Quiet Hints, Chapter 23–"Books and Reading”

Notes taken from Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers by Charles E. Jefferson, Chapter 23, “Books and Reading.”

There are preachers who would be stronger in their ministry if they read fewer books.

Books are numerous and cheap and no other working man in the town has so many hours in a wee which can be given to reading as the minister.

A parish gulps down an enormous amount of printed pabulum in a calendar year, and the minister who tries to read everything his people are reading is in danger of fatty degeneration of the mind.

A reader of many books is counted wise : his reading may make him a fool.

This habit of omnivorous reading begets mental habits which are blighting to the preacher’s work. Men addicted to it often become painfully superficial.

Men are best helped not by being told what the preacher has been reading, but by having poured upon them the hopes and convictions which have become so vital in his heart as to shape themselves into a message which must forthwith be uttered.

A sermon which smells of the lamp can be endured but never enjoyed.

When a minister neglects the sick and dying, when he ignores the stranger and the man in need of counsel, when he goes toward his people with repining and returns to his books with a sigh of relief he has entered on the road which leads down to the chambers of death.

No pride can be more scornful and cruel than the pride of a man who has lived with his books until he has lost his sympathy with men.

“Killed by his books” would be an epitaph fitting for the tombstone of many a ruined prophet of the Lord.

Men who would grow must be diligent students of the best books. They will not read every book of which one hundred thousand copies may be sold but will shut themselves up with the supreme books, the literature of power.

He who keeps constant company with the kings and queens of human thought will have a keenness of insight, a delicacy of touch, and an energy of persuasion which his indolent, newspaper, magazine, novel-reading brother may envy and marvel at but never possess.

Let the man of the pulpit read poetry for language and vision, biography for impulse and comfort, history for proportion and perspective, and the Bible for fire.