p. 84 | HEALTHY CHRISTIANITY

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 10, 1887

HEALTHY CHRISTIANITY.

ALTHOUGH Christianity is sometimes called the religion of a book, healthy Christianity can never be a mere book-religion. And yet there is a danger to all of us practically to make it so. When the adult Christian worker becomes so absorbed in the reading of devout biographies, or essays on personal religion, or manuals of prayer, that a distaste for actual service is created, he is displacing personal religion by book-religion. So is the Sunday-school scholar when he thinks that he is fulfilling all the claims of religion upon him, as he bends his head for hours over some half-sentimental, half-sensational religious story. The truth about religious reading is that half of it is not religious reading at all, but only a convenient way of soothing the spirit with pseudo-religious luxury when it ought to be braced by really religious work. There is a gain in varied religious reading, and no Christian

can afford to be lacking in close and personal study of the word of God; but to attempt to satisfy the claims of duty by religious reading, when religious doing is called for, is to attempt to pass counterfeit coin into the treasury of Heaven.—Selected.