All Sermons

Reading Habits of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones By Lady Elizabeth Catherwood

Fred began by talking about an hors d'oeuvre as a main course. There is such a thing as a main course and afters. I need you to decide which of us has done which. I think I'm very particularly happy to be here tonight giving the other half of this ensemble, as it were, of talking about my father and his books, here at a meeting of the Evangelical Library.
The Evangelical Library meant so much to him, probably most of you friends who were with him over the years in the Evangelical Library, people like Mr. Micklewright and all the rest of you. You knew this, how much he loved the work of the Evangelical Library, how much he loved working first with Mr. Williams and then with Mr. Sawyer. This whole idea of this great library full of Christian books, this great heritage and treasure of ours, it meant so much to him. We were talking earlier about numbers of members. I think we could never quite understand why there weren't thousands and thousands of people all cramming in for membership and all taking out hundreds of books all the time. It was a work that he felt was a great work of God, and I know he himself found it a tremendous privilege to be involved in it. It all began in such an extraordinary way how he came across Mr. Williams through a mutual friend of theirs, a chemist somewhere in North London who brought
these two men together. And from that moment on, here's the work of the Evangelical Library.
And I think it's peculiarly fitting perhaps that we're talking about his books here tonight.
Now it's a very difficult thing for me to do really. To start with, the title says,
him and his books. Well I think we found some difficulty in deciding on a title, and I think
perhaps I will be forgiven if I broaden the spectrum slightly. By the way, I'm not coming
here to talk about all the volumes on Romans and Ephesians. Somebody once said to me when
they knew I was going to do this, they said, but why are you doing that? Because Ian Murray
did it so magnificently in the Thanksgiving service anyhow. Well I'm not going to talk
like Ian. Ian was talking about him and his books. This really is about him and his reading.
Now it's a great subject this, and I'm very aware that as I start on it, I can see a lot
of you here. Friends from the early Evangelical Library days, as I say, ministers, really
his sons in the faith in the Westminster meeting, the Fraternal, the Westminster Conference,
you all know so much about him and his love of books. And I'm perfectly certain that probably
as time goes on you're going to say, my goodness, she hasn't mentioned that, or I don't agree
with her about that. Quite likely. I can really only do this personally. And if I leave
anything out, or if I don't put the emphasis that you wanted, please forgive me. I can
only do it, as I say, as I myself saw him. Well now, personally, if I'm to be quite honest,
I think I must say that on a very human, personal level, I miss him along the whole
line of reading, almost more than any other way. A lot of my friends who had lost those
dear to them said, honey, you know, it's the little things that bring back your loss to
you. And I'd heard them and I'd understood the kind of thing they meant. But I must say
that one of the most chattering experiences I had, really, was after the great mixture
of sadness and of glory, really, of the funeral service and of the Thanksgiving service here
in the chapel. This sense we had that he had gone to be with the Lord in glory, that his
weakness is now over. Now, I remember about a few weeks later, I was in the public library
and I was looking along the biography shelves and I had recently been reading the lives
of all that remarkable family of Benson, Archbishop Benson and his able sons, the man who wrote
for Punch and E.F. Benson and all the rest of them. I'd been reading them and suddenly
along the bookshelves I saw a book called Bishop King of Lincoln. I thought, now he
must have been at roundabout the same period as Archbishop Benson, who had also at some
point been at Lincoln. And I thought, when I get home I must ask my... And I realised
I couldn't ask him. And it was then I realised this great loss I was suffering, this great
reader, this friend of mine in reading, he wasn't there any more to talk about it. And
you see, I knew perfectly well, I mean, how many of us have heard of Bishop King? Not
many of us, I'm sure. But he would have known about Bishop King. He would have known where
he came from, where he went to, what his relationship with Benson was, where they disagreed, how
evangelical he was, all these things. And he's not there any more to answer these questions.
And I still find, and I'm perfectly certain that I'm speaking here for Anne as much as
for myself, that so often when one finds a new writer, not new in themselves, but new
to me, I still miss this. I was put, and I'm very grateful for this, onto that remarkable
little book, The Force of Truth by Thomas Scott. John Marshall said to me, have you
read it? And I hadn't. And I found it and I read it and it was the most remarkable book.
I've discovered J.G. Philpott, the old Baptist preacher, and I have enjoyed him very much
indeed. I've been discovering about Victor Pritchard of Wales, all these people that
I didn't know about before. Somehow the edge of the enjoyment goes off, because I can't
go to my father and say, now what about these? What about Philpott? What was his influence
exactly? How about Thomas Scott? Isn't it remarkable the way that he wrote this book
and so on? And so, I do miss him along this line, because as I say, it was a line along
which I peculiarly appreciated him and all that he had to give. Fred has given this picture
already of his sitting in this armchair. We've got a photograph of him in the family. It's
my favourite of all the photographs. Some of you may have seen it. I can't remember
if it was in any of the magazines. It was, that's right. Of him in profile, reading.
And that is exactly how I think of him. This oasis of peace in the middle of all the life
that was going on around us. This peaceful man sitting there with a book on his knee,
enjoying it and wanting us to enjoy it as well. Now, my early memories right back are
connected with him and reading. I remember quite well in the study in Aberavon. My mother
must have been out of something. Sitting in his study, as I say, which was lined with
books from floor to ceiling, over the floor as well often, on the deck, theology everywhere.
