It is an undoubted fact that the worst men have occasional visions of better things, just as dreams of holiness come to the least saint! find most worldly of us. Just as the Prodigal Son in the far country has his vision of his father's hou: so we, although we have turned our backs on God and Heavenly things, and allowed our desires to centre continuously on altogether worldly things—still have at times dissatis faction with life as it is, and a longing after a better life, and spiritual things. Perhaps that is "why we have come here to-night. And having come who will say that we shall not have granted to us here, to-night, a vision of heavenly things—a vision of God in the midst, where his people have gathered to worship him—a vision as compelling and real as that which Isaiah saw in the temple in the year that King Uzziah died; or a vision like to this dream of Jacob's, in which Heaven and earth appear in one grand progression—In spite of the fact that all week long, heart and mind have been set upon this world and its concerns, with seldom thought of God, and all unconscious of his all pervading presence, I would premise that to deny this dream to Jacob, is to deny God, and that God reveals himself. But God does reveal himself—he seeks the Jos. He is, to use Our Lord's simile The Good Shepherd, and wherever they may have wandered he seeks his sheep. No matter how far shaft man falls of that for which he was created, God does not abandon him to his evil courses, And into those realms of worldliness and sin, where, amid common and sordid things, the prodigal wanders there comes at times, the gleam of divine and eternal things.
For hours. for days and weeks together, we may not have a thought that rises above the level of sense, or goes beyond our world of getting and spending—not an aspiration worthy to be put into a prayer, or that we would care to have recorded in a book—and then there comes a time when the things of sense lose for a moment their seeming importance.—The divine spark within us—never wholly quenched—springs into flame, and again ideals, longings for better things reawaken within God comes near, and Heaven is laid open, and man áspires to climb the stairway that leads to him.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.