and before, like you.  So much are you alone that, if your fifty-first Psalm, or your seventh of the Romans, or your “Confessions,” or your “Private Devotions,” or your “Grace Abounding,” could ever venture to be all honestly and wholly written and published, your name would, far and away, eclipse them all.  You do not know what a singular and what an original and what an unheard-of experience your experience is destined to be; if only you do not break down under it; as you must not and will not do.

Begin, then, to make some new experiments upon a new life of faith, and of the obedience of faith.  And begin to-day.  If in anything you have been following a false and an unphilosophical and an unscriptural way of life, leave that wrong and evil way at once.  Be true Baconians, at once, as all the true men of science will tell you to be.  “If we were religious men like you,” they will all say to you, “we would do, and at once, what you are now being told to do.  We would not debate, or doubt, but we would make experiment, and would follow out the experience”:  so all the scientifically minded men will say to you.  Come away then, and make some new experiments from this morning.  For one thing, make a new experiment on secret prayer.  And then come forth from your place of secret prayer and make immediate experiment on more love, and more patience, and more consideration for other men, and, especially, for the men of your own household.  Be more generous-minded, and more open-handed, as God has been so generous-minded, and so open-handed toward you:  if that has indeed been so.  Make experiment upon the poor and the needy and help them according to your ability and opportunity and watch the result of the experiment upon yourself; and so on, as your awakened conscience, and as the regenerate part of your own heart, will prompt you and will encourage you to do.

Make such experiments as these and see if a new peace of conscience and a new happiness of heart does not begin to come to you, according to that great experimental psalm,—­“Oh, that my people had hearkened unto me, and Israel had walked in my ways!  I should soon have subdued their enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries.  He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat:  and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee.”

WATKINSON

THE TRANSFIGURED SACKCLOTH

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

William L. Watkinson, Wesleyan minister, was born at Hull, 1838, was educated privately and rose to eminence as a preacher and writer.  The Rev. William Durban calls him “The classic preacher of British Methodism.”  “He ranks,” says Dr. Durban, “with Dr. Dallinger and the Rev. Thomas Gunn Selby as the three most learned and refined of living preachers in the English Methodist pulpit.  Dr. Watkinson is famous for the glittering illustrations