Vesper Talks to Girls. Laura A. Knott
to other obligations and less responsive to the call of duty, beware of it! If your love for one has lessened your affection for your other friends, it is not a good friendship. Friendship should expand the heart, not contract it. Everything savoring of narrowness and exclusiveness is a hindrance. You must love your friend so much that you love the whole world better because of her. You must respect and reverence her so truly that all human nature is dignified and ennobled through her.
“All things through thee take nobler form
And look beyond the earth;
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.”
What is the place of the emotional element in friendship? Not the chief place, it may be confidently asserted. In the richest and most enduring friendships, other things are of more importance. Not that there is an absence of emotion—far from it. The danger, however, of over-emphasizing emotion is that the friendship may descend to mere sentimentality. What is more important than emotion in friendship, do you ask? The unity of spirit that gradually takes place in a fine friendship; the feeling that each is perfectly understood by the other; and the knowledge that each can depend upon the other’s loyalty in any and every emergency of life.
It usually takes years to learn how to be a true friend and often some hard experiences are necessary to teach us to appreciate our friends. Sometimes we look back upon the wasted years, and, thinking how rich and happy they might have been, we cry out, “If I had only known!” And sometimes, alas! our friends have to be taken from us ere we learn their worth. Then, as we sit alone with our thoughts, with what a heartache do we remember our every failure to measure up to the stature of the perfect friend!
If you would be a true friend and if you would appreciate your friends now, without waiting for costly lessons, ask yourself some searching questions. Do you care more about what you can get out of your friendship or about what you can put into it? Do you think more about being served or about serving? Do you wonder whether your friend loves you enough or whether you cannot love her more? Do you never imagine yourself slighted or neglected or misunderstood? If you can answer these questions as they ought to be answered, you are on the way to a perfect friendship. Phillips Brooks, who was famous for his friendships, wrote, “Surely there is no more beautiful sight to see in all this world than the growth of two friends’ natures, who, as they grow old together, are always fathoming with newer needs deeper depths of each other’s life and opening richer views of one another’s helpfulness.”
Does friendship cost anything? Yes. All the best things in the world cost something and only they can have them who are willing to pay the price. In its highest and most enduring form friendship belongs, as I have said, only to the highest and finest natures. So much does it cost that no others will—perhaps no others can—pay the price. What is the price? That is the point—one never knows the cost in advance. Whatever the price, however, the true friend is ready to pay it. No sacrifice is too great to make for a real friend.
Yet, sad to say, many a friendship makes shipwreck even though no heroic, sublimely self-sacrificing deeds were demanded of either of the parties to it. The things that would have kept it alive were so little, so easy, but they were too much! After your school days are over and you and your friend have gone your separate ways, it will take time to write those weekly letters. Will your friendship be worth enough to you to pay that price? And by and by, when new interests have come into your life, it will be even less easy to perform those offices of friendship which must not be neglected if friends are to continue to have any share in each other’s lives. To keep up the pretty customs of old—to send the birthday gift, the Christmas remembrance, the occasional message of warm and unchanging love—all these things take time in such a busy world! And so “the little rift within the lute” appears, which, ever widening, will slowly silence all. It is not a cheerful story, but it is the history of many a friendship which had believed itself eternal. Some of our early friendships we outgrow, and it is best that we should. It is part of “putting away childish things.” But if we realized what we were doing, it is inconceivable that we should ever depart so far from the dreams of our youth as to let any true friendship go.
Unless you are very watchful and loving, then, the old friends will, one by one, drop out of your life and make no sign. I beg that you will see to it that there is at least a handful of them left. They should be the real ones, who genuinely loved you and always will. “Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.” Never let them go. Let no changing tides of fortune sweep them from you. Be very patient with them as you expect them to be with you. Make allowances for the innumerable appearances of neglect, saying to yourself that they are only appearances. Friends who bear and forbear with each other in this way will find that the friendship grows deeper and stronger with each succeeding year.
If you really want to be such a friend as I have described, I can think of nothing that will help you more than to read over often the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians, that matchless chapter on love, and to try to make your affection as near as possible like that which he describes. Nowhere else, in the Bible or out of it, have we so clear, so true, so moving a description of love. Just to read it over brings a glow to the heart and a kindlier feeling toward the whole human race. Let the love that you give to your friends be the love that suffereth long and is kind; that envieth not, that seeketh not its own, is not easily provoked; that beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things; above all, that never faileth.
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