Let him
not only read his Bible deeply for his sermons and prayers, lectures and
addresses, let him do that all day every day of the week, and then read
it all night, and every night of the week, for his own soul. Let every
minister know his Bible down to the bottom, and with his Bible his own
heart. He who so knows his Bible and with it his own heart has almost
books enough. All else is but ostentatious apparatus. When a minister
has neither understanding nor memory wherewith to feed his flock, let him
look deep enough into his Bible and into his own heart, and then begin
out of them to write and speak. And, then, for the outside knowledge of
the passing day he will read the newspapers, and though he gives up all
the morning to the newspapers, and returns to them again in the evening,
his conscience will not upbraid him if he reads as Jonathan Edwards read
the newsletters of his day,--to see how the kingdom of heaven is
prospering in the earth, and to pray for its prosperity. And, then, by
that time, and when he has got that length, all other kinds of knowledge
will have fallen into its own place, and will have taken its own proper
proportion of his time and his thought.
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