The Wealth of Friendship: With a Homily on Friendship (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Wealth of Friendship: With a Homily on Friendship

All friendship, like all life, has its growth between these realms. It spreads its arms and shoots forth its leaves in that air which is the interfiow of what is and what ought to be - the real and the idea]. It cannot separate itself from either. If my supposed friend imagines that he can cut loose from the world and human life as it is, and befriend me by dwelling altogether in what ought to be, he deceives him self, and I find him to be but the ghost of afriend. Absolute truthfulness to the fact that as matters really are, I have a body and its needs, temptations and desires that fasten themselves on the earth; that, being on the earth, I must have to do with citizen ship, politics, trade, marriage, home, and the reform of this world - this is the somber fact that marks the place where our friend ship must root itself.

On the other hand, absolute truthfulness to the fact that as matters ideally ought to be, I am a soul able to climb up to God; full of potencies which it will take an eternity to unfold; that, being heaven-des tined, I have to do with beauty, divinity, ideality, and the atmosphere of pure spirit, - this is the luminous fact that marks the place where our friendship must pierce the soil of the limited and bounded, thence to rise unto its own fruitage in the limitless and the free. I grant that this latter realm must be the circumambient air in which the solid and prosaic earth, on which our friend ship roots itself, must roll. The ought to be must always be the boundless at mosphere of what is; and he who is thus true - to fasten with his thought my thought, to unite with his feeling my feel ing, to join with his will my will, unto these realms, the real and the ideal, is my friend.

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