How To Be Wise

"You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me..." John 5:39

       You have all seen the building with the name ''Library " across the front. Perhaps the first time you saw that name you asked some one what a library is. You were told that a library is a collection of books. The Bible is a library. There are sixty-six books in it, and they are books of many different kinds. Some are history and some are biography; there are books of poetry and the letters of great men. You can find them all in this wonderful collection, which we call the Bible.

       Some boy or girl says, " I have tried to read the Bible, and I cannot understand it, and I do not care to read anything that I cannot understand." But that is just because you have not looked in the right place in the Bible.

       If you were to go to the City Library to get a book to read, you would not go to the room where the grown-up people get their books. You would go into the children's room where they have children's books, and you would ask for something that you can understand. The Bible is like that library. There are books there for men and women, and there are books for children. When you go into a library you do not take up the first book you come to and try to read that. If you do, of course you get one that you cannot understand. You ask some one who knows to tell you what to read. That is what you ought to do when you read your Bible. Ask your father or mother or teacher to show you where to find a book in the Bible that will interest you. Ask for the story of Joseph, or Samuel, or David, or Esther, or the child Jesus. If you will do this you will find that there is no other library in the whole world that has so many splendid stories in it for children as the Bible.

       There are parts of the Bible that every boy and girl ought to know by heart. We all ought to be able to repeat by heart the Twenty-third Psalm, and the One Hundred and Third, the first part of the fifth chapter of Matthew, and Paul's chapter on love, the thirteenth of First Corinthians.

       There are two things we should remember about the Bible. It was given to us to show us where to go. David once said, "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a guide unto my path." Did you ever go walking in the country, where there are no bright streetlights? You tried to walk in the path but you could not see where you were going. First you bumped into a tree, and next stumbled into the gutter, till you said to yourself, "I must have a light." So you went back and lighted a lantern and started

out again. Now you have no trouble, for the lantern makes the path light for you. That is what David meant when he spoke of the Bible as a light for our feet. It shows us plainly where to go, and the reason boys and girls run into difficulties, and stumble and fall so often is because they have not taken the Light for their feet.

       But there is still something else about this Bible. Paul said to Timothy, "From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation." That means that the Bible will change our lives and make them like the life of Jesus.

       Dr. Moffat, the great missionary to Africa, told the story of a shepherd boy who had become a Christian. He had been a very bad boy, but he learned to read the New Testament, and it made him gentle and kind and thoughtful of others.

       One day he came to Dr. Moffat in great trouble, telling him that his big dog had found a piece of the New Testament and had eaten it. Dr. Moffat told him that it did not make any difference, that he would give him another Testament. But that did not seem to make the boy feel any better. "It is the dog that I care about," he said.

       "Oh," said the missionary, "if your dog can crunch a big bone in his teeth, it will not hurt him to eat a little piece of paper."

       ''That isn't it," said the boy. "I was once a bad boy. If I had an enemy I hated him, and everything in me wanted to kill him. Then you gave me the Bible, and I read about Jesus, and I began to love my enemies, and now my big dog has got the Bible in him, and he will be loving the lions and letting them help themselves to the sheep."

       That boy thought that because the Bible had changed him it would change his dog too.

       It will not change dogs, but it will make boys and girls every day more like Jesus. Hutchinson