Reading the Bible

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 9, 1873

Reading the Bible

Read your Bible slowly. Take time, even if you have but little time. A great mathematician once said, if his life depended upon solving a problem in two minutes, he would spend one of the two in deciding how to do it. So in reading the Scriptures; if you are pressed for time (and this ought to be a rare case), then spend the precious moments on a portion of a chapter. When you feel that the mind and heart begin to drink in the sentiment, even of a single verse, then stop and drain the heavenly chalice, because the divine Spirit is filling the cup. It is a true, solemn, and interesting thought, that we are to wait, to linger, to tarry, for the blessing to come from the word before us.

To search the Scriptures with the clear, unmoved eye of meditation secures treasures of knowledge known only to him who thus coolly, piously, and philosophically, studies the word of God.

Let any man give us the reason why, when the Scriptures are read so much, memory retains so little, the quotations are so blundering and incorrect, if the reason is not found in the fact of hasty reading of the word of God. There, as elsewhere, man must reap as he sows.