The Necessity of the Social Life

“Woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.” — ECCLESIASTES iv. 10.

THESE words of the preacher are capable of a low or of a very high application. We may read them as the words of worldly prudence, the exhortation to every man to make to himself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; or they may be the utterance of the profoundest religious philosophy, the statement of how God Himself has bound our lives together and made us rest on one another. Of course we give to them their highest meaning.

And the words begin by assuming the certainty that every man will fall sometimes. “Woe to him that is alone when he falleth.” We look forward into our lives, and a wise prudence compels us to recognize that there will certainly come times when life will flag, times when the buoyancy and courage upon which we rely will break, when over some one of the many obstacles that lie in our way we shall stumble. We need not be gloomy prophets. We need not put so blankly and hopelessly before ourselves the certainty of these times of faltering courage and of weakened principle, that we shall be in despair and not try to do anything for the lives that are so sure to meet disaster. But, on the other hand, it would be foolish in us to expect an even, level, unbroken future, a changeless prosperity and spiritual progress that never know a fall. Surely our darker and despondent days will come, our days of broken resolution and of feebler will.

And when we thus look forward to them, among the questions which we ask ourselves ought to be these: “What will the best way be to meet those days? How shall I best prepare for them? How shall I best recover myself? Will it be best for me to be alone, or to be in company when the darkness comes? Will a close association with my brethren help me up, or hold me down with all their extra weight, when I have fallen?”

It opens a wide question and a very deep one, the whole question of the social and the solitary life. Here are certain dispositions always drawing us to one another. Here are certain dissatisfactions always drawing us away from one another and making us want to live alone. Here is the sense that our brethren make safety about us and call out our best powers into exercise. Here is another sense that our brethren around us make our danger, and that our best powers and activities often spring to life and do their work when we are separated and set all by ourselves. Which shall we follow? The practical answer that we mostly give is in a vacillating life which divides itself almost at random between the two dispositions, yielding sometimes to one and sometimes to the other, as the feeling moves; and often yielding wrongly, looking often to society for that culture which only solitude can give, and also often seeking in loneliness that strength which a man ought to get out of the company of his fellow-men.

Let us look a little at this question of society and solitude. It is not enough to give the easy answer that society is good or bad according to whom it is composed of; to be with good men is good for us; to be with bad men is bad for us. That is true, of course. But still the difficulty remains that the societies which offer themselves to us are not thus blankly good or bad. They are all mingled and confused. And even between the best company and solitude the question is always an open one. How far is it best to fight the battle of one’s life alone, and how far is it good to identify our battle with our brethren’s, and get the advantage of their strength, even with all the disadvantage that it brings? Surely there are few questions which we ever meet more pressing or more puzzling than these.

The first suggestion of an answer comes from our own experience, from what we may freely appeal to as the universal experience of healthy-minded men; which is that whatever there is of good in us has been made possible and has been preserved by the associations with our fellow-men which have filled up our life. However deeply precious may seem the things that have come to us when we were alone; however we may know that the choicest thoughts and truest feelings have been worked out in solitude; everybody is certain, as he takes a large look back, that, on the whole, if he had been left to solitude he never could have come to so good life as he has reached in the company of his brethren. And the reason why he thinks so is, in large part, that he sees that in his darkest times, in the falling and fallen periods of his life, he could not have arisen from the depths into which he had been cast, he would have stayed at his worst, if it had not been for the rescue that came to him from his fellow-men. Perhaps there are great heights where a man may be independent, mountain-tops where one may walk in solitude. Perhaps there are exalted moments in which one seems to live his best, and not to need companions; but what we come to thank our fellow-men most for is the way in which they have bridged over with their company the uncertain places of life, and brought us up again when we were demoralized and broken down, that we have not been alone when we have fallen, but have had another to lift us up.

