Even
death, which sunders us from our friends, cannot permanently divide us.
In the great Home-coming and Reunion of hearts, all the veils which
obscure feeling will be torn down, and we shall know each other better,
and shall love each other better.

But every opportunity carries a penalty; every privilege brings with it
a warning. If we will not live the life of love, if we harden our
heart against a brother offended, we will find in our need even the
great and infinite love of God shut against us, harder to be won than a
strong city, ribbed and stockaded as the bars of a castle. To the
unforgiving there is no forgiveness. To the hard, and relentless, and
loveless, there is no love. To the selfish, there is no heaven.

The Limits of Friendship

If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or
the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend which is as thine own soul, entice
thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, thou shalt not
consent unto him, nor hearken unto him, but thine hand shall be first
upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people;
because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the Lord thy God.

DEUTERONOMY.

Yet each will have one anguish--his own soul,
Which perishes of cold.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

The Limits of Friendship

Friendship, at its very best and purest, has limits. At its beginning,
it seems to have no conditions, and to be capable of endless
development. In the first flush of new-born love it seems almost an
insult to question its absolute power to meet every demand made upon
it. The exquisite joy of understanding, and being understood, is too
keen to let us believe, that there may be a terminal line, beyond which
we may not pass. Friendship comes as a mystery, formless, undefined,
without set bounds; and it is often a sore experience to discover that
it is circumscribed, and limited like everything human. At first to
speak of it as having qualifications was a profanation, and to find
them out came as a disillusionment.

Yet the discovery is not all a loss. The limitless is also the vague,
and it is well to know the exact terms implied in a relationship. Of
course we learn through experience the restrictions on all intimacy,
and if we are wise we learn to keep well within the margin; but many a
disappointment might have been saved, if we had understood the inherent
limitations of the subject. These are