Take Time for the Bible by T. H. Darlow

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 23, 1915

Take Time for the Bible

By T. H. Darlow

In these days people are fond of complaining rather helplessly about the pace and pressure of modern life. The spirit of the age is rushing faster every year. Business was never so exacting, nor pleasure so elaborate. We work and play under conditions of mental and physical tension. Often we sigh for some antidote to the hurry that is in the world. For, after all, any society must stand condemned which has lost its leisure.

From the very nature of the case, nothing great or enduring can ever be done in a hurry. People rush to be rich, and gamble for the fortune which they will not wait to earn. But even they are hardly absurd enough to rush to be wise. They understand that education, if it deserves its name, must needs be a deliberate and gradual thing. Nature herself rebukes our human feverishness with the example of her inexhaustible patience.

The greatest naturalist of our time devoted eight whole years almost entirely to a monograph on barnacles, and summed up a course of observations which had gone on through more than thirty years, in his book on earthworms. The like temper is characteristic of the artist. Genius cannot afford to be driven.

And this principle, which is justified in education and science and art, holds good even more absolutely in religion. We need to remember it today, when Christian work has so multiplied its activities and become so fatiguing in its demands, and the spirit of strain and hurry and competition even creeps into our devotion, and infects our very worship of God. And in particular we must take time for the Bible. It is true, indeed, that a hasty glance at a single verse can bring grace to the soul. Often to a jaded Christian in the midst of his busiest

labor, the word is fulfilled, “He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head.” But how many modern Christians are there who systematically give as much time to the Bible in a week as they give to magazines and newspapers? They open it at odd moments, they read it in fragments and snatches, or in some cases they hurry mechanically through an allotted number of verses. But do they steadily and habitually steep their spirits in the spirit of Holy Scripture?

Yet the Bible itself is a book of tranquillity. The peace of God rests upon its pages like sunshine on the summer hills. The record of our Lord’s life is full of serene leisure. His Father’s business was done for thirty patient years at Nazareth. And afterwards, when he became the vortex of eddying multitudes, through all those crowded days of healing and controversy, he never knew what it was to be feverish or hurried or distraught. He moved like a king in his own realm, and passed deliberately on to his appointed and accepted end. And so also his everlasting gospel has no fellowship with hurry. It cannot even be understood, except by those who will take time to understand it.

The Bible unfolds its secrets only to the disciples who brood over its pages. Not until we study it book by book do we grasp the divine inner unity which lies hidden beneath its manifold outward diversities. We can never fathom the profound meaning of redemption until we have possessed our own minds with the thoughts of the New Testament. And then, as we take time for the Bible, we rise above the spirit of hurry. The peace of Holy Scripture delivers from the weariness, the fever, and the fret which spoil so much of modern religion. The heart which believes becomes the heart at leisure, and the saints obtain at last their share in God’s timeless beatitude, wherein one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. —T. H. Darlow, M. A., in the Bible in the World.