Sermons at Rugby

said, Surely the Lord is in this place;

ul awoke in him. And they surprise us in some degree, as such awakenings of spiritual capacity often do; for Jacob's recorded antece

d he saw the angels ascending and descending, and the Lord standing above it, and he heard the Divine voice charged with promise and with blessing: "I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest." This, taking it in all its parts, is

; and it remained with him as a constant reminder of the presence of God in his life, to protect and to inspire him-"I am with thee, and I will keep thee

mmon heathen life around him, from that day onwards. It was this which, in spite of all his wea

in transforming him from Jacob the su

h with latent capacities, his thoughts bent on securing his personal safety and his worldly success.

ts ladder of angelic communication, which he had not so seen or felt before; the moment when a new consciousness flashed through his soul, and illumined unsuspected chambers

n the young man Jacob? It is because there is just the same soul, the same capacity of higher life in every one

e whether in your case this capacity is awakened or not. This, then, is what I have to p

or the most degraded, there is latent, it may be altogether unfelt and disregarded through long years, giving no sign of its presence, it may be, it often is, overlaid, trodden down, even

s, between your life and your neighbour's life, may depend on this aw

as we read, the impulsive, the impetuous, the affectionate, and we feel a corresponding dislike of Jacob's craft a

ild of the world around him, yielding to its temptations, living by its standards. The soul in him never awoke, so as to transfigure his t

a change may come to any of us, if the unawakened capacities of

we feel it all the more because Jacob to begin with seems to be made of such common c

d by spiritual hopes or Divine thought, or the call to new duty, remains in one man a selfish and worldly life, in another a frivolous, in a third a sensual life. But the very same life-and here is the practical value

s, may indeed come to you without your feeling all at once how great a thing it is. At first it may be nothing more than some vision of the possibilities of your life, or some electric flash of new consciousness that runs through you, or the sharp pang of remorse for some sin or some neglect, or the flush of shame or repulsion as you think of something or othe

u 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 ex

e-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,

her thing to note about s

oral sense and the repulsion towards the lower forms of life which comes with it-this is God's personal gift to us, an

g up. As the plant turns to the sun, it grows towards the sun; as it looks up to the light, it grows towards the light; so it is with us. We feel that we are sons of God, and we tend to become so. Through some influence or o

ound you here, and that you may hold the