And here I was, sitting, I must have been, well I certainly wasn't at school, sitting
on his knee while he very seriously read to me from the littlest one his book. And I don't
know how many of you know it. It's a book of poems, an enchanting book of the twenties
and thirties, of poems for children. And I remember him very earnestly discussing the
characters of Jane and Emily Jane with me. Why Emily Jane was so much nicer than Jane
and what it was about Jane that wasn't pleasant. He was perfectly prepared on reading to come
down as it were to this level. It was something that he enjoyed doing. And of course, he himself,
I know has said, and here again when I reread what he had to say in Preaching and Preachers,
I felt well really what am I going to say that he hasn't already said, but perhaps I'm
really only underlining some of the things he said. But he said how always on holiday
he would always read a great deal. And this takes me back to another early memory. I remember
going to a stay in, in Both. I was again very young. It was the mid-1930s on that lovely
sandy beach in Both. It was a boiling hot summer day. I know we always tend to think
it was boiling hot when we were children. But I, this really was a boiling hot day and
I was gambling about in a bathing costume and digging and paddling and all the rest
of it. Everybody else was on the beach in the amount of undress that was allowed in
the mid-1930s. We were all hot and there we all were with this glorious sunshine all sunbathing
as I say and playing. In a rock, in front of a rock, over to one corner of the beach,
fully clothed, in a grey suit, with a hat upon his head, his usual hat, shoes, socks,
the holes they waistcoat, sitting, bowled upright as I say, leaning back against a rock
and reading, the Divine Imperative. And this was on a sunbathing beach. You see he read
like this. He read always, as I say, in the mornings and the summer holidays, he read
all the time. But the great thing about it was that we never resented this. Anne and
I took this as part of him. He was the great reader. It was his work, it was his enjoyment.
It was part of him and so it became a part of us. We never resented it. In fact, it's
interesting, my mother has a story, I don't remember this myself, of apparently in my
first term at school, it was the time of the great unemployment in Aberavan at the
time and a lot of people of course were out of work then. And every child in the reception
class apparently was asked what work their father did. Nobody knew about this. It was
something that apparently landed on us in an ad hoc sort of way. The first thing that
my parents knew was that I came back from school weeping copious tears of indignation.
And when they tried to find out what was wrong, apparently what had happened was this
amiable but ill-advised teacher had asked each child in the class what work their father
did. She'd gone right round the class and of course this was to find out how much unemployment
there was in the class. Now as I say, the girl was ill-advised because she happened
to know what my father was. He was the minister of the chapel down the road from the school
so she knew she didn't bother to ask me. I came back filled with indignation. My father
worked terribly hard all day reading and nobody had mentioned that he worked at all. So you
see, there it was. Reading was to him something that we knew. Yes, he preached but he read
and he read lovingly, regularly and a lot. Well now then, as I talk about this reading
of his, perhaps I just better fill you in a little with the background, I won't belong
here. He came from a family that was always interested in reading. His father was not
a very well educated man but he was a man who was interested in the whole world around
him. He read the papers carefully and methodically. He read one or two religious papers as well.
He kept himself in touch with the world around him. My father's older brother who died in
the flu epidemic in 1918 was also a great reader who not only read but also wrote poetry.
We don't know what the poetry itself was like. We've got one or two little exercise books
of rather charming First World War type poems. He knew apparently of Robert Graves and Siegfried
Sassoon so it's interesting. He was in that kind of literary background, this older brother.
Tragically, as I say, he died. His younger brother also was a literary figure. He went
to Oxford and there he knew Ronald Knox. He met Evelyn Waugh. He has got a considerable
amount of fame over the past weeks with this Brideshead Revisited because he'd actually
met Evelyn Waugh and knew him. Not well but he had at least come into contact with him.
And even more interestingly my uncle was actually in the same tutorial group as C.S. Lewis.
So you see they all, they were a reading family. There was this kind of talk about books and
authors and writers and how you wrote and so on. So there it was. Well then as we look
at him as a reader, to come on to how he handled his reading, I wouldn't be true to his tradition,
would I, if I didn't start with the negative. Remember? He told us we must always start
with the negative. So I shall start with the negative. He disliked paperbacks very much
indeed. Now all of us in the family, grandchildren, children, everybody, we all had to persuade
him that books were very expensive nowadays. The students of course as you can imagine
were very ferocious about this. How could they afford to buy books costing £10.95
and so on? And he did grudgingly agree that perhaps this was true. But you see it's interesting
why he disliked these paperbacks. Books to him were friends that you kept for life. And
you see you couldn't keep these paperbacks, they fall apart. If you just bend them open
then they're finished, aren't they? He did have a kind of grudging allowance of these
halfway house books. I can't remember what they're called, they're sort of stiff paperbacks.
Then perhaps he could tolerate, but by and large he did not like the paperback world
in which he now found himself and was I think never quite happy that one or two of his own
books came out in paperback, though as I say he allowed it for expense's sake. Now the
other thing that's interesting of course, and one tended to forget this about him, he
didn't like digests at all. He said at one point, I am not a believer in digests and
encyclopedias. They encourage a Reddy-Wreckner mentality rather than thought. But when you
think about it of course this is very typical of him. He couldn't bear anything potted as
it were. He didn't like shortened versions of things. He didn't like biographies which
were just a few broad sweeps of facts. He liked the biography to start about two hundred
years before the subject was born and worked up to it. He liked his books to be full books.
He didn't like this modern habit of thinking that you've got a lot of knowledge if you
just knew a few headings and so on. Digests and encyclopedias, no way for him. I must
say the reader's digest did go in and out of the house but very rarely would you find
him looking at it. And I'll be coming back to this potted and dislike of potted things
later on. And interestingly enough to a rising out of this in a way, the third thing he disliked
was an over-concentration, I must underline, an over-concentration on style for its own
sake. Now of course he liked his books to be well written. I mean he liked all books
to be well written. He himself enjoyed a good style. What he was worried about was that
if the style took over as it were from the contents, if they were mannered, books that
he couldn't bear them. He had a very interesting passage you may remember in Preaching and
Preachers where he says that he thinks that this was part of the cause of the downfall
of the pulpit and preaching, I don't know if you remember this place, was that you see
preachers had begun producing beautifully styled essays instead of preaching the word.
