How to estimate books.
Saint Martin
Let all who read this book - you even who may indulge the taste for writing
yourselves - learn to reduce your own books and those of your fellow-creatures
to their real value. All these productions should be pictures; and pictures,
to be worth anything, presuppose real originals, whose features they represent
to us, and positive facts, of which they convey a faithful report.
Yes! the annals of Truth ought to be nothing but compilations of its own
dazzling lights and wonders; and he who has the happiness to be called to
be its true minister ought never to write till he has acted virtually under
its orders, and only to tell us of the marvels he may have wrought in its
name.
Such, in all times, has been the way of ministers in spirit and in truth
of the things of God. They never wrote till they had wrought. Such also
should still be man's course, since he is specially destined for the stewardship
of the things of God. What are those enormous heaps of books, the issue
of human fancy and imagination, which not only have not waited for works
to describe or marvels to relate, but present themselves to us with the
puerile and culpable pretension of altogether taking their places?
What are all those writers, whose object is only to make us contribute to their own vain and noisy celebrity, instead of sacrificing themselves for our good? False friends, who are ready enough to talk to us of virtue and truth, but take great care to leave us in peace, in inaction, and falsity; fearful lest if they attempted to pluck us out with sharp words we should desert their school and stand in the way of their glory, and so reduce them to silence and oblivion.
Oh ! throw aside those profitless books, and take the way of work at once,
if you are happy enough to know what this really means. Give yourself to
work at the cost of your sweat and blood, and take not a pen till you have
some discovery to relate in the regions of true knowledge, some instructive
experience in the works of the spirit, or some glorious conquest gained
over the kingdom of darkness and lies.