Nay, do not all our best poets
first learn in their sufferings what afterwards they teach us in their
songs? At any rate, that is certainly the case with preachers and
pastors. As my own old minister once said to me in a conversation on
this very subject, 'Even God Himself cannot inspire an experience.' No.
For if He could He would surely have done so in the case of His own Son,
to Whom in the gift of the Holy Ghost He gave all that He could give and
all that His Son could receive. But an experience cannot in the very
nature of things be either bestowed on the one hand or received and
appropriated on the other. An experience in the unalterable nature of
the thing itself must be undergone. The Holy Ghost Himself after He has
been bestowed and received has to be experimented upon, and taken into
this and that need, trial, cross, and care of life. He is not sent to
spare us our experiences, but to carry us through them. And thus it is
(to keep for a moment in sight of the highest illustration we have of
this law of experience), thus it is, I say, that the apostle has it in
his Epistle to the Hebrews that though Christ Himself were a Son, yet
learned He obedience by the things that He suffered.
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