p. 11 | Reading the Bible by J. Stalker

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 17, 1903

Reading the Bible

By J. Stalker

I WELL remember the first time in my life I ever read a whole book of the Bible through at a stretch.

It was in France. I was in a town where there was no Protestant service. In the early morning I attended the Roman Catholic church; but, the worship being over about breakfast time, I had the rest of the day on my hands.

Having sauntered out of the town, and cast myself down on a green knoll, I began, by mere chance, to read the Epistle to the Romans. I read one chapter; but instead of stopping there, as I had been accustomed to do, I read a second, and then a third. By degrees I was caught in the current of the great argument, which swept me irresistibly along.

Then I forgot everything except the delicious impact of the crowding thoughts and the kaleidoscopic vistas opening out on every hand, till at last I came out, excited and overawed, at the close of the last chapter.

That experience was a revelation to me of a new way of finding interest in the Bible. I saw that a book of the Bible is a unity—the discussion of a single great theme. In the light of this whole, all the parts become luminous, the meaning of every verse being manifest when it is seen in its place as the bridge from what goes before to what comes after.

Ever since that day I have cultivated this method of reading the books of the Bible, and it has brought me untold profit and satisfaction.—Rev. J. Stalker.