and more your estimates of
preaching and your appreciations of preachers will have real insight
and real value and real weight with us. "The natural man receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness to him:
neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." But
he that is spiritual discerneth spiritual things and spiritual persons
and he has the true authority to speak and to write about them.

And then, for all doubting and skeptically disposed persons among
you, your own experience of your evil heart, if you will receive that
experience and will seriously attend to it, that will prove to you
the true apologetic for the theism of the Holy Scriptures and for the
soul-saving faith of Jesus Christ. What is it about which you are
in such debate and doubt? Is it about the most fundamental of
all facts--the existence, and the nature, and the grace, and the
government of Almighty God? Well, if you are really in earnest to know
the truth, take this way of it: this way that has brought light and
peace of mind to so many men. Turn away at once and forever from all
your unbecoming debates about your Maker and Preserver and turn to
what is beyond all debate, your own experience of yourselves. There is
nothing else of which you can be so sure and certain as of the sin and
the misery of your own evil hearts, your own evil hearts so full
of self-seeking, and envy, and malice, and pride, and hatred, and
revenge, and lust. And on the other hand, there is nothing of which
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