The printed page is a missionary that can go anywhere and do so at minimal cost. It enters closed lands and reaches all strata of society. It does not grow weary. It needs no furlough. It lives longer than any missionary. It never gets ill. It penetrates through the mind to the heart and conscience. It has and is producing results everywhere. It has often lain dormant yet retained its life and bloomed years later.
– Samuel Zwemer
The Christian Church, as a whole, has never seen the complicated immensity of this task spread over all the languages in which Christ is preached. It is now time to confront it with the task and the challenge.
– Ruth Ure
The time is ripe to confront the Church with the place literature ought to have in the total planning for the world mission. For despite gallant efforts on the part of some, Christian literature has been largely a sideline, honored indeed but not made part of the great main stream of resources in personnel and cash. Search for it among lists of new appointees, among statistics, among estimates!….In unadorned language one has dared to sue three words to describe the contemporary sphere of Christain literature: urgent, unprecedented, unique. This is strong language; but it is wholly justified. With more people reading than ever before, more people wanting books than ever before, more tension of “isms” and more mental plasticity than ever before, the Church dare no longer be content to let who will devote what time and talent he can to the powerful printed page. Quite the contrary; the day has unmistakably come for bold new ventures, and for literature to be recognized as an integral part…of the entire Church program.
– Ruth Ure
If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, error will be; if God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendancy; if the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will.
– Daniel Webster
The best thing to throw at the devil of ignorance and error is Luther’s inkpot – in modern terms, a printing press.
– Samuel Zwemer
Book-making is the ripest and richest fruit of all. Its influence extends over nations and continents and goes down to successive generations.
– John Nevius
Some believers are ‘rivers of living water’ long after they die. They do good by their books and writings in every part of the world, long after the hands which held the pen are mouldering in the dust. Such men were Bunyan, and Baxter, and Owen, and George Herbert, and Robert MCheyne. These blessed servants of God do more good probably by their books at this moment, than they did by their tongues when they were alive. ‘Being dead they yet speak’ (Hebrews 11:4).
– Iain Murray
The Christian books put out by evangelical publishers in Brazil have gone into mansions and shacks, large cities and tiny, remote villages that might have waited many years before being reached by the Gospel message through missionaries. But books can reach people and penetrate into places that never have heard – and possibly never would hear – of Jesus Christ and His work.
– Augusto Rocha
an accessory in all language work the little mission press was indispensable. All of its equipment cost less than $1200, [and] was housed on a floor not more than 14 by 16 feet. It was an unimportant layout. Yet no other bit of equipment has wielded so important an influence upon the progress of the mission’s enterprise. From the December day in 1913 when it was first set in motion in one of the rooms of the mission home at Maragoli, it has been the fountain source which issued a steady flow of useful booklets and Scripture. In a very real sense it made possible the very commendable progress of the mission’s educational and religious program.
– Emory J. Rees, missionary to Africa