Chapter V: Part 5

Holidays are sometimes spent in incessant excursions with young friends, leaving your mother at home to look after the little ones; and yet, perhaps, your mother had a very dull time of it in term-time, when you were either at work, and could not be spoken to, or were busy over school gossip with some friend, and, perhaps, she looked forward to the holidays as a time when she would get a little companionship from the daughter for whom she makes so many sacrifices. But she is too unselfish to be the least drag upon you; so she asks a school friend to stay with you, and, somehow, always has a good reason for really wanting not to join the expedition, and takes the younger ones off your hands with an air of its being almost self-indulgence on her part to do it. But, all the same, whatever she says, mothers like going about too, and, even if they do not, they like to feel that their presence makes part of their daughter's pleasure in the holiday pleasurings. You may think it very hard-hearted and mistaken of me to suppose that you would be so selfish with your mother, but I have, often and often, seen it done, and I feel like a little boy I know, who can hardly speak yet, but who is evidently born to be a general redresser of wrongs,--he is very quickly struck by any instance of the folly and injustice of the world, and his favourite remark is, "_Somebody_ ought to tell them; why shouldn't I?" Now, _somebody_ ought to say this about mothers, and the mothers who do the unselfish things are the last people who will ever remind you that they, too, have feelings, so I will usurp that little boy's office, and tell you myself, for I am quite sure that, if it ever struck you, you would be shocked at doing it, but,

"Evil is wrought by want of thought,
As well as want of heart."

However, I do not intend to make this my closing quotation, as I am sure my children will have plenty of both heart and thought, and that they will shed around them a full supply of that sunshine which the weather seems so determined to deny us! I suppose we must allow, with Southey's old woman, that "any weather is better than none," but it is incontestable that we seem likely to have every opportunity afforded us, during these holidays, at all events, of

"Making a sunshine in a _shady_ place."

Sunday.

In many ways this is a disquieting age in which to live, and yet it is also markedly hopeful. It is true that the power of authority and of custom is crumbling on many sides, but surely this should lead to the laying of deeper and truer foundations. In this very question of Sunday, the Fourth Commandment used to settle the question, whereas now we investigate its origins and claims in a way which sounds rebellious and unfilial. Yet it may be nearer the mind of Christ than unthinking obedience, for the servant accepts with blind obedience this or that rule spoken by his master; the friend, the son, strives to understand "his father's innermost mind." He may or may not be convinced that certain words spoken on Mount Sinai, about the Jewish Sabbath, were intended to refer to the Christian Sunday; but, in either case, he realizes the nature of the spiritual life, and perceives that worship and thought and time are essential to it. He sees that the old Jewish rule tends to develop this spiritual life, and therefore, until he finds a better way, he feels it morally binding on himself; not because it was a Jewish rule, but because it assists his own growth.

Suppose a master admired a bed of lilies and said, "Let me always find some here;" if a landslip destroyed that bed, a slave might feel absolved from further trouble about lilies, but the son would say, "No; we can give my father what he wants by growing them elsewhere--it was not so much the bed, as the lilies, that he really cared for."

God will look in us for the lilies of peace and spiritual-mindedness, which only grow where there is what the old Babylonians called "a Sabbath of the heart." Are we to feel absolved from responding to His demand because old Jewish ways have vanished? When St. Paul speaks so slightingly of "times and seasons and Sabbaths," does he mean that the worship and meditation belonging to such seasons were valueless? No; he is rather saying, "How can you think that our Father values, not the lilies, but only the fact of their growing on this or that bit of earth?"

Every day, landslips are altering the features of God's great garden--this present world. We can no longer rely on definite instructions to plant in this or that place; many circumstances, as yet unborn, may hinder it. But we must get it well into our minds that the Master will certainly come down into His garden to ask for lilies, and that we must plant without delay; tools and methods may be improved upon, certain aspects which are now favourable may be deprived of sun by future buildings, but let us clearly realize that the end and object of having a garden is to grow flowers, though ways and means may vary with the times.

It is much easier to follow rules than to be inspired with the burning desire to produce flowers and the moral thoughtfulness which uses the best methods of the day.

But you can less well afford to do without moral thoughtfulness now than you could have done a generation ago. Thirty years ago a woman's path was hedged in by signposts and by-laws, and danger-signals, to which she attended as a matter of course; to-day, she has to find her way across a moorland with uncertain tracks, which she may desert at will. She needs to know something of the stars to guide her now--she needs nobler and deeper teaching than in the days of convenances and chaperons.

At present you have your home ways to guide, but you will find Sunday vary in almost every house you stay in, and when you marry you will have to set the tone of a household; if you are to keep Sunday rightly in the future, you must learn now to value it rightly, and that means moral thoughtfulness,--a realization of our need of an inner life and of what that inner life requires for its sustenance, and an appreciation of the teaching of the Church Catechism, which tells us that our duty to God begins with Worship.

