Our business as Christians is to keep ourselves free from it.
3. The tone and balance of our own minds can only be preserved and
restored thus. Solitude is the mother-country of the strong. 'I was left
alone, and I saw this great vision.' We get hot and fevered, interested
and absorbed, and we need solitude as a counterpoise.
4. What is the connection of this with other kinds of worship and with
our life's work? It has a function of its own.
These cannot be substituted for it--public worship, reading Christian
books, bring a different class of feelings altogether into play.
They are not to be excluded by it. They find their true foundation in
it. A tree's branches stretch to the same circumference as its roots.