It was interesting too with regard to style how sometimes he really disliked something
that was quite beautiful in style because the content was wrong. I remember having quite
a discussion with him about Tennyson's poem Crossing the Bar. I don't know how many of
you know it, sunset and evening star and one clear call for me and may there be no moaning
of the bar when I put out to sea. And I thought this was the most beautiful poetry. He said
but it's wrong, he said, it's wrong, the truth is safe into the haven guide. Oh receive my
soul at last. Christians don't go out to sea when they die, they come into the haven. And
I said but it is beautiful isn't it, he said, the beauty doesn't matter, it's wrong. So
you see this is the point, it was style you had to be very careful of and here of course
I've got to mention the whole question of style in his own books. I mean now the things
he wrote, well not he wrote but his Ephesians, Romans and all the rest of them. My goodness
he did have some problem with his editors, especially I remember one day right at the
very beginning, one of the very first books he brought out, the very earnest editor, it
was a very early book, the very earnest editor sent him back his manuscript covered in alterations,
nevertheless instead of but or although instead of something else and on it would go or an
adjective instead of a noun or in the margin, don't you think there are too many adverbs
in this line. My father almost threw the manuscript at me and said cross it all out
he said, put it back in the original and leave it alone. And it was interesting towards the
end he said to me when you come to do the editing of the books he said don't agonise
too much over the words. Now he was perfectly prepared for anything that was repetitive
or you know where he'd already said it or at the beginning for instance you know he
didn't want the same thing repeated over again, he didn't mind these first paragraphs
and so on but this desperate fuss about the exact word all the time, don't worry about
it he said, this is the truth of God, let the truth go out and I must say it's very
interesting how many people have said to all of us in the family it's great reading his
books, we can hear him as we read it. And that's the point, it was the content that
mattered. This was the thing on which you concentrated, of course you made the content
as nice as you could for people to understand it but you didn't fuss and fiddle on about
the style, to that style. Then the other thing that he was really not keen on, he didn't
enjoy novels. Now I must make this quite clear, he didn't disapprove of novels, he didn't
object really to other people reading them within moderation as with everything else
though I think he did sometimes feel that too much novel reading was a waste of time
but he himself didn't enjoy them, men he used to say. Dickens I think probably because
of the intense assault on the emotions that Dickens keeps on doing, you know he keeps
on twanging on your heartstrings, everybody dies by inches and there are always little
girls and all this kind of thing, I don't think he could take this. And then Hardy with
his cynical pessimism, he disliked them and as I say novels in general he didn't enjoy
but there was one great exception and that was Sir Walter Scott. Now Sir Walter Scott
he really had enjoyed tremendously, as I say time was at a premium in his ministerial life
and I don't remember him reading him much but Scott was a novelist whom he loved and
the funny thing about him was of course that the bit that the rest of us always skip, the
first hundred pages of every Scott novel, that was the bit he liked best. You see it's
this non-potted thing again, here was Scott building up his background, he loved it. Also
I always think as far as I myself am concerned it's interesting how pacificatious he was
as a lover of literature, it always worries me as an ex-English teacher how they often
start children off with Scott with Quentin Durward or Ivanhoe, far and away the most
boring thing Scott ever wrote. Now my father started me off with Scott with The Antiquary,
a great novel and Old Mortality, another one, Heart of Midlothian, all these, they were
the ones he got me onto first, Scott at his greatest really. So his whole approach to
Scott was interesting and as I say really very pacificatious. So Scott really was all
right as far as novels were concerned. Now that really also leads me on to say that he
was very fair about novels, I haven't mentioned one thing, he was very good, he would often
put us in touch with perhaps writers we hadn't heard of, I'll be coming onto this more just
a little later on, but it was he for instance who began me off on John Buckham, interesting
he during the war produced a few copies of Buckham and said I think you'll enjoy this,
but I think probably Buckham again because he's in a sort of Scott mold in a way, it's
this kind of novelist he liked. But there was one lesson I think that he always taught
us and that was, and here I come onto something else that he felt strongly against in reading,
and that was that reading must never become like a drug. Fred has memories of his talking
about people who are always wandering about with their noses in books. I always have an
uncomfortable feeling that he may have been referring to, well perhaps to me, perhaps
to Anne, perhaps to both of us, I don't know at that time. There was a time I remember
quite well when I evolved a system whereby you could dress and undress while reading
a book at the same time. Now this kind of thing I think worried him a little. In other
words reading can very quickly become a drug. I think that's why perhaps he had slight reservations
about novels as well. One must never allow reading to sort of drug one. One must never
allow it to take control of one. The Christian reader is to be in control of his reading
as well as of everything else. So that was a danger. The other thing too, and he makes
a very clear point of this, that never, never should one read just to impress other people.
He says, I have emphasized the place and value of reading, but if your chief reason
for reading is to parade it and make a display of your knowledge, it is obviously bad in
every sense. Now he was talking largely about ministers there, but I think he meant all
of us as well. He was always worried when somebody would become famous in the world
of whatever it was, and you get Christians rushing to get hold of it, just to get a smattering
of knowledge about him in order to say, I have read so and so. Now this always concerned
him. You don't read in order to show how well read you are. You read, as we go on to see,
for much more important and profound reasons. And the other thing that he felt very strongly
was that you never read just to get ideas which you then regurgitated. He said, we are
not meant to be gramophone records or tape recording machines. I remember sometimes he's
expressing some anxiety about various speakers who, because of their love for the writers
of the 17th, 18th, 19th century, would produce the thoughts of the 17th, 18th, 19th century,
and often in the language of the 17th, 18th, 19th century. In other words, a kind of regurgitation
of your reading was what he didn't like. He used to worry sometimes about a person who
he'd say, we'd say, goodness, isn't he, yes, he'd say, but I think that what he is is just
a good student. Now this didn't mean that he didn't want people to work, to work or
to concentrate on their work, but not just somebody who read things and could reproduce
them. Reading was much more than that, he said, much more than that. And here I go on
to perhaps one of his most significant statements about reading, and now I am moving on to
the positive. He said, in a sense, one should not go to books for ideas. The business of
books is to make one think. The function of reading is to stimulate us in general, to
stimulate us to think and to think for ourselves. Take all you read, he said, and masticate
it thoroughly. It's rather like bacon, isn't it? You know about books that are meant to
be not some swallowed, et cetera, et cetera, but some are meant to be chewed and digested.
