There are books that we deliberately seek out, and there are books that seem almost to find us. Family Prayers by Henry Thornton was one of those books for me. I discovered it five or six years ago, and it has remained a personal favorite ever since. Thornton’s prayers have that quality I so often appreciate in older Christian works: they are substantial without being elaborate, deeply scriptural without merely stringing together quotations, and conscious of the seriousness of ordinary Christian life. They bring the household before God with an awareness of sin, providence, duty, grace, eternity, and the mediation of Christ that is sometimes difficult to find in more modern devotional material. Thornton originally composed these prayers for the use of his own household; they were published after his death in 1834 and went through numerous editions.

Because I value the book so much, I have occasionally bought copies to give to other people whom I thought would appreciate it. There is something satisfying about placing an old neglected book into the hands of someone who would probably never have discovered it otherwise. The book is not sitting on the front table at a Christian bookstore. It is not appearing in anyone’s list of this year’s recommended releases. No publisher is spending advertising money to make certain it crosses our path. Unless someone happens to go digging through old books, old catalogs, digitized libraries, used bookstores, or the recommendations of someone else who has already found it, Henry Thornton’s Family Prayers can simply remain invisible. Yet invisibility is not the same thing as worthlessness. A treasure may be forgotten without ceasing to be a treasure.

I have often felt unusually blessed in this respect. Through old books, digitized libraries, sermons, biographies, and the recommendations of other readers, I have been allowed to wander into rooms of the Christian library that many believers simply never discover. I have met writers long dead who have nevertheless instructed me, reproved me, encouraged me, and sometimes altered the way I understood a passage of Scripture or the Christian life. Some of those discoveries have become part of my own spiritual vocabulary. They have given names to things I had observed but could not adequately describe. They have shown me sins where I had previously seen only habits, graces where I had previously seen only personality traits, and providences where I might otherwise have seen merely circumstances. I did not earn access to this inheritance. Much of it simply came within my reach because somebody preserved a book, digitized a volume, quoted a paragraph, mentioned an author, uploaded a sermon, or said, in effect, You should read this.

That last thought has been returning to me.

I was recently searching for other works connected with Henry Thornton when I ran across a little eighteenth-century publication concerning the establishment of a repository of cheap religious and moral literature. What I stumbled into was the world of Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts, an evangelical publishing effort launched in 1795. More conceived the project; Henry Thornton served as its treasurer and was also involved in the larger work surrounding it, while other evangelical figures contributed material and helped support its distribution. The purpose was remarkably practical. Cheap popular literature was already circulating widely among ordinary people. More and her associates did not imagine that they could make people stop reading inexpensive ballads, stories, pamphlets, and sensational material simply by deploring it. Instead, they sought to put something better into the same channels of distribution. The tracts were intentionally inexpensive and were distributed through booksellers, hawkers, schools, charitable institutions, and private individuals who purchased them for further circulation.

That made me pause and think. They were looking at a population being formed by what it consumed. So are we.

Their concern was that cheap, accessible, entertaining material was carrying ideas into ordinary homes and minds faster and more effectively than serious religious instruction could reach them. Ours is the same problem multiplied by technologies they could scarcely have imagined. The cheap publication has become the feed. The ballad sheet has become the reel. The pamphlet handed from person to person has become the shared post. The traveling street vendor has been replaced by an algorithm capable of placing thousands of fragments before us without our ever leaving a chair.  And cheap has become cheaper still.

Much of what shapes us now costs us nothing to acquire and therefore seems to cost us nothing at all. We scroll past one image, then another. One opinion, another outrage, another advertisement, another joke, another tragedy, another argument, another beautiful house, another political claim, another piece of gossip, another ten-second theological assertion, another person telling us what we ought to desire. Each fragment appears almost weightless. Yet the cumulative effect is not weightless. Our attention is being trained. Our affections are being stirred. Our assumptions are being reinforced. Our desires are being suggested to us. Our fears are being cultivated. Our sense of what is normal, desirable, shameful, important, urgent, beautiful, or ridiculous is being formed little by little.

