Wide Reading.

Then one needs to have a plan of reading.  A consecutive plan gathers up the fragments of time into a strong whole.  Get a good plan, and stick to it.  Better a fairly good plan faithfully followed, than the best plan if used brokenly or only occasionally.  Probably all the numerous methods of study may be grouped under three general heads, wide reading, topical study, and textual.  We all do some textual study in a more or less small way.  Digging into a sentence or verse to get at its true and deep meaning.  We all do some topical study probably.  Gathering up statements on some one subject, studying a character.  The more pretentious name is Biblical Theology, finding and arranging all that is taught in the whole range of the Bible on any one theme.

But I want especially to urge wide reading, as being the basis of all study.  It is the simple, the natural, the scientific method.  It is adapted to all classes of persons.  I used to suppose it was suited best to college students, and such; but I was mistaken.  It is the method of all for all.  It underlies all methods of getting a grasp of this wonderful Book, and so coming to as full and rounded an understanding of God as is possible to men down here.

By wide reading is meant a rapid reading through regardless of verse, chapter, or book divisions.  Reading it as a narrative, a story.  As you would read any book, “The Siege of Pekin,” “The Story of an Untold Love,” to find out the story told, and be able to tell to another.  There will be a reverence of spirit with this book that no other inspires, but with the same intellectual method of running through to see what is here.  No book is so fascinating as the Bible when read this way.  The revised version is greatly to be preferred here simply because it is a paragraph version.  It is printed more like other books.  Some day its printed form will be yet more modernized, and so made easier to read.

To illustrate, begin at the first of Genesis, and read rapidly through by the page.  Do not try to understand all.  You will not.  Never mind that now.  Just push on.  Do not try to remember all.  Do not think about that.  Let stick to you what will.  You will be surprised to find how much will.  You may read ten or twelve pages in your first half hour.  Next time start in where you left off.  You may get through Genesis in three or four times, or less or more, depending on your mood, and how fast your habit of reading may be.  You will find a whole Bible in Genesis.  A wonderfully fascinating book this Genesis.  For love stories, plotting, swift action, beautiful language it more than matches the popular novel.

But do not stop at the close of Genesis.  Push on into Exodus.  The connection is immediate.  It is the same book.  And so on into Leviticus.  Now do not try to understand Leviticus the first time.  You will not the hundredth time perhaps.  But you can easily group its contents:  these chapters tell of the offerings:  these of the law of offerings:  here is an incident put in:  here sanitary regulations:  get the drift of the book.  And in it all be getting the picture of God—­that is the one point.  And so on through.