rwich, where Joseph John Gurney's house was open
to its committee, and at its annual gatherings at Earlham his sister
Elizabeth Fry took a leading part, while Wilberforce, Charles Simeon,
the famous preacher, and Legh Richmond, whose _Dairyman's Daughter_
Borrow failed to appreciate, were of the company. 'Uncles Buxton and
Cunningham are here,' we find one of Joseph John Gurney's daughters
writing in describing a Bible Society gathering. This was John
Cunningham, rector of Harrow, and it was his brother who helped Borrow
to his position in connection with the Society, as we shall see. At the
moment of these early meetings Borrow is but a boy, meeting Joseph
Gurney on the banks of the river near Earlham, and listening to his
discourse upon angling. The work of the Bible Society in Russia may be
said to have commenced when one John Paterson of Glasgow, who had been a
missionary of the Congregational body, went to St. Petersburg during
those critical months of 1812 that Napoleon was marching into Russia.
Paterson indeed, William Canton tells us,[95] was 'one of the last to
behold the old Tartar wall and high brick towers' and other splendours
of the Moscow which in a month or two were to be consumed by the flames.
Paterson was back again in St. Petersburg before the French were at the
gates of Moscow, and it is noteworthy that while Moscow was burning and
the Czar was on his way to join his army, this remarkable Scot was
submitting to Prince Galitzin a plan for a Bible Society in St.
Petersburg, and a memorial to the Czar thereon:

The plan and memorial were examined by the Czar on the 18th (of
December); with a stroke of his pen he gave his sanction--'So
be it, Alexander'; and as he wrote, the last tattered remnants
of the Grand Army struggled across the ice of the Niemen.[96]

The Society was formed in January 1813, and when the Czar returned to
St. Petersburg in 1815, after the shattering of Napoleon's power, he
authorised a new translation of the Bible into modern Russian. From
Russia it was not a far cry, where the spirit of evangelisation held
sway, to Manchuria and to China. To these remote lands the Bible Society
desired to send its literature. In 1822 the gospel of St. Matthew was
printed in St. Petersburg in Manchu. Ten years later the type of the
whole New Testament in that language was lying in the Russian capital.
'All that was required was a Manchu scholar to see the work through the
pres