others, through the evil speaking, or the envy, or the whispering
tongues that delight in scandal. Some mean natures rejoice in sowing
discord, carrying tales with just the slightest turn of a phrase, or
even a tone of the voice, which gives a sinister reading to an innocent
word or act. Frankness can always prevent such from permanently
wrecking friendship. Besides, we should judge no man, still less a
trusted friend, by a report of an incident or a hasty word. We should
judge our friend by his record, by what we know of his character. When
anything inconsistent with that character comes before our notice, it
is only justice to him to at least suspend judgment, and it would be
wisdom to refuse to credit it at all.
We sometimes wonder to find a friend cold and distant to us, and
perhaps we moralize on the fickleness and inconstancy of men, but the
reason may be to seek in ourselves. We cannot expect the pleasure of
friendship without the duty, the privilege without the responsibility.
We cannot break off the threads of the web, and then, when the mood is
on us, continue it as though nothing had happened. If such a breakage
has occurred, we must go back and patiently join the threads together
again. Thoughtlessness has done more harm in this respect than
ill-will. If we have lost a friend through selfish neglect, the loss
is ours, and we cannot expect to take up the story where we left off
years ago. There is a serene impudence about the treatment some mete
out to their friends, dropping them whenever it suits, and thinking to
take them up when it happens once more to suit. We cannot expect to
walk with another, when we have gone for miles along another way. We
will have to go back, and catch him up again. If the fault has been
ours, desire and shame will give our feet wings.
The real source of separation is ultimately a spiritual one. We cannot
walk with another unless we are agreed. The lapse of friendship is
often due to this, that one has let the other travel on alone. If one
has sought pleasure, and the other has sought truth; if one has
cumbered his life with the trivial and the petty, and the other has
filled his with high thoughts and noble aspirations; if their hearts
are on different levels, it is natural that they should now be apart.
We cannot stay behind with the camp-followers, and at the same time
fight in the van with the heroes. If we would keep our best friends,
we must go with them in sympathy, and be able to share their thoughts.
In the letters of Dean Stanley, there is one from Jowett to Stanley,
which brings out this necessity. "I earnestly hope that the
friendship, which commenced between us many years ago, may be a
blessing to last us through life. I feel that if it is to be so we
must both go onward, otherwise the tear and wear of life, and the
'having travelled over each other's minds,' and a thousand accidents
will be sufficient to break it off. I have often felt the inability to
converse with you, but never for an instant the least alienation.
There is no one who would not think me happy in having such a friend."
It is not, however, so much the equal pace of the mind which is
necessary, as the equal pace of the spirit. We may think about a very
brilliant friend that he will outstrip us, and outgrow us. The fear is
natural, but if there be spiritual oneness it is an unfounded fear.
Yet oft, when sundown skirts the moor,
An inner trouble I behold,
A spectral doubt which makes me cold,
That I should be thy mate no more.
But love is not dependent on intellect. The great bond of union is not
that both parties are alike in mind, but that they are akin in soul.
Mere intellect only divides men further than the ordinary natural and
artificial distinctions that already exist. There are endless
instances of this disuniting influence to be seen, in the contempt of
learning for ignorance, the derisive attitude which knowledge assumes
toward simplicity, the metropolitan disdain for provincial Galilee, the
_rabies theologica_ which is ever ready to declare that this people
that knoweth not the law is accursed. It is love, not logic, which can
unite men. Love is the one solvent to break down all barriers, and
love has other grounds for its existence than merely intellectual ones.
So that although similarity of taste is another bond and is perhaps
necessary for the perfect friendship, it is not its foundation; and if
the foundation be not undermined, there is no reason why difference of
mental power should wreck the structure.