That was the reading that my father approved of. You chewed and you digested your books
so that they became part of you. You were then stimulated. You thought, and what came
out was your, as it were, quintessence of all the reading, but it was yours. It wasn't
originality for originality's sake. That was not what he meant. You took all this wisdom
of all the ages and you made them a part of you. You were stimulated, so you thought better
and as a result you spoke better. So then, coming on to his reading himself, what were
the marks in his reading? Well, you may be surprised at this, but he was not a quick
reader. I'm sure most people thought that he got through books at the speed of knots.
He didn't. He wished he could. My mother said that he often said, you know, there are so
many books to be read, I wish I could read more quickly, but he was basically a slow
reader. He once apparently sent away an answer to some advertisement for a book that told
you how to read more quickly. One of these books that tells you just to look at the middle
of the page and all the other words will float into it and it'll be all right. But in the
end he came back to his own method of reading and he read in his own way. He read a lot,
yes, but he didn't read it quickly. But of course the great thing about him was his phenomenal,
and I use the word advisedly I think, memory. He remembered what he read. And I think he
remembered what he read because of these things that I've talked about before. Because he
concentrated on the contents and this, what I can not think of putting in a better way,
mastication principle. Because he read in this way, then he remembered it all. It's
interesting as Fred has referred to his knowledge of the New Testament. He was not at all a
rote learner. He couldn't learn by heart. He actually couldn't learn by heart. I mean
to sit him down with a four line verse and say, now learn that, he couldn't do it. But
if he was preaching and he would begin on a passage in Paul, a verse would come to his
mind, he would often go through about 15 verses without stopping absolutely correctly in the
authorized version because he knew it. The contents had mastered him and so it came into
his mind. So the slowness of the reading didn't matter. He contained all that he read. May
I say incidentally, it's quite interesting on this knowledge of the Bible, though she
would I think be very annoyed if you know I was saying this. My mother, I think probably
could hold a candle to him in the Old Testament. He would often have to turn to her over some
of the stories. And if he wanted to know the names of the three daughters of Job, for instance,
mother would know them, the three of them. This kind of thing often, she had a good sense,
she has a good sense of the Old Testament stories. And he would often turn to her and
say, now where does that story about whatever it was come? But on the New Testament, the
Epistles of Paul, he was matchless. Now with regard to his reading himself, his general
reading, I think the amazing thing really was the breadth of his reading, the extent
of it. And as I said, this is what is so difficult really to know even how to begin to handle.
He was a very wide reader indeed. Fred has mentioned some of it and really I can only
underline some of the ways in which he read. He said at one point, he had been asked obviously
about the chief function of reading. I said about the stimulus, that was the main thing.
But he then went on and said, what then is the main function of reading? It is to provide
information. Now he read widely for information and it was interesting how important this
was in so many fields. For instance, the Westminster conferences, I'm sure we all remember
don't we? He'd finished, wouldn't he, at the last lecture. And he'd have his subject, how
he'd read it all, how he'd got all these facts, how he chaired all these meetings. And he
knew all the speaker's facts as well as they did, often, sometimes a little better. I remember
once in the very early days, he's reminding the speaker of something that he hadn't actually
put in his own lecture. He read widely for information of that kind. He also read for
information in other ways and this is where I often think that he has, certainly as far
as I myself am concerned, a lot to teach. He read for information on very basic things
and here we have a very interesting story in our immediate family. Our elder son had
to have a series of eye operations. And at one point my father was away and Christopher
began producing some very unpleasant, frightening symptoms. And the doctors were completely
baffled by them. It was almost like that bit in Christopher Robin, you know, all sorts
and conditions of famous physicians, almost came hurrying around at a run. But certainly
they were called in, these strange, distressing symptoms that this boy had. And they began
to discuss what it was. Was it something psychiatric? Was it this and that? And nobody knew what
it was. In the end they were going to send him to a series of specialists. At this point
my father came back from his holidays. Came back to find us all very anxious about him.
And he said, well now tell me about this medical system. Wasn't it really? And we told him
the whole story. And he said, the next time you take him to the outpatients I'm coming
up with you. So Christopher and I went up to the outpatients. My father came with us.
And of course it's great. The old boy network amongst doctors is terrific. Doctors can always
go in and say, well, I'm a doctor here and this is fine. So they let him in and he asked
the young husband, I suppose it was, if he could see Christopher's notes. And as I say,
because imagine one of us asking to see his notes. You know what happens in hospitals
if you ask to see anything, your temperature chart or anything. However, there was this
old doctor who could, well, he couldn't do any harm with the notes. So they handed him
Christopher's notes. And he sat while Christopher was being seen and everything and there was
considerable conversation going on, going through the notes carefully and accurately.
