The Enduring Classics

It gathers the books that have walked with pilgrims for centuries — Augustine's confession, Bunyan's dream, the counsel of Thomas à Kempis — the old paths that are still good. Its keynote is Jeremiah 6:16, "ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls": the shelf commends the tested and time-worn over the merely new.

Among them are Augustine's "Confessions," the treatises of Cyprian, the first epistle of Clement, the epistles of Ignatius, Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress," Thomas à Kempis's "The Imitation of Christ," Jonathan Edwards's "Freedom of the Will," and William Law's "A Serious Call" — a span from the early church to the eighteenth century.

"Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein" is the collection's whole argument — that wisdom is more often found by returning to the tested roads than by chasing novelty. It sets these classics not as museum pieces but as the good way still worth walking, promising rest to the soul that does.

Written around 397, it is the first true autobiography in Western literature and still the most searching — Augustine telling his own story back to God as one long prayer, from a boyhood theft to the garden in Milan where his life turned. Its opening line has never been improved upon: that our heart is restless until it rests in God, which is the note the whole shelf sounds.

Written in the 1420s and, after the Bible, the most widely read Christian book ever, Thomas à Kempis's four short books of counsel call the reader away from the noise of opinion and ambition into the inner life — humility, patience, silence, and a friendship with Christ that outlasts every consolation. It is a classic precisely because its sentences still read as though written this morning.

The collection reaches back to the first Christian centuries with Clement of Rome's letter to Corinth (the earliest Christian writing outside the New Testament), the seven urgent letters Ignatius of Antioch wrote on his way to the arena, and the treatises of Cyprian of Carthage — the church, in its earliest generations, learning to live out the gospel and pass it on.

Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" is the most accessible entry, carrying the whole of Christian experience in story form; Augustine's "Confessions" rewards the reader who suspects their own motives; and "The Imitation of Christ" is best taken slowly, a short chapter at a time, as it was written to be.

Because a book that has fed pilgrims for centuries has been tested in a way no new book can be, and these have not lost their power to search and steady the reader. Jeremiah's counsel holds: the old paths are still the good way, and the soul that walks them finds rest that novelty cannot give.