September, 1935
T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
334
The M inister’s Secular Reading [Continued from page 329]
should be of the great scholars, preachers, missionaries, and great statesmen. Our histories should be the standard ones, not trashy publications written only for the hour. The books with which we become acquainted, in English or European literature, should always be the great works, the works that are true to the human heart and true to the fundamental ideals of life, the products of the great minds of our race, of the true explorers of our souls, and not the output of some of our obsessed, over-sexed, and foul- minded so-called literary artists of this strange age. Throw the trash into the furnace. Shrink from books of minor importance. Look upon volumes that do not make you stronger, your mind richer, and your heart purer, as the very enemies of your life. Don’t even have them around. Sweep a whole shelf of books into the ash can and leave one great one remaining, if there is danger of the great one’s being ignored while you waste your time on the others. Y ield ing P r e em in en ce to G od ’ s W ord Of Adoniram Judson it was said, by his son, “As a missionary he was unwilling to disperse his mental forces over the wide surface of literary and philosophical pursuit, but insisted upon moving along the narrow and divinely appointed groove of unfolding the Word of God and meting it out to suit the wants of perishing men.” George Eliot once wrote in a letter to Elizabeth Stuart: “My constant groan is that I must leave so much of the greatest writing which the centuries have saved for us unread for want of time.” We all have had to groan like this. We probably shall have to continue to groan in this way, often, as the years come and go, but better suffer in the thought that there are many things we cannot read, many subjects we cannot master, many books we can never open, than be tempted by cravings of our minds to be abreast of every realm of modern thought, to be acquainted with all the important books that are being published, to try to solve the great economic and political problems of our day, and, as a consequence, put the reading and study of the Scrip tures in the background of our lives, and starve our people to death with the thoughts of men, when they were made for the truth of God. Of course there are many ministers who read nothing, who have dug a grave for themselves by living in a con stant state of mental inertia. They would not know a book if they saw ®ne. They waste their time, hours and hours and hours, by spending long afternoons on golf courses, by tinkering with their cars, by allowing themselves to become involved in the duties of housekeeping, which do not belong to them, by oversleeping in the morning, by wasting evenings at dinner parties, until the days are gone, and the months are gone, and the years are gone, and they have nothing to say and nothing to give their people. With these men the temptations of which I have been speaking are not known. I believe, however, that the great body of ministers in our land today are actually facing this problem, and many of them have yielded to the temptation to be primarily occupied with the acquisition of knowledge "Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine . . . Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all" (Him. 4:13, 15).
T h e S ecret of V ictory Well, what are we to do about it? First, would it be wrong if we said to ourselves what D. L. Moody con tinually said to himself ? “I have only one rule about books. ■I do not read any book, unless it will help me understand the Book.” I do not know whether any of us could ever lay down a rule like that, unless we could say that every great book and every book worth reading helps us to under stand the Bible. But this, at least, we must say to our selves: “I am not going to allow any book, no matter how fascinating, to be read any day before I have given time to the Word of God.” Now I know, as well as any man, how difficult such a rule as this is. I have often failed to keep such a rule myself, but I can honestly say that I long today, more than ever in my life, really to abide by such a program as this. I think Dr. G. Campbell Morgan has said that he never reads the morning news paper until first he has read the Word of God. If we leave our Bible to the end of the day, we are mentally tired. Other things might come in to prevent us from getting to the Word until the midnight hour has come, and it is then time to retire. To fill the mind with the thoughts of men first is not to give the Word of God its primary place. We take our guidance from the Scriptures. Anything we read later that day contrary to the Word of God we know at once to be false. D iscr im ina tion We will have to exercise the greatest ingenuity and scrupulous care in choosing only the best reading. We have too little time as it is, and such hours as we can devote to the reading of secular books we must give to the best. That great scholar and omnivorous reader, the late James Bryce, at one time ambassador of Great Britain to the United States, in an address he delivered some years ago, at Rutgers College, declared: “Life is too short for reading inferior books. Everyone finds, as he goes on, how terribly short life is and how much there is he would like to know that he will never have time to learn. None of our time, therefore, should be wasted on second or third-rate books, if first-rate ones are to be had.” ( I have always enjoyed recalling the question asked of Lord Bryce, “Have you bought the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica?” and the question with which the great scholar immediately replied, “Why should I?” ) That greatest of all homiletic teachers, Professor John A. Broadus, has well said in his famous work on The Prep aration and Delivery o f Sermons : “He who would become really a man must abandon as early as possible the childish dream of reading everything. Except what is done for recreation — and excessive recreation is destruction — he must have a limited field of study, and must cultivate that field with the utmost possible thoroughness. And upon every subject studied, he must find out the best books, and restrict himself almost entirely to those. If the men of true scholarship and real power were called on to give one counsel to young students, in this age of multiplied books [forty years ago!], they would probably all unite in’-saying, ‘Read only the best works of the great authors, and so read these as to make them thoroughly and perma nently your own.’ ” Our books of exegesis should be the greatest available. The volumes of sermons that we read, if we read any, should be by the greatest preachers of the church, and not by some whom the world calls great. Our biographies
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