RUE friendship is one of the most delightful sweeteners of human life. With many life would scarcely be worth the living, if it were bereft of the solace and the various helps of a well-assorted friendship. It is more than a mere luxury; it is one of the first necessaries which a noble heart most earnestly craves.

Addison describes friendship as "a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another." Surely friendship includes a great deal more than this. The mutual benevolence of any two kind hearts will secure that each shall seek to promote the good of the other, though nothing like hearty friendship may be possible between them. How much more profoundly does this word of Moses appreciate the unequalled tenderness of the relationship-"Thy friend, which is as thine own soul." "A friend is a second self," said Pythagoras, in a similar spirit, and coming wonderfully near to the inspired words. "Whom I was wont to call not mine, but me," says one of our own poets. This estimate of friendship is fittingly illustrated by the anecdote of Alexander and Hephestion. When the mother of Darius entered the tent of the conqueror of her son, to beseech his clemency, she flung herself at Hephestion's feet, who seemed to her to be more king-like than his companion. Alexander's friend drew back in confusion, and the kneeling queen, discovering her mistake, was alarmed for its consequences. "Fear nothing," said the conqueror frankly, desirous to set them both at ease; 66 you have made no mistake, for he also is Alexander." Perhaps he had learned this lesson from his tutor, Aristotle, who, when asked what a friend was, made reply, "One soul dwelling in two bodies."

Friendships of this confiding and whole-hearted kind should not, cannot indeed, be hastily formed. "Before you make a friend, eat a bushel of salt with him," says the proverb; and experience shows that friendships of the highest grade are not otherwise attainable. There is, indeed, a friendship of mere convenience a relationship which is the most common and the most easily procurable of all earthly things-but it has nothing to do with a true union of hearts, and is therefore no genuine friendship at all. It may serve to amuse, it may even be useful for lubricating the smaller wheels of the social machine; but in its personal influence it is not elevating, and it can never be counted on as permanent. It is not elevating; for, being based on mere selfishness, it cannot destroy the selfishness on which it rests. Neither is it likely to last; for the convenience which gave it birth may change to-morrow, and the alteration of circumstances will readily dissolve a partnership so heartless.

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There is also a sort of universal friendliness, which belongs to certain temperaments, agreeable indeed, and so far useful, but it is very shallow, and we must on no account confound it with the friendship of which we speak. He who is equally the friend of everybody is really the friend of none, and his amiability is more likely to spring from his vanity than from his love. As the old Greek proverb has it, “ Friends, but no friend." In this, as in many other matters, depth and breadth are incompatible; and the man who seems to give his heart to all has no single friend whom he regards as his own soul. Like the unspeakable boon of a father's tender affection and of a mother's inalienable love, the sweetnesses of highest friendship are allotted to us in very stinted measure. There is no limit, indeed, to the number of friendships of a certain kind which a man may form, but the friends who are each of them to us as our own soul must necessarily be few; though one need not querulously say, with Sir Philip Sidney, that "it is doubtful whether friendship be a thing indeed, or but a word."

Every one is not fitted, either, for forming or for enjoying such unions. Only in proportion to the completeness of a man's character is he capable of enjoying the sweets of a true friendship, or of discharging its duties. We are often told that there is honour among thieves, but nothing could be more false. The worthless in general have scarcely any sense of honour, and they owe the slight cohesion which is found among them to mere mutual convenience. Thieves rarely scruple to sell to the police those whom they call their friends; and were it not so, the police would not be half so efficient as they are. As we ascend in the moral scale, we find that friendship becomes more and more a possibility, but its loftiest forms are to be found only among the noblest types of character. A German proverb tells us that " one foe is too many, and a hundred friends are too few;" insinuating that human hatred is so much more active than human love. It may be so with the commonplace, every-day style of friendship, in which a man, for mere convenience' sake, attaches himself to his fellow; but it is otherwise in those unions of heart with heart-unions which involve the man's gift of himself in all his entirety, and in which friend becomes to friend even as his own soul.