What can we say as to the positive duty of keeping Sunday? We can hardly say we are literally bound by the Jewish Sabbath, since, for Jewish Christians, the Sabbath and Sunday existed for some time side by side, as separate institutions; Sunday being a day of united worship, while the Sabbath supplied retirement from the world.

Gentiles kept Sunday only; but gradually there were incorporated into it all the spiritual elements of the Sabbath. In this point, as in all others, the underlying eternal meaning of the Law was recoined and reissued by Christianity; no jot or tittle of its spirit passed away.

In "The English Sunday,"[4] by Canon Bernard, you will find a short sketch of the history of the day; its universal acceptance through the decree of Constantine, which organized the popular custom of a weekly holiday; the resistance of Luther and Calvin to any idea of being bound by the Jewish Sabbath; the Anglican idea of Church Services combined with the Book of Sports; the Puritan idea of a day of retirement from worldly business and amusement; and, finally, the gradual acceptance of this last idea by the English national conscience, so that High Churchmen, like Law and Nelson, echoed the Puritan ideal, and the average business Englishman accepted it as the right thing.

I am convinced that the vigour of the nation and the health of our own souls depends on keeping Sunday,--not only by going to Church, but by so arranging it that we get into an unworldly atmosphere, and have leisure for the thought and reading which develop our spiritual nature.

Such a Sunday is the development of the Fourth Commandment, keeping it in the spirit though not in the letter.

I am inclined to think that the Fourth Commandment is the most important of all: if that is faithfully observed--if we spend due time in God's Presence looking at things as He does, judging ourselves by His standard--then the rest of our lives must in time get raised to the level of those "golden hours;" we are as certain to improve as a person who regularly goes up into bracing air is certain to grow stronger.

Bishop Wordsworth's hymn suggests the highest lines on which to take the subject, and I would ask, are you specially careful to come to breakfast full of sunshine on Sunday mornings, as on a "day of rest and gladness"? Is it a cooling fountain to you? Do you soak yourself enough in good thoughts to be more soothed and peaceful than you were on Saturday? Was last Sunday a Pisgah's mountain?--did you cast so much as a glance at the promised Land, at what will make the true joy of Heaven, the being like Christ? did you seriously think over where you were unlike Him and where you could be more like Him in the coming week? "New graces ever gaining:"--did you gain any grace at all last Sunday--or would this week have been exactly the same if Sunday had been wiped out? Make up a prayer, for Saturday's use, on the ideas in this hymn, or use the hymn in your prayers, as inspiration on Saturday night and as self-examination on Sunday night.

Sunday should, as the Warden of Keble says, be a day of new plans for using the coming week better than we did the last, and this implies quiet time for thoughtfully considering both the past and the coming week. On Sunday we should breathe different air and see weekday vexations from a Sunday point of view.

Our Sunday reading may well include all that is referred to in Phil. iv. 8: "Whatsoever things are noble." I would not say this or that book is wrong on Sunday--a book which is good on Saturday does not become bad on Sunday, but, as is the case with many excellent weekday employments, it may very well be a misuse of Sunday time, because we could be doing something better. I strongly advise you to make your Sunday books--and as far as possible all your Sunday habits--different from those of the week, if only to give yourself a chance of getting out of grooves, of getting that complete change of air which is so conducive to a new start in one's inner life and mental vigour. Lord Lawrence's Life would be splendid Sunday reading, but if you are reading it in the week, you would be wise to put it away on Sunday in favour of a change of air.

It is quite possible that you are busy on Sunday, sometimes a father or brothers, hard at work all the week, want you to amuse them on Sunday. Or you may be busy with Sunday-school or Classes, which equally prevents the personal keeping of Sunday, while many household arrangements may make an old-fashioned Sunday impossible. (Let those who can have it be thankful instead of rebelling at its dulness!)

At the same time, I would suggest that the very young men for whose sake you are making the sacrifice--(the sacrifice of doing things which amuse you as much as them, sometimes more, since a young man occasionally likes to lie in a hammock and read, without having the girls always about)--those very young men need Sunday quiet whether they desire it or not.

Would it not be well also, if you do have games, to keep to those which allow of talk if the impulse comes, since a Sunday talk is often a help, and whether or no it is combined with boating or golf.

I do not say to you, stand out against household ways and make yourself disagreeable by carrying out a Puritan Sunday--the only kind I believe in. No; surely that would be a very unchristlike way of spending Sunday.

But every girl knows the difference between helping to make a pleasant family circle and lounging idly through the day in self-indulgent gossip and games. You must do what others do, and yet you must have a clear plan of the reading and prayer and thinking which is right for you personally. If you cannot do it at one time on Sunday, find another, or else get it done on Saturday. Nearly every one could find time for Sunday duties, only you would rather not, because they are dull. I am not surprised, it is not natural to like them till the spiritual nature is alive in you, but that will never be until you force yourself to take this spiritual food as a duty, or rather, as essential to your life.