And the consultation was over. He made notes. That's another thing. By the way, he said
you should never read without having a notepad at your side and a pencil. So that anything
you read, anything that struck you, you could write it down. So he went through the notes
carefully. He didn't say anything. He came home, got out the notes and he then went,
now the doctors, if there's any doctor here, they'll know what I mean. There's a huge book
of medicines, a great big sort of thing telling you every medicine that is made. It's brought
out of fresh every year. He went to this book. He always had one of these. He looked it up
and he found that at a certain point, Christopher had been given a certain drug. He found out
about the drug in his compendium of medicines, whatever it's called, and read there the side
effects of the drug. In other words, he had read the information. In other words, you
see, instead of just talking about things and airing theories, may I say his winged
words about the current state of some young doctors were marvelous to hear afterwards.
But you see, he read. He never put forward theories and great ideas on things that could
be a matter of fact. He always made certain that he knew his facts and so he read them.
And of course, once we had discovered about this medicine, it was passed back to the doctors
who all had to agree, yes, of course, this was the reason and everything was perfectly
alright and the symptoms went. So, facts. But more than this, again, telling you a family
story, our youngest son, as many teenagers do at one point, flirted dangerously with
transcendental meditation and was talking endlessly about it, of course, and discussing
it with everybody and saying he'd been reading these marvelous books that were going to set
the world right and it was all great from the standpoint of 15 years old. So, my father
said, well, now, what are these books? This is the great thing about grandparents, isn't
it? They have time to talk. And so, Jonathan produced the book by the guru, a man called
Lobsang Rampa. I always have to think, I have a tendency to say Lobsang Sushong, which is
a kind of tea. But it actually was Lobsang Rampa. And my father said, I'll take that
book, I'll read it, he said. So, he took the book with him and went off preaching in Manchester,
actually in the free trade hall. And they had a great service on this particular evening.
And as he came home in the train that evening, he thought he would read Jonathan's book.
And as he read it from cover to cover, he did say that he had a slightly uncomfortable
feeling. The book was a little paperback with a picture of a sort of Chinese faith. The
book was called, may I tell you, The Third Eye. And in the Chinese faith, there was an
eye in the middle like that, a most bizarre looking cover, hideous with this eye glaring
out from the cover. He did have a slightly uncomfortable feeling that the people who
had heard him preach in the free trade hall, if one of them was sitting opposite him, would
wonder quite what was going on. However, he read it. He read it with care. He read it
seriously. He took notes on it. And when he came back, he went through it with Jonathan.
In other words, the tendency so often isn't it with young ones is to say, oh, but goodness
sake, that's all rubbish. You'll be forget about trans and that's nothing. You'll grow
out of them. Not at all. He wanted to know just exactly what it was that was getting
hold of this boy. And he went through, he said where the points were good, but he pointed
out where they were dangerous. And because he had read it, he knew the book far better
than Jonathan did. And as a result, the information that he had acquired made him able to deal
with this kind of situation. And I'm sure you could all multiply these stories in so
many other occasions. This reading for information. Then of course, and here I, as I say, I can
only just say it in general, he read widely and he read generally. He read biography,
again detailed, rich biographies, and of a very interesting variety. He, for instance,
had greatly enjoyed reading a biography of that great, brilliant and tragic figure of
the 19th century, Cardinal Newman. This whole story where he'd gone wrong and how it had
happened and what this great mind, how it worked and so on, the whole way the Catholic
mind worked, he'd read that. I remember too, once Fred and I had to go to a luncheon where
I had the great good fortune to sit next to Owen Chadwick, one of the Regius professors
at Cambridge. And I had greatly enjoyed this. I had come across Owen Chadwick's Victorian
church myself, but I came back and, as Fred says, he was always very interested in everything
that was going on and I said I was sitting next to Owen Chadwick. And I found, you see,
he'd read all Owen Chadwick's books, knew them in detail, found them interesting, said
how significant this outstanding book of Chadwick's is on the secularisation of thought in the
19th century. He'd read it, he knew it. All these interesting thinkers of the day, he
read them, as I say, biography itself, and he believed in reading widely and he gave
his reasons. He said, it will be good for your mind, he said. It will preserve resilience
and freshness. I have always tried to do this and to take certain journals which deal with
general affairs and literary matters and, where there are good, well-written articles
and, and I underline it, good book reviews, which will suggest other books for reading.
Now I've been talking to Mr. Sayre about this. You see, here at the Evangelical Library,
he read all the book reviews, didn't he? And he told, he phoned up and said, now I've
read a good review here, how about this book? He read the reviews. They not only made him
enjoy his own reading and give him further ideas, but you see, they enabled him to join
enthusiastically in other people's reading as well. And he was really great here. This
is another thing I miss. He used to give books for birthdays, for Christmas, for the end
of a holiday, or the beginning of a holiday. Any occasion where he could give a book, he
would, and he used to love doing it, and it was always the book that you would like. Because
he knew the kind of thing that we liked, then he would read his reviews and think, oh, well,
that would be a good one. He'd keep an eye on contemporary literature for Anne. Knowing
my fondness for Victorian books, religious tract society books, Mr. Sayre is very helpful
to be here as well at the Evangelical Library. People like Hesber Stratton, the other one
that wrote these Christian-based books. He knew I enjoyed them. And so, what was my joy
one Christmas, you see, to receive a book that I'd never even heard of, called The Religion
of the Heart, a book that considers all these writers and deals with them and gives further
suggestions for reading and so on. Somebody we once knew was thinking of doing a Ph.D.
theology thesis. He got a subject. My father produced him a reading list backlog. He read
his reviews. He knew the kind of book. He'd read half of them himself. But at least he
knew the field in which the man moved. And in a way, even more remarkable, I think, was
his extraordinary series of pieces of advice to our daughter, to Bethan, who was doing
a very esoteric thesis on a very particular sort of literary subject of language and poetry
and so on, people like Edward Thomas and the old early Welsh poets, these old bards and
so on. And he said to her, you know, along this line you are discussing, he said there
are some interesting developments in Cambridge at the moment. This was about three, four
years ago. He said, you see, there are these structuralist fellows in Cambridge, he said.
