Returning now to reading:  You are not to neglect books.  They must be read.  If you are a professional man they must be more than read; they must be studied, absorbed, made a part of your intellectual being.  I am not despising the accumulated learning of the past.  Matthew Arnold, in his “Literature and Dogma,” quite makes this point.  What I am speaking of is miscellaneous reading.

After a while one wearies of the endless repetition, the “damnable iteration” contained in the great mass of books.  You will finally come to care greatly for the Bible, Shakespeare, and Burns.  Compared with these most others are “twice-told tales” indeed.  Of course one must read the great scientific productions.  They are an addition to positive knowledge, and are a thing quite apart from ordinary literature.

My recommendation of the Bible is not alone because of its spiritual or religious influences; I am advising it from the material and even the business view-point.  By far the keenest wisdom in literature is in the Bible, and is put in terms so apt and condensed, too, that their very brevity proves its inspiration—­is an inspiration to you.

Carry the Bible with you, if for nothing else than as a matter of literary relaxation.  The tellers of the Bible stories tell the stories and stop.  “He builded him a city”—­“he smote the Philistines”—­“he took her to his mother’s tent.”  You are not wearied to death by the details.  Go into any audience addressed by a public speaker, and you will perceive that his hearers’ interest depends on whether he is getting to the point.  “Well, why doesn’t he get to the point,” is the common expression in public assemblages.  The Bible “gets to the point.”

And it has something for everybody.  If you are a politician, or even a statesman, no matter how astute you are, you can read with profit several times a year the career of David, one of the cleverest politicians and greatest statesmen who ever lived.  If you are a business man, the proverbs of Solomon will tone you up like mountain-air.

A young woman should read Ruth.  A man of practical life, a great man, but purely a man of the world, once said to me:  “If I could enact one statute for all the young women of America, it would be that each of them should read the book of Ruth once a month.”  But the limits and purpose of this paper do not permit a dissertation on the Bible.

Shakespeare, of course, you cannot get along without.  I shall say no more about him here; for if anything at all is said about Shakespeare (or the Bible), it ought to take up an entire paper at least.  “Don’t read anybody’s commentaries on Shakespeare—­don’t read mine; read Shakespeare,” was the final advice of Richard Grant White, one of the ripest of the world’s commentators on this universal poet.

From the Bible and Shakespeare roads lead down among books but little lower in elevation and outlook.  Of these the essays of Emerson furnish a noble example; and the poems of the Concord philosopher are the wisdom of the ancients stated in terms of Americanism.  I would have every young man spend half an hour over each page of our American Thinker’s essays on Character, Manners, Power, and Self-reliance.