O happy famine, which leaves you not so much as the husk of one human comfort to feed upon! For this is the time and place for all that life and salvation to happen to you, which happened to the prodigal son. Your way is as short, and your success as certain as his was: you have no more to do than he had; you need not call out for books, or methods of devotion; for, in your present state, much reading, and borrowed prayers, are not your best method; all that you are to offer to God, all that is to help you to find him to be your Saviour and Redeemer, is best taught by the distressed state of your heart. Only let your present and past distress make you feel and acknowledge this two-fold great truth: _First_, That in and of yourself, you are nothing but darkness, vanity, and misery. _Secondly_, That of yourself, you can no more help yourself to light and comfort, than you can create an angel. People at all times seem to assent to these truths; but then it is an assent that has no depth or reality, and so is of little or no use: but your condition has opened your heart for a full conviction of them. Now give way, I beseech you, to this conviction, and hold these two truths in the same degree of certainty as you know two and two to be four, and then you are with the prodigal _come to yourself_, and above half your work is done. *Being now in the full possession of these two truths, feeling them, as you feel your own existence, you are to give up yourself entirely to God in Christ Jesus, as into the hands of infinite love; firmly believing that God has no will towards you, but that of _infinite love_, and infinite desire to make you a partaker of his divine nature; and that it is as impossible for the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to refuse all that life and salvation which you want, as it is for you to take it by your own power. *O drink deep of _this cup_! for the precious water of eternal life is in it. Turn unto God with _this faith_; cast yourself into this _abyss of love_: and then you will be in that state the prodigal was in, when he said, _I will arise, and go to my father, and will say unto him, father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son_; and all that will be fulfilled in you, which is related of him. *Make this, therefore, the two-fold exercise of your heart: _now_, bowing yourself down before God, in the deepest sense and acknowledgment of your own nothingness and vileness; _then_, looking up unto God in faith and love, consider him as always extending the arms of his mercy towards you, and full of an infinite desire to dwell in you, as he dwells in angels in heaven. Content yourself with this simple exercise of your heart for awhile; and seek nothing in any book, but that which nourishes it.