Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.' There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world."Addresses: The American Scholar;
When you sit down with your books each day to study the Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly, do you "carry out the wealth of the Indies"? Do you really read it? Is each section meaningful? Does it create in you each day a fresh motivation toward obtaining a greater knowledge of God, good? Or have you read so often the truths of man's perfection as the spiritual idea of divine Mind that many of their healing messages have merely been committed to memory and passed over?
Many of us remember learning a flag salute when we were small children. But how long before we really considered the meaning of those words we dutifully repeated each morning at school! And how that meaning has grown and changed in the intervening years!
