p. 142 | Being Alone by T. H. Munger

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 23, 1882

Being Alone.

By T. H. Munger

SECURE for yourself some regular privacy of life. As George Herbert says: "By all means use some time to be alone. God has put each soul into a separate body. We should follow the divine hint and see to it that we do not lapse again into the general flood of being. Many people cannot endure being alone; they are lost if there is not a clatter of tongues in their ears. It is not only weak, but it fosters weakness. The gregarious instinct is animal, the sheep and deer living on in us; to be alone is spiritual. We can have no clear, personal judgment of things until we are separate from them. Mr. Webster used to say of difficult questions, "Let me sleep on it." It was not merely for morning vigor, but to get the matter at a distance where he could measure its proportions and see its relations. So it is well at times to get away from our world—companions, actions, work—in order to measure it and ascertain our relations to it. The moral use of the night is in the isolation it brings, shutting out the world from its scenes, that it may be realized in thought. It is very simple advice, but worth heeding. Get some moments each day to yourself; take now and then a solitary walk; get into the silence of the thick woods, or some other isolation as deep, and suffer the mysterious sense of selfhood to steal upon you, as it surely will. Pythagoras insisted upon an hour of solitude every day to meet his own mind and learn what oracle it had to impart. —T. H. Munger, in Christian Preacher.