"practical man," often has under him a beginner fresh from the schools,
who is glib and confident in repeating bookish theories, but is not yet
skillful in applying them. If the practical man is thoughtless, he
sniffs at theory and points to his clumsy assistant as proof of the
uselessness of what is to be got from books. If he is wise, the
practical man realizes how much better off he would be, how much
farther his hard work and experience might have carried him, if he had
had the advantage of bookish training.

Moreover, the hard-headed skeptic, self-made and self-secure, who will
not traffic with the literature that touches his life work, is seldom
so confined to his own little shop that he will not, for recreation,
take holiday tours into the literature of other men's lives and labors.
The man who does not like to read any books is, I am confident, seldom
found, and at the risk of slandering a patriot, I will express the
doubt whether he is a good citizen. Honest he may be, but certainly not
wise. The human race for thousands of years has been writing its
experiences, telling how it has met our everlasting problems, how it
has struggled with darkness and rejoiced in light. What fools we should
be to try to live our lives without the guidance and inspiration of the
generations that have gone before, without the joy, encouragement, and
sympathy that the best imaginations of our generation are distilling
into words. For literature is simply life selected and condensed into
books. In a few hours we can follow all that is recorded of the life of
Jesus--the best that He did in years of teaching and suffering all ours
for a day of reading, and the more deeply ours for a lifetime of
reading and meditation!

If the expression of life in words is strong and beautiful and true it
outlives empires, like the oldest books of the Old Testament. If it is