This 365-day devotional was reprinted as part of our celebration of the 125th Anniversary of the Church of the Lutheran Brethren.

There are two ways in which a book like The Quiet Hour can be read.

The first way is to read it with the inquisitive mind and eye of the armchair historian or theologian. The Quiet Hour was first published in 1950 to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Church of the Lutheran Brethren, which had been organized at a small gathering of pietistic Norwegian immigrant churchmen and churchwomen in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in mid-December 1900. One reading for each day of the year, the 365 devotional readings found in this little volume come from the pens of fifty Lutheran Brethren ministers of the gospel—pastors, evangelists, missionaries, chaplains, and professors—whose names, though largely unknown to the average CLB church-goer of today, would have been familiar to almost anyone associated with the CLB seventy-five years ago. As such, The Quiet Hour provides a rare glimpse into the unique spiritual understandings, concerns, and emphases that were of greatest importance to the founders of the CLB and the generation that immediately followed them.

But there is a second way of reading The Quiet Hour. These short Bible lessons, consisting of brief quotations from scripture followed by concise explanations and applications addressed variously to an unseen “dear reader,” “dear friend,” “dear soul,” or “Christian brother and sister,” were intended to be read in the solitude and privacy of the home. They were meant to be taken, like good medicine, in short doses, on a daily basis, prescribed by some trusted pastor, solicitous evangelist, or wise counselor who was equally adept at administering spoonfuls of scripture from the Old Testament as the New.