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 in some other’s presence quite discrowned;” let the reverse be true where we are.

It is a terrible thought that we have perhaps made others less noble, less pure, less conscientious, than they would have been.  We can never repair the harm we do to one who loses faith in our goodness,—­he inevitably loses some part of his faith in goodness itself.  “Much of our lives is spent in marring our own influence,” says George Eliot, “and turning others’ belief in us into a widely concluding unbelief, which they call knowledge of the world, but which is really disappointment in you or me.”

Nobody, who has not watched or felt it, knows the laming of all spiritual energy, the hardening, the blighting of all noble impulse which comes from this sort of knowledge of the world; and who can say that he has never (more or less) been thus guilty?—­it is more truly blood-guiltiness than anything else, for it helps to murder souls.

Perhaps the greatest of the innumerable blessings which friendship confers on the character, lies in this fostering of moral thoughtfulness produced by its responsibilities:  “I know not a more serious thing than the responsibility incurred by all human affection.  Only think of this:  whoever loves you is growing like you; neither you nor he can hinder it, save at the cost of alienation.  Oh, if you are grateful for but one creature’s love, rise to the height of so pure a blessing—­drag them not down by the very embrace with which they cling to you, but through their gentleness ensure their consecration."[6]