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Page 24
The law that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap will never be
transcended, and if an enlightened spirit ever chooses to sink once more
into the slime it may do so; but it will at the same time be taught
with terrible intensity the moral bearing of the physical law that what
falls from the loftiest height will sink to the deepest depth.
At last the soul realizes that it is in the hands of a sympathetic,
holy, and loving Person, a Being who cannot be defeated, and who, in His
own time and way, will accomplish His own purposes. That vision of God
is the re-awakening, an inevitable and glorious reality in spiritual
progress.
What are the causes of this re-awakening? The causes are many and can be
stated only in a general way. Moreover, spiritual experiences are
individual, and the answer which would apply to one might not to
another.
The shock which attends some terrible moral failure, not infrequently,
is the proximate cause of the re-awakening of the soul. There is a deep
psychological truth in the old phrase, "conviction of sin." Men are
thus convicted. Some act of appalling wrong-doing reveals to them the
depths of their hearts and forces them in their extremity to look
upward. Hawthorne, in his story, "The Scarlet Letter," has depicted the
agony of a soul, in the consciousness of its guilt, finding no peace
until it dared to do right and to trust God. In the "Marble Faun," in
the character of Donatello, the same author has furnished an
illustration of one who was startled into a consciousness of manhood and
responsibility by his crime. It is the revelation of a soul to itself,
not of God to the soul. In Donatello we see a soul awakened to
self-consciousness and responsibility, but in "The Scarlet Letter" we
have the example of a man inspired to do his duty by the revelation of
God. Adoniram Judson was brought to himself by hearing the groans of a
dying man in a room adjoining his own in a New England hotel. Luther
was forced to serious thought by a flash of lightning which blinded and
came near killing him. Pascal was returning to his home at midnight when
his carriage halted on the brink of a precipice, and the narrowness of
his escape aroused him to a realization of his dependence upon God. The
sense of mortality, and the wonder as to what the consequences of
wrong-doing in "the dim unknown" may be, have been potent forces in the
re-awakening of souls.
Still others have been given new and gracious visions of "the beauty of
holiness." They have seen the excellence of virtue, and in its light
have learned to hate the causes of their humiliation, and to press
forward with courage and hope.
Speculations concerning the causes of this spiritual change are easy,
but they are of little value. Observation has never yet collected facts
enough to adequately account for the phenomena. Probably the most
complete and satisfactory answer that was ever given to such questions
was that of Jesus when He was treating of this very subject: "The wind
bloweth where it listeth, thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not
tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth."
The mystery of the soul's re-awakening has never been fathomed.
Sometimes there has been flashed upon conscience, apparently without a
cause, a deep and awful sense of guilt. Whence did it come? What caused
it? Calamities many times sweep through a life as a tornado sweeps over
a field of wheat, and when they have passed there is more than an
appreciation of loss; there is a vision of the soul's unworthiness and
humiliation. Again death comes exceedingly near, and, in a single hour,
the solemnities of eternity become vivid, and the soul sees itself in
the light of God. And again, the essential glory of goodness is so
vividly manifest that the soul instinctively rises out of its sin, and
presses upward, as a man wakens from a hideous nightmare. The more such
phenomena are studied, the more distinct and significant do they appear
and the more impossible becomes the effort to explain them. They may be
verified, but they can never be explained. They are the results of the
action of the Spirit of God on the spirit of man. Is this answer
rejected as fanciful or superstitious? Then some of the most brilliant
and significant events in the history of humanity are inexplicable.
What caused the revolution in the character of Augustine by which the
sensualist became a saint? Was it the study of Plato? or the prayers of
Monica? or the preaching of Ambrose? We know not; rather let us say it
was the Spirit of God. Who can define the process by which Wilberforce
was changed from the pet of fashionable society to one of the heroes in
the world's great crusade against injustice and oppression? Such
inquiries are more easily started than settled. I repeat, the only
rational and convincing word that was ever spoken on this subject is
that of Jesus. The Spirit of God, whose ministry is as still as the
sunlight, as mysterious as the wind, and as potent as gravitation, was
the One to whom He pointed.
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