“These remarks upon the kind and type of intellectual character, at which the clergyman must aim, prepare the way for considering the chief means, and methods of forming it. And these may all be reduced to one, namely, the daily, nightly, and everlasting study of standard authors, ‘Few,’ remarks John Foster, ‘have been sufficiently sensible of the importance of that economy in reading, which selects, almost exclusively, the very first order of books. Why should a man, except for some special reason, read a very inferior book, at the very time that he might be reading one of the highest order? A man of ability, for the chief of his reading, should select such works as he feels beyond his own power to have produced. What can other books do for him, but waste his time and augment his vanity?’” — W.G.T. Shedd, Homiletics and Pastoral Theology (1867, 1872), pp. 348-349