The deeper we search into the Holy Scriptures the more experimental matter do we discover in that divine Book. Both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament the spiritual experiences of godly men form a large part of the sacred record. And it gives a very fresh and a very impressive interest to many parts of the heavenly Book when we see how much of its contents are made up of God's ways with His people as well as of their ways with Him. In other words, when we see how much of purely experimental matter is gathered up into the Word of God. In a brilliant treatise published the other year, entitled, "The Gospel in the Gospels," the author applies this experimental test even to our Lord's teaching and preaching. Writing of the beatitudes in our Lord's Sermon on the Mount that fresh and penetrating writer says: "When our Savior speaks to us concerning what constitutes our true blessedness He is simply describing His own experience. The beatitudes are not the immediate revelation of His Godhead, they are much more the impressive testimony of His manhood. He knew the truth of what He was saying because He had verified it all in Himself for thirty experimental years." Now if that is so demonstrably true of so many of our Lord's contributions to Holy Scripture, in the nature of things, how much more must it be true of the experimental contributions that David and Paul have made to the same sacred record. And we ourselves are but imitating them in their great experimental methods when we give our very closest attention to personal and spiritual religion, both in ourselves and in all our predecessors and in all our own contemporaries in the life of grace in all lands and in all languages. Now by far the deepest and by far the most personal experience of every spiritually minded man is his experience of his own inward sinfulness. The sinfulness of his sin; the malignity of his sin; the ungodliness and the inhumanity of his sin; the dominion that his sin still has over him; the simply indescribable evil of his sin in every way: all that is a matter, not of any man's doctrine and authority; all that is the personal experience and the scientific certainty, as we say, of every spiritually minded man; every man, that is, who takes any true observation of what goes on in his own heart. The simply unspeakable sinfulness of our own hearts is not the doctrine of David, and of Christ, and of Paul, and of Luther, and of Calvin, and of Bunyan, and of Edwards, and of Shepard only. It is their universal doctrine, indeed, it could not be otherwise; but it is also the every-day experience and the every-day agony of every man among ourselves whose eyes are open upon his own heart.