Monday, June 15, 2015


  The following quote talks about that moment when an almost mystical clarity comes to us and we see our selves, our life and pursuits in a truer light than ever before. We see our vanities in living color and then we gain a glimpse of God like never before that offers an opportunity, if taken, to change everything, or if not taken, to fall back into mediocrity.

   "There are times, I suppose, to every thoughtful person, when the impression of the littleness in his actual life comes upon him with a startling force. Maybe by a touch of sorrow from the memory of a faded form of old affection, or a poet's strain at which some high enthusiasm vibrates in the heart again, a night upon the mountain or the ocean where a Presence greater than the whole field of worlds is felt in the rush of the waters and the silence of the air, or the sight of some secret sufferer who meekly bears a cross unknown to us and surprises us into the humbling discovery, that we have been dead to the sublimities that lie as a cloud of glory around us and within us. Something deeper than the senses show or the hand can touch gleams upon us everywhere; an expressiveness behind the features of life and nature which we had never seen before; and scenes quite often looked at now seem to look at us, and with the living light of a Divine eye. Something that was eternal we had always supposed that there must be; now we find that there is Some One who is eternal; and the drawing near to him, the penetration to him through his universe, the saying of a true word, the lifting of a clear face, to him, appears to have a meaning we did not suspect. Compared with this meaning, how poor seems all that we had taken to be most real! How empty the contents of our busiest day, too troubled about many things to leave any opening for the one thing needful!
If this arousing of the soul is not faithfully followed up, habit will reassert its power, and contradict the divine call by a positive relapse; and an utter skepticism of everything infinite will ensue, and the mind will look back on its only waking experience as nothing but a brilliant dream.
But, if, by perpetuity in the change, this proves to be a true regenerative hour, the opposite effect will follow. Finite things well be despised and disbelieved; will suffer vengeance for their long tyranny, and be spurned as mere deceptive shows; and the more intense their despotism has been, the more thorough will be the renunciation of their sway. When the scales first fall from the eyes of one who has been living for the moment, that which lies before his astonished view is the eternal depth of God, towards which the currents of a resistless spirit appear to draw him." James Martineau.


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