How to read and how to pray

To Read the Bible Through in a Year

Blackwood’s Comprehensive Aids to the Study of the Bible · Vol. I, p. 60

Various tables have been constructed for this object, but generally they are confused and difficult to be carried out. Perhaps the following is one of the simplest arrangements that could be adopted:

If the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm be reckoned as eleven chapters (i. e., two parts for a chapter), then all the chapters in the Old Testament will number nine hundred and thirty-nine (939). In the New Testament there are two hundred and sixty chapters (260). Now, if the Lord's Days, or fifty-two Sabbaths, be devoted to the New Testament, five chapters daily would include the whole book (i. e., 52 × 5 = 260). Reading three chapters daily, on the other days of the week, or during three hundred and thirteen days (i. e., 313 × 3 = 939), would exactly make nine hundred and thirty-nine, the number of chapters contained in the Old Testament. It is obvious that if the Old and New Testaments be read through consecutively from day to day, the same object will be accomplished by reading five chapters on the Lord's Days, and three on each of the other days of the week, still remembering to take two parts of the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm as a chapter.

During leap years, the extra day may be provided for by the division of some of the long chapters, as judgment would direct; so as to have a portion for the last day of February.

It is obvious that such a mode of reading the Word of God may become very unprofitable, as quantity might come to be the chief object, instead of that thoughtful comparison of passage with passage, and that lengthened and prayerful examination of difficult portions, which alone can enable the Christian reader to profit by The Word.