"A Sabbath well spent
Brings a week of content
And strength for the toils of the morrow."

Those are very old words by Sir Matthew Hale: I know them framed in the hall of an old-fashioned country house, and they bring back to me rest and quiet, and sweet sounds and scents--the bowl of roses and the pretty old chintz on the sofa just under the words.

I hope Sunday-like Sundays are not only to be found in old houses, but we all feel that Sunday quiet is likely to be the first thing sacrificed in the rush and bustle of modern life. But if we have no time to eat, we cannot keep up to working pitch, we lose vitality: if we have no time for spiritual food, our souls lose vitality, and unfortunately starvation of the soul is a painless process, so we may unconsciously be getting weaker and weaker spiritually.

You are regularly on your knees night and morning, but are you ever two minutes alone with God?--and yet "being silent to God"--alone with Him--is, humanly speaking, the only condition on which He can "mould us."[5] I am so afraid that the lawful pleasures and even the commanded duties of life, let alone its excitements and cravings, will eat out your possibilities of spirituality and saintliness: it is so easy to float on the stream of life with others--so terribly hard to come, you yourself, alone into a desert place to listen to those words out of the mouth of God, by which only your individual life can be fed. The self-denials of Lent are comparatively easy, but to gain that quietness, which Bishop Gore says is "the essence of Lent," is a hard struggle at all times of the year. Do not let any one think, "this is all very well for quiet homes, but I cannot be expected to act on it, since 'the week-end' is always so busy." It would be very unpractical to say, day after day, "I cannot be expected, for this and that excellent reason, to eat my dinner to-day." You would soon find it advisable, for your own sake, to find some time at which you _could_ eat. I do not say, though it would be true, "it is a sin to break the Sabbath, and, in order to avoid God's anger, you must go to Church and read good books;"--I say, "for your own sake, you _cannot afford_ to neglect these things, and if you cannot find time on Sunday, it will be not only a crime but a blunder if you do not make time on Saturday or Monday." I only say, "if you do not eat enough to keep you alive, you will die; and if you do not feed on the Word of God, your soul will shrivel away."

Dante saw some souls in hell whose bodies were still alive on earth,--their friends in Florence and Lucca had not the faintest idea that these men, seemingly a part of everyday life, were, all the time, "dead souls." There is hardly a more terrible idea in all that terrible book, and yet it is a possibility in our own daily life--this atrophy of the spiritual nature, corresponding to the atrophy of the poetical nature which Darwin noted in himself as due to his own neglect. Mr. Clifford, in "A Likely Story," forcibly depicts a soul awaking in the next world to find that through this unconscious starvation, there was no longer anything in him to correspond with God. "The possibility of death is involved in our Lord's words about the power of living by the Word of God."

Sometimes we are too tired to keep Sunday properly, and we give to "private sloth the time which was meant for public worship;" but surely then the Sabbath breaking lay really in the week's excess of work. If we allow ourselves to live so hard in the week, to be so late on Saturday, that we are sleepy and stupid on Sunday morning, then we are not keeping the Fourth Commandment, even if we force ourselves to go to Church; we are not serving God with a fair share of our mind and strength.

In these over-worked days of nerve exhaustion, it should be an inducement to remember how fresh and unwearied Mr. Gladstone was kept by his regular Sunday habits. He said, "Sunday I reserve for religious employments, and this has kept me alive and well, even to a marvel, in time of considerable labour. We are born on each Lord's day morning into a new climate, where the lungs and heart of the Christian life should drink in continuously the vital air."

Retreats and Rest-cures are nowadays found to be imperatively necessary; but are not both symptoms of something over-wrought in our system? Would it not be well for some if they tried, as Miss Wordsworth suggests, the effect of keeping one Sunday in the week?

I do not wish to dwell on the unselfish side of the question--the moral obligation of keeping to those forms of entertainment and games which give as little trouble as possible to servants,--I am sure that needs no enforcing on a generous mind.

Neither do I wish to discuss what employments are suitable for Sunday, though I should like to draw your attention to a suggestion, in the Bishop of Salisbury's Guild Manual, that Sunday letters should always, as a matter of principle, have some Sunday element in them, and that we should refrain from writing to people with whom we were not on this footing. How often our Sunday letters only clear our writing-table, that it may be freer for Monday's business!

Neither do I speak of our duty to God in the matter of worship, nor of the definite rules as to church-going which each must make for herself, if her religion is not to vary with every house she stays in; I do not speak of the obligation binding on every member of the Church to conform to her Church's regulations as to united worship. Every one of these points need a chapter to itself, and I wish to keep to a single point which seems in great danger of being neglected in this hurrying age, when there is such terrible likelihood that we may "never once possess our souls before we die."