However it happen that friends are separated, it is always sad; for the
loss of a friendship is the loss of an ideal. Sadder than the pathos
of unmated hearts is the pathos of severed souls. It is always a pain
to find a friend look on us with cold stranger's eyes, and to know
ourselves dead of hopes of future intimacy. It is a pain even when we
have nothing to blame ourselves with, much more so when we feel that
ours is the fault. It would not seem to matter very much, if it were
not such a loss to both; for friendship is one of the appointed means
of saving the life from worldliness and selfishness. It is the
greatest education in the world; for it is education of the whole man,
of the affections as well as the intellect. Nothing of worldly success
can make up for the want of it. And true friendship is also a moral
preservative. It teaches something of the joy of service, and the
beauty of sacrifice. We cannot live an utterly useless life, if we
have to think for, and act for, another. It keeps love in the heart,
and keeps God in the life.
The greatest and most irretrievable wreck of friendship is the result
of a moral breakdown in one of the associates. Worse than the
separation of the grave is the desolation of the heart by
faithlessness. More impassable than the gulf of distance with the
estranging sea, more separating than the gulf of death, is the great
gulf fixed between souls through deceit and shame. It is as the sin of
Judas. Said a sorrowful Psalmist, who had known this experience, "Mine
own familiar friend in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath
lifted up his heel against me." And another Psalmist sobs out the same
lament, "It was not an enemy that reproached me, then I could have
borne it, but it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide and mine
acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked into the
house of God in company." The loss of a friend by any of the common
means is not so hard, as to find a friend faithless. The trustful soul
has often been disillusioned thus. The rod has broken in the hand that
leaned on it, and has left its red wound on the palm. There is a
deeper wound on the heart.
The result of such a breakdown of comradeship is often bitterness, and
cynical distrust of man. It is this experience which gives point to
the worldling's sneer, Defend me from my friends, I can defend myself
from my enemies. We cannot wonder sometimes at the cynicism. It is
like treason within the camp, against which no man can guard. It is a
stab in the back, a cowardly assassination of the heart. Treachery
like this usually means a sudden fall from the ideal for the deceived
one, and the ideal can only be recovered, if at all, by a slow and
toilsome ascent, foot by foot and step by step.
Failure of one often leads to distrust of all. This is the terrible
responsibility of friendship. We have more than the happiness of our
friend in our power; we, have his faith. Most men who are cynical
about women are so, because of the inconstancy of one. Most sneers at
friendship are, to begin with at least, the expression of individual
pain, because the man has known the shock of the lifted heel. Distrust
works havoc on the character; for it ends in unbelief of goodness
itself. And distrust always meets with its own likeness, and is paid
back in its own coin. Suspicion breeds suspicion, and the conduct of
life on such principles becomes a tug-of-war in which Greek is matched
with Greek.
The social virtues, which keep the whole community together, are thus
closely allied to the supreme virtue of friendship. Aristotle had
reason in making it the _nexus_ between his Ethics and his Politics.
Truth, good faith, honest dealing between man and man, are necessary
for any kind of intercourse, even that of business. Men can do nothing
with each other, if they have not a certain minimum of trust. There
have been times when there seems to be almost an epidemic of
faithlessness, when the social bond seems loosened, when men's hands
are raised against each other, when confidence is paralyzed, and people
hardly know whom to trust.
The prophet Micah, who lived in such a time, expresses this state of
distrust: "Trust ye not any friend, put ye no confidence in a familiar
friend. A man's enemies are of his own household." This means
anarchy, and society becomes like a bundle of sticks with the cord cut.
The cause is always a decay of religion; for law is based on morality,
and morality finds its strongest sanction in religion. Selfishness
results in anarchy, a reversion to the Ishmaelite type of life.