The question is therefore not simply whether we are consuming pornography, blasphemy, obvious falsehood, or some other plainly sinful content. Those things certainly matter. The more subtle question is what thousands of seemingly harmless fragments are doing to the architecture of our minds.

Scripture does not permit us to regard the mind as morally neutral territory. Paul tells us to be transformed “by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2). He commands believers to take “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). He directs our attention toward what is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise (Philippians 4:8). The psalmist prays, “Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways” (Psalm 119:37). These are not merely rules about avoiding explicit wickedness. They assume that what repeatedly enters our sight and thought matters because human beings are creatures whose loves, judgments, imaginations, and habits can be cultivated.

This is where the old Cheap Repository began to trouble my thoughts in a way I did not expect. Perhaps Christians have spent too much time asking how to get people off social media without asking sufficiently what we might place within the channels where they already are.

There is certainly good reason to warn about the endless feed. I increasingly suspect that many people have no idea what continual scrolling is costing them in attention, reflection, prayer, reading, conversation, memory, and simple mental quiet. We should say so. We should also examine ourselves. Christians are no more immune to distraction merely because we occasionally encounter Christian material between advertisements and entertainment.

But condemnation by itself is unlikely to empty the feed. Someone else will fill it.

That was part of Hannah More’s insight. The inexpensive literature already circulating among ordinary people could not simply be wished away. If corrupting ideas traveled through stories, songs, pamphlets, and popular forms, then truth also needed to become accessible. Her project deliberately adopted familiar forms and existing means of distribution rather than waiting for the people she wanted to reach to become the sort of people who frequented serious libraries. The Repository brought the material toward them. McGill’s history of the project notes that the tracts were deliberately distributed not only through formal booksellers but through the ordinary channels by which popular literature already traveled.

There is something deeply suggestive in that. We sometimes behave as though our only choices are either to imitate the triviality of social media or to withdraw from it entirely. Perhaps there is another possibility: learn how to place small portions of worthwhile truth into the stream without reducing the truth itself to triviality.

• A paragraph from an old sermon.
• A sentence from a forgotten book.
• A question that interrupts an hour of mindless scrolling.
• A brief explanation of a biblical doctrine someone has never encountered.
• A quotation that makes a person stop long enough to think.
• A short video that does not attempt to explain everything but awakens the desire to understand something.
• A photograph of an old page with several lines marked and a simple invitation: Read this.
• A short trail leading toward a longer article, sermon, book, or passage of Scripture.

There is a place for such things.  I have often thought of such things as breadcrumbs. No single breadcrumb is the meal. That distinction matters enormously. The Christian faith cannot be compressed into inspirational sayings, aesthetic quotations, clever reels, or sixty-second theological summaries without serious loss. “Content” is not discipleship. Virality is not evangelism. Engagement statistics are not conversions. And no technique, however ingenious, can accomplish what belongs to the Holy Spirit alone. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). God saves sinners through the gospel, not through our mastery of an algorithm.

But God ordinarily works through means. Someone hands someone a book… Someone recommends a sermon…

Philip asks the Ethiopian eunuch, “Do you understand what you are reading?” and the man replies, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:30–31). Andrew tells his brother, “We have found the Messiah” and brings him to Jesus (John 1:41–42).

A seed is sown.
A word is remembered.
A question follows a person home.
One paragraph awakens hunger for another.

And sometimes the person who introduces us to a truth plays a much smaller role than the person who originally wrote the book, preached the sermon, translated the passage, or carefully developed the doctrine. That is perfectly acceptable. We do not always need to be authors. Sometimes we need to become carriers.

That realization has changed the way I think about all those old books I have been privileged to discover. Perhaps enjoying them creates a certain stewardship.  Not an obligation to become an expert on everything I read, nor a demand that every private pleasure be turned into public production. There is a danger here too. We can become so preoccupied with sharing what we are reading that we cease actually reading it; so concerned with producing Christian content that we cease quietly receiving Christian truth. Some truths need to remain with us awhile before we speak of them. Mary “treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). There is a necessary inwardness to the Christian life that social media can easily violate.

