Every book-lover agrees with
Channing: "No matter how poor I am..if the sacred writers will enter and
take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold
to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the words of
imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich
me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual
companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from
what is called the best society in the place where I live." Kingsley
says: "Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful Than a
book!--a message to us from the dead,--from human souls whom we never
saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away; and yet these, in
those little sheets of paper, speak to us, amuse us, terrify us, teach
us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers..If they are good
and true, whether they are about religion or politics, farming, trade,
or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the Maker of all things,
the Teacher of all truth." The wide range of truth secured through
reading acts in two ways upon the reader. It spiritualizes his
character, and it makes him mighty in action. Knowledge on almost any
subject has a marked tendency to sharpen one's wits, to refine his
tastes, to ennoble his spirit, to improve his judgement, to strengthen
his will, to subdue his baser passions, and to fill his soul with the
breath of life. It is only upon truth that the soul feeds, and by means
of knowledge that the character grows. "It cannot be that people should
grow in grace," writes John Wesley, "unless they give themselves to
reading. A reading people will always be a knowing people." Reading
makes one mighty in action when it gives one knowledge, since "knowledge
is power," and since power has but one way of showing itself, and that
is, in action. Knowledge takes no note of hardships, ignores fatigue,
laughs at disappointment, and frowns upon despair. It delves into the
earth, rides upon the air, defies the cold of the north, the heat of the
south; it stands upon the brink of the spitting volcano, circumnavigates
the globe, examines the heavens, and tries to understand God. With but
few exceptions, master-minds and men of affairs have been incessant
readers. Cicero, chief of Roman orators, whether at home or abroad, in
town or in the country, by day or by night, in youth or in old age, in
sorrow or in joy, was not without his books. "Petrarc