ll.

Often, too, must he question his own motives with a severer judgment
than that of the world, as his scrutiny is more close, and his
self-knowledge more minute. He knows the secret sin, the mental act, the
spiritual aberration. He knows the distance between his highest effort
and that lofty standard of perfection to which he has pledged his
purposes. Alone, alone does the great conflict go on within him. The
struggle, the self-denial, the pain, and the victory, are of the very
essence of martyrdom,--are the chief peculiarities in the martyr's
lot. His, too, must be the solitude of prayer, when, by throwing by all
entanglements,--in his naked individuality,--he wrestles at the Mercy
Seat, or soars to the bliss of Divine communion. In such hours,--in
every hour of self-communion,--when we ask ourselves the highest
questions respecting faith and duty, it is the deepest comfort to the
religious soul to feel and to say, "I am not alone, for the Father is
with me."

Again; there are experiences of Sorrow in which we are peculiarly alone.
How often does the soul feel this when it is suffering from the loss
of friends! Then we find no comfort in external things. Pleasure charms
not; business cannot cheat us of our grief; wealth supplies not the
void; and though the voice of friendship falls in consolation upon the
ear, yet with all these, we are alone,--alone! No other spirit can
fully comprehend our woe, or enter into our desolation. No human eye can
pierce to our sorrows; no sympathy can share them. Alone we must realize
their sharp suggestions, their painful memories, their brood of sad
and solemn thoughts. The mother bending over her dead child;--O! what
solitude is like that?--where such absolute loneliness as that which
possesses her soul, when she takes the final look of that little pale
face crowned with flowers and sleeping in its last chamber, with
the silent voice of the dead uttering its last good night? What more
solitary than the spirit of one who, like the widow of Nain, follows to
the grave her only son?--of one from whom the wife, the mother, has been
taken? The mourner is in solitude,--alone, in this peopled world;--O,
how utterly alone! Through the silent valley of tears wanders that
stricken spirit, seeing only memorials of that loss.

Indeed, sorrow of any kind is solitary. Its deepest pangs, its most
solemn visitations, are in the secrecy of the individual soul. We labor
to conceal it from others. W