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.