It is not the duty of keeping Sunday on which I want to lay stress, but the fact that we dare not, for our own safety's sake, neglect it. Our moral thoughtfulness, our spiritual growth, the very existence of our inner life, depends on our obtaining a sufficient supply of the air of Heaven to keep our souls alive. To use Dean Church's words: "On the way in which we spend our Sundays depends, for most of us, the depth, the reality, the steadiness, of our spiritual life."

[Footnote 4: Methuen. 1_s. 6d._]

[Footnote 5: "Be silent to God, and let Him mould thee."--Ps. xxxvii. 7.]

Friendship and Love.

"The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair."

No word in our language has a nobler meaning than "friendship;" it is a pity that none is more often abused. Every hasty intimacy formed by force of circumstances--often merely by force of living next door--is dignified with the title; but a deeper bond is needed to make a real friendship. "By true friendship," says Jeremy Taylor, "I mean the greatest love, and the greatest usefulness, and the most open communication, and the noblest suffering, and the most exemplary faithfulness, and the severest truth, and the heartiest counsel, and the greatest union of minds of which brave men and women are capable."

"Friendship is the perfection of love," says the Proverb, and a certain James Colebrooke and Mary his wife, buried in Chilham churchyard, seem to have been of this mind, for the climax of their long epitaph is, that they "lived for forty-seven years in the greatest friendship."

Proverbs on this subject abound, and teach varied lessons: "A faithful friend is the medicine of life;" but it would seem to act differently on different constitutions, for, on the one hand, we are told, "a Father is a Treasure, a Brother is a Comforter, a Friend is both;" on the other, we hear the familiar exclamation, "Save me from my friends!" which is justified by experience from the times of Aristides downwards, and is endorsed by Solomon, when he said, "He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him;"--words of which the wisdom will be felt by all who know what it is to feel unreasoning prejudice against some unoffending person, solely because of the excessive praise of some injudicious friend. Yet none the less are we bound to defend our friends behind their backs and to set them in a fair light. If we cannot aspire generally to St. Theresa's title of "Advocate of the Absent," honour demands that we should at least earn it with regard to our friends: though it requires infinite tact to avoid making your friend fatiguing, if not distasteful, to your listener in so doing. For Tact, as well as Honour, is a necessary condition of friendship, in speaking both of, and to, your friend. In this matter of tact, Courtesy covers a large part of the ground.

"We have careful thought for the stranger,
And smiles for the some time guest,
But we grieve our own
With look and tone,
Though we love our own the best."

This applies most to brothers and sisters, but also to friends; it takes the delicate edge from friendship if we think ourselves absolved from the minor courtesies of manner and speech.

We often say pretty things to an acquaintance, and omit them to a friend, "because she knows us, and we need not be ceremonious." But ceremony is not half such a bad thing as this age seems to think; it may be overdone, but so may its opposite. Why should we not give our friend the pleasure of this or that acknowledgment of her powers, which a stranger would give her, but which she would value far more from us, even though she "knows we know" it? Saying those things makes the wheels of life's chariot run smoothly,--we think them, why are we so slow to say them? Why should "the privilege of a friend" be synonymous with a cutting remark? Why should we all have reason to feel that "friend" might, without any violation of truth, be substituted for the last word in that acute remark on the "fine frankness about unpleasant truths which marks the relative"? Well might Bob Jakes say, "Lor, miss, it's a fine thing to hev' a dumb brute fond o' yer! it sticks to yer and makes no jaw." This question of making no "jaw" is rather a vexed one. Most people's experience would lead them to attend to a canny Dutch proverb, which observes that a "friend's" faults may be noticed but not blamed: since the consequences of blaming them are mostly unpleasant; but a braver proverb says, "A true friend dares sometimes venture to be offensive;" and we read that it is our duty to "admonish a friend; it may be that he hath not said it, and, if he have, that he speak it not again." But this earnest remonstrance which is sometimes required of us is very different from the small, nagging, and somewhat impertinent criticisms which pass so freely between many friends. But defending an absent friend is not the only point of honour essential in true friendship. At the present time the Roman virtues seem somewhat at a discount,--they are suspected of a flavour of Paganism; it is more in accordance with the Genius of our Age to show our interest in our friend by talking over his moral and spiritual condition (and _par parenthèse_, all his other affairs) with a sympathizing circle, than to heed the old-fashioned idea, "He that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter." How often do we hear, "I wouldn't, for the world, tell any one but you, but--;" and then follows a string of repeated confidences which the friend under discussion would writhe to hear; yet the speaker would be most indignant at being considered dishonourable, because "it was only said to So-and-so, which is _so_ different from saying it to any one else"! The Son of Sirach made no exception in favour of "So-and-so" when he said, "Rehearse not unto another that which is told unto thee, and thou shall fare never the worse." If it be true of a wife, that "a silent and loving woman is a gift of the Lord," I am sure it is no less so of a friend; in friendship, as in most relations of life, silence, in its season, is a cardinal virtue.

