I liked Virgil ever so much better after this, and always tried to get at the tune of it, and of every other poem I read.
“The right way of anything,” said my father, “may be called the tune of it. We have to find out the tune of our own lives. Some people don’t seem ever to find it out, and so their lives are a broken and uncomfortable thing to them--full of ups and downs and disappointments, and never going as it was meant to go.”
“But what is the right tune of a body’s life, father?”
“But how is a person to know that, father?”
“By trying to do what he knows of it already. Everybody has a different kind of tune in his life, and no one can find out another’s tune for him, though he _may_ help him to find it for himself.”
“But aren’t we to read the Bible, father?”
“Yes, if it’s in order to obey it. To read the Bible thinking to please God by the mere reading of it, is to think like a heathen.”
“And aren’t we to say our prayers, father?”
“We are to ask God for what we want. If we don’t want a thing, we are only acting like pagans to speak as if we did, and call it prayer, and think we are pleasing him.”
“I fancy the old man we are going to see found out the tune of _his_ life long ago.”
“That depends on what you mean by _wise_. _I_ should call him a wise man, for to find out that tune is the truest wisdom. But he’s not a learned man at all. I doubt if he ever read a book but the Bible, except perhaps the Pilgrim’s Progress. I believe he has always been very fond of that. _You_ like that--don’t you, Ranald?”
“I’ve read it a good many times, father. But I was a little tired of it before I got through it last time.”
“But you did read it through--did you--the last time, I mean?”
“Oh yes, father. I never like to leave the loose end of a thing hanging about.”
“That’s right, my boy; that’s right. Well, I think you’d better not open the book again for a long time--say twenty years at least. It’s a great deal too good a book to let yourself get tired of. By that time I trust you will be able to understand it a great deal better than you can at present.”
I felt a little sorry that I was not to look at the Pilgrim’s Progress for twenty years; but I am very glad of it now.
“We must not spoil good books by reading them too much,” my father added. “It is often better to think about them than to read them; and it is best never to do either when we are tired of them. We should get tired of the sunlight itself, beautiful as it is, if God did not send it away every night. We’re not even fit to have moonlight always. The moon is buried in the darkness every month. And because we can bear nothing for any length of time together, we are sent to sleep every night, that we may begin fresh again in the morning.”