Professor Phelps, in his lectures to divinity students, gives golden advice to the class of professional men whose life-work compels them to draw upon their productive intellect more than any other class of professional men.
Phelps.
“There is an influence exerted by books upon the mind which resembles that of diet upon the body. A studious mind becomes, by a law of its being, like the object which it studies with enthusiasm. If your favorite authors are superficial, gaudy, short-lived, you become yourself such in your culture and your influence. If your favorite authors are of the grand, profound, enduring order, you become yourself such to the extent of your innate capacity for such growth. Their thoughts become yours not by transfer, but by transfusion. Their methods of combining thoughts become yours; so that on different subjects from theirs you will compose as they would have done if they had handled those subjects. Their choice of words, their idioms, their constructions, their illustrative materials become yours; so that their style and yours will belong to the same class in expression, and yet your style will never be merely imitative of theirs.
“It is the prerogative of great authors thus to throw back a charm over subsequent generations which is often more plastic than the influence of a parent over a child. Do we not feel the fascination of it from certain favorite characters in history? Are there not already certain solar minds in the firmament of your scholarly life whose rays you feel shooting down into the depths of your being, and quickening there a vitality which you feel in every original product of your own mind? Such minds are teaching you the true ends of an intellectual life. They are unsealing the springs of intellectual activity. They are attracting your intellectual aspirations. They are like voices calling to you from the sky.
“Respecting this process of assimilation, it deserves to be remarked that it is essential to any broad range of originality. Never, if it is genuine, does it create copyists or mannerists. Imitation is the work of undeveloped mind. Childish mind imitates. Mind unawakened to the consciousness of its own powers copies. Stagnant mind falls into mannerism. On the contrary, a mind enkindled into aspiration by high ideals is never content with imitated excellence. Any mind thus awakened must, above all things else, be itself. It must act itself out, think its own thoughts, speak its own vernacular, grow to its own completeness. You can no more become servile under such a discipline than you can unconsciously copy another man’s gait in your walk or mask your own countenance with his.”[17]
“Give to yourself a hearty, affectionate acquaintance with a group of the ablest minds in Christian literature, and if there is anything in you kindred to such minds, they will bring it up to the surface of your own consciousness. You will have a cheering sense of discovery. Quarries of thought original to you will be opened. Suddenly, it may be in some choice hour of research, veins will glisten with a lustre richer than that of silver. You will feel a new strength for your life’s work, because you will be sensible of new resources.”[18]
Two ways of reading.
There are two ways of reading books,—one a help to thinking, the other destructive of ability to think. If the reader allows the ideas of a book to pass through his mind as a landscape passes before the eye of a traveller, ever seeking the excitement of something new and never stopping to reflect upon the contents of the book so as to weigh its arguments, to notice its beauties, and to appropriate its truths, the book will leave him less able to think than before. Passive reading is permissible when the aim is merely recreation, but he who would read to gain mental strength must read actively, read books that he can understand only as the result of effort. President Porter gives this advice: