Or sometimes these Divine voices in our ears bring it home to us how much
we are losing out of our life's higher possibilities, if from sinful or
selfish habit, from dulness of spirit or lack of sympathy, we cut
ourselves off in thought and feeling and interest from the great needs,
the great sorrows, the great pulsations of the larger world.

But why, you may ask, do I dwell on all this? It is because these are
the true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out of
narrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to make
us feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of a
low type, and to stir us with social and religious interests and
enthusiasms.

These calls that come to you, whether invited or not, and that stir your
heart, speaking to you out of the multitudinous life of the time you live
in, are like the watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem, which never hold
their peace day nor night.

This ferment of higher life within us and around us, these voices of the
Spirit in us, as it struggles to lift us out of the region of fleshly
influences, is renewed in every generation and in every single life. If
you hear no such voices, if the phenomena of life make no such impression
upon you, if you are deaf to all these calls, and care for none of these
things, then it is clear that your soul is not yet awake in you; you are
living with a dull or darkened heart. It is a sort of cave life, or
subterranean life, you lead in such a case, a life of lower rank and
lesser hopes.

Yet these voices from above, that come as the witness of the Divine
Spirit with our spirit that we are the children of God, never fail us.