mages in each other's souls.

Then kinship becomes friendship. Upon the material consanguinity is
superinduced a spiritual consanguinity; the legal and customary bonds
of descent, association, and duty are brightened and exalted into
delightful relations of intelligence and sympathy, a choice community
of character, purposes, and experience. The relative is then hidden
in the friend. Innumerable aunts and nephews, nieces and uncles,
cousins, and other branches of kindred, have found in their
relationship, with the common interests and the consequent meetings,
a fortunate occasion for forming close and blessed friendships.

The biblical instance of Esther and Mordecai is very charming.
Esther, left an orphan, was adopted and brought up by her uncle,
Mordeoi. When the beautiful Jewish maiden was taken into the palace,
among those from whom Ahasuerus was to choose his queen, "Mordecai
walked every day before the court of the women's house, to know how
Esther did and what should become of her." And when she had been made
queen, "she did still the commandment of Mordecai, like as when she
was brought up with him." In the threatened calamity of the Jews,
Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and wept.
Esther's maids told her of it. "Then was the queen exceedingly
grieved; and she sent raiment to clothe Mordecai." In all the sequel
of the well-known tale, it is easy to see that the niece's friendship
for her uncle was at least as important a sentiment as the wife's
love for her husband. Beranger caused to be placed on the tomb of his
aunt this touching inscription: She was never a mother, yet sons
mourned for her. It is a striking fact that the strength of the tie
of blood is in an historic process of decrease, while, parallel with
it, the strength of the tie of moral sympathy is in an historic
process of increase. In primitive ages, when barbaric force
prevailed, and life was full of exposures, and redress was uncertain,
the family was the unit of society. All within the bond of the family
stood compactly together in the most sacred and intense of leagues
against every hostile approach from without. But as law and order
became consolidated, and their sanctions diffused, and adequate
general tribunals were set up, and public considerations encroached
on private, the tie of physical kindred grew less, that of moral
fellowship more. The bloody feuds of old times, which ran down the
veins of successive gen