A course of reading which shall include any number of the works here mentioned will be no child’s play; it will involve the severest exercise of the thinking powers, but it will enable you “to look into the perfections and relations of things, and to see the clouds, the bright lights, and the everlasting hills on the horizon.” The reading of such books is like the training of a gymnast; it will lead to the healthy development of the parts most skillfully exercised, but the strength of him who exercises should never be too severely tested. Would you prefer a lighter course of reading, but one which will probably lead you into pleasanter paths of contemplation and reflection, and finally open up to your view a prospect equally boundless and grand? Allow me to suggest the following, which is neither philosophical nor religious, in the strictest acceptation of these terms, but which leads us to an acquaintance with that which is best in both.
We shall begin with the Bible, and throughout the course we shall make that book our grand rallying-point. “Read the Bible reverently and attentively,” says Sir Matthew Hale; “set your heart upon it, and lay it up in your memory, and make it the direction of your life: it will make you a wise and good man.” From the reverential reading of the Bible, which to most of us is rather an act of religious duty than of intellectual effort, we turn to the great masterpieces of antiquity. In the Phædo and the Apology and Crito of Plato, we find the ripest thoughts of the world’s greatest thinker; then we turn to Aristotle’s Ethics, and, afterwards, we compare the doctrines of the Greek philosophers with the Teachings of Confucius and of Mencius.[22] If we have supplemented these readings with the proper acquaintance with ancient history, we shall now be ready to understand the great poems of antiquity, and to read them in a light different from that which we have hitherto known. We read the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and the Greek tragedians; then the old Indian epics, Arnold’s “The Light of Asia,” and Swamy’s “Dialogues and Discourses of Gotama Buddha.” Descending now to more modern times,—for we would not make this course a long one,—we turn again to our Bible, and thoroughly acquaint ourselves with “the unsurpassedly simple, loving, perfect idyls of the life and death of Christ,” as we find them in the New Testament. After this, we shall obtain more exalted ideas of the brotherhood of the human race and the “hope of the nations,” if we spend some time in the study of the majestic expressions of the universal conscience found in such works as the “Vishnu Sarma” of the Hindoos, the “Gulistan” of Saadi, the “Sentences” of Epictetus, and the “Thoughts” of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Then, to get at the poetic interpretation of the teachings of Mohammed, we read the “Pearls of Faith; or, Islam’s Rosary,” and Lane Poole’s “Selections from the Koran.” Returning to the study of Christian ethics and poetry, we take up the “Confessions of Saint Augustine,” and the “Discourse” of Saint Bernard, and then the “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas à Kempis. We read Milton’s “Paradise Lost” again, and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress;” and we enjoy the wealth of imagery in Jeremy Taylor’s “Holy Living and Holy Dying.” Holy George Herbert’s “Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations” claim our attention for a time, and then we take up Pascal’s “Thoughts,” and selections from Fénelon’s “Telemachus” and “Dialogues of the Dead.” Finally, we read Wordsworth’s “Excursion,” and Keble’s “Christian Year,” and return after all to a further perusal of the Bible and the poems of antiquity.
You may say that this course is rather fragmentary, and so it is; but it differs from the other courses which I have indicated, in that it is undertaken as a heart-work rather than a head-work. Unlike the course just preceding, it has to do with our emotional and devotional natures rather than with our highest powers of thinking and reasoning. With few exceptions only, the books here mentioned are voices out of the past, speaking to us of the human soul’s belief and experience in different ages of the world and under different dispensations. “I suppose,” says George Eliot, speaking of the “Imitation of Christ,”—“I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness; while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart’s prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary, hidden anguish, struggle, trust, and triumph,—not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced,—in the cloister, perhaps with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours,—but under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness.”
Writing of works like these, Emerson says: “Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart.... These are the Scriptures which the missionary might well carry over prairie, desert, and ocean, to Siberia, Japan, Timbuctoo. Yet he will find that the spirit which is in them journeys faster than he, and greets him on his arrival,—was there long before him. The missionary must be carried by it, and find it there, or he goes in vain. Is there any geography in these things? We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only optical, for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as good eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a Bible.”
We are brought now naturally to the subject of Theological Literature. The number of books in this department is very great, and there are wide differences of opinion with regard to the merits of many of the best-known works. Without attempting to select always the best, I shall name only a sufficient number of books necessary for the use of such non-professional readers as may desire to acquire a moderate knowledge of the commonly accepted theological doctrines—
McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (10 vols.).
Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible.
Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible.
Barrow’s Sacred Geography and Antiquities.
Dean Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine in connection with their History.
Clark’s Bible Atlas, with Maps and Plans.
Bissel’s Historic Origin of the Bible.
Lange’s Commentary on the Holy Scriptures.
Alford’s The Greek Testament; and The New Testament for English Readers.
Oehler’s Theology of the Old Testament.
Weiss’s Biblical Theology of the New Testament.
Geikie’s Hours with the Bible.
Lenormant’s The Beginnings of History, according to the Bible and the Traditions of Oriental Peoples.
Dean Stanley’s Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church.
Geikie’s Life and Works of Christ.
Farrar’s Life of Christ.
Farrar’s Life and Work of St. Paul.
Conybeare and Howson’s Life and Epistles of St. Paul.
Schaff’s History of the Christian Church.
Dean Milman’s History of Latin Christianity (8 vols.).
Dean Stanley’s Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church.
Maurice’s Religions of the World.
James Freeman Clarke’s Ten Great Religions.
Moffatt’s Comparative History of Religions.
Trench’s Lectures on Mediæval Church History.
Ullman’s Reformers before the Reformation.
Fisher’s History of the Reformation.
Ranke’s History of the Popes during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
Griesinger’s History of the Jesuits.
Baird’s Rise and Progress of the Huguenots in France.
Stevens’s History of Methodism.
Tyerman’s Life and Times of John Wesley.
Hagenbach’s History of Christian Doctrines (translated by C. W. Buch).
Fisher’s Faith and Rationalism.
McCosh’s Christianity and Positivism.
Farrar’s Critical History of Free Thought in reference to the Christian Religion.
Smith’s Faith and Philosophy.
Calderwood’s Relations of Science and Religion.
Max Müller’s Science of Religion.
Christlieb’s Counteracting Modern Infidelity.
Trench’s Shipwrecks of Faith.
Walker’s Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation.
Smyth’s Old Faiths in New Light.
Brooks’s Yale Lectures on Preaching.
Dorner’s System of Christian Doctrine.
Goulburn’s Thoughts on Personal Religion.
Richard Baxter, speaking of this class of books, says: “Such books have the advantage in many other respects: you may read an able preacher when you have but a mean one to hear. Every congregation cannot hear the most judicious or powerful preachers; but every single person may read the books of the most powerful and judicious. Preachers may be silenced or banished, when books may be at hand; books may be kept at a smaller charge than preachers: we may choose books which treat of that very subject which we desire to hear of. Books we may have at hand every day and hour, when we can have sermons but seldom, and at set times. If sermons be forgotten, they are gone. But a book we may read over and over until we remember it; and if we forget it, may again peruse it at our pleasure or at our leisure.”
