Here too are sufferers in homes of bereavement and pain, where arms are empty and hearts are full, where love calls but receives no answer, where disease binds the body but leaves the mind free to grieve over its loss; where lack of work gives place to temptation, and renders occupation of some sort a moral and religious necessity; where worldliness, that makes the soul barren, needs thoughtfulness to moisten, beautify and fructify the life.
In such great and gracious companionship you sit down for solitary study. Dismiss the thought, therefore, that this is solitude. Reach out your soul to greet the currents of invisible and loving influence that pour in upon you from every quarter.
3. Select and furnish your Chautauqua corner. Do not be too anxious to have it harmonize with other corners of the room. Put shelves for your books “required” and for “review.” On the lowest shelf pile The Chautauquans. On the wall put up the motto cards, the list of memorial days, the Chautauqua calendar, the photograph or engraving of the Hall of Philosophy, and such other Chautauqua views as you approve. Put up busts or engravings of the great leaders—Homer, Cicero, Dante, Milton, Goethe. Somewhere place a picture of Bryant, the earliest distinguished friend of the C. L. S. C. By gradual additions fill the Chautauqua corner with pictures and bookshelves, busts and mottoes, all in the line of your reading, until the other corners and the intervening walls shall be filled with reminders of Chautauqua and the world of literature, science and art it represents. And if somehow you can place on the wall that matchless engraving representing the great Master with his two disciples on the way to Emmaus, you will, in a sense, sanctify your room, and set forth most effectively, the aim, scope and spirit of the great Chautauqua movement. In such a room, or in such a corner, can students be solitary?
4. You will greatly increase your power by systematic habits. One may “read up” at any time, but the regular daily reading which renders unnecessary what is called “reading up,” is much the better way. It renders the work comparatively light; it makes the C. L. S. C. a help to other less congenial work of the day into which it falls like a refreshing shower. It forces life into a system which always expedites and lightens labor. It schools the will. It brings lower duties into proper subjection to the higher. It is every way better to do each day’s work as each day comes. Thus working alone, but systematically, one keeps the hand in and does not lose grasp, taste or delight.
5. Though compelled to work alone, make casual contacts with others afford opportunities for drawing them out, for finding out what they know, or for corroborating your own views. Ask questions. Elicit opinions. Start conversation. Try to tell what you know or think. Tell your children. Tell your neighbors. As you interest them, you set them in search of knowledge, which finding, they will later on report to you, and you thus give them a start in lines of self-improvement.
6. This setting others at work in quest of knowledge for you is a most practicable way of getting knowledge and doing good to the finders thereof.
Write out ten different questions, and give one to each of ten young boys and girls of a high school, for example. They will ransack libraries, consult teachers, find out and report what you want to know, and be immensely helped by the knowledge found and the service rendered. Though alone, you need not work alone.
7. Practice talking to yourself about the things you have read. Put facts and dates into sentences. Now and then write out these sentences, or speak them off. Recite a lesson to yourself every day. Make a speech with yourself as audience. Put facts into recitative lullabies, by which you sing baby to sleep. Don’t do too much of all this, lest it weary you, but do a little of this sentence-framing and solitary speech-making, and nursery-crooning every day. You will then have a local circle of you, and yourself and your own soul. Now one’s self makes very good society sometimes; there are so many powers and voices and thoughts and projects in a single soul.
8. Lift your soul up to its height, now and then, and breathe a thought of the heart that may grow into a prayer as you recall the great Circle of which you are a member. Think in silence of their multiplied and varied circumstances, perils, temptations and necessities. Think of the disheartened, the bereaved, the suffering, the doubting; those who have great power, but do not know how to use it; those who are sick of sin and worldliness, and do not know how to get into the path of holiness and peace. Think of all these, and then pray. Let your heart swell toward God in sympathy and longing.
Thus will you find in your solitude the presence of the Spirit invisible and eternal, whose name is love, and whose home is heaven, and whose children are the lowly and meek and devout, who love souls—the world full of souls—and who daily bear them in tender sympathy to the throne.