Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 178, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 August 1917 — The Reader. [ARTICLE]

The Reader.

The gift of reading is not very common nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment —a free, grace, I find I must call it —by which a man, risps to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas, he may hold them passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, he may change his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems insolently false or dangerous, is the test of a reader.' If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read. If he is hurt or offended, or exclaims upon his author’s folly, he had better take to, the dally papers ; he will never be a reader. —Robert Louis Stevenson.