57 Sermon Illustrations on Spiritual Growth

SOLITUDE, Pleasures of The man with a taste for solitude is generally a great reader, and has an imaginative sympathy with alien circumstances of life. He tastes the wealth of Cressus; he touches Juliet's lips; he groans with Job under the exhortations of his friends. By this curious sympathy, he projects himself into distant times and lands. He passes into Abraham's tent. For him, Pharaoh is not a mummy; Cleopatra has not lost her swarthy bloom. He peoples vacancy; he selects his friends from the race, and depends neither for solace nor amusement nor interest on contemporary acquaintance. The man who is familiar with Homer and Shakspeare need not tear his hair because Tompkins omits to leave his card. And in this way, knowing all forms and conditions of life, — success, reverse, health, illness, wealth, poverty, — the vicissitudes of fortune do not surprise him, or take him off his guard. If he is called upon to fight, he fights like a general on ground which he has carefully reconnoitred. In whatever circumstances he is placed, he is never lonely: such a man has companionship on a throne or in a dungeon. Wherever he goes, he is walking in human footsteps; and he knows in whose footsteps he walks. I can feel no pain which some one has not felt before me; and no valuable, spiritual or material, can come into my possession, which has not already belonged to some one. Aeneas Sage.

If a tree is not growing, it is sure in the long run to be dying. And so are our souls. If they are not growing, they are dying; if they are not getting better, they are getting worse. This is why the Bible compares our souls to trees; not out of a mere pretty fancy of poetry, but for a great, awful, deep, world-wide lesson, that every tree in the fields may be a pattern, a warning, to us thoughtless men, that as that tree is meant to grow, so our souls are meant to grow. As that tree dies unless it grows, so our souls must die unless they grow.

— C. Kingsley

Dr. Buchanan, in a conversation he had with a friend, a short time before his death, was describing the minute pains he had been taking with the proofs and revisions of the Syriac Testament, every page of which passed under his eye five times before it was finally sent to press. He said, he had expected beforehand that this process would have proved irksome to him, but that every fresh perusal of the sacred page seemed to unveil new beauties. Here he stopped, and said he to his friend, as soon as he recovered himself, "I could not suppress the emotion I felt, as I recollected the delight it pleased God to afford me in the reading of his word."

A gentleman, speaking of a certain Sabbath school in Massachusetts, says: The school embraces those of all ages, from 3 to 80. With a few exceptions, the whole congregation attend the school.

A more interesting school I have never seen: all seem desirous of under-

# 400. SATAN,