Book Buyers & Book Readers

A couple of years ago I read Warren Wiersbe's book 50 People Every Christian Should Know [2] and marked a couple of paragraphs that I thought would prove worth sharing. These words come from a chapter devoted to Alexander Whyte. Here they are:

The sales manager of a successful Christian publishing house tells me that pastors are not buying books. "Most of the books sold in Christian bookstores are sold to and read by women," he said. If our pastors are not using their valuable time for study, what are they using it for? Perhaps Whyte had the answer: "We shroud our indolence under the pretext of a difficulty. The truth is, it is lack of real love for our work."

Alexander Whyte loved books, and he read them to his dying day. The Puritans in general and Thomas Goodwin in particular were his main diet. But he also thrived on the mystics and the princes of the Scottish church, such as Samuel Rutherford. Whyte constantly ordered books for himself and his friends in the ministry. However, he cautioned young pastors against becoming book-buyers instead of book-readers. "Don't hunger for books," he wrote a minister friend. "Get a few of the very best, such as you already have, and read them and your own heart continually." Whyte often contrasted two kinds of reading--"reading on a sofa and reading with a pencil in hand." He urged students to keep notebooks and to make entries in an interleaved Bible for future reference. "No day without its line" was his motto. He wrote to Hubert Simpson: "for more than forty years, I think I can say, never a week, scarcely a day, has passed, that I have not entered some note or notes into my Bible: and, then, I never read a book without taking notes for preservation one way or another."