Girls are often tempted to retail their family affairs to some chosen friend, from a love of confidential mysteries; the pleasure of being a martyr leads not only to the communication of moving details of home life, but frequently to their invention. A friend of mine adopted a niece, who afterwards married and wrote from India asking her aunt to look through and burn her old letters. My friend found touching pictures of home tyranny in the letters from school friends and answers to similar complaints, which the niece had evidently written about her own treatment and since forgotten; possibly the home circles of the other girls would have found the same difficulty that my friend did in recognizing themselves:

"Portrayed with sooty garb and features swarth."

Equal with Honour, and before Tact, among the conditions of Friendship, I would place Truth, for there can be no union without this for a basis. We have touched already on the truth involved in what is called being "faithful" to a friend, but there are many other kinds required. Passing over the more obvious of these, I would draw attention to the subtler form of untruth, involved in endowing your friend with imaginary gifts and graces.

Yet the more we know of a true friend, the more we find to reverence in him, and the more ground for humility in ourselves: "Have a quick eye to see" their virtues; nay, more, idealize those virtues as much as you will, for this is a very different thing from endowing them with those they have not; this is only learning to see with that divine insight essential to the highest truth in friendship. "There is a perfect ideal," says Ruskin, "to be wrought out of every human face around us," and so it is with our friends' characters.

And when we have found that ideal and true self, we must be loyal to it--loyal to our friends against their lower selves as well as against their detractors. Plutarch says, "The influence of a true friend is felt in the help that he gives the noble part of nature; nothing that is weak or poor meets with encouragement from him. While the flatterer fans every spark of suspicion, envy, or grudge, he may be described in the verse of Sophocles as 'sharing the love and not the hatred of the person he cares for.'" Such a bit as that makes us forget the centuries which have rolled between us and Plutarch; his temptations are ours--how much easier it is to us to please our friends by sympathizing with their feelings, whether that feeling be right or wrong! How much pleasanter it is to us to gratify our selfish affection by giving them what they want, as Wentworth did King Charles, than to brace them to endure hardness for the sake of others!

We are so apt to give and to ask for weakening consolation. Sympathy in the ordinary use of the term is more weakening than anything, and it is pleasant to give and to take.

But sympathy should be like bracing air: "no friendship is worth the name which does not inspire new and stronger views of duty." We all care to be sons of consolation,--let us see to it that we brace others instead of giving mere pity. We all like to be pitied, but in our heart we are more grateful to the friend who puts fresh spring into us, by what perhaps seems hard common sense. Those are the friends whose memory comes back to us when circumstances, or years, or distance, have drifted us far apart.

The friend who fed the weaker part of us never gets from us the same genuine affection with real stuff in it. How much easier it is to sympathize with our friends' unreasonable vexation--to join in their uncharitable speeches, or in laughing at something we ought not to laugh at, than to brace them

"to welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!"

We find it very hard, almost impossible, to live always up to our own best self, and we may be quite sure our friends do too, whether they talk about it or not, and our duty, as a friend, is to see their best self and help them to be it. Very often the mere fact of knowing that our friend sees our nobler nature, and believes in it, heartens us to keep faith in it and to go on striving after it. "Edward Irving unconsciously elevated every man he talked with into the ideal man he ought to have been; and went about the world making men noble by believing them to be so."

It rests with each of us to draw out the better part in others; we all know people with whom we are at our best, and we have failed in our Duty to our Neighbour if we do not make others feel this with us. "Each soul is in some other's presence quite discrowned;" let the reverse be true where we are.

It is a terrible thought that we have perhaps made others less noble, less pure, less conscientious, than they would have been. We can never repair the harm we do to one who loses faith in our goodness,--he inevitably loses some part of his faith in goodness itself. "Much of our lives is spent in marring our own influence," says George Eliot, "and turning others' belief in us into a widely concluding unbelief, which they call knowledge of the world, but which is really disappointment in you or me."

Nobody, who has not watched or felt it, knows the laming of all spiritual energy, the hardening, the blighting of all noble impulse which comes from this sort of knowledge of the world; and who can say that he has never (more or less) been thus guilty?--it is more truly blood-guiltiness than anything else, for it helps to murder souls.

