e time to
get well acquainted with the company of his followers, to test them, to
study their character, to learn their qualities of strength or weakness.

Many fatal mistakes in the choosing of friends come from unfit haste.
We would better take time to know our possible friends, and be sure
that we know them well, before making the solemn compact that seals the
attachment.

Jesus made his choice of friends a subject of prayer. He spent a whole
night in prayer with God, and then came in the morning to choose his
apostles. If Jesus needed thus to pray before choosing his friends,
how much more should we seek God's counsel before taking a new
friendship into our life! We cannot know what it may mean to us,
whither it may lead us, what sorrow, care, or pain it may bring to us,
what touches of beauty or of marring it may put upon our soul, and we
dare not admit it unless God gives it to us. In nothing do young
people need more the guidance of divine wisdom than when they are
settling the question of who shall be their friends. At the Last
Supper Jesus said in his prayer, referring to his disciples, "Thine
they were, and thou gavest them me." It makes a friendship very sacred
to be able to say, "God gave it to me. God sent me this friend."

In choosing his friends, Jesus thought not chiefly of the comfort and
help they would be to him, but far more of what he might be to them.
He did crave friendship for himself. His heart needed it just as any
true human heart does. He welcomed affection whenever any one brought
the gift to him. He accepted the friendship of the poor, of the
children, of those he helped. We cannot understand how much the
Bethany home was to him, with its confidence, its warmth, its shelter,
its tender affection. One of the most pathetic incidents in the whole
Gospel story is the hunger of Jesus for sympathy in the garden, when he
came again and again to his human friends, hoping to find them alert in
watchful love, and found them asleep. It was a cry of deep
disappointment which came from his lips, "Could ye not watch with me
one hour?" Jesus craved the blessing of friendship for himself, and in
choosing the Twelve expected comfort and strength from his fellowship
with them.

But his deepest desire was that he might be a blessing to them. He
came "not to be ministered unto, but to minister;" not to have friends,
but to be a friend. He chose the Twelve that he might lift them up to
hono