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 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,