"Soul's Awakening"

https://www.ebay.com/itm/The-Souls-Awakening-1891-Artist-James-Sant-Engraver/153402178463?hash=item23b77b7b9f:g:puMAAOSwdA5bNPpF

His sense of spiritual and mental awakening was epitomized for him by James Sant’s portrait of a young girl entitled “Soul’s Awakening.” Prints of Sant’s painting were given out as premiums by religious magazines. Russell felt that the picture represented something in the experience of “practically all who have come to the Lord”:

Perhaps in your case, as in mine, it was not a case of awakening out of a condition of sin, but we had been God’s people all our lives, had never known anything else. I am sure that is the case with a great many people who are of the Lord’s family; trained as Christian children, they never knew anything except the Bible, hymns and prayers; and yet the soul was not awake. It was going through the form of singing the hymns without really thinking of what the words meant. They were asleep – somnambulism, as it were, going around half stupid, not knowing what they did or said. I had my own experiences in that way. I remember very well the period of my soul awakening. It was when I was about 15 years of age, and I thought, as I looked at that picture called “Soul’s Awakening,” that the young person in the picture looked to be about 15, and that gave me the thought that perhaps there were a great many of about that age when they reach thoughtful conditions. There seems to be a great change, you know, in human nature about that time, and it is a splendid time for the forces of spiritual growth to come toward these, and for parents and guardians to have in mind that it is a very favorable time for soul awakening. I do not mean to say that we should delay our endeavor to bring the child to a knowledge of the Lord. Quite to the contrary, from the time the child is born it should always be trained in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We believe the training of the child should begin nine months before it is born

He saw this as his true dedication, writing that he “when fifteen years of age” gave the Lord his heart “and reverenced and worshiped him with what amount of knowledge we had.” He was confident of God’s acceptance even though “indoctrinated … to believe that only the elect would reach glory, and that all the non-elect would experience eternal torment, we were [He often used the royal “we” when speaking of himself] accustomed to think of our self as one of the elect, and to appreciate the love of God, which had provided for the salvation of the elect.”