XV. HUMAN LONELINESS. IF THOU BE WISE, THOU SHALT BE WISE FOR THYSELF; BUT IF THOU SCORNEST, THOU ALONE SHALT BEAR IT.- Prov. ix. 12. RIVE at midnight through the mazy streets of some DRI great centre of human life. Here and there a lamp is faintly burning. The crowds have melted away. Silence has settled down between the dark ranges of mansions and warehouses. The eye glances up and runs along the surface of the tall, dim walls. What is hidden. there within? What secrets do those shuttered homes enclose? If one could look into all that seclusion, what strange elements of society, what varied and perhaps startling experiences, personal and social, would meet his view! High up, half shaded, but struggling feebly out, a light burns obscurely. What is there, sickness, wakefulness, plotting crime, or only deep slumber watched over by that friendly ray? Imagination revels at will. But night, silence, and the dark masonry, with its curtains and blinds, keep their secrets. We cannot explore or know. And if all those windows were to flame out with a sudden illumination, if we could take the wings of the bird of night and fly over the thronged city, and every - roof were transparent, we should know not much more than we now know while pacing slowly and wonderingly along the dark street. The interior scenes of those guarded shelters would be visible, passages, stairways, and the furnishing of occupied apartments. We should look upon faces and forms, hear the heavy respiration of sleepers, or perhaps human voices interchanging murmuring confidences. But the real mystery of life is more darkly shrouded. Wake all the unconscious thousands there, and let them offer their opened eyes and their ordinary daily face to our gaze, we should be but little nearer the solution. There are more impenetrable walls, there is a deeper night around that mystery, than the retiring day and the hand of man have made. Only God above and the heart within know the facts of experience and character. Each human life is an isolated life. It may have its alliances and its contacts, but it never loses its identity and its individuality. The stars are by our science, for convenience' sake, set in systems, grouped in constellations, but each is, for all that, a separate sphere, with its own unexplored interior world. So the human soul is an orb by itself. Its peopled chambers compose a world apart from all other worlds. Amid crowds or amid solitudes the man sits ever by himself in the solitariness of his own uninvaded consciousness, with secrets which he could not, if he would, make clearly intelligible to any fellow-man, with questions and issues which he must meet alone. I wish to lead in our thoughts out of the world of broad and general sympathies, to disengage each of us from our associations and clanships, to separate us from the sweep of the tide, in which we seem blent with kindred drops, our career and our destiny merged with those of our classification and fellowship, and to bring us in face to face with our own single selves. That is the intent of our Scripture to single us out from a massed humanity, to isolate us within our own personal orbit, to discover to us the singularity of that orbit, to make us feel that undivided responsibleness that burdens ourselves, and to recall us to the conviction that we are to meet the real problem of life solitary and alone. The solitariness of human life is the point specially to be illustrated. 1. Each man is alone in the original, native singleness of his being. He was born alone into this world of his kind, a unit of life, a single fresh soul from the Creator's hand, with his own private and personal outfit of mental and material forces, his own adjustment and proportions of mind and body, their interchanges and relations of offices and effects special and peculiar to him. His cerebral development is his own. The intellectual and the animal divide him up and share him by appointments never exactly repeated. The physical serves well the rational, or disappoints and cripples it, or shades off toward the one extreme or the other. He is of a hardy or tender spiritual constitution; his sensibilities, frigid and stern, or warm and sympathetic. His temperament is his own. The whole balance, poise, and composition of his manhood are individual and unique. The elements of the common humanity are there, but differently mingled in him from what they are in any other fellow specimen. God's creative versatility and variety never run low. In all the forest no two oaks in limb and trunk and shade stand alike. On the seashore each grain of sand is individual and distinct. The wintry air is full of falling snowflakes like blossoms shaken from the trees of paradise, but each is crystallized with a conformation of its own. In breadth and height and hue the grass-blades vary, and "one star differeth from another star in glory." The diversity of the human form is a symbol of the real diversity of the human life, and of itself helps by no mean contribution to constitute that diversity. Souls are as unlike as bodies. One may seem twin to another, as in the fleshly form, but in stature, color, texture, or whatever expresses the dimensions and qualities of spirits, each has its own specialty and vindicates its separate type. The very object of creating men single and distinctive, that their function and work may fulfil the Creator's design, keeps them in their identity apart. They may touch at many points, they may compose little societies, they may join their voices in the same strain of music, they may lift together at the same burdens of human travail; but each voice has its own tone, each nerve its own force; this singleness of their own individual make always attaches to them. In that, each is forever himself,-himself alone, and not another, and those limits and boundaries, those descriptive lines that mark him off from the world at large, shut him in to a personal and perpetual solitude. 2. Again, each man is alone in the citadel of his own consciousness. He has an outward eye and an inward eye. With the outward he looks, and this map of earth is unrolled before him. There rise the mountains, there spread the plains, there the valleys are scored, there wave the forests and murmur the brooks, and chase one another in the play of Titans the colossal waves of lights and shadows over the harvest fields of summer. There heaves the sea, now in stormy tumult, flinging its angry billows against all its bounds, and now sobbing itself to sleep like a child wearied out by its own passion, and again bright and sparkling in the gleam of sunny weather. Above bends the sky, sometimes gusty and howling with winter winds, or all still and black with a rayless gloom, or curtained with impenetrable and chilling mists, or weeping softly in summer rain; and then again, with a deep, pure, and unfathomable blue, across which the crescent moon cleaves her way, or the sun rides royally, or through which, as a transparency, the starry lights of celestial windows and avenues show far and clear. This is the outer world, with its sea and sky, its landscapes, seasons, and changes. And I have outlined its map, because it has its counterpart within. The inward eye looks over an inner world as broad, varied, and marvellous as the outer. There rise the ridges of its controlling thoughts, its grand and stable beliefs; there gush the fountains and murmur the streams of its sensibilities. There wind the channels of its habitual purposes and courses of soul; there is the expanse of knowledge over which the mind ranges; the long, branching vales of memory; the heights imagination scales; there come and go the April lights and shadows of its changeful moods; there surges |