Reading the Bible Through.
By Sel.
ONE of my neighbors says that he reads the Bible all through once every year. He begins at Genesis on New-Year's Day. He reads just so many chapters or pages every day, and manages to finish up on the 31st of December. He thinks that everybody ought to do as he does—take just so much Bible a day, whether the days are long or short, hot or cold, wet or dry. The result of this plan in my neighbor's case is that he goes over the Bible as a matter of form. His object is not to get truth to feed upon—truth adapted to the varying circumstances of life—but to get through. That is his task, and he takes great credit to himself when he has accomplished it. But I don't find that he knows any more about the Bible, after all, than those of us who don't read it as much, but who remember more of what we read. I went to visit this neighbor once, when there was a revival in progress. I had been reading the promises and the account of the day of Pentecost; but he was just then in Chronicles, and was feasting his soul on such edifying verses as these:— The sons of Levi: Gershom, Kohath, and Merari. And then the names of the sons of Gershom: Libni, and Shimei. And the sons of Kohath were Amos and Izhar and Hebron and Uzziel, &c. I did not find him in a very spiritual frame. He wanted the revival postponed until he got over to the Psalms and Isaiah. But that would have brought it into mid-summer, so we were obliged to leave him stumbling through the genealogies, like a man walking in a graveyard. Now the genealogies are a part of the Bible. They have been recorded, and the record preserved for our instruction. Yet it does not follow that they are as interesting and as instructive as the Gospels, and ought to be read just as often. I don't believe much in this idea of just so much Bible a day. Sometimes I want to spend an hour upon half a dozen verses. The more I read them, the more I see in them. To go over the fourteenth chapter of John or the eighth of Romans as we go over the first, second, and third chapters of Chronicles is as absurd as to say that a nickle is worth as much as a half-eagle because both are money. The stamp of inspiration is upon every part of the Bible. But it does not follow that every part is of equal value. Who does not know the twenty-third Psalm by heart? But who ever thought of committing to memory the thirty-sixth chapter of Genesis—"the generation of Esau, which is Edom," &c.—Sel.