Out of the Best Books…

Today we should like to turn to rich rewards of reading — not reading merely for the purpose of passing time, but for the purpose of discovering truth, of discovering what thoughtful men think. Reading enriches life; it enriches conversation; it enriches understanding. It perpetuates the past and teaches its lessons to the present. Leigh Hunt, perhaps best known for Abou Ben Adhem, left these moving and meaningful lines: “The world was all forgot, the struggle o’er, Desperate the joy. — That day they read no more.”¹ And Strickland Gillilan wrote: “You may have tangible wealth untold; Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be — I had a mother who read to me.”² Many others among the great have added their witness to the worth of reading, indeed to the absolute essentiality of it, if a mind is broadly to mature: “…the clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be assiduous in your reading. Learn to be good readers…”² said Thomas Carlyle to the students of Edinburgh University. “I wish you to see,” wrote John Ruskin, “that both well-directed moral training and well-chosen reading lead to the possession of a power… which is… in the truest sense, kingly;…”⁴ And William Ellery Channing added: “Reading is… the royal road to intellectual eminence… Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, …but lives in them perpetually.”⁵ “Great and heroic men have existed,” added Emerson, “who had almost no other information than by the printed page.”⁶ This array of witnesses cannot well be ignored. And added to all else in our reading, earnestly to be pursued, is the word of God itself, so precious in its preservation and so essential to an understanding of the purpose of life and of all that God has given. “…seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”⁷ In the hours that are free from other pressing pursuits, one of the most rewarding endeavors of all is to read: great thoughts, great literature, present and past, including scripture, including “the best books.”