Experiment, you
know, results in experience. There is no other way by which any man can
attain to a religious experience but by undergoing temptation, trial,
tribulation:--experiment. And it gives a divine dignity to all things,
great and small, good and bad, when we see them all taken up into God's
hand, in order that by means of them He may make for Himself an
experienced people. Human life on this earth, when viewed under this
aspect, is one vast workshop. And all the shafts and wheels and pulleys;
all the crushing hammers, and all the whirling knives; all the furnaces
and smelting-pots; all the graving tools and smoothing irons, are all so
many divinely-designed and divinely-worked instruments all directed in
upon this one result,--our being deeply experienced in the ways of God
till we are for ever fashioned into His nature and likeness. Our faith
in the unseen world and in our unseen God and Saviour is at one time put
to the experiment. At another time it is our love to Him; the reality of
it, and the strength of it. At another time it is our submission and our
resignation to His will.
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