tions 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 stirrin