There's going to be some sort of problem there, I think. Obviously their writings are beginning
to clash. Well, of course, two years later the whole balloon blew up in Cambridge and
it had all, but he'd seen it coming. He would say, there's a book you should read by Frank
Kermode exactly along your line, he would say. Or I read a poem by one of your cuters,
Tom Paul, in the Times Literary Supplement. I mean, not only in general knowledge, but
in specific little details of research, he would know what was going on and as a result
was able to help us to enjoy what we were reading. He was a tremendous enthusiast and
he enjoyed sharing with other people's enthusiasms as well, with the grandchildren. You see,
he would enjoy discussing the finer points of a wrestler with Adam, or school problems
with the two older girls, or American politics with Jonathan. And in fact, I remember myself
when I was a very little girl, I used to collect cigarette cards. Now, as you can imagine,
it was rather a hard job for me to collect cigarette cards because nobody anywhere smoked
around me. There were very few members of the church in Aberavon that smoked either.
And I really labeled my way through a collection of film stars in cigarette cards. I can't
remember if it was wills or players. Anyhow, by catching from my friends, by borrowing
from school friends, fathers, all devious means, I got them all, except Norma Shearer.
And Norma Shearer hung over me for weeks. I couldn't get her. I kept on getting all
these ordinary ones, like Errol Flynn and all these others, but not Norma Shearer. What
number she was even. And I was getting depressed about this. I thought I was about seven or
eight. These cigarette card collections are now selling for anything up to a hundred pounds.
But anyhow, as I say, there it was, I couldn't get her. And then one morning, I remembered
it to this day, I got up and there at my breakfast place on my plate was Norma Shearer.
And my excitement was tremendous. And apparently what had happened was my father had been preaching
somewhere up the valleys. And somebody who'd been driving him, they always had tea. Oh goodness,
I'd look back at these signs, these marvelous teas that there were between the afternoon and
the evening meeting. You'd go to somebody's house, the table groaning with food, and there would be
talk and the ministers would be there. They were great days. However, on this particular occasion,
the man who'd been driving him pulled out a packet of cigarettes,
pulled a cigarette out. My father leaned across the table and said,
excuse me, have you got a card in that packet?
Somewhat surprised, the man said, well, I'll have a look.
Pulled out, yes I have, he said. My father said, can I see it? Good, he said, it's Norma Shearer.
Now you see what I mean? He said that I'm now off my point, aren't I? But it was part of his,
it's part of the thing that made him such a great reader. He was a great, he joined in with it all.
That was why it was so, ministers have said so often how much they loved him coming for them.
He'd join in with the enthusiasms and everything, and it didn't matter what it was, whether you
were reading great tomes of philosophy or whatever, or whether you were a little girl collecting
cigarette cars, he'd join in with you, and he would enjoy it with you, and your pleasure
was as much to him as his own pleasure in finding it. Then, and this is very significant of him as a
reader, he believed, of course, in relaxation. Now, on the whole, if people do a lot of reading,
people say, well, you know, when you get tired, go out and have a walk, or play a game of tennis,
or watch television or something. Not my father. He has a sense, very revealing. He says, the mind
must be given relief and rested, but to relieve your mind does not mean that you stop reading.
You read something different. Now, this is what he did also. He read for relaxation,
and the funny thing about this, and it's something that often used to amuse my mother,
his real relaxing reading was his medical journals. He read medicine, as Brad says, right to the end.
He enjoyed them, and they were, often you'd find him in the evening reading them, and as I say,
he sometimes read them to the most marvelous effect. He didn't just read them to relax,
he took them in. Again, he masticated his medical reading as well, and sometimes it was invaluable.
He would have read of something, some medical magazine somewhere that was just the answer
that somebody somewhere needed, and so he read for relaxation. He also read apologetic works,
of course. Now, really, where can I start here? I was talking to the Reverend Howard
Jones the other day, and he said that he thought the great thing about him was that he was always
about 10 years ahead of everybody else in his reading, and I think there's a lot in this.
I have read with great interest this last week in the Welsh Evangelical Movement magazine,
the Kilkground, a review, and an excellent review, by a book, about the book, by a man called
René Laurentin of Catholic Charismatics. It's a very, the Welsh review is a very interesting
one, and I wholeheartedly support what he says, but the interesting thing is now this is appearing in
June 1982. My father got a number of us reading this book, I think at the beginning of 1978.
In other words, he read that he was aware, and kept himself aware, of the general thought of the
world. You see, I'm slightly moving on now. We come from literature and so on. He had read Hans
Kung long before anybody else had ever heard of Hans Kung. He knew what Hans Kung was saying.
He could see this problem. Not only could he see the problem arising in the English
faculty in Cambridge, but he could see the philosophical and the theological developments
of the world, and he was slightly amused at the sort of wild rush that a lot of speakers
had to do to get hold of a copy of Hans Kung, to read him, because they didn't know him.
He had read him, and he had understood him, and saw how the man's thought was going, and the
problems that were going to arise. Again, to quote my mother, he said that he often used to say to
her that he felt that when you read general reading like this, philosophy as I say, and
general religious thought, he always wanted to know the other man's point of view better than
he knows it himself. I illustrated that, didn't I, with Jonathan and that transcendental meditation
man. Not only that, he used to say, you must read all these books, and he used to do it himself,
and because he read them so thoroughly, he always advised us, didn't he, and I'm sure you all
remember this, to be quite certain what a man didn't say, as much as what he did. So often,
you know, one would read and get taken over by a writer and say, my goodness, he says A-B-C-D-E.
Yes, he would say, but he doesn't say F-G-H-I-J. In other words, you're missing what he's not saying.
