fidelity. "All praise the faithful friend," is the testimony of an eminent folk-lore gatherer. "All praise to the faithful friend!" responds the world.

And thus along the centuries and out of every clime! From the torrid wastes of Sahara to the frozen peaks of Iceland, from the ancient seat of empire in the far East to the unsettled prairies of the still receding West, there sounds one voice of sense and sentiment, instinctive or inspired. Egyptian seer, and Hebrew lawgiver, and Greek philosopher, and Roman scholar, and Christian apostle, and Chinese sage, and Persian mystic, and Hindoo devotee, and Arab enthusiast, and Russian doubter, and German schoolman, and French skeptic, and Italian dreamer, and Spanish romancist, and Swiss theologian, and Norseland bard, and English and American essayist and poet, and every primitive teller of folk-lore tales from pole to pole,-all are at one in their emphatic testimony to the surpassing preciousness of the unselfish love and the unswerving fidelity of a human friend.

"What a thing friendship is, world without end!"

HILE friendship is by its very nature unselfish and out-going, friendship is also by its very nature a constant gainer through its loving expenditure of self. It receives by its outlay.

"Friendship renders prosperity more brilliant, while it lightens adversity by sharing it and making its burden common." It was Cicero who popularized this thought; although he re-phrased it from Euripides, and again it is cited in substance among the sayings of Confucius. Whoever may have first given currency to this idea, it has come down through the ages as the accepted epitome of the advantages of the expensive and remunerative relation of friendship.

"This communicating of a man's self to his friend," says Bacon, "works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves. For there is no man that imparteth his joys to his friend, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his griefs to his

friend, but he grieveth the less." Jeremy Taylor gives, as usual, an added finish to this figure, when he says: "A friend shares my sorrow and makes it but a moiety; but he swells my joy and makes it double. For so two channels divide the river and lessen it into rivulets, and make it fordable and apt to be drunk up at the first revels of the Sirian star; but two torches do not divide, but increase, the flame: and though my tears are the sooner dried up when they run upon my friend's cheeks in the furrows of compassion, yet when my flame hath kindled his lamp we unite the glories, and make them radiant like the golden candlesticks that burn before the throne of God, because they shine by numbers, by unions and confederations of light and joy."

So often and so earnestly has this truth of the incidental gain of a mutual friendship been urged in poetry and in prose, that many have recognized in its affirmations an inducement to friendship. But just so soon as a friendship is sought for its reward, that friendship falls short of being the friendship which has this reward. In all holiest service of love the truth remains, that "whosoever shall seek to gain his life shall lose it: but whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it." Friendship brings its largest returns to him who asks no return, but who lavishes love without a thought of gain.

Friendship is indeed profitable to him who exercises it, but its profit is in proportion to its expensiveness; and the expensiveness of friendship is cumulative and ceaseless. He, therefore, who would fain have the gains of friendship, may well ask himself if he is willing to make the necessary outlay of friendship. “Grant unto

us," asked two of the friends of Jesus, "that we may sit, one on thy right hand, and one on thy left hand, in thy glory. But Jesus said unto them, Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink? or to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" Many a longing one since the days of John and James has wished for the returns of a loving devotedness without counting the countless cost of such devotion.

'All like the purchase; few the price will pay :

And this makes friends such miracles below."

"Ye canna' be a guid freen' ohne peyin' for't," is a Scotch proverb with a truth for all peoples. The outlay in a real friendship's cost is threefold: an outlay in selfsurrender; an outlay in suffering for one's friend; an outlay in suffering from one's friend; and these three items of outlay are expensive and remunerating in the order of their naming.

Only through an unfailing forgetfulness of self is friendship a possibility; and self-forgetfulness is an expensive virtue. Publius Syrus said: "Enmity costs less than affection;" that is, there is no such outlay involved in the disregarding of others as in giving to others loving service. This is unmistakably true; but it is also true that affection gains more than enmity, and that there is no such personal advantage in loving only one's self as in loving another above one's self.

He who is a friend suffers with his friend because he is his friend. No suffering on one's own account can, indeed, be such a grievous trial to a friend as the suffering he endures when the one whom he loves best is a suf

ferer. He inevitably shares the burden of that suffering, and he would be glad if he could bear it wholly. Now the sharing, or, what is more, the bearing and engrossing, another's griefs and trials, demands a larger outlay of sympathy and of strength in endurance than is called for in carrying only one's personal sorrows; yet this very outlay is its own return accordingly, enlarging and strengthening the heart which it taxes.

This certainty of an increased outlay of heart's blood through the demands of an unselfish affection it is that prompted the selfish maxim of the icy-hearted Booddha: Let, therefore, no man love anything; loss of the beloved is evil. Those who love nothing and hate nothing have no fetters." And it is in answer to this disloyal cry of the self-insulating soul, that our Christian laureate rings back the rejoinder:

"I hold it true, whate'er befall;

I feel it when I sorrow most;

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all."

In no realm is it truer than in the realm of the affections that "it is more blessed to give than to receive;" and it is in illustration and in proof of this primal principle that in that outlay of self which makes one a friend there is gained that income of added capability of friendship, which, after all, is the chiefest reward of being a friend.

The uttermost outlay of an unselfish friendship is, however, liable to be in the loving endurance of suffering from a friend. And nothing better proves, or more surely advantages, a true friendship, than this willing outlay of self, when the need exists, under the inflictions of pain,