endship
has done its work when the limits of friendship are reached, when
through the discipline of love we are led into a larger love, when a
door is opened out to a higher life. The sickness of heart which is
the lot of all, the loneliness which not even the voice of a friend can
dispel, the grief which seems to stop the pulse of life itself, find
their final meaning in this compulsion toward the divine. We are
sometimes driven out not knowing whither we go, not knowing the purpose
of it; only knowing through sheer necessity that here we have no
abiding city, or home, or life, or love; and seeking a city, a home, a
life, a love, that hath foundations.

We have some training in the love of friends, as if only to prove to us
that without love we cannot live. All our intimacies are but broken
lights of the love of God. They are methods of preparation for the
great communion. In so far even that our earthly friendships are helps
to life, it is because they are shot through with the spiritual, and
they prepare us by their very deficiencies for something more
permanent. There have been implanted in man an instinct, and a need,
which make him discontented, till he find content in God. If at any
time we are forced to cease from man, whose breath is in his nostrils,
it is that we may reach out to the infinite Father, unchanging, the
same yesterday, to-day, and forever. This is the clamant, imperious
need of man.

The solitude of life in its ultimate issue is because we were made for
a higher companionship. It is just in the innermost sanctuary, shut to
every other visitant, that God meets us. We are driven to God by the
needs of the heart. If the existence of God was due to a purely
intellectual necessity; if we believed in Him only because our reason
gave warrant for the faith; it would not matter much whether He really
is, and whether we really can know Him. But when the instincts of our
nature, and the necessities of the heart-life demand God, we are forced
to believe. In moments of deep feeling, when all pretence is silenced,
a man may be still able to question the _existence_ of God, but he does
not question his own _need_ of God. Man, to remain man, must believe
in the possibility of this relationship with the divine. There is a
love which passeth the love of women, passeth the love of comrades,
passeth all earthly love, the love of God to the weary, starved heart
of man.

To believe in this great fact