because our friends are unfeeling,
but simply because they are unable. It is not their selfishness which
keeps them off, but just their frailty. Their spirit may be willing,
but the flesh is weak. It is the lesson of life, that there is no stay
in the arm of flesh, that even if there is no limit to human love,
there is a limit to human power. Sooner or later, somewhere or other,
it is the experience of every son of man, as it was the experience of
the Son of Man, "Behold the hour cometh, and now is come, that ye My
friends shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave Me
alone."

Human friendship must have limits, just because it is human. It is
subject to loss, and is often to some extent the sport of occasion. It
lacks permanence: misunderstandings can estrange us: slander can
embitter us: death can bereave us. We are left very much the victims
of circumstances; for like everything earthly it is open to change and
decay. No matter how close and spiritual the intercourse, it is not
permanent, and never certain. If nothing else, the shadow of death is
always on it. Tennyson describes how he dreamed that he and his friend
should pass through the world together, loving and trusting each other,
and together pass out into the silence.

Arrive at last the blessed goal,
And He that died in Holy Land
Would reach us out the shining hand,
And take us as a single soul.

It was a dream at the best. Neither to live together nor to die
together could blot out the spiritual limits of friendship. Even in
the closest of human relations when two take each other for better for
worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, they may be
made one flesh, but never one soul. Singleness is the ultimate fact of
human life. "The race is run by one and one, and never by two and two."

In religion, in the deepest things of the spirit, these limits we have
been considering are perhaps felt most of all. With even a friend who
is as one's own soul, we cannot seek to make a spiritual impression,
without realizing the constraint of his separate individuality. We
cannot break through the barriers of another's distinct existence. If
we have ever sought to lead to a higher life another whom we love, we
must have been made to feel that it does not all rest with us, that he
is a free moral being, and that only by voluntarily yielding his heart
and will and life to the King, can he enter the Kingdom. We ar