Read to acquire knowledge. Knowledge is the perception of truth. One arrives at knowledge by the assimilation of facts and principles, or by the assimilation of truth itself. Three sources of knowledge are experience, conversation, and reading. Experience leads one slowly to knowledge, is limited entirely to the path over which one has passed, and is a "dear teacher." To acquire knowledge by conversation is to put one at the mercy of his associates, making him dependent upon their good favor, truthfulness, and learning. But reading places one in direct communication with the wisest and best persons of all time. To acquire knowledge by reading is to defy time and space, persons and circumstances, at least, in our day of many and inexpensive books. Through books facts live, principles operate, justice acts, the light of philosophy gleams, wit flashes, God speaks. Every book-lover agrees with Channing: "No matter how poor I am..if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the words of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live." Kingsley says: "Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful Than a book!--a message to us from the dead,--from human souls whom we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away; and yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, amuse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers..If they are good and true, whether they are about religion or politics, farming, trade, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the Maker of all things, the Teacher of all truth." The wide range of truth secured through reading acts in two ways upon the reader. It spiritualizes his character, and it makes him mighty in action. Knowledge on almost any subject has a marked tendency to sharpen one's wits, to refine his tastes, to ennoble his spirit, to improve his judgement, to strengthen his will, to subdue his baser passions, and to fill his soul with the breath of life. It is only upon truth that the soul feeds, and by means of knowledge that the character grows. "It cannot be that people should grow in grace," writes John Wesley, "unless they give themselves to reading. A reading people will always be a knowing people." Reading makes one mighty in action when it gives one knowledge, since "knowledge is power," and since power has but one way of showing itself, and that is, in action. Knowledge takes no note of hardships, ignores fatigue, laughs at disappointment, and frowns upon despair. It delves into the earth, rides upon the air, defies the cold of the north, the heat of the