On this episode, Five Minutes in Church history, we are returning to our journey through American

evangelical institutions, and we are stopping off at Christian publishing.

Way back in the 1600s and 1700s, we had more printers than publishing houses as we have them today.

Printers would supply material for businesses and government, but they would also publish newspapers

and books, and sometimes they would even print currency. Benjamin Franklin was a good example of

an entrepreneurial printer publisher. He printed many of the sermons of the Great Awakening

figure, George Whitfield. These printing presses were very busy during the Revolutionary War,

printing tracks to spur on the war effort and newspapers. That fervor rolled on into the early

decades of the Republic. This was also the time of the Second Great Awakening,

and in this moment in 1825 came about the American Tract Society. It was founded, quote,

to promote the interests of vital godliness and sound morality by the circulation of religious tracts

calculated to receive the approbation of all evangelical Christians.

They printed millions of pieces of literature. They published Bibles and books and tracks

that ranged from 4 to 48 pages, and an advertisement tells us that the established price is one cent per ten pages.

Well, I am holding one such tract in my hand, and I wish you could see it.

It has up at the top number 144, and it is titled,

The Conversion of President Edwards, written by himself.

On the back, it tells me that it's a first edition and that there were 6,000 of

these that were printed. So we have writers and we have printing presses and we have books. Now the

challenge is, how do we distribute them? Well, the American Tract Society used what were called

coal porters.

These would transport goods on horseback or on simple horse-drawn wagons.

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