ever small, then flashed across your mind, and you acknowledged that there was a God though you understood but little of him, and you felt that his religion was sacred though your appreciation of the fact was small.
That flash of light was the first beginning of your regeneration. And when God, from his eternal throne, looked down within the mind so darkened once, and beheld his first illuminating ray break through its gloomy shadows, then he saw the light and pronounced it good. And then He began to divide the light from the darkness. He brought to bear upon you, inwardly, such influences as to cause you to make a distinction in your mind between present views of truth and former errors, or between the good and the evil, a thing not in all respects clear to you before; or between a religious life and a worldly life, a life of love to others and a life all love of self; in short, between the truth with regard to existence and its objects and value, and the falsities which before had prevailed with you, or the ignorance concerning it in which you were steeped.
And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. Now God calls, in the Divine language of his Word, this new state of yours, this state of light, the day; but the former state of darkness He terms night. The night-time of the soul is its time of ignorance or falsity; its day-time, its condition of enlightenment.
