et many letters from clergymen asking advice about reading, and
deploring their lack of books. I warrant they all have books enough to
shake earth and heaven with, if the books were rightly used. A man who owns
a Bible has, to begin with, a library as long as from here to heaven. The
dullest preachers I know of have splendid libraries. They own everything
that has been written on a miracle, and yet when you hear them preach, if
you did not get sound asleep, that would be a miracle. They have all that
Calvin and other learned men wrote about election, and while you hear them
you feel that you have been elected to be bored. They have been months and
years turning over the heavy tomes on the divine attributes, trying to
understand God, while some plain Christian, with a New Testament in his
hand, goes into the next alley, and sees in the face of an invalid woman
peace and light and comfort and joy which teach him in one hour what God
is.

There are two kinds of dullness--learned dullness and ignorant dullness. We
think the latter preferable, for it is apt to be more spicy. You cannot
measure the length of a man's brain, nor the width of his heart, nor the
extent of his usefulness by the size of his library.

Life is so short you cannot know everything. There are but few things we
need to know, but let us know them well. People who know everything do
nothing. You cannot read all that comes out. Every book read without
digestion is so much dyspepsia. Sixteen apple-dumplings at one meal are not
healthy.

In our age, when hundreds of books are launched every day from the press,
do not be ashamed to confess ignorance of the majority of the volumes
printed. If you have no artistic appreciation, spend neither your dollars
nor your time on John Ruskin. Do not say that you are fond of Shakespeare
if you are not interested in him, and after a year's study would not know
Romeo from John Falstaff. There is an amazing amount of lying about
Shakespeare.

Use to the utmost what books you have, and do not waste your time in
longing after a great library. You wish you could live in the city and have
access to some great collection of books. Be not deceived. The book of the
library which you want will be out the day you want it. I longed to live in
town that I might be in proximity to great libraries. Have lived in town
thirteen years, and never found in the public library the book I asked for
but once; and getting that home, I discovere