honourable,
when he is tempted to play the coward, and be false to God's Spirit
within him. No man is so pure-minded but what he may find a purer-
minded person than himself to help him in the battle against the
world, the flesh, and the devil.

My friends, do not think it a mean thing to look up to those who are
superior to yourselves. On the contrary, you will find in practice
that it is only the meanest hearts, the shallowest and the basest,
who feel no admiration, but only envy for those who are better than
themselves; who delight in finding fault with them, and blackening
their character, and showing that they are not, after all, so much
superior to other people; while it is the noblest-hearted, the very
men who are most worthy to be admired themselves, who, like
Jonathan, feel most the pleasure, the joy, and the strength of
reverence; of having some one whom they can look up to and admire;
some one in whose company they can forget themselves, their own
interest, their own pleasure, their own honour and glory, and cry,
Him I must hear; him I must follow; to him I must cling, whatever
may betide. Blessed and ennobling is the feeling which gathers
round a wise teacher or a great statesman all the most earnest,
high-minded, and pious youths of his generation; the feeling which
makes soldiers follow the general whom they trust, they know not why
or whither, through danger, and hunger, and fatigue, and death
itself; the feeling which, in its highest perfection, made the
Apostles forsake all and follow Christ, saying, 'Lord, to whom shall
we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life'--which made them ready
to work and to die for him whom the world called the son of the
carpenter, but whom they, through the Spirit of God bearing witness
with their own pure and noble spirits, knew to be the Son of the
Living God.

Ay, a blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend; one
human soul whom we can trust utterly; who knows the best and the
worst of us, and who loves us, in spite of all our faults; who will
speak the honest truth to us, while the world flatters us to our
face, and laughs at us behind our back; who will give us counsel and
reproof in the day of prosperity and self-conceit; but who, again,
will comfort and encourage us in the day of difficulty and sorrow,
when the world leaves us alone to fight our own battle as we can.

If we have had the good fortune to win such a friend, let us do
anything ra