The independent reading of a book in this sense is urged because of its development of one's own intellectual powers. To be ever leaning on help from others is like walking on stilts all one's life and never attempting to place one's feet on the ground. Who can ever come to know the most direct and highest type of the teaching of the Holy Spirit in this way? Who can ever understand the most precious and thrilling experiences of spiritual illumination thus? Should you wish to teach others, how could you communicate to them that sense of your own mastery of the subject so vital to a pedagogue had you never really dealt with it at first hand? One of our millionaires is reported as carrying a cow around with him on his yacht because he dislikes condensed milk. It is a great gain to so know the Bible for yourself that, carrying it with you wherever you go, you may be measurably independent of other books in its study and use.
But there is another reason for the independent reading of the book, and that is the deliverance from intellectual confusion which it secures. The temptation is, when an interpretive difficulty is reached, to turn at once to the commentary for light, which means so very often that the reader has become side-tracked for good, or rather bad, as the situation is now viewed. The search for the solution of one little difficulty leads to searching for another, and that for another, until, to employ F. B. Meyer's figure, we have "become so occupied with the hedgerows and the copses of the landscape as to lose the conception of the whole sweep and extent of the panorama of truth." The "intensive" has been pursued to the great disadvantage of the "extensive," and usually there is nothing to be done but to begin all over again, for which every reader does not possess the required courage.
And there is an advantage in this independent reading from the teacher's point of view, too, as well as that of the learner. How many pastors through the country have spoken of the success the synthetic method has been to them in attracting their people to the house of God and awakening in them a real interest in Bible study! That is, what a success it has been up to a certain point, when they got "swamped," to use the very expressive word of more than one of them! Swamped? How? Investigation has always revealed the one cause, and brought the one confession—a failure to diligently and faithfully pursue the method in consequence of the temptation to investigate minutiae and multiply details. There is lying before me at this moment the debris of a collapse of this kind. A devoted pastor sends me the printed syllabus of his work with his congregation covering the Hexateuch. They were so delighted and so helped by it until now, when there has come a "hitch." He fears he is getting away from the plan, and giving and expecting too much. And his work reveals the ground of his fears. Such work belongs to the pastor in his study, but not on the platform before a popular audience in Bible teaching. And if it will "swamp" the trained and cultivated teacher, how much more the inexperienced learner! A faithful reading of the various books on an independent basis will secure a working outline, and this should be carried with one in his mind, and on his notebook, as he proceeds from book to book, until the work is done. Then he can successively begin his finer work, and analyse his outline, and study helps, and gather light, and accumulate material, without confusion of thought, without a false perspective, and with an ever-increasing sense of joy and power.
[Sidenote: Read It Prayerfully]
The most important rule is the last. Read it prayerfully. Let not the triteness of the observation belittle it, or all is lost. The point is insisted on because, since the Bible is a supernatural book, it can be studied or mastered only by supernatural aid. In the words of William Luff,
"It is the Spirit's Bible! Copyright every word!
Only His thoughts are uttered, only His voice is heard!"
Who is so well able to illuminate the pages of a given book as the author who composed it? How often when one has been reading Browning has he wished Browning were at his side to interpret Browning! But the Holy Spirit, by whom holy men of old wrote, dwells within the believer on Jesus Christ for the very purpose of bringing things to his remembrance and guiding him into all the truth. Coleridge said, "The Bible without the Holy Spirit is a sundial by moonlight," and a greater than he said, "We have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given us of God" (1 Corinthians 2:12). That dear old Scottish saint, Andrew Bonar, discriminated between a minister's getting his text from the Bible, and getting it from God through the Bible; a fine distinction that holds good not only with reference to the selection of a text to preach upon, but with reference to the apprehension spiritually of any part of the Word of God. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him; but God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit" (1 Corinthians 2:9, 10). The inspired apostle does not say God has revealed them unto us by His Word, though they are in His Word; but by His Spirit through His Word. "For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God."
There is a parallel passage to the above in the first chapter of Ephesians which has always impressed the writer with great force. Paul had been unveiling the profoundest verities of holy writ to the Ephesians, and then he prays that the eyes of their heart (R.V.) might be enlightened to understand, to know what he had unveiled. He had been telling them what was the hope of their calling, and the riches of the glory of God's inheritance in the saints, and the exceeding greatness of His power toward them that believe; but how could they apprehend what he had told them, save as the Holy Spirit took of these things of Christ and showed them unto them? The Word of God is not enough without the Spirit of God. In the light of the foregoing, let the reader punctuate the reading of it and every part of it with prayer to its divine Author, and he will come to know "How to Master the English Bible."