For what is it that keeps a man down when he has fallen out of goodness and self-respect? When the spring of his life is broken and the fresh hopefulness of the manly struggle to be high and pure and good is blurred and lost, when he has sinned and the burden of his sin is lying on him, what is it that keeps him down? What hinders him from springing back again into the strength and purity which he has lost? Mainly these things: first, his self-indulgence, the dreadful indolence and force of habit that takes possession of him; secondly, his loss of reputation, the feeling that nobody expects or thinks anything of him any longer; thirdly, his conceit and affectation, which take his sin and disgrace and trick it out in some disguise of virtue or brilliancy, and set him to boasting of it. Picture any fallen man, a man who used to be brave and good and sober and honest. Now he has gone. You never see him in the paths of reputable people. Men look to him no more for examples of upright living. What has caused all this? He came to some bad place. He sinned. He fell into disgrace. And the powers that have held him down, that have stereotyped and perpetuated his disaster, have been these: He has grown self-indulgent in his sin, with no enterprise or energy to rise up and cast it off; he has ceased to care what men think about him; and, having lost everything else to be proud of, he has grown proud of his disgrace, making believe to himself that it is honorable.

Now all those are powers, as you will recognize, which fasten themselves upon a man in solitude. There he becomes self-indulgent, morose, and affected. But now suppose that that man, when he fell, had had a friend, one who really had been close to him. What would that friend have done for him? or, rather, what would a body of such friends have done for him, surrounding him on every side, enclosing, enshrining his tottering life? They would have shamed and encouraged him out of self-indulgence. They would have let him see that they did care for him, and so kept him from being reckless about reputation. They would have held up before him the truth and righteousness from which he had departed, and made him know that his wickedness was base and not glorious. Hope, pride, and honesty, — these are what they would have given him. These are what your friendships have given you many a time, and kept your falls from being fatal and final, and held you to recovery.

This is the reason of it. Now, that which is reasonable and capable of philosophic explanation in the middle orders, in the mass of beings, appears always as an instinct which it is hard to explain, both in the lower beings, who seem to be below the range of its influence, and in the highest beings, who seem to be above its need. Man gets a clear and accountable help out of the companionship of his fellow-men in his darkened and weakened times; and it is good to see how this impulse of companionship plays freely from the bottom to the very top of all life. The animals crowd close together when the thunder roars, as if in company there would be safety. And when Jesus Christ was going to his agony in Gethsemane, He took with Him Peter and James and John. It is the social impulse running through all life, and making each try to appropriate for his own the strength of all.

I want to urge on all of you, the young and old, but specially the young, the good, nay, the necessity, of social life. Do not yield to the passion for solitude. Knit your life to your brothers’ lives. Cultivate every true relation to your fellow-men. If, when things are going wrong with you either by misfortune or by sin, the desire springs up to live alone, to get away from men, beware how you indulge it. You will certainly grow self-indulgent and reckless and affected. That is where the indolent, cynical, headlong, and fantastic men are made. Not more than one man in a thousand, perhaps not so many, can live in solitude and yet be vigorous, self-respecting, simple. It needs a man of such wonderfully exceptional resource and truthfulness to be shut up to himself!

It may seem as if this were not the counsel that men need. “Rather urge solitude,” you say. “People are social over-much. They grow thin and superficial. Send them apart to think, and let them dwell alone that their own selves may be developed. There is too much society.” But so often we have seen the man in his misfortune shut himself away, and lose the fibre and recovery of life, that there does seem need to urge the preserving and recuperative power of a true social life.

A true social life! — remember that that does not mean what often passes for society. The ordinary contacts of men in business, whose knowledge of and care for one another is limited to their mere business interests, who never talk anything but business; and the frivolous meetings of what we call fashionable life; — these are not true companionship. Out of their very midst a man or woman falls, and they have no power of help. The dumb company of brute with brute in a pasture or a barnyard, their stolid huddling to each other’s sides, means more of real association than much that we call social life.

But the true society, in which man really meets with man, and mind with mind, and heart with heart, and character with character — that is another thing, a thing you cannot do without. As you shun the false, so seek the true. Draw really near your fellows, and do not live alone.

