Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth.
For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures,
and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

--- Francis Bacon

It probably should not surprise us that there is so much confusion and feckless speculation about Tozer's missing friends. Today people don't know what a friend is for: witness the babblers who tell us their wives are their best friends. No wonder their friendships are less durable than their marriages. Their marriages are no great shakes, but careers depend on a certain pretense. No one measures a man by the friends he abandons or the associations he plies.

"A principle fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce." [Bacon, later in that same essay.] And with the low standing of friends in this society, it is not surprising that A. W. Tozer found himself alone.

But in addition to the discharge of the swellings of the heart, Bacon reminds those who know only the associations of convenience nurtured in the place of friendship that the joys of that discharge are doubled and the sorrows halved.

And beyond the fellowship of the affections, friendship is also "healthful for the understanding". When a man shares his thoughts with a friend, "he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly, he seeth how they look when they are turned into words: finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour's discourse, than by a day's meditation."

Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but these wounds are generally not those we desire from our spouses.

"A man cannot speak to his son but as a father; to his wife but as a husband; to his enemy but upon terms: whereas a friend may speak as the case requires, and not as it sorteth with the person."

Bacon again.

I believe that what we find in Aiden Wilson Tozer is not just a perceptive and forthright man; we find in his personal life an evidence of the truth he speaks. The loneliness is not just a fact about Tozer, it is about the church Tozer found himself in. It is not that his peers were worse preachers. He claimed to be a poor preacher, and I accept his witness. What we see in Tozer is the sort of man who would cherish the truth when he found it and a man who could say it out loud. To the discomfort of those around him.

It should not surprise us that he found few who could be com-passionate. Who shared his passions?

Who shares them now? Even today, where is the Society of the Burning Heart one might suggest to discharge the fullness of the heart? Perhaps the most uncomfortable question is not how Tozer could be lonely but how it is that we are not?