Now by far the deepest and by far the most personal experience of every spiritually minded man is his experience of his own inward sinfulness.  The sinfulness of his sin; the malignity of his sin; the ungodliness and the inhumanity of his sin; the dominion that his sin still has over him; the simply indescribable evil of his sin in every way:  all that is a matter, not of any man’s doctrine and authority; all that is the personal experience and the scientific certainty, as we say, of every spiritually minded man; every man, that is, who takes any true observation of what goes on in his own heart.  The simply unspeakable sinfulness of our own hearts is not the doctrine of David, and of Christ, and of Paul, and of Luther, and of Calvin, and of Bunyan, and of Edwards, and of Shepard only.  It is their universal doctrine, indeed, it could not be otherwise; but it is also the every-day experience and the every-day agony of every man among ourselves whose eyes are open upon his own heart.

And then, if you are that spiritually enlightened man, from the day when you begin to have that heart-sore experience of yourself you will begin to search for and to discover those great passages of Holy Scripture that contain the recorded experiences of men like yourself.  “I am but dust and ashes,” said the first father of all penitent and believing and praying men.  “I am vile,” sobs Job.  “Behold, I am vile, and I will lay my hand upon my mouth.  I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee.  Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.”  And David has scarcely heart or a pen for anything else.  “There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine anger; neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin.  My loins are filled with a loathsome disease.  For, behold, I was shapen in iniquity.”  And Daniel, the most blameless of men and a man greatly beloved in heaven and on earth:  “I was left alone and there remained no strength in me:  for my comeliness was turned to corruption, and I retained no strength.”  And every truly spiritually minded man has Paul’s great experimental passage by heart; that great experimental and autobiographic passage which has kept so many of God’s most experienced saints from absolute despair, as so many of them have testified.  Yes!  There were experimental minds long before Bacon and there was a great experimental literature long before the Essays and the “Advancement” and the “Instauratio Magna.”

And then among many other alterations of intellectual insight and spiritual taste that will come to you with your open eyes, there will be your new taste, not only for your Bible, but also for spiritual and experimental preaching.  The spiritual preachers of our day are constantly being blamed for not tuning their pulpits to the new themes of our so progressive day.  Scientific themes are prest upon them and critical themes and social themes and such like.  But your new experience of your own sinfulness and