HOW TO WORK ALONE.
BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D.D.
Not all members of the “C. L. S. C.” can enjoy the benefits of a local circle. Some live in the country, or in remote parts of the city. They can not get out at night, through lack of company, or because the house, the boys, or the baby must not be left alone; the local circle is not under wise direction, and is unprofitable; or it may be that the only accessible local circle is a close corporation, and is “inaccessible.” Father or husband objects to the time wasted, or the long walk, or something else. So the student is solitary. Whatever is done must be done alone.
This is not an unmixed evil, because it may develop power in the student, or drive him or her to find associates at home, associates who are not enrolled in Plainfield as “regulars,” and some of whom are quite too young to be enrolled at all. No deprivation in this world that does not make a place for some other unsought, unexpected blessing.
I purpose to offer a few hints to these solitary readers, who may, I trust, find much profit out of the restrictions of providence, and do their work well even though it be done alone. On the blank pages of your necessity you may make records of your own, worth more to you than volumes of other people’s print.
1. Although alone, remember that you are associated with a great Circle numbering thousands and tens of thousands of members. You are not alone, but one of many. This thought helps you. It sets currents of sympathy in motion. It annihilates distance. It fills the very air about you with companions with whom you are in sweet fellowship, although you have never seen them. They are a great cloud of witnesses. They march under the same banner; put their names on the same great record book in the central office; read the same pages; sing the same songs; answer the same questions; recite the same mottoes; observe the same memorial days; and turn with tender hearts to the same heavens, under the mystic spell of the vesper hour; experience the same longings after true culture, and have hearts full of sympathy for their fellow-students everywhere. This thought of oneness in work gives feelings of kinship and companionship. The solitary student in the little room—kitchen, sitting room, library, or bed chamber—is surrounded by thousands of fellow-students. They seem to look over the page with you. They seem to whisper words of good will and faith, and some of them, I assure you, are royal people. They would give you such greeting, if they had opportunity, as would make you proud and glad of your connection with the Circle. Indeed, solitariness is impossible to the thoughtful member of the C. L. S. C.
2. This sense of fellowship is increased, and a helpful stimulus given to the solitary worker, by reflecting on the character of the great fraternity of which you are a part. We now enroll more than seventy thousand members. Perhaps twenty-five thousand have practically given up the readings. Only fifty thousand remain with us. Many thousands of readers are connected with local circles who have never joined as “regulars” at the central office in Plainfield, N. J. There are thousands who are reading a part of the course, but who neither belong to the local nor general circle. I believe that these non-recorded and irregular readers make up for the lapsed thousands, so that to-day we have nearly or quite seventy thousand people doing all or a part of the required reading. This, therefore, becomes a great institution. Its territorial extent is as vast as its numerical strength. There are “C. L. S. C.s” in all parts of the world. Our office records contain names from India, China, Japan, the Sandwich Islands, and many other outlying regions, while the list in Canada and on the Pacific coast runs up among the thousands. In every state and territory members are to be found.
And who are these with whom you, my solitary student, are associated? They represent every calling in life, and almost every grade, social and intellectual. Here are lawyers, judges, physicians, clergymen, doctors of divinity, college graduates, literally by the thousand, who seek through our course to review the studies of other and earlier years. Here are seminary and high school graduates, and people old and young who dropped out of the grammar school when they were too young to understand their folly in doing so. Here are business men, mechanics and farmers who have been prospered, and who covet now a measure of culture to fit them for society, that their money may gain for them and their families more than a mere social recognition. Here are mothers good and true, who do not want to part hands with sons and daughters as they enter the higher schools, but who propose by our course of reading to keep in the literary and scientific world where their children are to be at home. Here are people of “low degree,” who toil for bread, with lengthened hours of service, that they may help those who are dependent upon them. They are in shops and kitchens, and have souls that would put honor into palaces. They want outlook as they go weighted down through busy and weary years. They do not expect always to be slaves to society and circumstance. There is blood-royal in every heart-beat, and power to hold princedoms in some near future. So, despised of men who live, they hold converse through books with gifted and kingly souls who, though dead, yet live, and who work in other kingly souls. There are many of these disguised princes and princesses in your Circle.