Many times man has attempted to destroy the Bible.

In A.D. 303 the Roman Emperor Diocletian issued an edict to destroy Christians and their Bible. The persecution that followed was brutal. Over a burned and extinguished Bible, Diocletian built a monument on which he wrote these triumphant words, “Extincto nomene Christianorum” (the name Christian is extinguished).

Twenty-five years later, Diocletian was dead and the new Emperor Constantine commissioned fifty copies of the Bible to be prepared at government expense.

In 1776, Voltaire, the French philosopher, announced, “One hundred years from my day, there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker.”

One hundred years later Voltaire was dead and his own press and house were being used to print and store Bibles by the Geneva Bible Society.

One hundred years from the day of Voltaire’s prediction, the first edition of his work sold for eleven cents in Paris, but the British government paid the Czar of Russian one-half million dollars for an ancient Bible manuscript.