Article March 20, 1902 Issue

Our Companions

The Outlook

No man is ever absolutely alone. In the deserts every man is accompanied by his own past. So long as memory, which makes a man contemporary with his past and makes the past a part of the present, and imagination, which projects the past into the future with all manner of new combinations, exist, no man can be in absolute solitude. Temptation comes to a man as searchingly, and sometimes even more overpoweringly, in solitude than in a crowd. Solitary as every man sometimes feels himself to be, detached and lonely, lost in a crowd of other personalities like his own, no real solitude is possible; so long as men stand in relations to the world, to one another, and to God they must always be in company.

In the sight of the Infinite it is always present; there is no past or future, and they who have gone before in the long generations of the dead, and they who are to come after, with the men and women of to-day, constitute one innumerable, unbroken company. This sublime fact, the glorious incarnation of the idea of immortality, is rarely realized by men, but it exists as a fact in their lives, if not in their consciousness. Sir Philip Sidney, the image of all nobleness, said, "They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts." This is the beautiful and impressive side of the picture; there is another and darker side; he might have added, "They are never alone who are accompanied by evil thoughts." But, to put it more accurately, no man is ever alone so long as thoughts, good or evil, noble or debasing, accompany him. He is not solitary; and since every man must think, and to every man, however isolated, thoughts come and go in countless troops and in unbroken succession, no man is ever without company.

The real question is, "What kind of company shall he keep?" That depends upon what he selects; for, in a very true sense, every man creates his own world. Every man is born into a vast workshop full of materials and tools. His business in life is to select the material upon which and the tools with which he shall work; and then, out of his own imagination, he fashions his world, and, as the product of what he thinks and does and feels, that world passes out of the realm of the imagination into reality, and becomes his world. So every man creates his companionship according to his thought. If his thought is fine and generous and high, he is in the best company and the most inspiring; if it is mean and low and vile, no matter what deserts surround him, he is in base and vile and ignoble fellowship; it is a matter of character. Companionship does not depend upon accident, but upon selection. Every man makes his own friends; and it is this fact which gives the profounder truth to the old proverb, "A man is known by the company he keeps."—The Outlook.

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