The story of the French Revolution has in it some of the darkest pages
in the history of modern civilization, due to the breakdown of social
trust. The Revolution, like Saturn, took to devouring her own
children. Suspicion, during the reign of terror, brooded over the
heads of men, and oppressed their hearts. The ties of blood and
fellowship seemed broken, and the sad words of Christ had their horrid
fulfilment, that the brother would deliver up the brother to death, and
the father the child, and the children rise up against the parents and
cause them to be put to death. There are some awful possibilities in
human nature. In Paris of these days a man had to be ever on his
guard, to watch his acts, his words, even his looks. It meant for a
time a collapse of the whole idea of the state. It was a panic, worse
than avowed civil war. Friendship, of course, could have little place
in such a frightful palsy of mutual confidence, though there were, for
the honor of the race, some noble exceptions. The wreck of friendship
through deceit is always a step toward social anarchy; for it helps to
break down trust and good faith among men.
The wreck of friendship is also a blow to religion. Many have lost
their faith in God, because they have lost, through faithlessness,
their faith in man. Doubt of the reality of love becomes doubt of the
reality of the spiritual life. To be unable to see the divine in man,
is to have the eyes blinded to the divine anywhere. Deception in the
sphere of love shakes the foundation of religion. Its result is
atheism, not perhaps as a conscious speculative system of thought, but
as a subtle practical influence on conduct. It corrupts the fountain
of life, and taints the whole stream. Despair of love, if final and
complete, would be despair of God; for God is love. Thus, the wreck of
friendship often means a temporary wreck of faith. It ought not to be
so; but that there is a danger of it should impress us with a deeper
sense of the responsibility attached to our friendships. Our life
follows the fortunes of our love.
The Renewing of Friendship
Perhaps we may go further, and say that friends, whose friendship has
been broken off, should not entirely forget their former intercourse;
and that just as we hold that we ought to serve friends before
strangers, so former friends have some claims upon us on the ground of
past friendship, unless extraordinary depravity were the cause of our
parting.--ARISTOTLE.
The Renewing of Friendship
It is a sentiment of the poets and romancers that love is rather helped
by quarrels. There must be some truth in it, as we find the idea
expressed a hundred times in different forms in literature. We find it
among the wisdom of the ancients, and it remains still as one of the
conventional properties of the dramatist, and one of the accepted
traditions of the novelist. It is expressed in maxim and apothegm, in
play and poem. One of our old pre-Elizabethan writers has put it in
classic form in English:--
The falling out of faithful friends is the renewing of love.
It is the chief stock-in-trade of the writer of fiction, to depict the
misunderstandings which arise between two persons, through the sin of
one, or the folly of both, or the villainy of a third; then comes the
means by which the tangled skein is unravelled, and in the end
everything is satisfactorily explained, and the sorely-tried characters
are ushered into a happiness stronger and sweeter than ever before.
Friends quarrel, and are miserable in their state of separation; and
afterward, when the friendship is renewed, it is discovered that the
bitter dispute was only a blessing in disguise, as the renewal itself
was an exquisite pleasure, and the result has been a firmer and more
stable relationship of love and trust.
The truth in this sentiment is, of course, the evident one, that a man
often only wakens to the value of a possession when he is in danger of
losing it. The force of a current is sometimes only noted when it is
opposed by an obstacle. Two persons may discover, by a temporary
alienation, how much they really care for each other. It may be that
previously they took things for granted. Their affection had lost its
first glitter, and was accepted as a commonplace. Through some
misunderstanding or dispute, they broke off their friendly
relationship, feeling sure that they had come to an end of their
regard. They could never again be on the same close terms; hot words
had been spoken; taunts and reproaches had passed; eyes had flashed
fire, and they parted in anger--only to learn that their love for each
other was as real and as strong as ever. The very difference revealed
the true union of hearts that had existed. They had been blind to the
strength of their mutual regard, till it was so painfully brought to
their notice. The love is renewed with a more tender sense of its
sacredness, and a more profound feeling of its strength. The
dissensions only displayed the union; the discord drove them to a
fuller harmony. This is a natural and common experience.
