of God’s salvation:  your new need and your new taste for spiritual and experimental truth will not lead you to join in that stupid demand.  As intelligent men you will know where to find all the new themes of your new day and you will be diligent students of them all, so far as your duty lies that way, and so far as your ability and your opportunity go; but not on the Lord’s Day and not in His house of prayer and praise.  The more inward, and the more spiritual, and the more experimental, your own religion becomes, the more will you value inward, and spiritual, and experimental preaching.  And the more will you resent the intrusion into the evangelical pulpit of those secular matters that so much absorb unspiritual men.  There is another equally impertinent advice that our preachers are continually having thrust upon them from the same secular quarter.  And that is that they ought entirely to drop the old language of the Scriptures, and the creeds, and the classical preachers, and ought to substitute for it the scientific and the journalistic jargon of the passing day.  But with your ever-deepening knowledge of yourselves and with the disciplined and refined taste that will accompany such knowledge you will rather demand of your preachers more and more depth of spiritual preaching and more and more purity of spiritual style.  And then more and more your estimates of preaching and your appreciations of preachers will have real insight and real value and real weight with us.  “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God:  for they are foolishness to him:  neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”  But he that is spiritual discerneth spiritual things and spiritual persons and he has the true authority to speak and to write about them.

And then, for all doubting and skeptically disposed persons among you, your own experience of your evil heart, if you will receive that experience and will seriously attend to it, that will prove to you the true apologetic for the theism of the Holy Scriptures and for the soul-saving faith of Jesus Christ.  What is it about which you are in such debate and doubt?  Is it about the most fundamental of all facts—­the existence, and the nature, and the grace, and the government of Almighty God?  Well, if you are really in earnest to know the truth, take this way of it:  this way that has brought light and peace of mind to so many men.  Turn away at once and forever from all your unbecoming debates about your Maker and Preserver and turn to what is beyond all debate, your own experience of yourselves.  There is nothing else of which you can be so sure and certain as of the sin and the misery of your own evil hearts, your own evil hearts so full of self-seeking, and envy, and malice, and pride, and hatred, and revenge, and lust.  And on the other hand, there is nothing of which you can be so convinced as that love, and humility, and meekness, and purity, and benevolence,