“All like the purchase; few the price will pay;
And this makes friends such miracles below.”
“Friendship’s best fate is, when it can spend
A life, a fortune, all to serve a friend.”
We use the word friend very lightly. We talk of our “hosts of friends,” meaning all with whom we have common friendly relations, or even pleasant acquaintance. We say a person is our friend when we know them only in business or socially, when their heart and ours have never touched in any real communion. There may be nothing amiss in this wide application of the word; but we ought to understand that in this use of it, its full sacred meaning is not even touched.
To become another’s friend in the true sense is to take the other into such close, living fellowship that their life and ours are knit together as one. It is far more than a pleasant companionship in bright, sunny hours. It is more than an association for mutual interest, profit, or enjoyment. A true friendship is entirely unselfish. It seeks no benefit or good of its own. It loves not for what it may receive, but for what it may give. Its aim is “not to be ministered unto, but to minister.”
There are many people who take others into what they call relations of friendship, but who think only selfishly of what these persons may be to them. They seek social advancement and hope to enter new circles through certain friends. Or they aspire to enter some brilliant intellectual coterie and seek the entrée by forming a friendly connection with one whose name is on the honored list. Or they wish to win business success, and they spare no cost to make friends of those who are influential in the community and can help them in the achieving of their ambition. Or they seek merely passing enjoyment, and choose for companionship, one which seems amiable, kindly, congenial, with a good measure of sweetness and power to please and thus minister to their own cravings. In all these instances there is nothing but selfishness, not one trace of true affection. To apply to them the name of friendship is to degrade and desecrate a sacred and holy word. The friendship that is true “seeketh not its own.”
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