for the missions to realize how important, and how nearly autonomous, women’s work had become, in both its home and its overseas organization.

The origin of such activity probably lies in a development initiated by the British and Foreign Bible Society and copied by missionary societies, including the CMS, of establishing local auxiliaries. The local Bible societies had a dual function: they distributed the Bible in their own localities by arranging easy-payment subscriptions and enrolled those who already possessed a Bible to contribute to making it available elsewhere in the world – both at home and overseas. In Scotland, where a higher proportion of households than in England already had Bibles, there was little scope for the first function but plenty for the second, and in both England and Scotland the second function was readily applied to overseas missions. It was a new sort of society, for, while its leadership was inevitably dominated by clergy and local bigwigs, its membership straddled a vast range of income and social standing, since the subscription could be as little as a penny a week. Subscription was encouraged and sustained by a flow of information, information from and about lands with which the subscribers had hitherto had nothing to do, but in which by their subscriptions they were now personally involved. Thomas Chalmers in 1819 reflects on the educational function of such societies, their capacity for enlarging minds by up to date reporting from every continent. Characteristically, he also assesses their socio-economic effect. He had been deeply impressed to come upon an Aberdeen Female Servants’ Society for Distributing Scriptures among the Poor, where the subscription was only a halfpenny a week. This meant that female domestic servants, who were at the very bottom of the earned income scale, could contribute to the improvement of the lot of people who were poorer still. It led Chalmers to consider ‘the influence of Bible Societies on the temporal necessities of the poor’.47 Bible and missionary associations, he argued (and much to the dismay of some Bible Society committee members he wanted to amalgamate the two),48 were a bulwark against pauperism. There could be no surer form of social and economic insurance than to raise the dignity of poor people to the level of their social superiors by recognizing them as donors in their own right.