From his 1911 address 'The Religious Life of Theological Students,' in the course of commenting on the great privilege of spending all day studying the Bible in all its glory and technicality:
The very atmosphere of your life is in these things; you breathe them in at every pore; they surround you, encompass you, press in upon you from every side. It is all in danger of becoming common to you! God forgive you, you are in danger of becoming weary of God!
Do you know what this danger is? Or, rather, let us turn the question--are you alive to what your privileges are? Are you making full use of them? Are you, by this constant contact with divine things, growing in holiness, becoming every day more and more men of God? If not, you are hardening!
And I am here today to warn you to take seriously your theological study, not merely as a duty, done for God's sake and therefore made divine, but as a religious exercise, itself charged with religious blessing to you; as fitted by its very nature to fill all your mind and heart and soul and life with divine thoughts and feelings and aspirations and achievements. You will never prosper in your religious life in the Theological Seminary until your work in the Theological Seminary becomes itself to you a religious exercise out of which you draw every day enlargement of heart, elevation of spirit, and adoring delight in your Maker and your Saviour.
The whole thing can be
read online. Justin quotes
another stirring excerpt.
From his 1911 address 'The Religious Life of Theological Students,' in the course of commenting on the great privilege of spending all day studying the Bible in all its glory and technicality:
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