Agencies went with tens of thousands of Gospels and Testaments, and with the encouragement of the officers of the American Red Cross. Anxious, discouraged, perplexed people found in the little books a message of hope; the idle, a profitable occupation. One of the workers wrote, "I have had twenty or thirty hands held out to me at one time for the Word of God. I have stood in one place and given out two hundred portions of Scriptures. It was a surprise to me to see so many people reading these little books in the tents, on the streets, and even while standing in the registration line or at the long dining-table."

This visitation of the camps was followed later by the more gradual process, still going on, of placing Bibles in the reestablished homes where they were destroyed or lost, or in meeting fresh spiritual needs brought out by the experience of the disaster.

A second major event was the Gospel Reading Campaign in January and February, 1927. This was the result of the cooperation of Secretary Ryan with the Federal Council's Commission on Evangelism and similar bodies in the respective denominations. During January the Gospel of Luke was read; during February the Book of Acts—a chapter a day. Estimates, based on the number of copies issued for the period of the campaign above the average issues of these books, indicated the use of more than 500,000 Luke and more than 400,000 Acts. The Northwestern Agency's distribution at this time was particularly noteworthy. More extensive preparations, by specially prepared letters and order blanks, were made in the autumn of 1927 for the 1928 reading. The story of the results belongs to next year's report. It is clear that the Gospel reading at this season of the year is becoming established as a valued method of quickening the life of the churches in the weeks preceding the Lenten devotional period.

One of the Agency Secretaries well says that "Bible circulation is much like talking into a micro

phone; for you can never know how many are 'listening in,' and what effect your message has on those who listen." Judging by the occasional reports that come, many lives have felt profound effects. Often it is the experience of individuals. A colporteur finds a quarreling husband and wife, with suitcases packed, ready to separate; he reads to them; prays with them; pleads with them; eventually the home is saved, and at its center is the very Bible from which the colporteur read. An Italian comes to an Agency to buy some Testaments and is asked if he is familiar with the one-cent Gospel of John in Italian. He replies, "Oh, yes! I was saved three years ago by reading one of those little books. I now give them to others." Multiplied instances such as these are the experience of every worker.

Other influences are felt by groups. In a rough isolated community a few Christians come together and organize a Bible Study Class. They appeal to the Society for help, which is given. In course of time a mission church is organized, and the morals of the community begin to improve. Or, again, an Agency Secretary promotes Scripture reading among the young people of an entire district by awards for the best essays on their reading. Federal, state and local hospitals, penitentiaries, jails, sawmill camps, immigrant stations, ship crews, "poor-farms," logging camps, conventions, state and county fairs, amusement resorts, week-day religious schools, are some of the many communities where the ministry of the Bible has been carried forward this year.

A most interesting growth has been the plan developed with the Committee on Indian Work of the Home Missions Council, by which boys and girls in Indian schools receive for faithful study Bibles granted by the Society. A little Indian girl wrote:. "I have received one of the Bibles which you sent us; so I want to thank you for it. I know it will help me to be a better girl and draw me near to Jesus

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our Saviour." A troublemaking young fellow in one of these schools stole and took home on his vacation one of these Bibles. Curiosity led him to read it. He came back a different lad, becoming a trustworthy assistant.

One of the veteran Agency Secretaries wisely writes: "To hand a book out is not all of it. If the Bible is to be given to help the people, the man who is carrying it must represent the Book," and how patiently and heroically they do represent it.

Faithful followers indeed are they of the Shepherd who searched out the lost sheep. In wearying house-to-house visitation, never knowing whether they will receive a welcome or a rebuff, skillful in turning indifference into attention and opposition into appreciation, the colporteurs of the Society and many of its associated workers render service of which the world takes little heed, but which is recorded in the Book of Life. Suddenly called upon by a mother and a daughter to judge which was right in a bitter quarrel in which the daughter had threatened to run away, a colporteur, made wise by his study of the Scriptures, reconciles them to each other with tears and prayers. To a man sick unto death a visit of a colporteur and the reading of the Bible brought courage and consolation. Truly, the eyes of the blind are opened, and the poor hear the gospel preached to them.

In many parts of our country a house-to-house visitation may mean miles of traveling between one home and the next. Far up into a valley in the Rocky Mountains a colporteur makes his way. He finds only a dozen families have the Bible. Others have had it and lost it. Still others have never even seen the Book of Books. Before he leaves, every home in the valley has a Bible or a Testament, and soon Sunday schools are organized and the ranchers begin to plan for a resident minister. Again, finding that his car could not negotiate a 9,000-foot mountain

pass in the dark, the colporteur seeks refuge for the night with Mexican sheep herders, in the hours about the camp fire tells the Great Story, and in the morning leaves with them the Gospel of "San Juan." Months later, and a hundred miles away, two Mexicans stop him and remind him of that night and ask for another Gospel to take the place of the one which they had worn out.

It is with sadness that we record here the death, during the year, of a number of the veteran colporteurs of the Society, of whom further word will be said in the ANNUAL REPORT for this and the succeeding year. Some have burned themselves out, like flaming torches, in the service. Others have fallen prey to the risks of their work in street accidents or from illness due to exposure.

Similar service marks the lives of correspondents and voluntary workers. On Western plains a consecrated layman travels forty miles each week and supervises eleven Sunday schools. Another has seen churches built where he once, single-handed, strove to stir the hearts of lonesome householders into religious earnestness, and kept the hard-won work alive by the witness of the Book he left behind him.

Others organize classes for Bible study in prisons and penitentiaries, or win the respect and affection and eventually the souls of circus folk. Historians reckon that the religious changes which came in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which eventually were to mean so much to the religious life of the world, would never have come to pass, had it not been for the preaching in the hedgerows and lanes of Lollard followers of Wycliffe. Truly in our own land, hundreds of humble folk are spreading, under modern conditions but with the same great Book, this leavening pervasive influence.

Although the slackening of the tides of immigration is found to have its expected influence upon the demand for volumes in foreign languages, this, never

theless, remains a very large and important part of the service of the Society in the United States. Records show that, in 1927, Scriptures in 108 languages were distributed in the United States.

A single worker, settled in one city, distributed Scriptures in seventeen languages. Another, visiting logging camps and lumber towns, used them in fourteen languages. A movement of special interest has been the promoting of the use of a diglot, consisting of Ancient and Modern Greek, in the Orthodox Greek diocese of Chicago. When it is realized that for most of these languages the American Bible Society is almost the sole, and the most accessible, source of supply, the significance of its foreign-language work will not be missed.

A development of interest which is appearing in some of the large cities is the desire of many individuals to circulate the Book of Proverbs among high school students. In Philadelphia a single layman has bought and distributed more than 10,000; and even more extensive distribution has been made. in Buffalo through the Buffalo City and Erie County Bible Society. In a city in the mid-West, where a few hundred copies of Proverbs had been presented in a high school, more than one hundred pupils came back for personal conference concerning the Book and a pressing desire for a New Testament or for the whole Bible.

Broadcasting has continued daily through the year from Stations KPO in San Francisco and WGBS in New York City. At other points, agents of the Society have cooperated with local religious forces to provide for special reading, and have from time to time broadcast the story of the Society's work.

The evidence of the year shows that increasingly the work of the Agencies is being carried on by mail orders. Colporteurs of the desired consecration and capacity seem harder and harder to secure. Chang