The independent reading of a book in this sense is urged because of its development of one's own intellectual powers. To be ever leaning on help from others is like walking on stilts all one's life and never attempting to place one's feet on the ground. Who can ever come to know the most direct and highest type of the teaching of the Holy Spirit in this way? Who can ever understand the most precious and thrilling experiences of spiritual illumination thus? Should you wish to teach others, how could you communicate to them that sense of your own mastery of the subject so vital to a pedagogue had you never really dealt with it at first hand? One of our millionaires is reported as carrying a cow around with him on his yacht because he dislikes condensed milk. It is a great gain to so know the Bible for yourself that, carrying it with you wherever you go, you may be measurably independent of other books in its study and use. But there is another reason for the independent reading of the book, and that is the deliverance from intellectual confusion which it secures. The temptation is, when an interpretive difficulty is reached, to turn at once to the commentary for light, which means so very often that the reader has become side-tracked for good, or rather bad, as the situation is now viewed. The search for the solution of one little difficulty leads to searching for another, and that for another, until, to employ F. B. Meyer's figure, we have "become so occupied with the hedgerows and the copses of the landscape as to lose the conception of the whole sweep and extent of the panorama of truth." The "intensive" has been pursued to the great disadvantage of the "extensive," and usually there is nothing to be done but to begin all over again, for which every reader does not possess the required courage.