able exhaustively to delineate the soul’s humiliation?  AEschylus and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe, Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have but skimmed the surface of the great tragedy of human life.  Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Faust, and Wilhelm Meister, Beatrice Cenci, the sad, sad story of Guinevere, and the awful shadows of the Ring and the Book—­how luridly realistic are all these studies of the downfall of souls and the desolation of character!  If they had expressed all there is of life it would be only a long, repulsive tragedy; but happily there is another side.  To that brighter phase of the growth of the soul we turn in this chapter.

What is the difference between the awakening of the soul and its re-awakening?  Are they two experiences? or different phases of the same experience?  The awakening is nearly simultaneous with the dawn of consciousness.  It is the adjustment of the soul to its environment—­the realization of its self-consciousness as free, as in a moral order, and as possessing mysterious affinities with truth and right.  This realization is followed by a period of growth, during which many hindrances are overcome, and in which the ministries of environment, both kindly and austere, help to free it from its limitations and to promote its advance along the spiritual pathway.  But while the soul dimly hears voices from above it has not yet, altogether, escaped from the influence of animalism.  It dwells in a body whose desires clamor to be gratified.  It is like a bird trying to rise into the air when it has not yet acquired the use of its wings.  Malign influences are still about it, and earthly attractions are ever drawing it downward.  It falls many times.  I do not mean that it is compelled to fall, but that, as a matter of fact, its lapses are frequent and discouraging.  In the midst of this painful movement upward, there sometime comes to the soul a realization of a presence of which it has scarcely dreamed before.  It begins to understand that it is never alone, that its struggle is never hopeless because God and the universe, equally with itself, are concerned for its progress.  It is humiliated by its failures, but it has learned that, however many times it may fail and however bitter its disappointment, in the end it must be victorious because neither principalities nor powers, neither things on the earth nor beyond the earth, can forever resist God.  Thus hope is born, and he who one moment cries, Who shall deliver from this body of death? the next moment with exultation exclaims, I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

The light which shines into the soul from Jesus Christ is the revelation of the cooeperation of the Deity, and of the forces of the universe, with every man who is moving upward.  The realization that, however deep the darkness, humiliating the moral failure, constant and imperious the solicitations of animalism, “the nature of things” and the everlasting love are on the side of the soul is its re-awakening.