PURPOSE: To help people understand the difference between observation and interpretation.

Years ago in the New York Times, there was an advertisement for Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book." It pictured a teenager reading his first love letter. The blurb was, "How to read a love letter."

The copy said this:

"This young man has just received his first love letter. He may have read it three or four times, but he is just beginning. To read it as accurately as he would like, would require several dictionaries and a good deal of close work with a few experts of etymology and philology.

"However, he will do all right without them.

"He will ponder over the exact shade of meaning in every word, every comma. She has headed the letter Dear John. What, he asks himself, is the exact significance of those words? Did she refrain from saying Dearest because she was bashful? Would My dear have sounded too formal?

"Jeepers! Maybe she would have said, Dear so-and-so to just about anybody.

"A worried frown will now appear on his face, but it disappears as soon as he really gets to thinking about the first sentence: she certainly wouldn't have written that to just anybody.

"And so he works his way through the letter, one moment perched blissfully on a cloud, the next moment huddled miserably behind an eight-ball. It has started a hundred questions in his mind. He could quote it by heart. In fact, he will—to himself—for weeks to come."

The advertisement continues:

"If people read books with anything like the same concentration, we'd be a race of mental giants."

To which we could add, if we would read the Bible with anything like the same concentration, we could be a church of spiritual giants.