So all these philosophical books he read, and he read all the journals, they all
came pouring into the house. Theological journals of every shade and colour would arrive in the
house. He would read them, and as I say, reading these reviews, he'd have ideas for his own
reading. Not only that, he felt that it was important for us all as Christians to know what
was going on in the world around us. One of the last books he gave Fred and me was a book by this
man, Harry Blamire, or Blamire, I'm sure some of you read him. He said, read this man, he's an
interesting man, see what his position is, where he stands with regard to us, how close he comes,
and yet how far away he is, and so on. He enjoyed this kind of reading, but he said too that one
always needed to be careful about one's general reading. It's the same point as I was making
earlier. General reading is good, but it must never take over. You must know yourself, he would
say, if you find you're spending too much time on reading something, and stop it and balance it back
again. He believed in balance, and not only was he balanced himself, as I said already, he was
helpful to others. He said, you have to know what to read for yourself and also for others, and he
certainly did. It's interesting to me, always looking back historically the last 30 odd years,
what a help he was to those of us who read literature back in the 40s and 50s. You see,
this was the time before the whole arts thing had taken over in the Christian world,
before Dr. Chaver's books had begun to come out, and the help that Dr. Chaver's books have to give.
I was reading English at Oxford at the time, and I remember quite well getting myself into terrible
trouble by attacking Chaucer for writing some story that I felt he shouldn't have written,
and more or less calling him a dirty old man. I didn't quite, but I very nearly did,
and of course the wrath of the tutor came upon my head, and I remember telling my father this,
rather thinking that I'd been suffering as a Christian, as it were. Not at all, he said,
you're not handling your literature properly. He believed in this balance, you looked at literature
as literature, and as a Christian, he helped you to handle it, to see what the style did,
what the content was, what the purpose of the man was in writing it. I learned far more from
him than from the tutor how to handle literature itself, and he was very good at giving the right
book to the right person. He tempered the wind, of course, to the shorn lamb. He has a marvellous
passage, hasn't he, in Preaching and Preachers, where he says, if somebody is introspective
and slightly given to depression, you do not give them a book that is thundering out the message of
conviction of sin and the total depravity of man, and so on. Otherwise, he said, you will drive him
mad. He knew his people, he knew how to help them, as I say, from literature students through,
as Fred says, to souls who were suffering. There was always something that he could find,
and now I must quickly do the last three things, the reading he loved best. I've left this till
the end, but of course, in a way, this is what you know even better than I do, a lot of you,
I know this, certainly as well as I do. He read theology. A preacher, he said,
should continue to read theology as long as he is alive, but it must be biblical theology.
He didn't like this arid reading and discussion of theology, where you tossed one doctrine around
from one to the other. It had to be theology that arose out of the word of God. This was theology
at its greatest to him, and when he read a book of theology, again, he could see what the man didn't.
I remember when he was in hospital having some very unpleasant treatment.
For the whole of one hour, when the treatment was really at its worst, he sat talking to us
about a person that's having a great vogue at the moment in the States, this marvellous new
evangelical theologian. He said, you need to watch his writings. He's not quite right, he said.
In other words, his theology was so great, it was so much a part of him, that he could
almost feel what other people were saying. Then there was his devotional reading.
I use this word carefully. Because he said at one point, I abominate, he said, and it's a very
strong word, I abominate devotional commentaries. I do not want other people to do my devotions for
me. He didn't like a sort of sentimental devotionalism at all. What he meant by something
devotional was a type of reading, he said, which will help you in general to understand and enjoy
the scriptures. He had a lot of people in this. The Puritans, he said, you will find, I think,
in general, that the Puritans are invariably helpful. He told the story of how when he himself
was at a low ebb, how the heavenly Dr. Sibbes, do you remember, had helped him by the bruised
reed and the soul's conflict. This heavenly pastoral figure had given him great blessing.
He knew that some of them, like John Owen, were the greater theologians, but he said,
that was his expression about it. And then, of course, how often have we heard him say,
I am an 18th century man, Jonathan Edwards. He kept on saying to us, you must read Jonathan
Edwards. In the middle of your political lives and your travelling around, read Jonathan Edwards,
he said. He is the one that can keep you with your feet solidly based on the rock. Read him
and learn from him. Then, it's interesting, too, how, do you remember how in the Thanksgiving
service, Gaius Davis and Mr. Omri Jenkins had a kind of slight debate about my father as a
human being, whether he was essentially a doctor or essentially a preacher. Do you remember the
discussion they had almost? Now, not speaking about the greatness of the calling at all,
I'm not, I'm speaking now about him as a personality and as a temperament. We in the
family think probably that both were right. But there is one other thing that one must add,
and that is that he was a Welshman. Now, this was a very important part of him.
Surprising how many people were surprised that it was in Wales that he was buried.
He couldn't have been buried anywhere else. He was a Welshman through and through. He
loved the other nations, sometimes with a sardonic smile. But he was a Welshman, and at the very end
he only read two things. Now, one of those things was his book of Welsh hymns.
I'm sorry that so many of you are so deprived, but I can't read some of them to you.
These men used to be transcendental, in the right way, poets with their marvelous imagery,
their great grasp of doctrine, the wonder of their love for God, the tenderness of their
application of the gospel message to the soul. He loved them. And as I say at the end, it was
that book, the one of the two, that was by his side. Always a Welshman. Then, of course,
he loved church history and biography. Now, this is so obvious that I really need to go on. You
all know this. What was the Westminster Conference doing? What was he always telling us to do but to
read church history and biography? He loved it for itself. Again, it had to be a detailed biography.
None of these potted things. That's why he always enjoyed big ones, like, you know,
Mr. Darleymore's book on Whitfield or, you know, some of the earlier ones with their great
concentration of detail and so on. He also felt, I think, that reading biography provided a balance.
He said the best way of checking any tendency to pride, pride in your preaching or in anything else
that you may do or maybe is to read on Sunday nights the biography of some great saint.
