Experience Not Reliable
67
Experience is said to be the best teacher. Genuine experience
is indeed superior to book knowledge. But habits and customs gird
men and women as with iron bands, and they are generally justified
by experience, according to the common understanding of the term.
Very many have abused precious experience. They have clung to their
injurious habits, which are decidedly enfeebling to physical, mental,
and moral health; and when you seek to instruct them, they sanction
their course by referring to their experience. But true experience is in
harmony with natural law and science.
Here is where we have met the greatest difficulties in religious
matters. The plainest facts may be presented, the clearest truths,
sustained by the word of God, may be brought before the mind; but
the ear and heart are closed, and the all-convincing argument is: “my
experience.” Some will say: “The Lord has blessed me in believing
and doing as I have; therefore I cannot be in error.” “My experience”
is clung to, and the most elevating, sanctifying truths of the Bible
are rejected for what they are pleased to style experience. Many of
the grossest habits are cherished under the plea of experience. Many
fail to reach that physical, intellectual, and moral improvement which
it is their privilege and duty to attain, because they will contend for
the reliability and safety of their experience, although that misjudged
experience is opposed to the plainest revealed facts. Men and women
whose wrong habits have destroyed their constitution and health will
be found recommending their experience as safe for others to follow,
when it is this very experience that has robbed them of vitality and
health. Many examples might be given to show how men and women
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have been deceived by relying upon their experience.
The Lord made man upright in the beginning. He was created with
a perfectly balanced mind, the size and strength of all its organs being
perfectly developed. Adam was a perfect type of man. Every quality
of mind was well proportioned, each having a distinctive office, and
yet all dependent one upon another for the full and proper use of any
one of them. Adam and Eve were permitted to eat of all the trees in
the garden, save one. The Lord said to the holy pair: In the day that ye
eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, ye shall surely die. Eve
was beguiled by the serpent to believe that God would not do as He
said He would. “Ye shall not surely die,” said the serpent. Eve ate and
imagined that she felt the sensations of a new and more exalted life.