But a mistake may easily be made by confusing cause and effect. "The
course of true love never did run smooth"--but the obstacles in the
channel do not _produce_ the swiftness and the volume of the stream;
they only _show_ them. There may be an unsuspected depth and force for
the first time brought to light when the stream strikes a barrier, but
the barrier is merely the occasion, not the cause, of the revelation.
To mistake the one for the other, may lead to a false and stupid
policy. Many, through this mistake, act as though dissension were of
the very nature of affection, and as if the one must necessarily react
on the other for good. Some foolish people will sometimes even produce
disagreement for the supposed pleasure of agreeing once more, and
quarrel for the sake of making it up again.
Rather, the end of love is near at hand, when wrangling can live in its
presence. It is not true that love is helped by quarrels, except in
the small sense already indicated. A man may quarrel once too often
with his friend, and a brother offended, says the proverb, is harder to
be won than a strong city, and such contentions are like the bars of a
castle. It is always a dangerous experiment to wilfully test
affection, besides being often a cruel one. Disputing is a shock to
confidence, and without confidence friendship cannot continue. A state
of feud, even though a temporary one, often embitters the life, and
leaves its mark on the heart. Desolated homes and lonely lives are
witnesses of the folly of any such policy. From the root of bitterness
there cannot possibly blossom any of the fair flowers of love. The
surface truth of the poets' sentiment we have acknowledged and
accounted for, but it is only a surface truth. The best of friends
will fall out, and the best of them will renew their friendship, but it
is always at a great risk, and sometimes it strains the foundations of
their esteem for each other to shaking:
And blessings on the falling out
That all the more endears,
When we fall out with those we love
And kiss again with tears!
But in any serious rupture of friendship it can only be a blessing when
it means the tears of repentance, and these are often tears of blood.
In all renewing there must be an element of repentance, and however
great the joy of having regained the old footing, there is the memory
of pain, and the presence of regret. To cultivate contention as an
art, and to trade upon the supposed benefit of renewing friendship, is
a folly which brings its own retribution.
The disputatious person for this reason never makes a good friend. In
friendship men look for peace, and concord, and some measure of
content. There are enough battles to fight outside, enough jarring and
jostling in the street, enough disputing in the market-place, enough
discord in the workaday world, without having to look for contention in
the realm of the inner life also. There, if anywhere, we ask for an
end of strife. Friendship is the sanctuary of the heart, and the peace
of the sanctuary should brood over it. Its chiefest glory is that the
dust and noise of contest are excluded.
It must needs be that offences come. It is not only that the world is
full of conflict and controversy, and every man must take his share in
the fights of his time. We are born into the battle; we are born for
the battle. But apart from the outside strife, from which we cannot
separate ourselves, and do not desire to separate ourselves if we are
true men, the strange thing is that it looks as if it must needs be
that offences come even among brethren. The bitterest disputes in life
are among those who are nearest each other in spirit. We do not
quarrel with the man in the street, the man with whom we have little or
no communication. He has not the chance, nor the power, to chafe our
soul, and ruffle our temper. If need be, we can afford to despise, or
at least to neglect him. It is the man of our own household, near us
in life and spirit, who runs the risk of the only serious dissensions
with us. The man with whom we have most points of contact presents the
greatest number of places where difference can occur. Only from
circles that touch each other can a tangent strike off from the same
point. A man can only make enemies among his friends. A certain
amount of opposition and enmity a man must be prepared for in this
world, unless he live a very invertebrate life. Outside opposition
cannot embitter, for it cannot touch the soul. But that two who have
walked as friends, one in aim and one in heart, perhaps of the same
household of faith, should stand face to face with hard brows and
gleaming eyes, should speak as foes and not as lovers of the same love,
is, in spite of the poets and romancers, the bitterest moment of life.
