not crowd out of your life the higher capacity for
sympathy. For you may understand all knowledge and speak with all
tongues, and if you have lost thereby {179} the personal, human,
sympathetic relation with people which we call love you are not really
to be counted as a man. You are nothing more than an instrument of
sound, a wind instrument like a trumpet, or a clanging instrument like
a cymbal." That is the apostolic warning to the successful
professional man,--the warning against the narrowing, self-contented
result which sometimes taints even great attainments and professional
distinction. Covet the best. Be satisfied with nothing less than the
highest professional work of doctor, politician, or teacher. But
beware of the imprisoning effect which sometimes comes of this very
success in professional life, the atrophy of sensibility, the
increasing incapacity for sympathy, for public spirit, for charity,--an
incapacity which makes some men of the highest endowments among the
least serviceable, least loving, and least loved of a community. "If,"
says the apostle, "in the gain of professional success you lose the
higher gift of love, you are no longer a great man; you are not even to
be described as a small man. You are 'nothing.'"

{180}

LXXII

THE CENTRAL SOLITUDE

_John_ xvi. 32.

In one of Frederick Robertson's sermons he speaks of the conduct of
life as like the conduct of atoms, which have a certain attraction for
each other, but at a certain point of approach are repelled and do not
touch. There is in every large life a certain central solitude of this
kind into which no other soul can enter. Some persons fear this
solitude, some rejoice in it, but the use of it is the test of a man's
life. A very near friend of Dr. Brooks's once heard of a man who said
that he knew Dr. Brooks intimately; and this friend said: "No man ought
to say that. Not one of us knew Dr. Brooks intimately. There was a
central Holy of Holies in his life, into which none of us ever
entered." So it was. And this preservation of an inner privacy for
the deeper experiences of life is what proves a soul to be peaceful and
strong. Guard your soul's individual life. In the midst of the social
world keep a place for the {181} nurture of the isolated life, for the
reading and for the thoughts which deal with the interior relations of
the single soul to the immanent God.

"Thyself amid the silence clear,
The world