Let me refer in a few words to some of the conditions in which the tendency to solitude is apt to assert itself most strongly, and ask you to observe how bad it is. It often becomes strong in periods of doubt. When truth appears unsettled to a man, and he is all adrift, how apt he is to let his life float away into some solitary creek, and there to moor it and let it toss on the waves till it decays. He draws off from the crowd of busy and believing men, and spends his days in moody uselessness, brooding upon himself. Would we were not so familiar with the sad consequences! First, a dull and hopeless indolence, which tells itself over and over that it is not worth while to seek for truth; then a definite disregard whether men think that it is good to believe or not; and then an affected eccentricity which wears its skepticism like a plume. Now set that same doubter in the midst of men and keep him there. I do not say, let him take their faith for his, but let him see that faith, and faith alone, is doing work and making men brave and happy everywhere; and he must lose at least the wretchedest part of unbelief, and come to know that truth is good, and to be sure that men can find it, and to set himself with new courage to the generous and glorious search.

And so, when a man undertakes to think. Is it not true that all solitary thinking has a tendency to grow hopeless and defiant and fantastic? The best and truest Christian thoughts, the sweetest, the healthiest, the best balanced, have come not from the hermits or the monks, but from the heart of Christian society and work; where men and women living Christian lives held up the thinker in his feebler moods, and made him earnest, simple, practical. No man by nature thinks so truly and so surely that you could send him off alone, and let him come back after years, and not be sure that his thoughts would have grown self-indulgent, conceited, and distorted.

Or, take the great emotional epochs of one’s life. In times of strong emotion there comes the strong impulse to break away from and have no more to do with a world whose ordinary doings seem to be so far below the high condition to which we have been brought. It may be hard for you to recollect it now, but you have seen such times. In great and overwhelming joy it comes. What can this dull earth, living its placid life of averages, know about this leaping delight which has transfigured every thing for you? How coldly it answers to your ecstasies! These people take your hand and say to you, “I am glad for you”; but what has their sober, indifferent gladness to respond to these full veins and eager hopes of yours?

Or, here comes sorrow, and the impulse then is stronger still. This ache about the heart, this sense of want which does not relieve itself in any effort to ioo THE NECESSITY OF THE SOCIAL- LIFE

restore that dear thing which must be forever wanting, this desolation which is as personal and all your own as was the love which made it possible, — why should this stay here in the crowd, where the kindest hands touch it only to make it ache a little more? Why should it listen to a sympathy which only brushes and wounds its surface? Why should not such a sorrow creep away and hide where none can gaze upon it, nor try to comfort it; where it can live on its own luxury of woe?

O my dear friends, I know how natural are both desires; but indeed it is not good to yield to either of them. Your joy and sorrow will be strong and healthy only as you keep them among your brethren. Do not try to carry them away. It is no superficial impulse which sometimes drives the very happy or the very sorrowful into the presence and the company of men. There, their happiness and sorrow are held in place, held firm and upright, so that the new life which grows about them grows straight and true. Both into the Mountain of Transfiguration and into the Garden of Agony Christ took with him Peter and James and John; and surely He took them not for their sake alone but also for His own.

So everywhere dread and escape a lonely life. Even the frivolous companionships of men have a humanity about them which is preservative, and are better than solitude. The worst, certainly the most persistent and ineradicable, of vices, are those which men conceive and execute alone. It is the social life that holds the soul in its true place. I know you will not think that I have pleaded in behalf of social life just as it is, in behalf of what you call Society, with all its follies and its falsenesses, but in behalf of something far deeper and far higher.

And now we want, if we can, to separate these two — the ideal and the real society — and see if we can tell at all how the man who must live with his fellow-men may find the way of living with them that shall be most unmixed with harm. If, then, we try to estimate the tendencies of social life, I think that the one which would strike us all most generally would be its disposition to produce uniformity, to keep at once the bad from sinking as low, and the good from rising to as lofty a height, as would be the case if their lives were wholly by themselves and wholly free. Social life is some thing like a sheet of ice upon the surface of a pond. It holds up the stones which are frozen in it so that they shall not sink, and it holds down the light, ambitious particles so that they shall not start up and soar away into the clouds. As we look round upon the actual life of society, can we not all see both of these powers at work? We shall see some men of whom we feel sure that, if the restraints and decencies of social life were broken up, they would drop like lead. They are held out of wickedness by the standards and habits of the times and places where they live. And then there are other men who, you fear, are held back from any great and venturesome enterprise, from any exceptional characteristic virtue, by these same restraints. If they were living alone, you feel certain that they would break out into lofty thoughts and blaze into original and splendid works, which are impossible here in this average of life.

