picture called Life. For each of
us there is the day's work, wherein we can labour, or idle, as we
choose, and for each there comes the night when no man can work. And
what we have to do we must do _alone_. The majority of men who live
the life of duty do so unnoticed and uncared for. They are like those
stars which our eyes never see, but they shine all the same. Such men
work and suffer, and wait till their time comes to join

"The crowd untold of men,
By the cause they served unknown,
Who moulder in myriad graves of old,
Never a story, never a stone."

But such men have the comfort of knowing that they have not run in
vain, neither laboured in vain; they have lived unto God in this world,
and if solitary, they have been alone with God. Again, _we must all
suffer alone_. However kind and sympathetic our friends may be, they
cannot enter into our pains and agonies. They can be sorry for us, but
they cannot feel as we feel. When the body is racked by severe pangs
of suffering, even the presence of friends is too much for us. We want
to be alone, _alone with God_. And this is specially true of the
sorrows of the mind. "The heart knoweth its own bitterness." No one,
not even our nearest and dearest, can go with us to the Gethsemane,
where we suffer, or the Calvary, where we endure our cross. But it is
in these hours of bitterest suffering that the Christian feels that he
is not forsaken. He remembers that his Master, Jesus, trod the
winepress of sorrow alone, and that of the people there was none with
Him. He knows that he is permitted to walk the same lonely path as
Jesus trod before him. He knows that as he kneels in the darkened room
with his solitary sorrow, with his breaking heart, with his sinful soul
bowed down in penitence, that Jesus is with him--he is alone with God.
And again, _we must all die alone_. The moment of death is the most
solitary of all our life. The Prince, with his armies, and crowds of
friends and courtiers, is, at his death, as much alone as the beggar
who drops and dies by the roadside. Loving hands may clasp ours
fondly, but we must let them go. Husband, mother, wife, or child may
cling to us in close embrace, but they cannot detain us, or go with us,
we must die alone. And yet in that most solitary moment the Christian
who is dead unto sin, and living unto God, knows that he is not alone.
He knows that when he has heard the sound of the last voice on