have loved you, that ye also love one another" was the new
requirement.

Since, then, the new ideal of friendship is that which Jesus gave in
his own life, it will be worth our while to make a study of this holy
pattern, that we may know how to strive toward it for ourselves.

We may note the tenderness of the friendship of Jesus. It has been
suggested by an English preacher that Christ exhibited the blended
qualities of both sexes. "There was in him the womanly heart as well
as the manly brain." Yet tenderness is not exclusively a womanly
excellence; indeed, since tenderness can really coexist only with
strength, it is in its highest manifestation quite as truly a manly as
a womanly quality. Jesus was inimitably tender. Tenderness in him was
never softness or weakness. It was more like true motherliness than
almost any other human affection; it was infolding, protecting,
nourishing love.

We find abundant illustrations of this quality in the story of the life
of Jesus. The most kindly and affectionate men are sure sometime to
reveal at least a shade of harshness, coldness, bitterness, or
severity. But in Jesus there was never any failure of tenderness. We
see it in his warm love for John, in his regard for little children, in
his compassion for sinners who came to his feet, in his weeping over
the city which had rejected him and was about to crucify him, in his
thought for the poor, in his compassion for the sick.

Another quality of the friendship of Jesus was patience. In all his
life he never once failed in this quality. We see it in his treatment
of his disciples. They were slow learners. He had to teach the same
lesson over and over again. They could not understand his character.
But he wearied not in his teaching. They were unfaithful, too, in
their friendship for him. In a time of alarm they all fled, while one
of them denied him, and another betrayed him. But never once was there
the slightest impatience shown by him. Having loved his own, he loved
them unto the uttermost, through all dulness and all unfaithfulness.
He suffered unjustly, but bore all wrong in silence. He never lost his
temper. He never grew discouraged, though all his work seemed to be in
vain. He never despaired of making beauty out of deformity in his
disciples. He never lost hope of any soul. Had it not been for this
quality of unwearying patience nothing would ever have come from his
interest in human lives.

T