F RIENDSHIP is a religion between two human souls; the truest religion is a friendship between the human and the divine. Revelations of the divinity in humanity occur when God is the great personal friend of man. These higher discoveries occur according to the same law that operates as between human beings in a spiritual friendship when each makes a revelation not only to each, but of each and within each other. There is no such challenge, at once awakening and commanding to all that is chivalric, sweet and strong, as is offered by a true friend approaching the soul of a man through these ministries. It is impossible to keep the forces of friendship out of the realm of religion. Whenever any fine soul touches the subject, he forces his thought of it into the region of ethics, adoration, worship. It is only the greatest literature that sounds truly the keynote of friendship. Antony may have over-estimated Caesar, but Shakespeare, greater than either of them, was too fine a dramatist to withhold from the tongue of Antony greater words concerning him than the Caesar of history will bear. And so one of the profoundest utterances ever made concerning man, or about friendship, was that which the silvery speech of Antony bore, when standing near The Rev. Frank W. Gunsaulus The Rev. Frank W. Gunsaulus Caesar's corse, his voice faltered with his feelings, as he said: He was my friend, faithful and just to me. So also when our American poet of the abstract utters something of what he knows of this relationship of souls, he simply puts into the language of the ideal what Shakespeare made real in the eloquence of Mark Antony: Oh, friend, my bosom said, Through Thee alone the sky is arched. All things through Thee take nobler form, The mill-round of our fate appears A sun-path in Thy worth. Me, too, Thy nobleness hath taught The fountains of my hidden life Are through Thy friendship fair. All such words, taken like these-one from the real, the other from the ideal-will illustrate the fact that friendship worthy the name is founded on truth. If, as one poet sings, a friendship be streaked with colors of the ideal, it must be a true ideal, lest the friendship become a beautiful dream, which, however, ends in nightmare. Such an ideal there must be, else friendship can not be true. For with all the roots that every friendship has in the real world, and with all the demands which every friendship makes on the soil of practical life in which it is rooted, it is a sad lie if somewhere it blooms not. How can it blossom without a true ideal? So the simplest beginning of a human friendship begins in the ground of service, one soul to another, and it operates like a germinating seed on the faith that there is atmosphere, and a sun, and a sky above the ground in which it shall bloom. In friendship, as in all the life of man, the practical seems to suppose the ideal, as everywhere the finite hints the infinite and the human yearns for the divine. He who shuts off the infinite sky from above me is most untrue to me. It is as fatal to my true life, as though he had taken away the finite world from under me. Friendship, like life, must have the practical and real for its rootage, the poetic and ideal for its fruitage. All friendship, like all life, has its growth between these realms. It spreads its arms and shoots forth its leaves in that air which is the interflow of what is and what ought to be the real and the ideal. It cannot separate itself from either. If my supposed friend imagines that he can cut loose from the world and human life as it is, and befriend me by dwelling altogether in what ought to be, he deceives himself, and I find him to be but the ghost of a The Rev. Frank W. Gunsaulus |