The Demand for Easy Reading.
By J. R. Miller, D. D.
THERE are many people, in these days, who like all the intellectual work they undertake to be very easy,—so easy as to require no serious effort, or next to none. This statement applies particularly to the reading which these good, but very gentle, people are willing to do. The demand upon their thinking faculties must not be severe. Everything must be made very plain. The deepest truths and the most abstruse teachings must be presented in such a vivid way as not only to be easily understood, but also to charm the mind by their striking beauty. All reading must be easy to get itself read by any but a very small class. There are still a few heroic souls who despise anything that is not hard, and who pride themselves on their exploits in wrestling with the deepest problems of science and metaphysics. But the great masses of those who read,—and does not everybody read in these days?—must have only easy reading. How many people, in this great reading age, really study history? How many regularly read solid and abstruse matter of any kind? Our modern culture knows all about the auroral literature that flashes up to-day and dies out again to-morrow, but knows almost nothing of the really great books of the ages. Many people who have not the courage to confess ignorance of the last novel, regard it as no shame to be utterly ignorant of the grand old classics. It is pretty safe to say that not one in a hundred now reads Milton's "Paradise Lost," and that not one in a thousand has ever read even a translation of Homer's "Iliad," or knows its contents. All literature, to win attention and to find readers, must be served up in attractive form, and made pathetic, or romantic, or thrilling, or sentimental. As an age, we are running to novel-reading, and the lightest kind of novel-reading at that. Even Walter Scott is too hard to read, and too dull and heavy for the great bulk of our reading public; and Hawthorne is too philosophical and too solemn. A look into the publishers' accounts of sales shows that the great books of the market to-day are not the really great books of the masters. Even religious teaching must be wrought into charming story form to get our boys and girls and young people to like it enough to read it. Our Sunday-school books are chiefly stories, and stories, oft-times,—had we not as well confess it?—whose only merit is that they are easy reading. Is it not true, that, in feeding our children from the Sunday-school-library table on these diluted fictions, we are helping to vitiate their intellectual taste, to weaken their ability for earnest thinking, and to unfit them for strong mental work in their maturity? The effect of this perpetual Sunday-school-book reading is seen in the growing distaste of the young for solid religious instruction of any kind. Teaching must be pictorial, or illustrative, or by story-telling. The children must have "sermonettes" of their own, duly diluted and etherealized, and not more than five or seven minutes long, sandwiched somewhere in the old people's service. It would never do to ask the dear things to listen to the solid preaching that their fathers and mothers get; such intellectual effort might work permanent injury to their minds. But it is not the children's religious teaching only that has to be made easy. How many good Christians now read the great religious books? It is altogether possible that, if we were perfectly honest about it, it would appear that many of us do not even read the Bible; or that, if we do, we read it only when we are half asleep, and merely to satisfy a mild demand of conscience. Some of us cheat ourselves into the belief that we are diligent Bible-readers because we read a great deal about the Bible, in the way of comments upon, and explanations of, certain passages, while really we scarcely ever read and study the book for ourselves. We go to church, and listen to the preacher (if his sermon is not too deep and abstruse, and too hard to follow) to hear what he thinks about some Scripture text or doctrine; but we do not care to search the sacred word for ourselves. Why should we, indeed? Is it not the minister's business to "feed" our souls? Should he not, therefore, do the hard thinking and the deep searching after the truth, and bring us the results in well-digested, logically arranged, clearly expressed, finely illustrated, eloquently delivered half-hour sermons? As for the doctrines of the Bible, there surely can be no necessity for people to tire themselves in freshly going over the ground. Have not wise and good men gone over it with conscientious diligence and care, and do not the creeds and confessions of the church contain all the important and essential truths of the Bible? Faith is easier than hard study, and the easier way is the best. Whether the easy ways of doing everything so much in vogue at present will make the grand men and noble women that grow up in the older-fashioned methods of hard intellectual work, remains to be seen. Some one has said,—Heinrich Heine, was it not?—that wherever a great thought is born, there has been a Gethsemane. It has heretofore been supposed that that which costs little is worth but little. If this be true, the easy reading that is now so much in demand will not produce vigorous intellects; nor will the easy religious education required by modern tastes make fine characters.