Such intimate and precious friendships thrive best between parties who do not too closely resemble each other. Up to a certain point dissimilarity helps, rather than hinders, such unions, but the dissimilarity must not be too great. An inequality in worldly circumstances, for instance, is favourable to the development of such attachments. In this case the two parties are not so likely to be rivals, or to find that their interests

come into collision in any sort of way. Differences of character and disposition, also, when they are not too wide, are equally helpful to the formation of the strongest friendships. We delight most in a friend who is rather the supplement than the duplicate of ourselves. We like to be strong on the side on which he is weak, that we may have the joy of sustaining his weakness with our strength; and we like him to be strong where we are confessedly weak, that we too may receive his loving help in return. Hugh Miller likens friendship to a ball-and-socket-joint, in which two souls are fitted for each other, not because they resemble, but because they correspond. Of course, the dissimilarity must not be too great, else the two parties shall be incapable of mutual appreciation; but if their predominant dispositions and leading tastes be sufficiently similar, they shall enjoy communion all the better that the miner features of character are considerably unlike. And their intercourse shall, in this case, not only be more pleasant, but more profitable. When friends resemble too closely, they have by disposition a tendency to the same kinds of faults; they are therefore prone to spare, or even to overlook, those faults in their friend since they overlook them in themselves. And thus the mutual influence of the two friends serves to confirm rather than to check the faulty tendency in each other.

True friendship, at least among Christians, is to endure for ever. "I would not give a sixpence," says one, "for the friendship which death can break up." Like the attachment between Augustine and Alypius, a Christian's friendship should be "cemented with the blood of Christ." "Blessed is he who loveth thee," says the same Augustine, "and his friend in thee, and his enemy for thee." When affection is thus sanctified, its indulgence affords the happy subject of it the maximum of enjoyment and of profit here, and then he needs never dread the prospect of its loss. What delightful anticipations are thus opened up to the humble believer! If earthly friendships be so helpful and so sweet, what shall be the everlasting fellowship in glory with the just made perfect? What shall it be to have restored to us for ever the dearest object of our love-the friend whom we looked on as our own soul, but now made so much more loving, and so much more lovely? What shall it be to form new friendships with the choicest spirits of every age, so excellent when here, but made perfect yonder; to sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob as our friends; and, above all, to be with Christ as his friend, which shall be far better? Let the blessed hope give an increased tenderness, and tenacity, and sanctity to our friendships now, and let us seek to bring their present stages into perfect harmony with what we expect them yet to become. "Thine own friend and thy father's friend forsake not." How paltry and insufficient do all minor hindrances to friendship, such as change of circumstances, or even personal infirmities, look in the light of an everlasting communion of perfect love!

Youth is generally the time for forming strong at

tachments. The young heart is peculiarly open; and it can enjoy companionships so incongruous, that age, more hard to please, could scarcely endure them. But while the young heart more readily admits of new friendships, advancing years cling with the stronger tenacity to friendships already formed. When, therefore, the friendships which are formed in youth are suitable, they become the cherished inheritance of middle life; and the affections becoming every year more conservative, can scarcely endure the thought of losing them. The wine of true friendship thus mellows and strengthens by increasing age.

"Each year to ancient friendship adds a ring,
As to an oak, and precious more and more,
Without deservingness or help of ours,

They grow, and silent wider spread each year
Their unbought ring of shelter or of shade."

This is especially the case with Christian friendships. Nothing cements the union of heart to heart like the common endurance of great sorrows, the cherishing of the same engrossing aims, and, above all, hearty communion in earnest prayer; and the fiery discipline of half a lifetime secures that warm Christian friends shall have enough of these, to fuse their hearts into one inseparable mass. And as this discipline of sorrow makes the love of each more needful and more helpful to the other, the two lives become interwoven into one web, like warp and woof; and you must destroy the cloth ere you can separate the threads which compose it. In such a case the friendship has become a necessity; and either would as soon dream of putting out his eyes as of dismissing the other from his love.

"And whate'er may be the friendship
We may gain in after-years,
None can come between the compact
Which has been annealed with tears."

But if we would enjoy such friendships in the autumn of life, we must sedulously cultivate them in the spring and summer. The plant is one of slow growth, and it is easily blighted during its earlier stages. As it grows older it grows ever hardier. Like all precious things, however, the cultivation of it will cost much pains; and unless a man be prepared to pay the price, he need not expect to obtain the coveted merchandise. And what the price is let the poet tell :

Can gold gain friendship? Impudence of hope!
As well mere man an angel might beget;
Love, and love only, is the loan for love.
Lorenzo, pride repress, nor hope to find

A friend, but what has found a friend in thee.
All bless the purchase, few the price will pay;
And this makes friends such miracles below."

Sacrifices must be made, great and frequent sacrifices; but the blessing aimed at is worth them all. Nay, since the sacrifices are those which love makes, they more than recompense the person who makes them with their own peculiar consolations, even though they should bring him nothing more. And if, through our heedlessness, we unhappily mar a valued friendship,

especially in its earlier stages, the loss is scarcely to be repaired. The delicate bloom has been rubbed off the peach, and nothing will replace it; the trusting confidence has been shaken, and its stability will henceforth be more precaricus. We should therefore guard our friendships like the apple of the eye; for " a brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city." And if we have not such a friend as has been spoken of, let us do all that we honestly can to get one; if happily we have such a friend, let us do all that we honestly can to keep him.

