d day and all his
days. If he has not the strength of understanding and memory to read his
Bible easily in the original Hebrew and Greek, let him all the more make
up for that by reading it the oftener and the deeper in English. Let him
not only read his Bible deeply for his sermons and prayers, lectures and
addresses, let him do that all day every day of the week, and then read
it all night, and every night of the week, for his own soul. Let every
minister know his Bible down to the bottom, and with his Bible his own
heart. He who so knows his Bible and with it his own heart has almost
books enough. All else is but ostentatious apparatus. When a minister
has neither understanding nor memory wherewith to feed his flock, let him
look deep enough into his Bible and into his own heart, and then begin
out of them to write and speak. And, then, for the outside knowledge of
the passing day he will read the newspapers, and though he gives up all
the morning to the newspapers, and returns to them again in the evening,
his conscience will not upbraid him if he reads as Jonathan Edwards read
the newsletters of his day,--to see how the kingdom of heaven is
prospering in the earth, and to pray for its prosperity. And, then, by
that time, and when he has got that length, all other kinds of knowledge
will have fallen into its own place, and will have taken its own proper
proportion of his time and his thought. He was a man of a great
understanding and a great memory and great industry who said that he had
taken all knowledge for his province. But he was a far wiser man who
said that knowledge is not our proper happiness. Our province, he went
on to say, is virtue and religion, life and manners: the science of
improving the temper and making the heart better. This is the field
assigned us to cultivate: how much it has lain neglected is indeed
astonishing.

Now, my brethren, two dangers, two simply terrible dangers, arise to
every one of you out of all this matter of your ministers and their
knowledge. 1. The first danger is,--to be frank with you on this
subject,--that you are yourselves so ignorant on all the matters that a
minister has to do with, that you do not know one minister from another,
a good minister from one who is really no minister at all. Now, I will
put it to you, on what principle and for what reason did you choose your
present minister, if, indeed, you did choose him? Was it because you
were assured b