the prayer of a Christian to God is just as literal, direct, and real, as a petition from a child to a father, or a subject to his queen. I have gone to God empty, on the supposition that he heard my voice, and I have returned full, with the experience that he hears my voice. I have gone to God sick and weary, I have returned joyous and happy, with the deep experience that he hears me. My fears for the future have been dispersed, my afflictions have been sweetened in their current, and sanctified in their issues, I have found the bitterest afflictions as clouds that sweep over the sunny fields, leaving their shadows for an instant, but dropping their refreshing showers upon the fainting violets, and the drooping corn, and reviving the vegetation that would otherwise die. I have gone to God, and I have found by experience, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” What is the Baconian method of philosophy? Not to guess, but to infer from facts. The inductive process is the highest philosophy. Why not apply it to religion. Have all those martyrs and all those sainted sufferers been deceived when they have said, We have felt this, we have experienced this. The highest science, the purest diagnosis, the widest truths, are all on the side of experimental religion.

We have learned that God's word is true. When a scholar wants to conclude that the Bible is true, he very properly takes prophecies, and compares them with history, and he says, here are credentials; he takes the miracles asserted and attested to have been done, he investigates their historical relations, and he says, they are conclusive. But what is the poor peasant to do? what is a hard-working man, who toils from morning till night, with scarcely a respite for reading or for rest-what is he to do? God has given him a means of knowledge much better than the

voice of the church he has given him the Scripture, teaching him by experience that God's word is true. I have seen many a peasant, and many a laboring man, with little education, come to the conclusion, irresistible as omnipotence itself, that God's word is truth, and its credentials are in his own heart. Like the poor woman spoken of by

the beautiful English poet,

"She, for her humble sphere by nature fit,
Has little understanding, and no wit,

Receives np praise; but, though her lot be such,
(Toilsome, and indigent,) she renders much;
Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true,

A truth the brilliant Frenchman [that is, Voltaire] never knew!
And in that charter reads, with sparkling eyes,

Her title to a treasure in the skies.

O happy peasant! O unhappy bard!
His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward;
He, praised perhaps for ages yet to come,
She, never heard of half a mile from home;
He, lost in errors his vain heart prefers,
She, safe in the simplicity of hers."

I have learned by experience, "Thy word, O God, is truth."

Experience is the most powerful and satisfactory commentary upon the word of God. In a Christian I see, and if I am a Christian myself I feel, a new nature emerge from the old, new tastes superseding the past, a new light displacing inveterate darkness. Study Christianity, and the more you will be struck with it. Every day that I read this Book, every Sunday I preach from it, the deeper is my conviction that it is the most wonderful fact in the universe of God. The Bible is the key-note of all creation: it is the only decipherer of those mysterious hieroglyphs written over every wall of nature's vast cathedral, impenetrable except in the light and splendor in which God originally

wrote them. It is only in this blessed Book that I can estimate and understand those gigantic shadows that fall down at times from the heights of this great universe, that have perplexed philosophers, puzzled naturalists, but are to a Christian intelligible, even as noonday. I have learned this by experience.

Christianity is not a collection of dry dogmas, it is not a thing without, but something within. The religion of the Bible is not doctrine merely, but life, a power, a motive spring, ever permanent, ever active within. It is not a parchment record, or a creed that man subscribes, but an inner life, an experimental power that man feels. It is not a cistern about which man reads, or an ocean that he sees afar, but a well of living water within, springing up in his heart unto everlasting life. The gospel is not Protestantism, nor Roman Catholicism, nor Puseyism, nor Calvinism, but an inward, living, holy, spiritual power; a pulse that never stands still; a joy that shineth more and more unto the perfect day; so that no one can say, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."

Let us be satisfied with nothing else than experimental religion. Mere conviction lies outside the threshold, but experimental religion is that conviction entertained within, written on the heart, studied by the fireside, and teaching man by experience what it is to be a Christian. Religion is not in the schools, nor in the colleges, but in the heart. We have plenty of theology in our churches, we have too little religion in our homes.

"Let me gaze at thy glory; change to flesh this heart of stone;
Let the light illume my darkness that around the apostle shone.
Cold belief is not conviction; rules are impotent to move;
Let me see thy heavenly beauty, let me learn to trust and love."

"And Rebekah said to Isaac, I am weary of my life."- GEN. Xxvii. 46.

In one place we learn from an aged patriarch that a man will give all that he has for his life. In a second we hear from the wife of another aged patriarch, "I am weary of my life." Sometimes man seems so devoted to life, that he will give all to retain it; at other times he seems so sick of life that he feels anxious for it to depart at the nearest and the readiest avenue. Truly, life is a mystery. It is intricate and inexplicable in itself. It is explicable only in the light in which it was first created. The living and the dying dwell together; the happy and the sad are next door neighbors. The same air that is ringing with the peals of laughter, conveys also the groans of despair. Genius is here, madness is there. Wealth is one span remote from poverty, and genius is next to idiotcy, and life in its phases and fugitive shades is an enigma no sphinx can explain. God, who made it, tells us what it was; the Bible, that records its redemption, tells us how it is; and the beautiful Apocalypse of the future discloses what it shall yet be, when sin, and sorrow, and tears, and weariness shall be no more.

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What are some of the grounds and reasons why man feels sometimes now, as Rebekah felt then, "weary of life?" There is scarce a deeply reflective individual on earth whose lips have not sometime unadvisedly exclaimed, "I am weary of life”—it is a burden to me. It was sinful if it arose from reasons connected with this world; it was holy and devout if it arose from that yearning for a better and a brighter, which is part and parcel of the Christian nature. There are reasons for which to say "I am weary of life" is positively sinful. There are other reasons that render it really a proof of high spirituality to say, "I am weary of life." At the same time it perhaps indicates the noblest type of Christian character when one can say, “I am neither weary of life because it is painful, nor weary of it because I long to go to a better, but, Father, thy will be done with me on earth, even as it is done in heaven." Some of the reasons that make it sinful to say "I am weary of life," I will attempt to enumerate. strong self-righteousness on our part. There are who think every one else gets more than he deserves, but that they, insulated from the general treatment, receive infinitely less than they deserve. Hence, every disappointment grieves them, every loss irritates and exasperates; self is in their economy so magnificent and meritorious a personage, that all waters ought to rush into its cistern, and none to be distributed to any besides. His own footfall is to such a one the richest music; his own shadow the most exquisite symmetry; his own personal advantage the great end worth living for, and the only reason why he should not be weary of life; and when he finds that he does not get what he thinks he deserves, he is chagrined and exasperated exasperation leads almost to despair, and he exclaims, under an imaginary sense of imaginary bad providential treatment, "I am weary of life." The cure for this is to recast our

One is, a

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