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.

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.

They who do these things can not be alone.

If it were not for my love of beautiful nature and poetry, my heart would have died within me long ago. I never felt before what immeasurable benefactors these same poets are to their kind, and how large a measure, both of actual happiness and prevention of misery they have imparted to the race. I would willingly give up half my fortune, and some little of the fragments of health and bodily enjoyment that remain to me, rather than that Shakspere should not have lived before me.—Lord Jeffrey (from a letter to Lord Cockburn, 1833).