The Experience of Isolation.
I. It is a common complaint amongst us that we want sympathy. We are lonely, we say. If not actually solitary, we are solitary in feeling and in heart. In later life people make up their minds to this, as a condition of earthly life. They have fought against it in youth; they have deemed it intolerable; they have thought existence itself valueless without sympathy. Now and then they have fancied for a brief time that they had found a sympathy real and indestructible below, but they have outlived the hope; they have known perhaps many such hopes one by one, and they have outlived them all. It is well if they have not too much acquiesced in this experience. The young are too impatient, too imperious, in their demand for sympathy; the old are sometimes too tolerant, at least too fond, of isolation.
II. St. Paul's thirst for human love was not that sentimental, sickly, vague, purposeless thing which may sometimes amongst us take its name; it was not the case with him, as it too often is with us, that his heart's best affections were roving in quest of an object, and that until the object presented itself in some human form he was a restless and dissatisfied roan. St. Paul's best affections were engaged and fixed unalterably. The sympathy he sought was a sympathy in his work for Christ; the loneliness he bewailed was a loneliness in his care for Christ's people. And if sympathy like this be still, as it sometimes was with St. Paul, denied or interrupted, yet even then we shall learn, like him, in whatever state we are, therewith to be content. If we really love Christ and are trying day by day to serve Him, we have within us the root of all comfort and the spring of all sympathy. They who are united in Him are united really in one another.
C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians,p. 151.