s natural and legitimate. A
perfect friendship would not have room for such grudging sympathy, but
would rejoice more for the other's success than for his own. The
envious, jealous man never can be a friend. His mean spirit of
detraction and insinuating ill-will kills friendship at its birth.
Plutarch records a witty remark about Plistarchus, who was told that a
notorious railer had spoken well of him. "I'll lay my life," said he,
"somebody has told him I am dead, for he can speak well of no man
living."

For true satisfaction of the heart, there must be a fount of sympathy
from which to draw in all the vicissitudes of life. Sorrow asks for
sympathy, aches to let its griefs be known and shared by a kindred
spirit. To find such, is to dispel the loneliness from life. To have
a heart which we can trust, and into which we can pour our griefs and
our doubts and our fears, is already to take the edge from grief, and
the sting from doubt, and the shade from fear.

Joy also demands that its joy should be shared. The man who has found
his sheep that was lost calls together his neighbors, and bids them
rejoice with him because he has found the sheep that was lost. Joy is
more social than grief. Some forms of grief desire only to creep away
into solitude like a wounded beast to its lair, to suffer alone and to
die alone. But joy finds its counterpart in the sunshine and the
flowers and the birds and the little children, and enters easily into
all the movements of life. Sympathy will respond to a friend's
gladness, as well as vibrate to his grief. A simple generous
friendship will thus add to the joy, and will divide the sorrow.

The religious life, in spite of all the unnatural experiments of
monasticism and all its kindred ascetic forms, is preeminently a life
of friendship. It is individual in its root, and social in its fruits.
It is when two or three are gathered together that religion becomes a
fact for the world. The joy of religion will not be hid and buried in
a man's own heart. "Come, see a man that told me all that ever I did,"
is the natural outcome of the first wonder and the first faith. It
spreads from soul to soul by the impact of soul on soul, from the
original impact of the great soul of God.

Christ's ideal is the ideal of a Kingdom, men banded together in a
common cause, under common laws, serving the same purpose of love. It
is meant to take effect upon man in all his social relationships