greatly beloved in heaven and on earth: "I was left alone and
there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned to
corruption, and I retained no strength." And every truly spiritually
minded man has Paul's great experimental passage by heart; that great
experimental and autobiographic passage which has kept so many of
God's most experienced saints from absolute despair, as so many of
them have testified. Yes! There were experimental minds long before
Bacon and there was a great experimental literature long before the
Essays and the "Advancement" and the "_Instauratio Magna_."

And then among many other alterations of intellectual insight and
spiritual taste that will come to you with your open eyes, there will
be your new taste, not only for your Bible, but also for spiritual
and experimental preaching. The spiritual preachers of our day are
constantly being blamed for not tuning their pulpits to the new themes
of our so progressive day. Scientific themes are prest upon them
and critical themes and social themes and such like. But your new
experience of your own sinfulness and 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