HERALDS OF GOD
panied with Shakespeare and Plutarch, Tolstoy and Dickens, Robert Bridges, Chesterton, Eddington, T. S. Eliot, is to find all your horizons stretched and widened. Such intercourse will impart new qualities of breadth, insight, dignity and precision to all your work. Therefore, in the words of the apostolic injunction, "give attendance to reading."
Need I remind you that when Paul laid that charge upon Timothy he was thinking supremely of Scripture reading? "I do not know," exclaimed Spurgeon, "how my soul would have been kept alive if it had not been for the searching of Scripture which preaching has involved." It is your immense privilege that the very nature of your calling compels you to live daily in the pages of the Bible. But do not, I beg you, debase the Word of God by regarding it as a mere hunting-ground for texts and subjects. Let there be a deeper constraint behind your Bible study than the feverish question, "Now what am I going to preach about next Sunday?" If all our people need the devotional use of the Bible for their spiritual nourishment and growth in grace, how much more do we, who have to speak to them in the Name which is above every name! Nothing can atone for slackness and indiscipline at this point. Let us give ourselves day by day to prayerful and meditative study of the Word, listening to hear what God the Lord will speak: lest, when we seek to interpret the Scriptures to others, it should have to be said of us, in the words of the Samaritan which were once applied to Robert Southey's attempt to interpret the
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