Perhaps the greatest of the innumerable blessings which friendship confers on the character, lies in this fostering of moral thoughtfulness produced by its responsibilities: "I know not a more serious thing than the responsibility incurred by all human affection. Only think of this: whoever loves you is growing like you; neither you nor he can hinder it, save at the cost of alienation. Oh, if you are grateful for but one creature's love, rise to the height of so pure a blessing--drag them not down by the very embrace with which they cling to you, but through their gentleness ensure their consecration."[6]

It needs a noble nature to be capable of friendship, or rather a nature which has carefully trained itself by discipline and self-denial, so as to develop all the possibilities of nobleness which were latent in it.

God gives each of us a nature with "pulses of nobleness," and it rests with us whether this shall grow, or be choked by the commonplace part of us. To be noble does not come without trouble. Good things are hard, and "noble growths are slow."[7]

He who would be noble must go through life like Hercules and the old heroes, working hard for others; not troubling about personal comfort and amusement, but practised in going without when he _could_ have,--for the sake of better things.

To be noble means having your impulses under control, and this most especially where your affections are concerned.

Do you want to help others to go right in life? I need not ask, for every generous nature would care to do that, even if she did not care much about her own soul.

Now, you will not do much by direct effort, but you will do an immense deal by conquering your own besetting sin. In the "Hallowing of Work," Bishop Paget says, "Increased skill and experience and ability are great gifts in working for others, but they do not _compare_ with the power gained by conquering one fault of our own."

Friendship can be the most beautiful thing in the world: it can be the silliest thing in the world. It can be the most lowering: it can be the most ennobling. Nothing excites so much laughter and hard speaking in the world as "schoolgirl friendships;" as often as not they are found among older people, but schoolgirls have given a name to this particular kind of folly, so it behooves schoolgirls to keep clear of it, and to deprive the name of its point.

But can you help being sentimental if you are made like that? Some are of good wholesome stuff, with an innate distaste for everything of the kind, while to some it is their besetting sin.

You can at least take precautions; for instance, do not day-dream about your friend,--brooding over the thought of her weakens your fibre more than being with her.

Make a rule of life for yourself about your intercourse; walk and talk with her more than with others, but at the same time sandwich those walks and talks by going with other friends,--it is a great pity to narrow your circle of possible friends by being absorbed in one person.

Do not write sentimental letters, and, finally, do not sit in your friend's pocket and say "Darling." (If you wish to know how it sounds, read "A Bad Habit," by Mrs. Ewing.)

I must confess that I believe in what is so often jeered at as "kindred souls." Love is not measured by time; often we are truer friends through some half-hour's talk, in which we saw another's real self, than through years of ordinary meeting. But this is so different from the folly I speak of, that I need not dwell on it; except to say that you will be spared many disappointments if you are content with the fact that such moments of sympathy have been, and do not look to have a permanent friendship on that basis. When people draw the veil aside for a minute they generally put it back closer than ever, and do not like to be reminded of the self-revelation.

In the foolish friendships that make so much unhappiness, half the folly lies in expecting the other person to be always at high-water mark, and in being fretful and reproachful when she is not.

But to return to "schoolgirl friendships." When you go out into society you may perhaps want to make private jokes among your friends, or to talk privately to them instead of helping in general conversation, and you may feel "I have nothing much to contribute to the general stock; why shouldn't I enjoy myself? it's very hard I should be so severely criticized for bad manners if I do." But if you look into any such matter, you are sure to find that bad manners are bad Christianity. There is a want of self-restraint in this schoolgirlishness; and you ought not to be able to pick out a pair of great friends in general society, not merely because, if you could, it would show them to be absurd and underbred, but because it would mean that others were made to feel "left out." Have you ever had some violent friendship--or laughed at it in others--which meant running in and out of each other's houses at all hours--being inseparable--quoting your friend, till your brothers exclaimed at her very name--and making all your family feel that they ranked nowhere in comparison with her? In this matter of home and friends conflicting, I quite see the point of view of some: "My family don't give me the sympathy and help that my friend does--they always tease or scold if I come to them in a difficulty, and yet they are vexed and jealous when I find a friend who can and will help."

I do not say, Cut yourself off from your friend,--she is sent by God to help you; but, Remember to feel for your Mother;--see how natural and loving her jealousy is, and spare it by constant tact--instead of being a martyr, feel that it is _she_, and not _you_, who is ill-used. And in all ways, never let outside affections interfere with home ones. It is the great difference between them, that outside, self-chosen affections burn all the stronger for repression and self-restraint; while home ones burn stronger for each act of attention to them and expression of them; _e.g._ postponing a visit to a friend for a walk with a brother will make both loves stronger, and _vice versâ_,--and your friendship will last all the longer because you consume your own smoke. Dr. Carpenter says that signs of love wear out the feeling;--every now and then they strengthen it, but their frequency shows weakness. Friendships are God-given ties when they are real, but inseparable ones are mostly only follies;--anyhow, family ties are the most God-given of all, and friendship should help us to fulfil family claims better, instead of making us neglect them. The best test of whether your love for an outside person is of the right kind, is, does it make you pleasanter at home? Mr. Lowell mentions an epitaph in the neighbourhood of Boston, which recorded the name and date of a wife and mother, adding simply, "She was so pleasant."

