igorous mental
effort.

I learned Greek with the worst Greek Grammar I ever saw; but when I had
learned the language tolerably, I found one of the best Greek Grammars
in the world, and went rapidly through it, and found that it had little
to add to the information I had gained already from the poorer one.

And it is the same with regard to books on God, religion, and duty.
Books with numbers of defects,--with defects of style, defects of
arrangement, and even defects in matter, may teach you many useful
lessons, if you read and study them properly; and the best books on
earth will not teach you much if you read them carelessly.

A great deal, almost every thing, depends on the spirit or the object
with which a man reads a good book. You may read the best books to
little profit, and you may get great good from very inferior ones.

The Bible is the best religious and moral book on earth; it is, in its
most imperfect translations, able to make men wise, and good, and
useful, and happy to the last degree, if they will read and study it
properly. But there is not a better book on earth for making a man a
fool, if he comes to it with a vain mind, a proud spirit, a fulness of
self-conceit, or a wish to be a prophet. A desire to be a prater about
the millennium, the second coming of Christ, the personal reign, the
orders of angels, the ranks of devils, the secrets of God's counsels,
the hidden meaning of the badgers' skins, the shittim wood, the Urim and
Thummim, the Cherubim and Seraphim, the Teraphim and Anakim, and all the
imaginary meanings of imaginary types, and the place where Paradise was
situated, and the mountain peak on which the Ark rested, and Behemoth,
and Leviathan, and the spot at which the Israelites entered the Red Sea,
and the compass of Adam's knowledge before he named the animals, and the
fiery sword at the gate of Paradise, and the controversial parts of
Paul's epistles, and the mysteries of the Book of Revelation, and the
spiritual meaning of Solomon's Song, and the place where Satan had his
meeting with the sons of God in the days of Job, and the exact way in
which Job used the potsherd, when he scraped himself as he sat among the
ashes, &c., &c.,--I say if this is what a man desires, the Bible will
help him to his wish, and make him the laughing-stock, or the pity of
all sensible men.

And if he employs the one hundred and fifty rules of Hartwell Horne for
misinterpreting the plain portions of the