espair 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 it