On Reading Many Books, Part 1

Benjamin Franklin said: "Read much, but not many books." I consider this very sage advice and I would like to expand upon it.

In this series of meditations I will cite several quotes from a book by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled Lectures to My Students. These quotes will be taken from the chapter entitled To Workers With Slender Apparatus. This lecture was addressed to ministers who do not have a large library of books. The essence of Mr. Spurgeon's advice to such men is that a man can read too many books, that it is better to have fewer books that are well-read and well-digested, and that reading is no substitute for thought. My experience confirms the truth of Mr. Spurgeon's words. Consider this first quote:

Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading. Books may be piled on the brain till it cannot work. Some men are disabled from thinking by putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. They gorge themselves with book-matter, and become mentally dyspeptic. Books on the brain cause disease. Get the book into the brain, and you will grow.

By the way, the word dyspeptic means indigestion. Just as one cannot well digest too much food, neither can one generally well digest too many books. It is better to read less, to think about what you read, and to absorb and retain it or, as Mr. Spurgeon said, get it into the brain; than to read more than the mind can process. This advice is especially relevant in our day when we are bombarded with so much to read. We are hit with the information highway of the internet, blogs, emails, postal mailings, handouts at meetings, magazines, and books ad infinitum.

I love this next quote about a single book well-read:

There is very much sound sense in the remark of a writer in the Quarterly Review many years back. "Give us the one dear book, cheaply picked from the stall by the price of the dinner, thumbed and dog-eared, cracked in the back and broken in the corner, noted on the fly-leaf and scrawled on the margin, sullied and scorched, torn and worn, smoothed in the pocket and grimed on the hearth, damped by the grass and dusted among the cinders, over which you have dreamed in the grove and dozed before the embers, but read again, again, and again, from cover to cover. It is by this one book, and its three or four single successors, that more real cultivation has been imparted than by all the myriads which bear down the mile-long, bulging, bending shelves of the Bodleian."

The Bodleian is the research library of the University of Oxford, which is surely a mammoth collection of books. More will be gotten from that one well-worn, well-read book than from volume after volume that has been read, but not retained. I know from my experience that I have a few books that I have referred to again and again, whereas most of the rest are much less opened. I also find that rereading a valuable book is extremely profitable. I pick up so much the second time around that I missed the first time.

Of course all of this most especially applies to the one book that it is most important for us to absorb and retain, that is, the Book of Books, the Holy Bible. Of all the books in your collection, this one should be read, marked, prayed over, thought about, and read again and again. The pages should be wrinkled, worn, and soiled from much turning. In time the cover should be frayed from being handled. Thoroughly acquainting yourself with that one book above any other and applying its teaching in your life will make you spiritually mighty, like Apollos, of whom it is written that he "was mighty in the scriptures" (Acts 18:24). Mr. Spurgeon put it this way:

You know the old proverb, "Cave ab homine unius libri - Beware of the man of one book. He is a terrible antagonist. A man who has his Bible at his fingers' ends and in his heart's core is a champion in our Israel; you cannot compete with him: you may have an armoury of weapons, but his scriptural knowledge will overcome you; for it is a sword like that of Goliath, of which David said, "There is none like it."

To which I can but say, "Amen and amen!" More about this next time, if the Lord will.