The Truth of God is a Pillared and Jeweled Palace

I have often sat, studying a passage of Scripture, and it is as if a world has opened up to my eyes and heart that I had never visited before, and could not have, unless the Holy Spirit gave me passage. In those moments, truth became an overwhelming delight, and my desire was to be able to express what I saw, though no one was around to see it with me. Reading today from Charles Spurgeon's comments on Galatians 1, he wrote beautifully, about experiences like this, what I couldn't have said myself.

Have you not often been surprised and overcome with delight as Holy Scripture has opened up, as if the gates of the golden city had been thrown open for you to enter? I am sure that you did not then gather your knowledge from men, because it was all fresh to you as you sat alone with no book before you but the Bible, and yourself receptive, scarcely thinking out matters, but drinking them in as the Lord brought them to you. A few minutes’ silent openness of soul before the Lord has brought us in more treasure of truth than hours of learned research. The truth is something like those stalactite caverns and grottoes of which we have heard, which you must enter and see for yourself if you would really know their wonders. If you should venture there without light or guide, you would run great risks; but with a blazing torch, and an instructed leader, your entrance is full of interest. See! your guide has taken you through a narrow winding passage, where you have to creep, or go on bended knees! At last he has brought you out into a magnificent hall; and when the torches are held aloft, the far-off roof sparkles and flashes back the light as from countless jewels of every hue! You now behold nature’s architecture; and cathedrals are henceforth toys to you. As you stand in that vast pillared and jeweled palace, you feel how much you owe to your guide, and to his flaming torch. Like this the Holy Spirit leads us into all truth, and sheds light on the eternal and the mysterious. This he does in certain cases very personally. Then he fills us with complete forgetfulness of all our immediate surroundings, and we commune only with the truth. I can well understand how philosophers, while working out an absorbing problem, have seemed lost, and oblivious to all the world besides. Have you never felt a holy absorption in the truth while the Spirit has filled you with its glorious vision? It has been so with many of the saints while taught by God. They are not likely to give up to popular clamour what they have received like this.