There are continual movements into and out of reading. Some students I have known and taught, who have discovered Reformed theology and gathered the beginnings of a library, have, alas, within a decade, drifted away from biblical religion, ending up in religious groups where reading is exceptional. As the years have gone by and the shallowness of that form of Christianity has not been able to sustain them, the books have again been taken up and read. But years have been lost. Some men who, in many ways, are godly leaders in congregations are 'not readers'. They will never be seen around the book table browsing through the latest books. But they read their newspaper every day. And the Bible of course. Then, to one's surprise, one finds they are reading. A faculty of appreciation, long dormant, has begun to flourish.

Some men have an extraordinary appetite for books. They are men of the keenest intelligence. When W. J. Grier went into Principal John MacLeod's house it was like entering a bookshop. 'He had shelves of books behind shelves of books,' he told me, laughing, and all of them well-read. But the greatest reader of them all must have been Prime Minister William Ewan Gladstone. How daunting to read these words of his in December 1835:

I have cast up my reading account, and brought it to the end of the year. During the last thirteen months I have read Aeschylus twice; Sophocles twice; Euripides once; Pindar twice; Callimachus; Apollonius Rhodius; Quintas Calaber; Theocritus twice; Herodotus; Thucydides; almost all Xenophon's works; almost all Plato; Aristotle's Politics, and a good deal of his Organon, besides dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch's Lives; about half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; Plautus twice; Catullus; Tibullus; Propertius; Lucan; Statius; Silius Italicus; Livy; Velleius Paterculus; Sallust; Caesar; and lastly Cicero. I have indeed a little of Cicero left; but I shall finish him in a few days. I am now deep in Aristophanes and Lucian...

All this in the midst of much else of great import. It is simply titanic, filling the rest of us with envy and inferiority. There is no hope of competing with him. Gladstone started with a better mind, but his achievement encourages us all to simplify and prune our lives to get in more reading of books that matter and that can change us.

The Influence of the Printed Word⤒🔗

Reading is changing people. Think of newspapers. Asahi Shimbun of Tokyo has a circulation of 9 million copies a day. This paper is not simply a popular daily; it exerts an enormous social and political influence. Izvestia of Moscow has a circulation of 8 million copies a day, Pravda of Moscow 7 million copies a day. Both these Russain papers are read by many more millions of people than their circulation figures indicate, being distributed through eastern Europe. They still present somewhat of a Marxist world view and are read by hundreds of millions of people. Jen Minh Jih Pao of China has a circulation of two and a half million copies a day. It reaches more people than any other journal in the world. It is the channel of state information for China, and is read out over the radio, on the trains, and in factories and farms. Copies are also placed in glass-enclosed holders at inter­sections and market places. It has never contained one word commending the Christian faith. Newspapers should be read with distinct aims in mind, selecting the various passages and articles you wish to read. Even the best newspapers abound in bias and error. 'Read a paper standing up', advised Ernest Kevan. So everyone is reading and being affected by what they read. It is too easy to declare oneself 'not a reader', and untrue.

Consider Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. ¹ As long as men have as their objective a quest for truth, and while they struggle with unclarified issues in their search, The Pilgrim's Progress will speak to them. The Pilgrim is a hammer with which to test theology and ideas. It is a light to clear the mind of vague and foggy thoughts, and detect fallacies. When Christian comes from the Cross he sees Simple, Sloth, and Presumption fast asleep with fetters upon their heels, and he tries to arouse them. Simple lethargically replies, 'I see no danger.' As long as he can dwell without/interruption within his own mental boundaries, he will not feel the shock of the fetters upon his heels. Simple can never stand the insecurity of a fresh perspective; a new mind is unwelcome to him. Look at Sloth: his eyes are closed to change and responsibility. Life does not interest or challenge him, and he sleeps his years away. Then there is Presumption. Living by empty, shallow platitudes, he refuses to throw himself into problems demanding thinking and discerning action. Simple, Sloth and Presumption are unwilling to read books. They live all around us. John Bunyan knew them and challenged them in his sermons, and in books! They would not read, so he would write books which would tempt them to read. He would create a faculty of appreciation.

Reading is an enthusiasm that can be instilled. J. I. Packer has four rules for good writing. First, have something clear to say. Second, keep it simple. Third, make it flow. Fourth, be willing to redraft as often as is necessary to meet these requirements. Keeping these rules has resulted in Packer selling two million copies of his books in ten languages. Nothing in comparison with the number John Bunyan has sold, of course. In his autobiography, Grace Abounding, ² Bunyan remarked,

God did not play in convincing me; the devil did not play in tempting me ... wherefore I may not play in my relating of them but be plain and simple and lay down the thing as it was.

He also wrote a book called The Greatness of the Soul. ³ It is a model of obedience to Packer's rules for what discussion and interchange should be: searching and precise, candid and open, courteous and calmly reasoned. He brought that same quality of mind to bear on a wide variety of subjects and by it he sought to awaken Simple, Sloth and Presumption.

The Reading Revolution←⤒🔗

Reading is not a matter of social class. Ordinary people can possess the greatest wisdom under heaven. Let us remember how the reading revolution came about. The first books were so expensive to produce that they were written for public reading, rather as concerts are performed today. Only the great institutions such as monasteries and state libraries could afford to keep a stock of books. Charlemagne, Alfred, and other enlightened monarchs introduced the remarkable doctrine that even kings should be able to read, publish, and write books. But owning books was still confined to courts, the church, and the professional scholar. Remember Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenforde in the Canterbury Tales who borrowed money from his friends to spend on books and learning, and whose ambition was to have twenty books, clad in black and red, of Aristotle and his philosophy, at his bed's head. One can see from paintings of the time that Gutenberg and the Renaissance brought in the notion that rich private citizens could and should own books, as well as paintings, Persian carpets, and other luxuries. But books were still only for the rich. For most of the seventeenth century, the only books you would have been certain of finding in an ordinary Englishman's home were the King James Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.

