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 soul amongst us. It bids us recognise and keep always before us that in every common life, of child or man, even in the most worldly or the hardest, the most frivolous, the most cynical, the most sensual, or the most degraded, there is latent, it may be altogether unfelt and disregarded through long years, giving no sign of its presence, it may be, it often is, overlaid, trodden down, even at the point of death, but still there, this living soul with all its possibilities. It is within every one of us, stamped with the image of God, and charged with unimagined possibilities. And it must be obvious that the whole difference between any two lives, between your life and your neighbour's life, may depend on this awakening of the soul in one of you and its not awakening in the other. Of the two brothers, Esau and Jacob, I suppose we are all drawn at the outset to Esau; our heart goes out to him, as we read, the impulsive, the impetuous, the affectionate, and we feel a corresponding dislike of Jacob's craft and cunning, and selfish calculations. There can be no doubt, we say, which was the meaner character to begin with.