Merits to be sought in a principal Text-book.

Question as between old writers and new.

Paradoxical extreme—­one book and no more.

Single all-sufficing books do not exist.

Illustration from Locke’s treatment of the Bible.

II.  “What constitutes the study of a book?”

1.  Copying literally:—­Defects of this plan.

2.  Committing to memory word for word.

Profitable only for brief portions of a book.

Memory in extension and intension.

3.  Making Abstracts.

Variety of modes of abstracting.

4.  Locke’s plan of reading.

A sense of Form must concur with abstracting.

Example from the Practice of Medicine.

Example from the Oratorical Art

Choice of a series of Speeches to begin upon.

An oratorical scheme essential.

Exemplary Speeches.

Illustration from the oratorical quality of negative tact.  Macaulay’s
Speeches on Reform.

Study for improvement in Style.

III.  Distributing the Attention in Reading.

IV.  Desultory Reading.

V. Proportion of book-reading to Observation at first hand.

VI.  Adjuncts of Reading.—­Conversation.

Original Composition.

* * * * *

VIII.

Religious tests and subscriptions.

Pursuit of Truth has three departments:—­order of nature, ends of practice, and the supernatural.

Growth of Intolerance.  How innovations became possible.

In early society, religion a part of the civil government.

Beginnings of toleration—­dissentients from the State Church.

Evils attendant on Subscription:—­the practice inherently fallacious.

Enforcement of creeds nugatory for the end in view.

Dogmatic uniformity only a part of the religious character:  element of
Feeling.

Recital of the general argument for religious liberty.

Beginnings of prosecution for heresy in Greece:—­Anaxagoras, Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle.

Forced reticence in recent times:—­Carlyle, Macaulay, Lyell.

Evil of disfranchising the Clerical class.

Outspokenness a virtue to be encouraged.

Special necessities of the present time:  conflict of advancing knowledge with the received orthodoxy.

Objections answered:—­The Church has engaged itself to the State to teach given tenets.

Possible abuse of freedom by the clergy.

The history of the English Presbyterian Church exemplifies the absence of Subscription.

Various modes of transition from the prevailing practice.