you can be so convinced as that love, and humility, and meekness,
and purity, and benevolence, 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