It may never have occurred to you to think of it as being just as sacred
a thing as was Jacob's vision at Bethel, as being indeed the work of the
same Divine spirit.

But let us consider it a little further. Whatever it is that is thus
stirring in your heart, it comes and it comes again; it lingers in your
thoughts and feelings; it haunts, it impresses and awes you; it rises
before you suddenly and stops you from some sin, or, if it fails to stop
you, it turns the pleasure for which you craved into wretchedness; or it
encourages and consoles you in some hour of weakness or sorrow. I
suppose there is hardly one of you who has not had some such experience
as this. And if you ask. What is it? It is, I repeat, the awakening of
the soul in you--nothing less than this--and happy is it for you, if you
recognise that it is the soul striving to win its proper place in the
regulation of your life.

When Moses saw the vision of the burning bush, and suddenly felt himself
on holy ground; when Elijah heard the still, small voice calling, "What
doest thou here, Elijah?" when Saul, on his way to Damascus, fell to the
ground conscience-smitten, crushed, blinded, rebuked; when the child
Samuel heard the Divine voice calling to him in the darkness of the
night;--in each case it was the awakening or the reawakening of the
soul--the uprising of the spiritual capacities, the vision of the higher
life--and so exactly with all of _you_. Are you not sometimes conscious
of the uprisings in you of a spirit calling upon you to recognise the
angels' ladder that connects _your_ life also with the heaven above us?

If so, there is this further thing to note about such moments of
experience.