We realize that we ought to make the world better than we find it, but we do not realize how much more we should succeed in doing so if we made it brighter,--a task which is in everybody's power. We are all ready to bear pain for others, but we overlook the little ways in which we might give pleasure. "Always say a kind word if you can," says Helps, "if only that it may come in perhaps with a singular opportuneness, entering some mournful man's darkened room, like a beautiful firefly, whose happy circumvolutions he cannot but watch, forgetting his many troubles."

And there is one tiny little suggestion I would make to you, so small it will not fit on to any of my larger headings. Do not make fun of your friend's little mishaps, little stupidities, losing her luggage, having said the wrong thing, or having a black on her face when she especially wished to look well! Your remark may be witty, but it does not really amuse the victim. I know it is very good for people to be chaffed, and I do not wish them to lose this wholesome bracing. And yet we have a special clinging to some tactful friends who never let us feel foolish.

Another test you should apply to Friendship is, does it lead to idle words? Every one likes talking about their neighbours, and dress, and amusement, but we need to be careful that kindliness and nice-mindedness are not sacrificed, and that all our interests are not on that level. Many think that a woman's interest can rise no higher, and many girls and many women give colour to what you and I think a slander on us! We all like these things, but we all like higher things too, and we need to encourage the higher part of us because it so soon dies away. You know better than I do how much of your own talk may be silly chatter--or worse--flippant or wrong talk, which you would stop if an older person were by. I have heard High Schools strongly objected to because they made the girls so full of gossip, about what this or that teacher said, or what some girl did, till their people hated the very name of school. If school friends talk much school gossip, they must weaken their minds and feel at a loss when out of their school set. It is very "provincial" to have no conversation except the small gossip which would bore a stranger, and yet I fear many friends confine themselves to a kind of talk which unfits them for general society. You prohibit "talking shop," by which you sometimes mean subjects which are interesting to all intelligent people, and yet you talk gossiping "shop" about the mere accidents of school life. But, unless you interweave thoughtful interests and sensible topics of conversation with your friendship, it cannot last. There must be the tie of a common higher interest--it may be a common work, or intellectual sympathy, or, best of all, oneness in the highest things--but without this a mere personal fancy will not stand the monotony, much less the rubs and jars, of close intimacy. A friendship, where the personal affection is the deepest feeling, is not a deep love, or of a high kind;--we must in the widest sense love "honour more." "Love is a primary affection in those who love little: a secondary one in those who love much" (Coleridge).

A stool must have three legs if it is to support you, and two friends want a third interest to unite them, or the friendship will die away in unreasonable claims and jealousies; since "claimativeness" is the evil genius which haunts friendship, unless common sense and wholesome interests are at hand to help. It is difficult, but necessary, to learn that affection is not a matter of will, except in family ties; that our friends love us in exact proportion as we appear to them lovable, that "the less you claim, the more you will have," as the Duke of Wellington said of authority. A very little humility would wonderfully lessen our demands upon our friends' affections, and a very little wisdom would preserve us from trying to win them by reproaches. How many coolnesses would be avoided could we learn to see that friendship, like all other relations of life, has more duties than rights. Nothing so certainly kills love as reproaches; I do not believe any affection will stand it. Our hurt feelings may seem to us tenderness and depth of feeling, but they are selfish:--"fine feelings seldom result in fine conduct." If our love were perfectly selfless, we should be glad of all pleasure for our friend; failure in his allegiance to us would not change us, nothing would do that except failure in his allegiance to his better self. We should love our friends not for what they are to us, but for what they are in themselves. Of course, it may be said that fickleness to us is a flaw in his better self, but if we stop to think how many tiresome ways we probably have, we shall be lenient to the friends who show consciousness of them.

It is a natural instinct with all of us to claim love; those who seem most richly blessed with it probably have some one from whom they desire more than they receive; every one has to learn, sooner or later, that "an unnavigable ocean washes between all human souls,"--

"We live together years and years,
And leave unsounded still
Each other's depths of hopes and fears,
Each other's depths of ill.

"We live together day by day,
And some chance look or tone
Lights up with instantaneous ray
An inner world unknown."

We all have to learn, sooner or later, that nothing less than Divine Love can satisfy us, but because our natural longings are so often denied, some say they are wrong and should be crushed out. It is wrong to give way to them, to yield to the tendency which is so strong with some, to let all their interests be personal,--to care for places and natural beauty and subjects only because they are associated with people,--to let life be dull to us unless our personal affections are in play. Women ought to make it a point of conscience to learn to care for things impersonally. We are too apt to be like Recha in "Nathan," when she only looked at the palm trees because the Templar was standing under them; when her mind recovered its balance, she could see the palm trees themselves.

