moment is this, that this vision
startled him into a new consciousness--"Surely the Lord is in this place;
and I knew it not." It was the beginning of a new life.

That vision, we may be sure, never entirely faded. He was never
afterwards the same man he had been before it. It had awakened the
divine capacity in him; 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 in all places whither thou goest." Such
a voice as this in a man's heart gives his life a new quality; it puts
him in a new relation to all common things.

We may well believe that it was this more than anything else which drew
Jacob apart from the common heathen life around him, from that day
onwards. It was this which, in spite of all his weaknesses, defects, and
failures in life and character, gradually raised him to a different
level.

It was this which finally culminated in transforming him from Jacob the
supplanter to Israel the prince of God.

So far as appears, he had gone out from his home, as so many go forth in
all ages, a dull soul, though with latent capacities, his thoughts bent
on securing his personal safety and his worldly success. But he woke in
the desert after that vision, with the seeds of the new life rooted and
growing in him.

It is this moment of awakening on which I desire to fix your
thoughts--this moment of his transfiguration; when he saw and felt a
heaven above him, and yet very close, with its 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 in it, stirring new thoughts and new aspirations. He woke up to
be a new man henceforth, moving in a new presence, and having always in
his ears the voice of a Divine call.

Do you ask why I dwell on this familiar history, or desire that you
should contemplate and realise this change in the young man Jacob? It is
because there is just the same soul, the same capacity of higher life in
every one of us: in some it is awake already and transfiguring their
life; in others still latent, sleeping, undiscovered.

I dwell on it because it makes and will make all the difference in the
world to your life whether in your case this capacity is awakened or not.
This, then, is what I have to postulate as giving a value beyond the
power of words to describe to every