Such unions are more likely to be formed, or, when formed, to be continued; and they are sure to be more useful, when each of the two parties is concerned about his duty to his friend, rather than about his friend's duty to him. Intercourse carried on in this spirit cannot fail to be both delightful and elevating. And to encourage our endeavours after it, let us remember that, of any two friends, it is always he who loves the most, and sacrifices the most, and is most devotedly attentive to the claims of friendship, that is the happier. He enjoys the fellowship, and profits by it, on a scale as much beyond the other as his love is greater. It is always so in everything that appertains to the province of the affections. In this region the dominating law is, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." It is the loving man rather than the beloved, who is the happy man. This is one of the open secrets of human life;-open, since all may read it in the experience of each during any single day; yet secret, since so few appear to learn it. We need not therefore expect to enjoy the blessedness of a lofty friendship apart from this self-abandonment to the claims of love. Every man would be glad to take, but every man is not prepared to give: however, on these selfish principles, the nobler attachments are impossible.

The practical uses of friendship are various and most important. There are many ways in which help may often be rendered in time of need,- forms of help which, without some degree of humiliation, could scarcely be received except from one whom a man regarded as his own soul. And such emergencies serve to test the strength and the tenderness of friendship: to test it, indeed, on both sides; for he who through pride refuses to accept the loving aid of a friend in time of actual need, is as untrue to the friendship as the other would have been, if he through selfishness had declined to help.

The mere intercourse of true friends is, by virtue of their mutual love, one of the sweetest delights of life. "Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart; so doth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel." "With friends," says the ardent Chrysostom, "even poverty is pleasant. Words cannot express the joy which a friend imparts; they alone can know who have experienced it. A friend is dearer than the light of day; and it were better for us that there were no sun than that we should

be without friends." And grace, by making the heart more tender, enables it to enjoy with keener relish the delights of a high-toned friendship. We see how Paul

felt when, on coming to Troas, he missed the anticipated pleasure of meeting Titus: "Furthermore, when I came to Troas, to preach Christ's gospel, and a door was opened unto me of the Lord, I had no rest in my spirit, because I found not Titus my brother " (2 Cor. ii. 12, 13). And what irritable man has not again and again felt the power of that inimitable sedative, the calm speech of a judicious friend? Unable, by himself, to look on his injuries, except through the magnifying lens of a morbid sensitiveness, let him talk over his troubles with a wise and trusted friend, and how speedily does he find himself brought back to sobriety and peace! As if by magic, the mountain-like injury dwindles into a paltry molehill, and he wonders whence has come the pigment that made all things look so yellow to his jaundiced eyes.

But far more important than the mere enjoyment afforded us by our friends, is the help which they render towards the shaping of our characters. No man would be precisely what he is, had it not been for the influence of his friends. The best of men could scarcely have been so good, or the worst of men so bad, or even the mediocre so very colourless, without the assistance of his friends. There is no moral power in social life more potent than this; hence the proverb, "Tell me what thy friends are, and I will tell thee what thou art thyself." In his early manhood, Hugh Miller, writing to a young companion, says: "I deem my intimacy with you the most important affair of my life. I have enjoyed more from it than from anything else, and have been more improved by it than by all my books." In a similar tone, the celebrated Clarendon confesses: "Next to the immediate blessing and providence of Almighty God, I owe all the little I know, and the little good that is in me, to the friendship and conversation I have still been used to, of the most excellent men in their several kinds that lived in that age." "Some men," says Socrates, as reported by Xenophon, "some men have a fancy for a fine horse, or a dog or a bird: what I fancy and take delight in is friends of a superior kind. If I know anything I teach it to them; I send them to any one by whom I think they may be improved. In company with them I turn over and explore the treasures of the wise men of old which have been left written in books; and if we find anything good we pick it out, and we think it a great gain if we can be beneficial to one another." And when it is carried out in this spirit, such intercourse cannot fail to be as profitable as it is pleasant; for “as iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." But whatever be the spirit in which friendly intercourse is carried on, it is silently but constantly giving its permanent shape to our characters; and the young can scarcely be too much alive to the fact that their entire future greatly depends on the silent influence of those whom they now accept as friends.

