The British and Foreign Bible Society

John Owen, a clergyman of the Church of England who declined to be one of the Society’s secretaries when they were first chosen and took the post on 23 April 1804, seven weeks after the founding (Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1816), vol. 1, pp. 59–60 (compare pp. 53–54)), wrote its history. He traces it to a visit to London in December 1802 by Thomas Charles of Bala, a clergyman of the established church who served among the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists and knew the needs of his countrymen from his travels and his Sunday schools (Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1816), vol. 1, pp. 15–16). On 7 December, before the committee of the Religious Tract Society, Charles described the want of Welsh Bibles and the failure of every attempt to obtain them by the usual channel (Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1816), vol. 1, pp. 15–16). In the conversation that followed, the Baptist minister Joseph Hughes suggested that Wales was not the only part of the kingdom in want, and that something should be done toward a general dispersion of the Scriptures (Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1816), vol. 1, pp. 16–17). To that suggestion, Owen says, the Society owes its beginning (Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1816), vol. 1, pp. 16–17).

A printed address invited supporters to a public meeting at the London Tavern on Wednesday 7 March 1804 (Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1816), vol. 1, pp. 35–36). The proposed society, it said, “presenting nothing but the inspired volume, would be sure to circulate truth, and truth alone”, and so would open a channel into which “Christians of every name” could pour their gifts (Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1816), vol. 1, pp. 35–36). Owen, who says he came reluctant to be persuaded, puts the company at about three hundred people of different denominations (Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1816), vol. 1, pp. 38, 41–44). Granville Sharp took the chair; a German minister, Steinkopff, described the scarcity of the Scriptures he had seen abroad; and Owen rose to support the plan, struck, he writes, at being surrounded by Christians “whose doctrinal and ritual differences had for ages kept them asunder” (Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1816), vol. 1, pp. 38, 41–44).

The Society’s first law states its “sole object”: “to encourage a wider circulation of the Holy Scriptures” (British and Foreign Bible Society, Reports, Laws and Regulations I–II, p. 3). In the languages of the United Kingdom it would circulate only the authorized version (see the King James Bible), “without Note or Comment”, and it would extend its work to other countries, “whether Christian, Mahometan, or Pagan” (British and Foreign Bible Society, Reports, Laws and Regulations I–II, p. 3). Its committee was to be thirty-six laymen: six foreigners living in or near London, and of the rest half members of the Church of England and half of other denominations (British and Foreign Bible Society, Reports, Laws and Regulations IX, p. 4). By 1805 Lord Teignmouth was president, with four bishops and William Wilberforce among the vice-presidents (British and Foreign Bible Society, Reports, list of officers for 1805, p. 7).

The first report, read in May 1805, shows the range of the work. A Bible society had been formed at Nuremberg on the British model, with a grant of a hundred pounds from London (British and Foreign Bible Society, Reports, First Report (1805), pp. 12–14). The committee ordered two thousand copies of the Gospel of John in Mohawk, translated by Captain Norton, a chief of that nation (British and Foreign Bible Society, Reports, First Report (1805), pp. 19–20). Twenty thousand Welsh Bibles were ordered from the university press at Cambridge, and the committee recorded that nearly nineteen hundred pounds had been given in Wales, much of it by the poor (British and Foreign Bible Society, Reports, First Report (1805), pp. 22–23).