If we have gone wrong here, and have admitted into the sanctuary of our
lives influences that make for evil, we must break away from them at
all costs. The sweeter and truer relationships of our life should arm
us for the struggle, the prayers of a mother, the sorrow of true
friends. This is the fear, countless times, in the hearts of the folks
at home when their boy leaves them to win his way in the city, the
deadly fear lest he should fall into evil habits, and into the clutches
of evil men. They know that there are men whose touch, whose words,
whose very look, is contamination. To give them entrance into our
lives is to submit ourselves to the contagion of sin.

Friends should be chosen by a higher principle of selection than any
worldly one, of pleasure, or usefulness, or by weak submission to the
evil influences of our lot. They should be chosen for character, for
goodness, for truth and trustworthiness, because they have sympathy
with us in our best thoughts and holiest aspirations, because they have
community of mind in the things of the soul. All other connections are
fleeting and imperfect from the nature of the case. A relationship
based on the physical withers when the first bloom fades: a
relationship founded on the intellectual is only a little more secure,
as it too is subject to caprice. All purely earthly partnerships, like
all earthly treasures, are exposed to decay, the bite of the moth and
the stain of the rust; and they must all have an end.

A young man may get opposing advice from two equally trusted
counsellors. One will advise him to cultivate the friendship of the
clever, because they will afterward occupy places of power in the
world: the other will advise him to cultivate the friendship of the
good, because if they do not inherit the earth, they aspire to the
heavens. If he knows the character of the two counsellors, he will
understand why they should look upon life from such different
standpoints; and later on he will find that while some of his friends
were both clever and good, not one of the purely intellectual
friendships remains to him. It does not afford a sufficient basis of
agreement, to stand the tear and wear of life. The basis of friendship
must be community of soul.

The only permanent severance of heart comes through lack of a common
spiritual footing. If one soul goes up the mountain top, and the other
stays down among the shadows, if the two have not the same hi