The Real Best Seller

       The Bible is today more widely read than ever. Last year Bible societies printed and circulated 11,378,854 Bibles. More Bibles were sold than any other hundred books together. It is now printed in four hundred languages. China alone last year bought 428,000 Bibles. Last year's Bible output of the British and Foreign Bible Society was 6,620,024 copies. In the 106 years of its existence that society has issued 220,000,000 copies of the Scriptures and its annual output is steadily rising, last year's being 685,000 copies in excess of the year preceding. Of what other book could anything like this be said? If you pile in a single pyramid all the copies of the Koran since Mahomet's day till now, with all the copies of the Scandinavian Eddas, the Hindu Vedas, the Persian Zend-Avesta, the Buddhist Tripitakas and the Chinese Five Kings, and add to the pile the hundred other most famous books the world has ever known, including the best sellers of all ages, the pyramid, contrasted with the thousands of millions of copies of the Bible, would be as an ant-heap to Mount Everest. Christian Herald, 1912.