When the soul is roused in this way we see and feel the hatefulness of any sin that may have tempted or beset us; or we contrast our own life with that of those whose lot is so much harder than ours, and we are struck with shame at our selfishness, or waste, or our indifference to the privation, and sin, and suffering that are all around us in the world.
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. They do not belong only to times far off. We are not to think of them merely as enshrined in the Bible and peculiar to it; but as living voices that are speaking to us to-day out of the depths of the Divine life, in which our life is sustained.
But we have always to bear this in mind, that the Divine voices speak to men with most stirring effect in every generation when they speak to them through the pressing needs of their own day. To the Jews the voice of God came in the inspired language of their deliverers and prophets—in their unceasing warnings, and their impassioned appeals, and their revelations of new truth. To the first generation of Christians these same voices
came in the shape of strong Advent hopes. Many things contributed to lift the Apostles and their followers nearer to God than men of ordinary times. They had seen the Lord; they had lived in His presence; they had gone through much tribulation; the tongue of fire had rested on them; the Spirit had taken full possession of them; but we cannot read the New Testament without feeling that the most stirring, the most regenerative influence in their society was the vividness and intensity of their Advent hope. Their expectation of the Lord’s return lifted them out of the temptations of the world and above the trials of it. It took hold of their active powers, and made them new men.