"Ye did not choose me, but I chose you," says Jesus to those whom he calls his friends. “Herein is love,”— herein is Divine love, Divine friendship, says the disciple whom Jesus loved,-" not that we loved God, but that he loved us;" this love consists in God's loving us, rather than in our loving God; for the truest, highest, purest, love which is friendship, or which friendship is—whether it be Divine love or friendship or human love or friendship-always consists in loving, rather than in being loved.

Only he who is unwilling to love without being loved, is likely to feel that there is no such thing as friendship in the world.

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RUE friendship being love without compact or condition, true friendship never pivots on an equivalent return of service or of affection. Its whole sweep is away from self and toward the loved one. Its desire is for the friend's welfare; its joy is in the friend's prosperity; its sorrows and trials are in the friend's misfortunes and griefs; its pride is in the friend's attainments and successes; its constant purpose is of doing and enduring for the friend; and even its unrest, if unrest there be, is because of its never-satisfied endeavor to advantage and benefit the friend. This is ideal friendship; this is true friendship in actual attainment.

Take, for example, that most beautiful of all illustrative friendships, the friendship of Jonathan for David, in the Bible narrative,-it was grandly, gloriously unselfish. Jonathan was a prince of the royal house, heir-apparent to the throne of a kingdom. He was himself a hero of high achievement, with a foremost place in the people's

love and honor. His first glimpse of David was in the light of a successful rival. The stripling shepherd stood the new hero of the hour, brought into the presence of the king while the nation's praises were ringing in his ears because of the wonderful deliverance wrought by his faith-filled daring. Looking then upon him in his loveliness of person and of character, Jonathan saw with prophetic ken the sure future of David as the coming king of Israel, as the one in whose glowing light his own star of earthly hope must pale. But in the first flush of that discovery there was no shade of envy, nor yet the faintest trace of regret, in the more than royal heart of Jonathan. Joy in the recognition of so noble and lovable a character as David's, filled the whole being of the nobler and yet more lovable Jonathan. And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul." And from that time onward every heart-throb of Jonathan's friendship for David was a heart-throb of unselfish devotedness to him to whom he was a friend. What wonder that David pronounced upon that friendship as "passing the love of women;" passing all craving love, all selfish desire! Similarly, the unselfish devotedness of Ruth to Naomi gave her friendship a place in the sacred story, and marked the contrast of her love with Orpah's. The associations of a lifetime, the drawings of personal interest, of kindred, of patriotism, and of religion, combined for the attaching of the widowed daughters-in-law to Moab and its dwellers. Only a sacred friendship, a friendship which had its deepest roots in no obligations of blood or of

marriage, could offer effectual resistance to these multiplied attractions, in such an hour as that when Naomi and Ruth and Orpah wept together in the thought of their final parting, on the boundary banks of the Jordan. Orpah loved her mother-in-law, and "kissed her" tenderly; but Ruth had friendship for her mother-in-law, and "clave unto her "—as friendship by its nature cleaves. And the unselfish friendship of Ruth for Naomi spoke out then in that matchless asseveration of unswerving fidelity, which thrills through the ages, in its tremulous tenderness of womanly affection:

"Intreat me not to leave thee,

And to return from following after thee:
For whither thou goest, I will go;
And where thou lodgest, I will lodge:

Thy people shall be my people,

And thy God my God:

Where thou diest, will I die,

And there will I be buried:

The Lord do so to me, and more also,

If aught but death part thee and me."

The very name "Ruth" means, in the Hebrew, “A friend" (in its abstract form, "Friendship"); as if the sacred story would make this record of devotedness an illustration of true friendship. The name may, indeed, have been given to this faithful friend after her beautiful exhibit of its meaning, it being her new name in Israel. It was through her exhibit of friendship that Ruth won a place in the ancestral line of the Friend of friends, in his human descent from Abraham the friend of God.

Montaigne cites a story out of classic lore, in evidence

of this basal truth. "Endamidas, a Corinthian, had two friends, Charixenus a Sicyonian, and Aretheus a Corinthian. Endamidas coming to die, being poor and his two friends being rich, he made his will after this manner: 'I bequeath to Aretheus the maintenance of my mother, to support and provide for her in her old age; and to Charixenus I bequeath the care of providing for my daughter in marriage, and of giving her as good a marriage portion as he is able. And in case one of these executors chance to die I hereby substitute the survivor in his place.' They who first saw this will made themselves merry at the contents; but the executors, being made acquainted with it, accepted the legacies with great satisfaction; and one of them, Charixenus, dying within a few days thereafter, the survivor Aretheus, having by that means the charge of both devolved solely on himself, nourished that old woman with great care and tenderness; and of five talents he had in estate he gave two and a half in marriage with an only daughter of his own, and two and a half in marriage with the daughter of Endamidas; and in one and the same day he solemnized the nuptials of the two maidens."

In comment on this story, Montaigne adds that “Endamidas as a bounty and a favor here bequeaths to his friends a legacy of employing themselves in his necessity. He leaves them heirs to this liberality of his, which consists in giving them the opportunity of conferring a benefit upon him; and doubtless the force of friendship is more eminently apparent in this act of his than in that of Aretheus." In other words, Aretheus was here given the opportunity of evidencing as a friend that unselfishness