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The Russian Bible Society—a Case of Religious Xenophobia11
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2018
Extract
Who that has read that inimitable book by George Borrow, The Bible in Spain, and been entertained by his pilgrimage through that country has not been struck by the sheer audacity with which a handful of English colporteurs set out to redeem the world by the distribution of one book—the Bible? To take the Bible into every cottage, to make its phrases familiar to all, and through this medium alone, without homilies or comment, to proselytize the civilized world was the simple but forbidding task to which the British and Foreign Bible Society had addressed itself since it was first organized in London in 1804. It had spread its agents over Europe and America, it had taken the Scriptures to the Protestant countries of the North and had braved the opposition of the Catholic hierarchy by invading Spain, Portugal, and other countries of the South.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1948
Footnotes
1
Based on a paper read at a meeting of the American Historical Society in Cleveland
References
2 Dudley, Charles Stokes, An Analysis of the System of the Bible Society throughout Its Different Parts…. (London, 1821), p. 25 Google Scholar, citing Owen, John, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 3 vols. (New York, 1817), I, 237 Google Scholar.
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7 Dudley, , op. cit., pp. 45–46.Google Scholar It will be observed that the Finnish society already authorized in 1811 was not to be embraced under the terms of this ukaz which was to apply to the whole of the Russian Empire. One or two slight changes have been made in the text of the ukaz in the interests of greater clarity.
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32 Pëtr V. Znamenskij, “Čttenija iz istorii russkoj cerkvi za vremja Aleksandra I,” Pravoslavnyj sobesednik, October, 1885, p. 237.
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