Very often this equalizing, levelling power of social life vexes and burdens us. It gives an unreal look to people’s virtues. Who knows whether they are essentially, intrinsically good? Who knows whether they be not stones which, if the ice were melted, would fall and sink? And it leaves us always in doubt how much we may be losing in the remarkable men or actions which society is stifling. We have this same feeling about ourselves. We are not doing our worst; and though our best may not be much we are not doing even that. We are living a level decency, a tame monotony and uniformity. Society seems to be pressed flat and thin between two great hands; one pressing up from beneath and keeping the failures of society from falling very low; the other pressing down from above, and keeping the saints and heroes of society from rising very high.

Do you recognize the description? And what shall save us from the evil influence without losing for us the good? What shall set us free to be our best, and yet preserve the power which keeps us from being our worst? Not a moody retirement, a selfish isolation, but a higher consecration; not solitude, but some companionship higher and larger than our companionship with fellow-man, and yet including it, not inconsistent with it. And that must be a consecration to and a companionship with God. Sometimes, unless our lives have been exceptionally unhappy, we have seen a man or woman who seemed to us to almost realize an ideal of living; some one who lived in the world and yet was not its slave, who seemed to get out of society all the good it had to give, and leave its harm behind. While other men said, “This is all worthless and rotten,” and went off to crunch the crust of their own solitude, he staid where they had fled and ate the food which they called poison and throve upon it. It seemed as if for him the upward pressure on society was kept, so that it was a constant safeguard to him; and the downward pressure was removed, so that he could always freely go forth and be his best.

You who know it most thoroughly will bear me witness that there are not many such men or women in our social life. But there are some; and what is their secret? How does it come that they move free and erect where we go slavishly crouching? Is it not simply this: that over and above, surrounding and including all their life with fellow-men, there is a life with God? That consecration overrules every devotion to society. All social relations come as His helps and ordinances; and so, just as the business man, doing his business for a purpose beyond his business, gets from his business its rich cultures, and goes unpoisoned by its lower influences; so the man or woman of society, living a life with God above and round the life with fellow-men, finds in this last a steady support and help, and yet never a restraint to bind the soul from any most ambitious and characteristic flight to which God beckons it.

This is the secret. This was what made the social life of Jesus Christ the absolutely perfect type of a man’s living with his fellow-men. He came as close to them as possible; but always He was closer to His Father. He loved them, but He loved God more, and them in God. He loved the places where they gathered, but when He sat among them in the very centre of their densest crowds, through the people who pressed around Him there came like an unseen ether the subtler spiritual presence of God. It was not that He sat there touching them but not thinking about them, present in body but absent in the spirit. He was close to them; closer than man ever came to men. But through them came to Him the farther and deeper companionship of God. And so the result was that, while they helped His life, they never hampered it; while from them and His work for them He drew the stimulus that kept Him from discouragement, He constantly outwent them. All was free, upon the upper side, for Him to pass out into the company of God.

I think that this should be the picture of all social life. I have said that you ought not to live alone. Indeed you ought not. You ought to live with your brethren, as close to them, as clearly in the midst, as you can get. But to live with them rightly, you must have the secret which Christ had, the secret of a companionship with God surrounding and pervading all your companying with your brethren. Unless you have that, you will be bound by the society that saves you; and while your social life preserves you from .flagrant wickedness, it will also imprison you from active and enterprising goodness.

And here comes in a word upon the other side, a word to those who make as well as to those who receive the influences of social life. It is the object of true social life to keep men from sin, and to help them to their best development. It is a question for you all to ask how far social life, as it exists among us, is doing both these things. That it is doing the first to some good extent, I freely grant. It is setting the weak wills and unstable passions of many young people into the stability of its fixed standards, and saving them from flagrant vice by its prescriptive decencies. Is it doing the other thing as well? Is it helping every character to its own best development? Is it so free upon the upper side that any man or woman fired by some new impulse to do a work for God that is new, fresh, sincere, and personal may do it with the cordial encouragement of a society that delights to see any man lead the way to some goodness better than its own? As society stamps some vices as disgraceful, has it no tendency to stamp some virtues as quixotic? As one young person after another comes into it, is he met at its door by the spirit of the society which he is entering, saying to him: “You must not do foul and dishonest things here, for they are disgraceful; but you may be just as good, as pure, as truthful, as Christlike as you will, and we will like you all the better.” Is it not rather a spirit saying something like this: “You must not lie or steal or be wantonly foul here, for it is vulgar; but, just as much, you must not be overgood, nor say too much of Christ, nor think too much of God, nor strike any new or original note of manliness and truth, for it is troublesome.

