Norwich bulletin., 1916-09-11
CENTRAL BAPTIST PASTOR
 SPEAKS ON LONELINESS
Rev. Joel B. SIocum, D. D., Empha- sized the Loneliness of Conviction

Sunday evening at the Central Bap- tist church Rev. Joel B. Slocum, D. D., | preached on the topic, Loneliness, II. l Timothy ZIG. In part Rev. pr. Slo- | cum said:
 There is nothing so lonely as lone ] Illness. There are many kinds of lone 1 hness. There is, for instance, the | wastes may be the illimitable reaches of the land or the measureless ex- panses of the sea.
 Crossing this country to it's west ern ocean by the way of the Northern Pacific Railway, we saw amid the Bad Lands of Montana sunset on the prairie. These Bad Lands are well named. They look as though they had always been bad and always would be bad. They are thrown up into all though some eccentric sculptors had gone through this region and had carved out fantastic representations of almost everything under the sun. Down over these treeless deformities the sun poured his fading light until at last only the memory of the day remained along the western horizon. Only a few moments ago the cliffs and castles and temples and images of the Bad Lands had been touched with the dying glory of the day; but now the fires have gone out in the west and only a faint tinge of color reveals where the sun went down. Then night wide and deep and mighty settled down over those cheerless wastes. But as if to emphasize, as nothing else could do, the loneliness of the scene, there stood si1houetted against the violet splendor of the sky the profile of shepherd lad there alone with his sheep-mfles from the habitations of men. Whenever in my reading I come across the word lone liness-my mind instinctiveiy reverts to that never-to- be-forgotten scene. My cousin, Capt. Joshua Slocum, who sailed around the world almost twice in his vessel the Spray" abso- lutely alone, told me that he had some hard fights with solitude.
 To save himself from losing his mind he invented some little comfort ing fictions, one of which was that the pilot of the Pinta-one Of the yes sels of Columbus-was at the wheel when he himself could not De there. Those days that heightened out into weeks and months until he had spent | two years and more were days and years of solitude except for the com | panionship that he found at a few ports far apart.
 The solitude of the sea is a loneli- ness all of it's own. There was a | period of eighty consecutive days when he saw only his little vessel and the unbounded Indian ocean-nothing | else; no living thing; no smoke of a | steamer; no sail of another craft; no ! land; only the intending solitude of l the sea.
 i Then there is the loneliness of the crowd. There is nothing so lonely as the crowd. Everyone who has vis- tied a big city knows this. Multi tudes and muItitudes of people, but | no familiar face!.
 | But it is the loneliness of conviction i that l wish to emphasize tonight. The world has always had pioneers men who have blazed the trails; men who dreamed and pla-ned and
 build and failed amid the laughter of
 their fellows! Men whose means be-
 came the realities of other genera 1 tions! The old patriarchs were men
 of this sort. Abraham and Moses
 and Joshua and Samuel and David and Elijah and the other prophets.
 And Jesus lived the lonely life of one
 who lived ahead of His generation.
 And the men following him dreamed
 dreams and stood for their convic- tions and died in their tracks with l ter and Paul and the men of their
 day. Then the long line continued | through the centuries and we have
 Savonovola and Luther and Knox and Calvin and John Huss and the Wes- leys and Whitfield and Jonathan Ed wards and a host of others. They
 didn't all die at the stake. but they
 had the stuff in them to die any, where for their convictions.
 Paul in this text refers to his ap-
 pearance before the imperial court and how all foorsook him and he was
 there on his convictions, confessing
 where confession meant death. But
 there was One who stood by him and
 who kept the sacred tryst: ''L I am
 with you always. There is no lone
 Illness when men have Him for com
 panion and friend.
 Are you lonely? Do you want the joy that only He can give? Then comfort some other lonely hearts, an6
 into your heart He who was once a Man of sorrows and acquainted with
 grief will come.