For it is as sure and as self-evident as is your own experience." And so is it through all the succeeding doctrines of grace and truth: The incarnation of the divine Son: His life, His death, His resurrection, and His intercession: and then your own life of faith, and prayer, and holy obedience: and then your death, "dear in God's sight." Beginning with this continually experienced need of God, all these things will follow, with an intellectual, and a moral, and a spiritual demonstration, that will soon place them beyond all debate or doubt to you. Only know thyself and admit the knowledge: and all else will follow as sure as the morning sun follows the dark midnight. And then in all these ways, you will attain to a religious experience of your own, that will be wholly and exclusively your own. It will not be David's experience, nor Paul's, nor Luther's, nor Bunyan's; much as you will study their experiences, comparing them all with your own. As you go deeper and ever deeper, into your own spiritual experience, you will gradually gather a select and an invaluable library of such experiences, and you will less and less read anything else with very much interest or delight. But your own unwritten experience will, all the time, be your own, and in your own spiritual experience you will have no exact fellow. For your tribulations, which work in you your experience,--as the text has it,--your tribulations are such that in all your experimental reading in the Bible, in spiritual biography, in spiritual autobiography, you have never met the like of them. Either the writers have been afraid to speak out the whole truth about their tribulations; or, what is far more likely, they had no tribulations for a moment to match with yours. There has not been another so weak and so evil heart as yours since weak and evil hearts began to be; nor an evil life quite like yours; nor surrounding circumstances so cross-bearing as yours; nor a sinner, beset with all manner of temptations and trials, behind and before, like you. So much are you alone that, if your fifty-first Psalm, or your seventh of the Romans, or your "Confessions," or your "Private Devotions," or your "Grace Abounding," could ever venture to be all honestly and wholly written and published, your name would, far and away, eclipse them all. You do not know what a singular and what an original and what an unheard-of experience your experience is destined to be; if only you do not break down under it; as you must not and will not do.