ife can come.
Companionships may be close, and they may give much comfort and
inspiration, but in all the inner meaning of life each individual lives
apart and alone. No one can live your life for you. No one but
yourself can answer your questions, meet your responsibilities, make
your decisions and choices. Your relations with God no one but
yourself can fulfil. No one can believe for you. A thousand friends
may encircle you and pray for your soul, but until you lift up your own
heart in prayer no communication is established between you and God.
No one can get your sins forgiven but yourself. No one can obey God
for you. No other one can do your work for Christ, or render your
account at the judgment-seat.

In the realm of experience also the same is true. Each person suffers
alone, as if there were no other being in the universe. Friends may
stand by us in our hours of pain or sorrow, and may sympathize with us
or administer comfort or alleviation, but they enter not really into
the experiences. In these we are alone. No one can meet your
temptations for you, or fight your battles, or endure your trials. The
tenderest friendship, the holiest love, cannot enter into the
solitariness in which each one of us lives apart.

"Still in each heart of hearts a hidden deep
Lies, never fathomed by its dearest, best."

This aloneness of life sometimes becomes very real in consciousness.
All great souls experience it as they rise out of and above the common
mass of men in their thoughts and hopes and aspirations, as the
mountains rise from the level of the vale and little hills. All great
leaders of men ofttimes must stand alone, as they move in advance of
the ranks of their followers. The battles of truth and of progress
have usually been fought by lonely souls. Elijah, for example, in a
season of disheartenment and despondency, gave it as part of the
exceptional burden of his life that he was the only one in the field
for God. It is so in all great epochs; God calls one man to stand for
him. As Robert Browning says:--

"In life exceptional,
When old things terminate and new commence,
A solitary great man's worth the world.
God takes the business in his own hand
At such time."

But the experience is not that only of great souls; there come times in
the lives of all who are living faithfully and worthily when they must
stand alone for God, without companionship, perhaps without sym