Speedily does she find when she attempts to put into action the principles of living which she now understands to be the meaning of the Gospel that a breach of sympathy has been opened between her and her accustomed companions; that many things which she was accustomed to do in their society and which made for their common fund of amusement are no longer possible to her.  The careless talk, the shameless dress, the gambling, the drinking, the Sunday amusements—­such things as these she has thrown over; and she finds that with them she has thrown over the basis of intimacy with her usual companions.  It is not that they are antagonistic but simply that their points of contact have ceased to exist.  Her own inhibitions exclude her automatically from most of the activities of her social circle.  She finds herself much alone.  Her friends are sorry for her and think her foolish and try to win her back, but it is clear to her that she can only go back by going back from Christ.

This is the common case of the young whether boy or girl to-day, and the practical question is, Can they endure the isolation?  It is easy to say:  Let them make Christian friends; but that is not always practical, especially in the present state of the Church when there is no cohesion among its members, no true sense of constituting a Brotherhood, of being members of the same Body.  We have to admit that the attempt to hold a high standard usually ends in failure, at least the practical failure of a weak compromise.  But there are characters that are strong enough to face the isolation and to readjust life on the basis of the new principles and to mould it in accord with the new ideals.  The period of this readjustment is one of severe testing of one’s grasp on principles and one’s strength of purpose.  But the battle once fought out we attain a new kind of freedom and expansion of life.  We look back with some amusement at the old life and the things that fascinated us in the days of our spiritual unconsciousness much as we look back at the games that amused us in our childish hours.  The desert of Egypt that we entered with trepidation and fearful hearts turns out not to be so dreadful as we imagined, and indeed the flowers spring up under our feet as we resolutely tread the desert way.

These trials must be the daily experience of those who attempt to put their religion into practice, and these perplexities must assail them so long as the Christian community continues to show its present social incompetence; so long, that is, as we attempt to make the basis of our social action something other than the principles of the spiritual life.  A Christian society, one would naturally think, would spring out of the possession of Christian ideals; and doubtless it would if these ideals were really dominant in life, and not a sort of ornament applied to it.  Any social circle contains men and women of various degrees of intellectual development and of varying degrees