Here’s a quote from
that faithful Ohio Lutheran pastor, Simon Peter Long. From The
Eternal Epistle, “Twentieth Sunday After Trinity. Five
Fools.” on Eph. 5:15-21.
There never was a
time when people did more reading than they do now, and there
never was a time when Christians knew less of the Bible than
they do now. Some may question what I say, but you show me the
Christians of olden days, and they were people of two or three
books; they knew their Bibles; they knew what was in every
book and in every chapter; they knew their hymnbooks from
beginning to end, but today in the exchange of hymnbooks and
in the putting in of new books into the libraries, the world
is flooded with a literature that isn’t worth the paper to
kindle the fire to burn it up. If even our church libraries
are as poor as they nearly all are, what can we expect of the
public libraries? I read partly fourteen books of our own
library in the last ten days, and out of fourteen there are
eleven that are not fit to go into any home. Think of a little
child spending weeks in reading five hundred pages to find out
that finally some nonsensical Susie got married. That is the
kind of literature we have in our Sunday School library. Think
of the people that are sitting down day after day and reading
novel after novel, story after story, when the Word of God is
lying at home covered with dust, and the hymnbooks are never
used to sing in worship. Think of the people that are flooding
our libraries to get the very books they never should look at.
How many people are going to the library today hunting out
books of devotion, hunting out good true history, hunting out
the things that are worth knowing? The fact is the people want
literature in the form of soup and will not eat meat. There
never was a time when our country was so flooded with books,
books, books, and no knowledge. Ask the average reader what he
knows, and it is nothing. Oh, the minds of the people that are
being poisoned with the nonsensical literature of the day! It
is simply awful.
