and brotherly kindness, are your true happiness, or would be, if you could only attain to all these beatitudes.  Well, Jesus Christ has attained to them all.  And Jesus Christ came into this world at first, and He still comes into it by His Word and by His Spirit in order that you may attain to all His goodness and all His truth and may thus escape forever from all your own ignorance and evil.  As William Law, the prince of apologists, has it:  “Atheism is not the denial of a first omnipotent cause.  Real atheism is not that at all.  Real atheism is purely and solely nothing else but the disowning, and the forsaking, and the renouncing of the goodness, and the virtue, and the benevolence and the meekness, of the divine nature:  that divine nature which has made itself so experimental and so self-evident in us all.  And as this experimental and self-evident knowledge is the only sure knowledge you can have of God; even so, it is such a knowledge that cannot be doubted or debated away.  For it is as sure and as self-evident as is your own experience.”  And so is it through all the succeeding doctrines of grace and truth:  The incarnation of the divine Son:  His life, His death, His resurrection, and His intercession:  and then your own life of faith, and prayer, and holy obedience:  and then your death, “dear in God’s sight.”  Beginning with this continually experienced need of God, all these things will follow, with an intellectual, and a moral, and a spiritual demonstration, that will soon place them beyond all debate or doubt to you.  Only know thyself and admit the knowledge:  and all else will follow as sure as the morning sun follows the dark midnight.

And then in all these ways, you will attain to a religious experience of your own, that will be wholly and exclusively your own.  It will not be David’s experience, nor Paul’s, nor Luther’s, nor Bunyan’s; much as you will study their experiences, comparing them all with your own.  As you go deeper and ever deeper, into your own spiritual experience, you will gradually gather a select and an invaluable library of such experiences, and you will less and less read anything else with very much interest or delight.  But your own unwritten experience will, all the time, be your own, and in your own spiritual experience you will have no exact fellow.  For your tribulations, which work in you your experience,—­as the text has it,—­your tribulations are such that in all your experimental reading in the Bible, in spiritual biography, in spiritual autobiography, you have never met the like of them.  Either the writers have been afraid to speak out the whole truth about their tribulations; or, what is far more likely, they had no tribulations for a moment to match with yours.  There has not been another so weak and so evil heart as yours since weak and evil hearts began to be; nor an evil life quite like yours; nor surrounding circumstances so cross-bearing as yours; nor a sinner, beset with all manner of temptations and trials, behind