Go to the chambers of sickness, visit the melancholy retreats of indigence and woe! produce there your strong reasonings--strive, with learned labour, to open and convince the understandings of your suffering brethren--enumerate to them all the outward evidences, that you can collect, of the great truths of religion--give them proof upon proof, demonstration upon demonstration--talk to them of the Nature and Attributes of GOD, and the immortality of their souls--tell them what the SON OF GOD hath done and suffered for sinners; what are the means of reconciliation, and what the sure grounds of an happy death--give them all that they can receive "by the hearing of the ear"--and what have you done, and what have they gained?--Why you have done just as much as an unskilful physician would do, who entertained his patient with a learned dissertation upon the virtues and excellencies of a certain medicine, which he had somewhere read or heard of, as admirably adapted to the disorder, but which he had never seen with his eyes, and of the nature of which he knew nothing by his own experience. Thus it is with this outward knowledge of GOD: the poor soul is left to feed upon words or ideas, and to seek comfort, in vain, in empty speculations. Fruitless, indeed, are such attempts as these! Till the soul is shaken to her very center, till the stone is removed from the door of the sepulchre, that GOD who "makes darkness his secret place," can never be seen. The eye must be turned inwardly, to view what is passing in the inmost soul, to discover what its wants and necessities are, as well as what will supply them, and yield it peace, and yield it happiness, from an inexhaustible source. It must feel its own darkness, before it can seek to have it enlightened--The same Light that breaks in upon it like the dawn of day, gives it the first sensibility of distress, as well as the first sensibility of consolation "now hath mine eye seen thee, therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes"--I now feel the misery of nature without GOD--I feel nothing but darkness, and want, and hunger, and thirst! But in this darkness, under this want, in this hunger and thirst, the soul must wait, without reasoning, without repining, in stillness, in silence, till the invisible GOD shines into the darkness, and till the darkness comprehends and eagerly imbibes the Light, and he, in whom is no darkness at all, manifesteth his Presence by a self-evident sensibility.