February 17

Souls are not saved in bundles. The Spirit saith to the man, "How is it with thee? thee personally? Is it well? Is it ill?"

IN the end each must do the work for himself, and in his own fashion. Only in solitude can the hardest part of the pathway to reality be trodden:—

Space is but narrow—east and west— There is not room for two abreast.

No one of us is like any other, either in his needs or in the mode in which these needs must be satisfied. Every man bears the impress of his finitude, with its infinite variety of form. Hardly less is that impress borne by even the greatest and highest expression in which the truth is told to us. Yet if that truth be hard to reach—nay, even if the most genuinely strenuous effort to reach it must ever remain incomplete, and the work have to be done over again by each one for himself, we have no justification for despair, or for sitting in idleness with folded hands. For in the search for truth, as in all the other phases of our activity, we only gain and keep our life and freedom by daily conquering them anew.

RICHARD BURDON HALDANE, The Pathway to Reality

TO EACH HIS TASK