THE great day at last! Two perspiring couriers come up the Palm Avenue, the sun shining on their spears afar off and heliographing their approach. Down go the brown sacks from their brown shoulders, and nothing more tangible than intuition tells me that—yes, there they are. This THEY in large capitals means our long-loved, long-looked-for New Testament published by the National Bible Society. I sobbed. The men smiled. One of our preachers sang. And then all of us prayed. It had been the talk of a thousand camp fires one thousand times. Its arrival had been preached and prophesied about, and now at last when it comes we are awed into a childlike (not childish), uncanny contrition. Are we going to be worthy of it? Are we going to translate the Word into deed? The Bible substantiates all we say; liquid speech substantiated by printed page. But will we really trans-substantiate all that it substantiates?
Then the news spread. Straight as the topography of our Luanza would allow it, it spread and spread in a land that never had any book but the Book. No newspaper ever in this land. One oh-to-be-joyful sort of man gushed out at a street corner in prayer: “Lord,” he cried, “now I have all; I have a gun to shoot with, bullets to charge it with, arrows for my bow, and a net for catching many fish.” It was all genuine good-hearted gush. It was all honest heart-hunger in a hungry land.
To my knowledge the only bit of Bible that hits of majestically this heathen Bible-hunger is away back in I. Sam. iii.—“And the Word of the Lord was precious in those days: there was no open vision.” Now, the open Book means the open Vision. The elders had vowed to sit up all night reading it, but before that, at sun-down, we sound sleepers had an open-air thanksgiving meeting when my text was: “But blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, that many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them, and hear those things which ye hear and have not heard them.”
* This refers to the revised translation of the New Testament into Luba by Mr Dan Crawford, the well-known African missionary, whose book, “Thinking Black,” captured the imagination of the religious public of the English-speaking world. Mr Crawford, who was a Plymouthist, was born at Gourock in 1870. He died at Luanza, Central Africa, in 1926. He translated the whole Bible into Luba, the language of the people among whom he spent his life. The New Testament appeared first of all, and the above account refers to the reception given to a revision of the same issued in 1923. The account was sent by Mr Crawford to Rev. J. H. Falconer, and is taken from Dr Tüsley’s “Dan Crawford of Central Africa” (p. 467).