we would get the wine of consolation therefrom. Our bodies are not supported merely by taking food into the mouth, but the process which really supplies the muscles and the nerve and the sinew and the bone is the process of digestion. It is by digestion that the outer food becomes assimilated with the inner life. Our souls are not nourished merely by listening awhile to this, and then to that, and then to the other part of divine truth. Hearing, reading, marking, and learning all require inwardly digesting to complete their usefulness, and the inward digesting of the truth lies for the most part in meditating upon it. Why is it that some Christians, although they hear many sermons, make but slow advances in the divine life? Because they neglect their closets, and do not thoughtfully meditate on God’s Word. They love the wheat, but they do not grind it; they would have the corn, but they will not go forth into the fields to gather it; the fruit hangs upon the tree, but they will not pluck it; the water flows at their feet, but they will not stoop to drink it. From such folly deliver us, O Lord, and be this our resolve this day, ‘I will meditate on Thy precepts.’”[1]
Meditation is an exercise which stands somewhere between thought and prayer. It must not be confounded with mere reasoning; it is reasoning transfigured by devout feeling; and it proceeds by broodingly dissolving rather than by logically analyzing the thought. But it must be guarded from degenerating into mere day-dreaming on sacred themes; and it will be wise in order to secure ourselves from this fault to meditate chiefly with the Bible in our hands and always on its truths. As meditation, then, on the one side takes hold upon prayer, so, on the other, it shades off into devotional Bible-reading, the highest exercise of which, indeed, it is. Life close to God’s Word, is life close to God. When I urge you to make very much while you are in the Seminary of this kind of devotional Bible study, running up into meditation, pure and simple, I am but repeating what the General Assembly specifically requires of you. “It is expected,” says the Plan of the Seminary, framed by the Assembly as our organic law, “that every student will spend a portion of time, every morning and evening, in devout meditation and self-recollection and examination; in reading the Holy Scriptures solely with a view to a personal and practical application of the passage read to his own heart, character and circumstances; and in humble, fervent prayer and praise to God in secret.”
And do we not find in the practice here recommended the remedy for that lamentable lack of familiarity with “the English Bible”—as it is fashionable now to speak of it—which is distressing us all in candidates for the ministry? Brethren, you deceive yourselves if you fancy any one can teach you “the English Bible” in the sense in which knowledge of it is desiderated. As well expect some one to digest your food for you. You must taste its preciousness for your-
- ↑ Morning by Morning, p. 256.