But neither should everything good terminate upon ourselves. If I find an old book that strengthens me, why should I assume the blessing was intended to stop with me?  If I find a forgotten sermon that clarifies something beautifully, why not place a portion of it where another person might encounter it? If I discover an old writer who helps me understand Scripture more carefully, perhaps I can introduce someone else.

I have been doing something like this for years without thinking of it as a philosophy. That is why I buy copies of Family Prayers and give them away. I know people who would appreciate Thornton if only Thornton somehow crossed their path. Since he probably will not, I can become part of the path.

The internet merely enlarges that possibility. In one sense, this is an old Christian vocation wearing digital clothes. For generations there were tract distributors, colporteurs, booksellers, lending libraries, missionary presses, Bible societies, Sunday-school libraries, and ordinary Christians passing books from hand to hand. They understood something very simple: access matters. The best book in the world helps very little if the person who needs it never knows it exists.

Today access is simultaneously easier and more difficult than ever. Millions of books, sermons, lectures, articles, and historic Christian works can be reached instantly. Yet abundance has produced its own kind of invisibility. We are surrounded by everything and therefore often encounter nothing. The person who might benefit enormously from John Owen, Thomas Watson, John Bunyan, Charles Spurgeon, J. C. Ryle, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, or a hundred lesser-known writers is unlikely to wake tomorrow morning and search for them without some reason to do so.

But that person may scroll past one paragraph. And that paragraph may be enough to awaken curiosity. This is where I think the Christian use of social media can become something more interesting than merely creating “Christian content.”  We can search the storehouses, find what is good, distill without distorting, and place small portions within reach of people who would never enter the library themselves. Then we can leave the door open behind the quotation so they can find the source.

That last part is important. The goal should not be to make people dependent upon our summaries. The breadcrumb should lead somewhere.

• Read the chapter.
• Listen to the sermon.
• Open the Bible.
• Download the book.
• Consider the argument.
• Look up the passage.
• Think about this longer than thirty seconds.

In an attention economy designed to keep people moving, perhaps one Christian act of resistance is simply helping someone stop.

Stop and think.
Stop and read.
Stop and remember that eternity exists.
Stop and consider whether the life passing beneath their fingers is being spent wisely.

“Look carefully then how you walk,” Paul writes, “not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:15–16).

We may not be able to defeat the endless scroll. I doubt we will build a Christian alternative powerful enough to displace the enormous commercial systems designed to hold human attention. Nor is that ultimately our calling.

But we can interrupt it. We can place something true in its path. We can scatter seeds. We can leave breadcrumbs. We can become the person who says, Here is something I found. Here is something worth reading. Here is a thought worth considering. Here is a sermon you may never have heard. Here is an author you may never have encountered. Here is a question I do not want you to scroll past too quickly.

And then we can point beyond ourselves. That may be what affected me most about unexpectedly discovering that little eighteenth-century plan while looking for more Henry Thornton. I had begun by searching for another old book. Instead, I found myself confronted with a much larger question: What am I supposed to do with the treasures I have been allowed to find?  That questioned has always haunted me. It is behind the poem The Waves and the Wind.

Someone preserved Thornton’s prayers. Someone eventually digitized the old volume. Somehow it crossed the distance of nearly two centuries and landed in front of me. I read it. I loved it. I bought copies and placed them into other hands. Now the same Henry Thornton has, in a curious providence, introduced me to an older experiment in deliberately putting worthwhile material into channels crowded with material that was anything but worthwhile.

The technology has changed. Human nature has not. The battle for attention has intensified enormously, but the principle remains surprisingly recognizable: people are being taught, persuaded, entertained, tempted, discipled, and formed by the things continually placed before them.

The world understands this very well. Perhaps the church should understand it better. Not so that we become better marketers. Not so that the gospel becomes another product competing for clicks. But so that those of us who have been given access to rich storehouses of truth might become more deliberate about carrying some of that treasure into the public square.

The Cheap Repository was built around the conviction that good material should not remain inaccessible merely because harmful material was easier to obtain.

More than two centuries later, that conviction seems remarkably contemporary. And perhaps the question it leaves with me is one worth asking whenever I find another passage marked heavily in the margin of some forgotten old book:

Who else might need to see this?