But there is another side to friendship; for one great part of it is taking what our friends do for us, as well as doing things for them.  How he will take what they have to give!  He lets them manage the boat, while he sleeps (Mark 4:38), and go and prepare for him (Luke 9:52), and see to the Passover meal (Mark 14:13).  The women, we read, ministered to him of their substance (Luke 8:3).  There is a very significant phrase in St. Luke (22:28), where he says to them at the end:  “Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations.”  He tells them there that they have helped him.  How?  Apparently by being with him.  Is not that friendship?  In the same chapter (Luke 22:15) we find an utterance that reveals the depth of his feeling for his friends:  “With desire I have desired (a Greek rendering of a Semitic intensive) to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.”  They are to help him again by being with him, and he has longed for it, he says.  The Gospel of John sums up the whole story in a beautiful sentence:  “Jesus, having loved his own which were in the world, loved them unto the end” (John 13:1).  Augustine is right.  “One loving spirit sets another on fire.”

Note again the word which he uses in speaking to them ("Tekna”:  Mark 2:5, 10:24).  It is a diminutive, a little disguised as “children” in our English version.  It reappears in the Fourth Gospel in even more diminutive forms ("Teknia”, 13:33; Paidia, 21:5) with a peculiarly tender suggestion.  The word of Mark answers more closely than anything I know to “Boys,” as we used it in the Canadian Universities.  “Men,” or “Undergraduates,” is the word in the English Universities; “Students,” in Scotland and in India; in Canada we said “Boys”; and I think we get nearer, and like one another better, with that easy name.  And it was this friendly, pleasant word, or one very like it, that he used with them.  Nor is it the only one of the kind.  “Fear not, little flock!” he said (Luke 12:32).  Do not the diminutives mean something?  Do they not take us into the midst of a group where friendship is real?  And in the centre is the friendliest figure of all.

Look for a moment at the men who followed him; at the type he calls.  They are simple people in the main—­warm hearts and impulsive natures.  The politics of Simon the Zealot might at one time have been summed up as “the knife and plenty of it,” a simple and direct enough type of political thought, in all conscience, however hopeless and ineffectual, as history showed; but he gave up his politics for the friendship of Jesus.  Peter, again, is the champion example of the impulsive nature.  Why Jesus called James and John “the sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17) I am not sure.  Dr. Rendel Harris thinks because they were twins; other people find something of the thunderstorm in their ideas and outlook.  The publican in the group is of much the same type; he is ready to leave his business and his custom-house at a word—­once more the impulsive nature