Here are our iron plates, indicating the greatest virtue and the greatest vice allowable. Lay yourself here between them, and the softer you are the sooner we will press you into shape.” It becomes those who have influence and leadership in our society, to ask which of these is the greeting with which the newcomer is welcomed to the coveted and crowded halls.

All that I have said about life in general has its peculiar application to the Christian life. There, too, there is a solitary and a social way of living; and there, too, the social life is necessary for the fullest health and steadiness. A man becomes a Christian. The Bible calls that, as you know, his being “born again.” His life begins — the life with Christ, the life in God. How shall he live that life — alone, as if there were no soul but his attempting it; drawing its strength and its supply only out of its own personal relations with its great Supplier? Sometimes such solitude is forced upon the Christian. Sometimes the world of fellow-believers seems to fall away and leave him travelling alone a road that seems to stretch itself on and on as if no feet had ever trod that path before him. But the Christian life was not meant to live in such a solitude for ever, nor is it suited to it. It is a social life. All its movements suggest and prophesy a brotherhood. That Brotherhood of Believers is the Christian Church.

Now, the Christian Church is to the single disciple what all society is to the solitary man, only upon a higher plane. We have said that society keeps men from indolent self-indulgence, from defiant recklessness, and from affectation; and that, the more I watch it, seems to me just what the Church does for the Christian. You are a servant of Christ. I may believe it, though you never said it, though your faith never took any of those great sacramental utterances which would send it in to swell the chorus of all the Christian faith in all the ages. You say, “Why should I take any place in the visible Church? WThat have I to do with Baptism, Confirmation, Communion?” It ought to make you solemn when you remember how earnestly, how impressively, how lovingly, in the very last precious moments of His precious life, your Lord commanded — nay, begged — you to do what you have never done. It ought to stir your conscience when you see this world, which needs your Christian influence, robbed of it by your silence. But I put all that aside. I speak to you only of yourself. If this unuttered faith of yours is always growing sluggish, losing its manly courage, making excuses for itself; if it is self-asserting, scornful of the judgments and holy standards of the world’s long Christian experience; if it loves eccentricity and affects singularity; be sure here is what you need, — to set that feeble, fluttering, fantastic faith of yours into the Body of the Faith which is historic, old as the Lord’s own words, and yet forever new as the experience of the last young believer, — to put your solitude into the safety of a society, to enshrine your Christianity in the Church.

The Church, like all true society, is strength, but it is not restraint. If she becomes restraint, she loses her true character. The ideal Church is one that shall hold her children strongly on the lower side, and set them free as heaven on the upper side; keep them that they do not fall into sin, but hold her doors wide open, — nay, cast her roof away that they may rise to any unexpected goodness or truth to which their Lord, for whom she holds them, may summon them. For the strength and safety of the faith you have, for the hope and promise of the higher faith that you might have, the higher life that you might live, I stand, as it were, at the door of that Church, and in the name of your Master and mine, I invite you to enter in.

We look around, and all the world is full of fellowship. Solitude is everywhere unnatural and bad. All things seek their companionships. The atoms gravitate to masses everywhere. And so men seek each other. The impulse is so superficial often; but it might be so profound! Let us not trifle with so vast and universal a desire as this which brings us into constant fellowship. Not for mere pastime or amusement, not by vague instinct, but by reasonable purpose, let us have to do with each other’s life. Living in society, yet always keeping clear our own personality within all, and the higher companionship of God around all; helping and being helped; steady ing ourselves on others, and helping up others as they fall, while all together we are going on to Christ; — if that should come, all the old questions between society and the Church would be settled forever. Such a society as that would be the Christian Church. We could not be too deeply in the very centre of a society like that. Its light would be the present glory, its music the present voice, of God; and already in this city of the earth we should be living in the New Jerusalem.