Scripture, Neglect of – Charles Spurgeon

I WAS assured the other day by a good man, with a great deal of alarm, that all England was going over to Popery. I told him I did not know what kind of God he worshiped, but my God was a good deal bigger than the devil, and did not intend to let the devil have his way after all, and that I was not half as much afraid of the Pope at Rome as of the Ritualists at home. But mark it, there is some truth in these fears. There will be a going over to one form of error or another, unless there be in the Christian church a more honest, industrious, and general reading of the Holy Scripture. What if I were to say most of you church members do not read your Bibles, should I be slandering you? You hear on the Sabbath day a chapter read, and you perhaps read a passage at family prayer, but a very large number never read the Bible privately for themselves, they take their religion out of the monthly magazine, or accept it from the minister’s lips. Oh, for the Berean spirit back again, to search the Scriptures whether these things be so. I would like to see a huge pile of all the books, good and bad that were ever written, prayer-books, and sermons, and hymn-books, and all, smoking like Sodom of old, if the reading of those books keeps you away from the reading of the Bible; for a ton weight of human literature is not worth an ounce of Scripture; one single drop of the essential tincture of the word of God is better than a sea full of our commentings and sermonizings, and the like.