our current literature more and more with the sentiments and principles of genuine Christianity.
And now we are brought face to face with the Religious Tract Society and its very powerful claims upon our sympathy and support. It has been in existence upwards of seventy years, and is one of those vigorous institutions which struck their earliest roots into the Christian mind of England when our fathers were terrified by the storms of the French Revolution. Those institutions were not the seedlings of a fanatical panic; rather did they arise as healthy offshoots from God’s Tree of Life, to be planted by the hands of disinterested charity and cheerful hope. It was a movement of Christian philanthropy, taking a specific form, but instinct with large-hearted and manifold zeal; for out of the early conferences of its friends sprung the idea of the British and Foreign Bible Society; and it was in the committee-room of the Tract Society that the memorable words were uttered, “Bibles for Wales”—“Why not for the world?” The Tract Society may be regarded, if not as the mother, yet as the nurse of the Bible Society. The elder breathes the unsectarian temper, the Catholic spirit so pre-eminently manifested by the younger; and, like it, it aims only at bringing souls into the all-comprehensive flock of the one all-sufficient Redeemer. It eschews controversy on controversial questions, and throws its energies into a great crusade against infidelity, falsehood, sin. “Controversy at times,” it was remarked in the report for 1869, “may arise, or local circumstances may exist which tend to divide sections of Christians one from another; but should not this tendency be resisted in presence of the weightier controversies which the whole Church in all parts is called to wage against ignorance and error—against superstition and unbelief—against the practical godlessness of the pleasure-seekers and mammon-lovers amongst all classes?” This last is the only controversy in which the Tract Society engages; and it may be expected, therefore, to rally to itself all those who deem the spread of the truth of higher importance than similarity of opinion on the politico-ecclesiastical questions which are disturbing European society. And this the Committee have no doubt that it will do. The Society’s motto is—“Christ Jesus, and Him crucified,”—the only Saviour of the lost, the only and the all-sufficient Prophet, Priest, and King of his Church. To bring every thought of both young and old, rich and poor, scholar and teacher, into subjection to Him, is its one object. And it therefore claims the prayers and the support of all who love the Lord Jesus in sincerity and in truth.
The object of the Society is twofold—embracing both the purposes which I have just been enforcing:—The conversion of souls, sought by direct and appropriate means; and the general benefit of all classes of society, by a supply of works in general literature purified by the presiding power of Christian truth, righteousness, love, and wisdom.
The first object was originally the only one, and has ever been the chief; and the good done by the religious tracts which the Society has circulated, nobody can calculate. Who can tell the blessings conveyed in “The Dairyman’s Daughter” and “The Young Cottager,” tracts which, though old, can never be out of date—tracts which have been very rarely equalled, and, I believe, never surpassed? Others less striking have been the instruments of vast usefulness. The annual circulation from the London depot, I see, is 41,044,772; the total of issues, including those which are from foreign societies, connected with this, 49,000,000. The total circulation of tracts for seventy-one years reaches the enormous amount of nearly 1,335,000,000. It would seem, looking at these almost incredible numbers, as if the world could not contain so many books written of Him; and yet how many, many millions of the men and women in the world know nothing of Him, and have never yet been reached by any of these publications! What shoals have been and still are coming forth on the other side, full of infidelity and superstition and vice! So that, after all, the work of this Society is not half done.
The second object—the hallowing of literature with a Christian spirit—has increasingly occupied the attention of the Society of late years, but never, in the slightest degree, to the neglect of the first. The catalogue of its published books includes, besides solid divinity, lively histories, pleasant biographies, sparkling fictions, religious, moral, and descriptive poetry. Old works are brought out in modern dress under the care of competent editors; works entirely new are issued under the sanction of the Committee, which renders itself responsible for their contents. The pencil of the artist, the burin of the engraver, are employed in the illustration and adornment of many of the publications; and in an artistic as well as literary respect, “The Leisure Hour” and the “Sunday at Home” stand deservedly high amongst our popular periodicals. They are making way amongst the intelligent and the tasteful, conciliating prejudice, producing favourable impressions of Christian truth, and guiding the young into right paths.
The prophet Ezekiel stood in the court of the Temple at Jerusalem, and watched the flow of waters issuing “from under the threshold of the house eastward,” and descending the slope of Zion into the Valley of Jehoshaphat; he watched and followed the man with the measuring line in his hand through the waters, which were first ancle and then knee deep, and which, as they proceeded along the limestone gorge, rose up to the loins, and then became waters to swim in—a river which could not be passed over. When it reached the Dead Sea it healed the waters of it, and where it came everything lived. Then the prophet saw, in vision, groves, orchards, gardens, rising on each side of this river. Such is the Old Testament type of the Gospel of Christianity. It may be applied to all forms of its influence and action. We venture to employ it as a figure of what this Society is doing. It issues fertilizing, life-giving, and healing streams, because it is filling the world with books written about the many things which Jesus did, and is doing, and will do for the sons of men. “And by the river, upon the bank thereof, on this side and on that side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof be consumed: it shall bring forth new fruit according to his months, because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary; and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine.”
ABSTRACT OF THE SEVENTY-FIRST REPORT
OF THE
RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY,
FOR THE YEAR ENDING MARCH 31, 1870.
The object of the Religious Tract Society, like that of the public ministry of the Word, is to impress the contents of the sacred volume—its doctrines, its precepts, its promises, its prospects—separately, or in varied combinations, upon the consciences and affections of men according to their spiritual needs. In pursuing this object, it strives to imitate the Divine book itself, and to teach, not by doctrine only, but by history, biography, poetry, parable; and to tinge its information or instruction, as to the events of every-day life, with the spirit of pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father—disinterested benevolence and personal holiness.
There have been issued, during the year, THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-THREE new publications, of which ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-ONE were Tracts. The Books include a revised Quarto Paragraph New Testament, and two Parts of the Old; a historic Survey of the Papacy; a Grammar and Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, and many of a general character adapted for both adults and youth; and amongst the Periodicals, a new one entitled “The True Catholic.”