At last the soul realizes that it is in the hands of a sympathetic, holy, and loving Person, a Being who cannot be defeated, and who, in His own time and way, will accomplish His own purposes.  That vision of God is the re-awakening, an inevitable and glorious reality in spiritual progress.

What are the causes of this re-awakening?  The causes are many and can be stated only in a general way.  Moreover, spiritual experiences are individual, and the answer which would apply to one might not to another.

The shock which attends some terrible moral failure, not infrequently, is the proximate cause of the re-awakening of the soul.  There is a deep psychological truth in the old phrase, “conviction of sin.”  Men are thus convicted.  Some act of appalling wrong-doing reveals to them the depths of their hearts and forces them in their extremity to look upward.  Hawthorne, in his story, “The Scarlet Letter,” has depicted the agony of a soul, in the consciousness of its guilt, finding no peace until it dared to do right and to trust God.  In the “Marble Faun,” in the character of Donatello, the same author has furnished an illustration of one who was startled into a consciousness of manhood and responsibility by his crime.  It is the revelation of a soul to itself, not of God to the soul.  In Donatello we see a soul awakened to self-consciousness and responsibility, but in “The Scarlet Letter” we have the example of a man inspired to do his duty by the revelation of God.  Adoniram Judson was brought to himself by hearing the groans of a dying man in a room adjoining his own in a New England hotel.  Luther was forced to serious thought by a flash of lightning which blinded and came near killing him.  Pascal was returning to his home at midnight when his carriage halted on the brink of a precipice, and the narrowness of his escape aroused him to a realization of his dependence upon God.  The sense of mortality, and the wonder as to what the consequences of wrong-doing in “the dim unknown” may be, have been potent forces in the re-awakening of souls.

Still others have been given new and gracious visions of “the beauty of holiness.”  They have seen the excellence of virtue, and in its light have learned to hate the causes of their humiliation, and to press forward with courage and hope.

Speculations concerning the causes of this spiritual change are easy, but they are of little value.  Observation has never yet collected facts enough to adequately account for the phenomena.  Probably the most complete and satisfactory answer that was ever given to such questions was that of Jesus when He was treating of this very subject:  “The wind bloweth where it listeth, thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.”