e each other's resentments; to praise without hypocrisy, rebuke
without malice, rejoice without envy, and assist without ostentation.
This divine sympathy alone can break up selfishness, vanity, and pride.
It produces sincerity, truthfulness, disinterestedness,--without which
any friendship will die. It is not the remembrance of pleasure which
keeps alive a friendship, but the perception of virtues. How can that
live which is based on corruption or a falsehood? Anything sensual in
friendship passes away, and leaves a residuum of self-reproach, or
undermines esteem. That which preserves undying beauty and sacred
harmony and celestial glory is wholly based on the spiritual in man, on
moral excellence, on the joys of an emancipated soul. It is not easy, in
the giddy hours of temptation or folly, to keep this truth in mind, but
it can be demonstrated by the experience of every struggling character.
The soul that seeks the infinite and imperishable can be firmly knit
only to those who live in the realm of adoration,--the adoration of
beauty, or truth, or love; and unless a man or woman _does_ prefer the
infinite to the finite, the permanent to the transient, the true to the
false, the incorruptible to the corruptible there is not even the
capacity of friendship, unless a low view be taken of it to advance our
interests, or enjoy passing pleasures which finally end in bitter
disappointments and deep disgusts.

Moreover, there must be in lofty friendship not only congenial tastes,
and an aspiration after the imperishable and true, but some common end
which both parties strive to secure, and which they love better than
they love themselves. Without this common end, friendship might wear
itself out, or expend itself in things unworthy of an exalted purpose.
Neither brilliant conversation, nor mutual courtesies, nor active
sympathies will make social intercourse a perpetual charm. We tire of
everything, at times, except the felicities of a pure and fervid love.
But even husband and wife might tire without the common guardianship of
children, or kindred zeal in some practical aims which both alike seek
to secure; for they are helpmates as well as companions. Much more is it
necessary for those who are not tied together in connubial bonds to have
some common purpose in education, in philanthropy, in art, in religion.
Such was pre-eminently the case with Paula and Jerome. They were equally
devoted to a cause which was greater than th