There are some we cannot hurt even if we would; whom all the venom of
our nature could not touch, because we mean nothing to them. But there
are others in our power, whom we can stab with a word, and these are
our brethren, our familiar friends, our comrades at work, our close
associates, our fellow laborers in God's vineyard. It is not the crowd
that idly jostle us in the street who can hurt us to the quick, but a
familiar friend in whom we trusted. He has a means of ingress barred
to strangers, and can strike home as no other can. This explains why
family quarrels, ruptures in the inner circle, Church disputes, are so
bitter. They come so near us. An offended brother is hard to win,
because the very closeness of the previous intimacy brings a rankling
sense of injustice and the resentment of injured love. An injury from
the hand of a friend seems such a wanton thing; and the heart hardens
itself with the sense of wrong, and a separation ensues like the bars
of a castle.
It must needs be that offences come, but woe unto him by whom they
come. The strife-makers find in themselves, in their barren heart and
empty life, their own appropriate curse. The blow they strike comes
back upon themselves. Worse than the choleric temperament is the
peevish, sullen nature. The one usually finds a speedy repentance for
his hot and hasty mood; the other is a constant menace to friendship,
and acts like a perpetual irritant. Its root is selfishness, and it
grows by what it feeds on.
When offences do come, we may indeed use them as opportunities for
growth in gracious ways, and thus turn them into blessings on the lives
of both. To the offended it may be an occasion for patience and
forgiveness; to the offender, an occasion for humility and frank
confession; and to both, a renewing of love less open to offence in the
future. There are some general counsels about the making up of
differences, though each case needs special treatment for itself, which
will easily be found if once the desire for concord be established.
Christ's recipe for a quarrel among brethren is: "If thy brother shall
trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him
alone; if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother."
Much of our dissension is due to misunderstanding, which could be put
right by a few honest words and a little open dealing. Human beings so
often live at cross purposes with each other, when a frank word, or a
simple confession of wrong, almost a look or a gesture, would heal the
division. Resentment grows through brooding over a fancied slight.
Hearts harden themselves in silence, and, as time goes on, it becomes
more difficult to break through the silence. Often there are strained
relations among men, who, at the bottom of their hearts, have sincere
respect for each other, and smouldering affection also, which only
needs a little coaxing of the spark to burst out again into a dancing
flame. There is a terrible waste of human friendship, a waste of power
which might be used to bless all our lives, through our sinful
separations, our selfish exclusiveness, our resentful pride. We let
the sweetest souls we have met die without acknowledging our debt to
them. We stand aside in haughty isolation, till the open grave opens
our sealed hearts--too late. We let the chance of reconciliation pass
till it is irrevocable. Most can remember a tender spot in the past
somewhere, a sore place, a time when discord entered with another they
loved, and
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother.
And in some cases, as with the friends in Coleridge's great poem, the
parting has been eternal, and neither has ever since found another such
friend to fill the life with comfort, and free the hollow heart from
paining.
There is more evil from such a state of discord than the mere loss it
is to both; it influences the whole heart-life, creating sometimes
bitterness, sometimes universal suspicion, sometimes cynicism. Hatred
is contagious, as love is. They have an effect on the whole character,
and are not confined to the single incident which causes the love or
the hate. To hate a single one of God's creatures is to harden the
heart to some extent against all. Love is the centre of a circle,
which broadens out in ever-widening circumference. Dante tells us in
_La Vita Nuova_ that the effect of his love for Beatrice was to open
his heart to all, and to sweeten all his life. He speaks of the
surpassing virtue of her very salutation to him in the street. "When
she appeared in any place, it seemed to me, by the hope of her
excellent salutation, that there was no man mine enemy any longer; and
such warmth of charity came upon me that most certainly in that moment
I would have pardoned whomsoever had done me an injury; and if any one
should then have questioned me concerning any matter, I could only have
said unto him 'Love,' with a countenance clothed in humbleness." His
love bred sweetness in his mind, and took in everything within the
blessed sweep of its range. Hatred also is the centre of a circle,
which has a baneful effect on the whole life. We cannot have
bitterness or resentment in our mind without its coloring every thought
and affection. Hate of one will affect our attitude toward all.