It was John Foxe who said in the sixteenth century, 'God has opened the press to preach, and by this printing, as by the gift of tongues, the doctrine of the Gospel sounds to all nations and countries under heaven.' Then Bunyan began to write his books, and ordinary people had a bookshelf for the first time. John Wesley left two hundred and thirty-three works, many of them pamphlets or tracts. He wrote in his Journal on 18 December 1745: 'We have within a short time given away thousands of little tracts among the common people ... And this day An Earnest Exhortation to Serious Repentance was given at every church-door in or near London to every person who came out, and one left at the house of every householder who was absent from church.' Wesley's use of tracts probably led to the formation in England of the Religious Tract Society in 1799. Similar societies were established in other European countries, and, in 1825, the American Tract Society began its work. In his History of Christianity Kenneth Scott Latourette says, 'In 1832 the American Tract Society adopted a plan to place some of its literature in every religiously destitute family in the United States. In 1847 most of its 267 colporteurs were in the Mississippi Valley, in much of which frontier conditions still prevailed.' Now books are everywhere, even in the Millennium Dome. There was a sense of shock last year when it was pointed out that there would not be a book in the Dome. Now it has been announced that the first book to be displayed there will be William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament into English published in 1526.

The paperback revolution has changed things, making books no longer luxuries but essential companions to civilized living. We treat a book with little of the reverence of Chaucer's undergraduate, carrying it in our pocket or handbag, giving it away when we have completed it. Today we all live on the frontier between the kingdom of God and the world. There are other frontiers: between old and young, between rebels and the establish­ment. The Bible can cross every frontier. It is Christ's truth that makes men free from life in a cage.

The Computer Age←⤒🔗

What of this age of computers? Does it not foretell the death of the book? Far from it. Whatever the achievements of Internet-pioneer Jerry Yang and his followers, the computer and the written book are not in competition (as books and television are) but are complementary. Children cannot become truly computer-literate until they are truly literate. And even playing games on a laptop encourages the very habits of solitude, silence, concentration and sitting still that are involved in curling up with a book But who ever heard of curling up with a computer? The hardware is still too cumbersome, the screen too flickering, for reading at a computer to be a relaxing experience. Indeed most people, when they find a mass of information on the Internet, will print it out for the greater comfort of hand and eye. Publishers moved from scrolls to pages almost two thousand years ago: computers have yet to match that convenience. Books win the artificial competition for convenience.

The Written Versus the Spoken Word?←⤒🔗

Another artificial tension has been opened up in academic circles by the proponents of the 'logocentric' or 'phonocentric' nature of western culture. The argument runs like this: 'Our culture has granted to speech a privileged status above that of writing, regarding the spoken word as containing a truth and reality that are irretrievably lost when the word is written down. Speech provides the standard to which writing must return for its credentials' (see An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture by Roger Scruton, p. 120).

There have been times in the history of the western world when it was essential for people to be exhorted. Written words would not do. Churchill had to speak, and could do so magnificently. Through education it is the teacher who instructs, edifies and makes the child mature. But western civilization was founded on a Book where one hears the voice of God. That Book is read when we gather together. And when that Book is preached the same written Word comes with identical power to the hearers, so that the preacher can employ the present tense and cry, 'This is what God says!' But every hearer must search the written Word to see if it is so. There is for us a word-centredness in worship, but it is 'Scripture', the scripted, written Word, that determines and judges the truth of all we believe and do. No book can ever replace the Book.

'Know Your Books!'←⤒🔗

So use books. Sinclair Ferguson exhorts us, 'Know your books! Know specific passages in them. Know those sections which have particularly helped you, so that you are able to point your friends to answers to the questions they ask, and to the help they need. Then you will be able to say to them: "Here is something that you can read; it will explain to you better, and more clearly than I ever could, what I want to say to you." (Sinclair B. Ferguson, Read Any Good Books? Banner of Truth Trust, 1992, p.16).

A book and an accompanying letter can be such a help. Timothy D. Fellows, a friend from Augusta, Georgia, has, during his ministry, written hundreds of letters to a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. A year ago a stroke took him to death's door and he is still unable to write or preach. A collection of his letters has just been published by his church, Pilgrims' Bible Church, 638 Crawford Avenue, Augusta, GA 30904, U.S.A. They are full of pathos, and valuable. He writes thus to one grieving the death of his daughter:

What a painful experience you have had to face! I have never as yet been called upon to mourn the death of my child, yet my heart grieves for you in this time of awful loss. God is great ... Although we do not know particular 'Whys', we do know that God is good, and that He has purposed all things for our good, who love Him and who are the called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28). God is good, and as such He has all power in heaven and in earth at His disposal. We must not doubt His ability. Now, we see through a glass darkly, but one day we shall know even as we are known. Go onward: 'Stand, then, in His great might'.

I am enclosing a booklet by a well-known Scottish preacher of the last century, Robert Murray M'Cheyne. It was originally published under the title, Bethany: The Sickness, Death and Resurrection of Lazarus, and focuses on the words, 'He whom thou lovest is sick'. May this be a comfort and an encouragement to you in these sobering days.

Use the best books to 'LAY DOWN THE THING AS IT WAS', and read the best books, the books of those who have done so!