“Nun werd’ ich auch die Palmen wieder sehen
    Nicht ihn bloss untern Palmen.”

If God sends us the trial of loneliness, it may be that He has a special work for us, which needs a long and lonely vigil beside our armour.  He may be depriving us of earthly comfort to draw us closer to Himself, that we may learn from Him to be true Sons of Consolation.

“When God cuts off the shoots of our own interests,” it has been well said, “it is that we may graft on our hearts the interests of others.”

Nothing but knowing what loneliness is can teach us to feel for it in others.  Nine-tenths of the world do suffer from it at some time or other; you may not now, but you will some day; and, if you are spared it, nine-tenths of the sorrows of life will be a sealed book to you.  “I prayed the Lord,” says George Fox, “that he would baptize my heart into a sense of the conditions and needs of all men.”

But our Lord, Who Himself suffered under the trial of loneliness, sends all of us friends whom we do not deserve.  We can trust to Him to give us the friends we need, just when we need them, and just as long as we need them, as surely as we trust Him for daily bread.  He may be keeping His best to the last; nay, the best may never come to us in this life at all; but it is as true now as when St. Anselm said it, eight hundred years ago:—­

“In Thee desires which are deferred are not diminished, but rather increased; no noble part, though unfulfilled on earth, is suffered to perish in the soul which lives in Thee, but is deepened and hollowed out by suffering and yearning and want, that it may become capable of a larger fulfilment hereafter.”

The hunger of the heart is as natural, and therefore as much implanted by God, as the hunger of the body.  Neither must be gratified unlawfully; but when God sends food to either we should accept it thankfully, without either asceticism or greediness, and use the strength it gives us as a means of service.  Does not the essence of the wrong sort of love consist in our looking on the affection we receive, or crave for, as a self-ending pleasure, instead of as a gift which is only sent to us to make us happier, and stronger to serve others?

We do not need to be always self-questioning as to how far we are using our happiness for others.  We do not count our mouthfuls of food, we feed our bodies without thinking of it, and so we should do to our hearts; but we are often not healthy-minded enough to go right unconsciously, though some happy souls there are—­

    “Glad hearts, without reproach or blot,
    Who do God’s work, and know it not.”

The Fall brings us under the curse; the tree of knowledge of good and evil has entailed upon us the necessity of self-knowledge; and if we find our hearts out of joint, and craving for more love than we get, we should examine ourselves as to whether we use the love we do get, like the runner’s torch handed on from one to the other; whether the glow of our happiness warms us to pass on light and heat to others, or whether we absorb it all ourselves.