y be described in the verse of
Sophocles as 'sharing the love and not the hatred of the person he cares
for.'" Such a bit as that makes us forget the centuries which have rolled
between us and Plutarch; his temptations are ours--how much easier it is
to us to please our friends by sympathizing with their feelings, whether
that feeling be right or wrong! How much pleasanter it is to us to gratify
our selfish affection by giving them what they want, as Wentworth did King
Charles, than to brace them to endure hardness for the sake of others!

We are so apt to give and to ask for weakening consolation. Sympathy in
the ordinary use of the term is more weakening than anything, and it is
pleasant to give and to take.

But sympathy should be like bracing air: "no friendship is worth the name
which does not inspire new and stronger views of duty." We all care to be
sons of consolation,--let us see to it that we brace others instead of
giving mere pity. We all like to be pitied, but in our heart we are more
grateful to the friend who puts fresh spring into us, by what perhaps
seems hard common sense. Those are the friends whose memory comes back to
us when circumstances, or years, or distance, have drifted us far apart.

The friend who fed the weaker part of us never gets from us the same
genuine affection with real stuff in it. How much easier it is to
sympathize with our friends' unreasonable vexation--to join in their
uncharitable speeches, or in laughing at something we ought not to laugh
at, than to brace them

"to welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!"

We find it very hard, almost impossible, to live always up to our own
best self, and we may be quite sure our friends do too, whether they talk
about it or not, and our duty, as a friend, is to see their best self and
help them to be it. Very often the mere fact of knowing that our friend
sees our nobler nature, and believes in it, heartens us to keep faith in
it and to go on striving after it. "Edward Irving unconsciously elevated
every man he talked with into the ideal man he ought to have been; and
went about the world making men noble by believing them to be so."

It rests with each of us to draw out the better part in others; we all
know people with whom we are at our best, and we have failed in our Duty
to our Neighbour if we do not make others feel this with us. "Each soul is