"Nun werd' ich auch die Palmen wieder sehen
Nicht ihn bloss untern Palmen."

If God sends us the trial of loneliness, it may be that He has a special work for us, which needs a long and lonely vigil beside our armour. He may be depriving us of earthly comfort to draw us closer to Himself, that we may learn from Him to be true Sons of Consolation.

"When God cuts off the shoots of our own interests," it has been well said, "it is that we may graft on our hearts the interests of others."

Nothing but knowing what loneliness is can teach us to feel for it in others. Nine-tenths of the world do suffer from it at some time or other; you may not now, but you will some day; and, if you are spared it, nine-tenths of the sorrows of life will be a sealed book to you. "I prayed the Lord," says George Fox, "that he would baptize my heart into a sense of the conditions and needs of all men."

But our Lord, Who Himself suffered under the trial of loneliness, sends all of us friends whom we do not deserve. We can trust to Him to give us the friends we need, just when we need them, and just as long as we need them, as surely as we trust Him for daily bread. He may be keeping His best to the last; nay, the best may never come to us in this life at all; but it is as true now as when St. Anselm said it, eight hundred years ago:--

"In Thee desires which are deferred are not diminished, but rather increased; no noble part, though unfulfilled on earth, is suffered to perish in the soul which lives in Thee, but is deepened and hollowed out by suffering and yearning and want, that it may become capable of a larger fulfilment hereafter."

The hunger of the heart is as natural, and therefore as much implanted by God, as the hunger of the body. Neither must be gratified unlawfully; but when God sends food to either we should accept it thankfully, without either asceticism or greediness, and use the strength it gives us as a means of service. Does not the essence of the wrong sort of love consist in our looking on the affection we receive, or crave for, as a self-ending pleasure, instead of as a gift which is only sent to us to make us happier, and stronger to serve others?

We do not need to be always self-questioning as to how far we are using our happiness for others. We do not count our mouthfuls of food, we feed our bodies without thinking of it, and so we should do to our hearts; but we are often not healthy-minded enough to go right unconsciously, though some happy souls there are--

"Glad hearts, without reproach or blot,
Who do God's work, and know it not."

The Fall brings us under the curse; the tree of knowledge of good and evil has entailed upon us the necessity of self-knowledge; and if we find our hearts out of joint, and craving for more love than we get, we should examine ourselves as to whether we use the love we do get, like the runner's torch handed on from one to the other; whether the glow of our happiness warms us to pass on light and heat to others, or whether we absorb it all ourselves.

And if we know that we are selfish in the matter,--what then? We cannot make ourselves unselfish by a wish; we cannot win love at will. But, though we cannot gain love, we can give it; we can learn to love so well, that we are satisfied by the happiness of those we love, even though we have nothing to do with that happiness.

"How hard a thing it is to look into happiness with another man's eyes!" but it can be done. People do sometimes live, "quenching their human thirst in others' joys."

Although our craving for sympathy is wrong if it be allowed to lame our energies, yet in itself we cannot say it is wrong. "To become saints," says F.W. Robertson, "we must not cease to be men and women. And if there be any part of our nature which is essentially human, it is the craving for sympathy. The Perfect One gave sympathy and wanted it. 'Could ye not watch with Me one hour?' 'Will ye also go away?' Found it, surely, even though His brethren believed not on Him; found it in St. John and Martha, and Mary and Lazarus:"--

"David had his Jonathan, and Christ His John."

Some people are quite conscious that they do not "get on" with others; and they are tempted to be morbidly irritable and exacting, or else to shut themselves up and say, "It's no use, no one wants me." If no one wants you, it is your fault; for if you were always ready to be unselfish and thoughtful for others in small ways, you would be wanted. You need not fret because you are not amusing to talk to, and think that therefore you cannot win affection. As a rule, people do not want you to talk; they want you to listen. Now, any one can be a good listener, for that requires moral, and not intellectual qualifications. Sympathy to guess somebody's favourite subject, and to be really interested in it, will always make that somebody think you pleasant; but the interest must be real: if you only give it for what you can get, you will get nothing.

The right person always is sent just when needed. I do not believe in people missing each other--though it may very well be that we are not fit to be trusted with the affection we should like, and that God knows we should rest in it if we had it, and never turn to Him, and so He keeps it from us till we are ready for it. The longer we live the more we are struck by the apparent chance which threw us with the right people.

There is a Turkish proverb which says, "Every only child has a sister somewhere," and F.D. Maurice, in his beautiful paper on the "Faëry Queen," declares his belief that all who are meant to be friends and to help each other will find each other at the right time, just as Spenser's knights, though wandering in trackless forests, always encountered each other when help was wanted.