The standard of instruction is kept as high as the circumstances of the different provinces will admit, and the education given is thoroughly Biblical and Christian. And there are no more upright, intelligent, useful, loyal and progressive subjects of the Sultan today than the graduates of these colleges.
IV. The fourth evidence of the Gospel’s triumph is the translation of the Bible into all the languages of the Empire, and the publication of a vast mass of religious, educational, historical, and scientific books. The Bible is now printed in eleven languages and made available to all the people of the Empire. About fifteen hundred different books have been published in these various languages, of which nearly seven hundred are from the Arabic press in Beirut. The Arabic Bible is sent to the whole Arabic reading Mohammedan world. The literary, scientific, historical and religious books also have a wide circulation.
Seventy years ago there were neither books nor readers. Now the hundreds of thousands of readers can find books in their own tongue, and to suit every taste. There are children’s illustrated books for the school and the fireside, stories and histories for the young, solid historical, theological, and instructive works for the old, and scientific books and periodicals for students. Bunyan, D’Aubigné, Edwards, Alexander, Moody, and Spurgeon are speaking to the Orientals. Richard Newton instructs and delights the children. Eli Smith, Van Dyck, and Post, Meshaka and Bistany, Nofel and Wortabet, instruct the scholarly and educated, while mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, chemistry, and medicine, geology and meteorology carry students on to the higher departments of learning. Tracts and Sunday school lesson books abound, and periodical literature supplies the present daily wants of society.
The American Arabic Press, founded in Malta in 1822, and in Beirut in 1834, set in motion the forces which have now filled all the great cities of the Empire with presses and newspapers, and awakened the people to a new intellectual life. The Beirut Press alone has printed five hundred millions of pages in Arabic.
The Bible and the Koran are now the two religious books of the Empire. The Koran is in one language for one sect, and cannot be translated, and any copy of the Koran found in the possession of a native Christian or a European traveler is confiscated. The Bible is in eleven languages and is freely offered for sale to all. Sixty thousand copies of the Scriptures are sold annually in the Turkish Empire.
THE OUTLOOK.
1. Russia is straining every nerve to destroy Protestant schools as endangering the political solidarity of the Greek Church and thus hostile to her prestige and future influence in Turkey.
2. Republican France, having exiled the Jesuits as intolerable at home, finds them pliant tools of her political schemes abroad and subsidizes them heavily with money and diplomatic support in thwarting Protestant missions.