Re-Birth into Personality
Before birth a child is dependent entirely on his mother for all that makes up his life. At birth he becomes an individual human being, physically liberated from his mother. But he is still unborn mentally; for his soul, during childhood, is entirely dependent on others for his impulses; he is still in the spiritual womb of environment. A day comes when he awakes to become an independent free personality, to think for himself, to will for himself, to direct his own destiny, and to consciously relate himself to God and his fellows.
There is a beautiful, and very old, custom among the American Indians which illustrates this experience. When a boy comes to manhood, he is sent into the wilderness alone to fast for four days. Arriving in the solitude of the mountain, he begins singing this song: “O God! here, poor and needy, I stand.” He continues to sing this appealing heart cry in the hope that he may find himself in fellowship with God, that be may rightly face the mystery of life and destiny, that he may discover himself as an independent, free personality, responsible to God for all his future career.
The Eternal Solitude of the Soul
If there be any truth which Christianity has brought out into marvelous clearness before the human soul, it is this, that each soul really lives in awful solitude beneath the eye of God; that in the soul within us we possess a principle of imperishable life, which, moreover, is capable of infinite bliss and of unspeakable agony. Now the world endeavors in its literature, in its modes of language and thought, to lower this master truth by suggesting to us, what indeed is true, but what does not include that other truth, that we are members of a family, of a town, of a nation. It would fain make us forget that we live and that we shall die—alone.
—Henry P. Liddon.