Awhile back I slogged through
a very long and very dense essay titled A
Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in
the Higher and Middle Classes. For brevity’s sake (and to belay carpal tunnel
syndrome) I will nickname it Practical
Christianity. Published in 1797, this essay was written by William
Wilberforce, whom I had best known beforehand as being an instrumental player
in abolishing the slave trade in Britain.
This work is in public domain
and so I downloaded a free version on my Kindle. I read it during my breaks at
work, which hindered me from reading it very fast, and in the end I think that
was a good thing because this is one book that one cannot simply breeze through.
Practical Christianity is in fact a book that I highly recommend,
though not without some warnings. This is a book to approach with patience. One
does not recommend their friend visit a mountain-top without first advising
that friend to prepare for the climb. There is a lot of theological, philosophical,
and downright archaic vocabulary, not to mention very complex sentences whose
grammar and structure take some effort to decipher. Once I knew what each
individual word means, and had untangled the meaning of the sentence structure
to find out what Wilberforce is saying,
I still had to mentally grapple with his thoughts and arguments to really get
at what the meaning.
So yes, I admit that there was a
lot of time I was reading and feeling lost and perplexed, wondering why I had
decided to read this book in the first place. But then like an epiphany I would
come across a treasure of a phrase, or sentence, or paragraph, or passage, and
it was these moments that more than made up for the effort.
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