And all I want to do really is to illustrate this by two short stories. First of all, this reading
on Sunday night. The beginning of 1954, he was reading through D.E. Jenkins's life of Thomas
Charles. Some of you probably know it. Big tomes again. And for several weeks in January and
February, he would read bits of this aloud to us on Sunday evenings as we were going around getting
this up and so on. He'd be sitting there in the chair reading bits aloud. And in these two
particular months, Thomas Charles was having terrible trouble with the lady whom he subsequently
married. I don't know how many of you have read it, but she dithered for ages. She would come right
up to the point and then she would suddenly become afraid of launching upon the troubled seas of
matrimony. Back Thomas Charles would go again into a depression. On and on, week after week,
this went with the letters. He loved the letters, didn't he, in biographies, going back and forth.
In the end, one glorious Sunday night, she said, yes. And I assure you, we were all really rejoicing
in this. In fact, if I am to be very honest, I have to confess that the Sunday night before
Fred and I were due to be married, he was reading bits out of Thomas Charles, I actually found
myself thinking to myself, oh bother, I won't be here next Sunday night.
It is so great with his enthusiasm that he just got hold of us all, really. That was one story.
The other story was a marvellous occasion when we climbed up to see the great memorial to the
Covenanters, the communion stones. I don't know how many have been there. It's just up in the
hills behind Hoyk. You know the great story of the Covenanters, how they used to have to go and
have their communions up in the hills in case they were caught. We had a dire journey up there,
we had to go through fields full of bulls, we had to leap over ditches, climb under barbed wire,
but we got there. And we got to this really lyrically beautiful spot in a sort of amphitheatre
of the hills. And there's a great monument there, a high monument, on the top is a communion cup.
It's a wonderful monument to these great men of God, the Covenanters.
And my chief memory is of my father. We arrived there, standing, looking at this thing,
and taking off his hat. You see, he not only loved them, he was not only enthusiastic about
these great men of God, he revered them as brothers in the Gospel. They meant so much to him,
and I felt that was indicative of exactly how he felt about them. And then last of all, of course,
the Bible. I've left this until the very end because you all know it.
He said, read it, he said, because it is the bread of life, the manner for your soul's
nourishment and well-being. You all know, I'm sure, that he followed the Murray-McCain
system of reading. He believed in reading the Bible often, from beginning to end, through
and through, not just reading one's favorite passages. You studied certain passages when
you needed them, but you read the Bible consistently time and time again. I think
Mother worked out that they must have done the system for at least, I think it was 53 or 54
years. So you see, the New Testament, he would have read at least 110 times on the system,
let alone all his own study for his sermons. And it's a remarkable fact to me, he died on March
the first, on February the 28th. The last chapter of the daily reading he would have read
was 1 Corinthians 15. It was as if the Lord, yes, he'd stopped taking the times,
and the Lord was pointing him on to the resurrection of the body that was to come.
It was this great systematic reading he did. I've been rereading recently some of the very early
sermons he preached in Abba Abba. You see, he read his Bible regularly, he knew it and he loved it.
At the very end, the very end, when he couldn't speak, he would point to verses out of it.
He pointed and to the one about in all things to be content, not to be anxious. He pointed me to
the one about, you know, this earthly house of our tabernacle, the far better reward that was waiting
for him. He just pointed to them or he tried to write them down on a piece of paper. It was the
Bible, the Welsh hymns and the Bible. And as I say, one of his early sermons in Abba Abba said this,
on your own deathbed, he was about 28 at the time, you will be confident in the love of God
and the knowledge which you have that Christ has died for you and your sins and that you
shall be with him in the world to come. Now he proved that. You see, that was true of him because
great, enthusiastic, wide-ranging, fascinated reader that he was. As far as he was concerned,
the only fact in the whole world that mattered was the truth to which the Word of God, his greatest
reading, pointed him to. The old, old story of Jesus and his love. And to finish, I really would
like to read you a passage out of this little book, The Force of Truth. I think it really
expresses the kind of way that we all saw my father at the very end. This is written by the
Reverend John Scott, who wrote about Thomas Scott, and this is what he said.
In the concluding years of his life, he was, as it appeared to me, obviously ripening for heaven.
He had fought a good fight. He had finished his course. He had kept the faith so that at the last,
his genuine humility before God, his joy in Christ Jesus, his holy zeal for the diffusion of the
Gospel, his tender affection to his family and all around him, his resignation to the will of his
Heavenly Father, and his exclusive trust in the merits and grace of his Saviour, seemed to leave
little more to be done, but for the stroke of death to bring him to his grave in a full age,
like as a shock of corn cometh in its season.
My dear friends, I think that you've all listened with me, enthralled, to what we've heard tonight.
I'm going to say no more than thank you to Sir Frederick and Lady Catherwood
for those quite remarkable accounts of Dr. Lloyd-Jones as they knew him so well.
I have an idea too that we shall all want to read afterwards what's been said to us this evening.
We really are most grateful to you both. Thank you very much indeed.
I'm grateful. We contemplate the beauty of a God-filled life.
Bless you that you have illustrated it so well and so movingly in the life of Dr.
Martin Lloyd-Jones. We say humbly, Father, and lovingly, and yearningly, do it again in our lives.
Make our lives strong and beautiful in the faith and the grace of the living Christ,
our Christ as his, your Son for us as for him, who is now in glory with you.
Grant to us also for our generation, for the years of our pilgrimage,
for the moments of our days that are appointed us, grace upon grace, out of the fullness
of the risen Christ, your Son Jesus, the Lord of heaven. Be he most evidently the Lord of our lives
and use us to extend his kingdom and to bring the light of the knowledge of the Savior
into lives that are around us yet in need of him. So may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ
and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all now and evermore. Amen.
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