The most trying, though it is also one of the most important offices of friendship, lies in reproof. We are naturally so inclined to flatter ourselves, to magnify our very moderate excellences, and to ignore our most notice

able blemishes, that it is hard to attain to any tolerable degree of self-knowledge without the help of others. A mirror will assist a man to see his face much as others see it; but where shall he find a mirror which will faithfully reveal to him the defects and blemishes of his individual character? An enemy with his severe censures and culumnies may serve this purpose occasionally; a service so very valuable to a wise man, that its usefulness will more than repay him for any pain which it may occasion. But few are able to profit by these ill-natured censures. They are so much exaggerated, that a man, instead of setting himself patiently to separate the precious from the vile, and to allow for the elements of truth which underlie the ungracious criticisms, has a plausible pretext for casting the whole aside as a mass of falsehood. Here comes into practical operation the peculiar usefulness of a faithful friend. He can render a similar kind of service more efficiently and much more pleasantly than an enemy can. He has not the same temptation to exaggerate, and we are not so extremely jealous about his statements. Faithful are the healing wounds which he inflicts; and when a true friend is called to inflict these wounds, he himself suffers more than the wounded man does. Alas! that faithfulness of this kind is so rare among us, so seldom ventured on, and so coldly welcomed.

It would be wrong, however, to blame only the one party for the general neglect of this great duty and privilege of friendship. Here, as in so many other cases of failure, there are faults on both sides. Why is it that, as a rule, it is so very difficult to give the gentlest reproof, even when it is manifestly needed? and why are kind-hearted men so reluctant to give it, but because the man who might be benefited by the reproof is so unwilling to learn his faults? It is scarcely one in a hundred who really wishes help to reform himself; the remaining ninety-nine want only to be flattered; and if a friend were to exercise towards them the noblest office of true friendship, they would be ready to feel disgust, and to dissolve the disagreeable relationship. Of course it is in all cases a most delicate matter to show a friend his faults; and when it is done, it should be done not only in love, and as a duty, but in manifest love, and as a duty which needs much self-denial to discharge it. And a repayment of the service in the same kind of coin should always be modestly desired and heartily appreciated. But it is only the higher kinds of friendship that can thrive by means of intercourse of this nature. Commonplace friendship is hollow and selfish; and a friend is too often a man's second self, only in the ignoble sense of being, next to himself, the man's chief flatterer. Such a friend seeks his own ends, not the best welfare of his brother; and these ends he can best secure by flattery,-a flattery which is none the less real that it is not direct but tacit. "You cannot have me both for a friend and a flatterer," said Phocion to Antipater; and it would be well to remember that the two functions are irreconcilable.

is a second self; and when we thus double ourselves, we double our chances of being hit by the arrows of affliction. The love which makes another to us as our soul, makes the trials of that beloved one our own trials; and in this way a lofty friendship exposes a man to griefs which selfishness is spared. But there is something elevating, nay, there is something sweet, in such sympathetic sorrows; and he who thus weeps with his weeping friend finds more calm enjoyment in his tears than the selfish man ever found in his selfish pleasures. Thus afflicted was Paul when he found that Epaphroditus was afflicted; and thus joyful was he in his friend's recovery. "For indeed he was sick nigh unto death; but God had mercy on him; and not on him only, but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow" (Phil. ii. 25).

The world has witnessed, over and over again, magnificent specimens of lofty friendship. How many an eye has moistened as it read the touching words of Ruth to Naomi, so expressive of all the deep affection which we suppose a high-souled friendship to include: "And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me" (Ruth i. 16, 17). We are all familiar, too, with the tender attachment of David and Jonathan, who each loved other as he loved his own soul; and most of us have been thrilled by the touching lament pronounced by the bereaved mourner: "I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan ; very pleasant hast thou been unto me thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!" Classic story furnishes many noble specimens of friendship; and so do medieval and modern histories. Very beautiful is the narrative of the Christian friendship between Madame Guyon and her maid-servant. Without fee or reward, or prospect of earthly good, the devoted domestic attached herself to the person of her mistress, saying, "Go wherever the Lord may lead you, do whatever the Lord may bid you, I will go with you, and will find my service to him in serving you." And when, after they had wandered to many places in company, the mistress was cast into the dreaded Bastile for her alleged heresies, the maid followed as a matter of course; and the two friends lay in the same cell for many years. Happy are both the parties to such an attachment as this; but the happier of the two is that one whose friendship is the most loving and devoted.

But though friendships like these have never been altogether unknown, they have never been common. Such heights are attainable only by characters of peculiar excellence, and under favourable circumstances.