The third rule is, read the book continuously. I think it is in his lecture on "The Lost Arts" that Wendell Phillips tells the story of the weaver who turned out so much more material from his loom than any other workman in the mill. How was it done? In vain was the secret sought, until one day a bribe from one of his employers elicited the information, _"Chalk the bobbins."_ Each morning he had carried a piece of chalk with him to his loom, and when unobserved, applied it to that small but important part of the machinery. The result was astonishing. The application of the chalk to every bobbin of every loom of every workman made his employers rich. Who cannot supplement this story with some other where a principle just as simple wrought results as great? Try it in the case of the continuous reading of a given book of the Bible, and see what it will do. But what is the meaning of "continuous" in this instance? The adjective may not be the most lucid, but the idea is this: It stands for two things--the reading of the book uninfluenced by its divisions into chapters and verses, and the reading of the book in this way _at a single sitting._ The divisions, it should be remembered, are of human origin and not divine, and, while effecting a good purpose in some particulars, are a hindrance to the mastery of the book in others. Sometimes a chapter or a verse will cut a truth in half, whose halves state a different fact or teach a different doctrine from that intended by the whole, and necessarily affecting the conception of the outline. As to the "single sitting," the reason for it is this. Many of the books of the Bible have a single thread running through the whole--a pivotal idea around which all the subsidiary ones resolve--and to catch this thread, to seize upon this idea, it is absolutely necessary to unravel or break up the whole in its essential parts. To read Genesis in this way, for example, will lead to the discovery that, large as the book is, it contains but five great or outline facts, viz.: The history of creation. The history of the fall. The history of the deluge. The history of the origin of the nations. The history of the patriarchs. It is, then, a book of history, and the larger part of it history of the biographical sort. This last-named fact can be subdivided again into four facts, viz., the histories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and thus the whole book can be kept in mind in a very practical way in eight words. Moreover, the reading necessary to have gained the eight words will unconsciously have fastened upon the understanding the subsidiary facts associated with each word, so that a very satisfactory examination might be passed as to the contents of the whole book. [Sidenote: Read It Repeatedly]