Friendship yields these plastic moments and unique opportunities.  For the most part the soul dwells in a castle locked and barred against outsiders.  No man can keep open-house for every passer-by.  But friendship is an open sesame, drawing every bar and bolt.  How the heart leaps when the friend crosses the threshold!  His shadow always falls behind him.  His coming is summer in the soul; his presence is peace.  Friendship glorifies everything it touches.  When on a stormy night our friend comes in he seems to warm the very fire upon the hearth; he sweetens the sweet singer’s voice; lends new meaning to the wise man’s words; gives reminiscence an added charm; makes old stories new; makes the laughter and smiles come twice as often and stay twice as long.  Friendship lies upon the heart like a warm fire upon the hearth.  By reason of friendship history exhibits every great man as leaving his school of thought and a group of disciples behind him.  His spirit lingers with men long after his form has disappeared from the streets, as the sun lingers in the clouds after the day is done, as the melody lingers in the ear long after the song is sung.  Longfellow, after a day and a night with Emerson, literally emitted poems and plays.  He was stimulated by friendship as bees by rose liquor and the sweet pea wine.  Friendship always makes the heart plastic.  Then the mental furrows are all open and mellow; sympathy falls like dew and rain; then the heart saith to its friend:  “Here am I, all plastic to your touch; work upon me your will; for good or ill—­I am thine.”  Therefore, friendship imposes frightful responsibilities; in asking and receiving it we assume charge of another’s destiny.  This is the very genius of the teacher’s influence over his pupil, the parent’s over his child, the general’s over his soldier, the patriot’s over his people.  Better a thousand times never open the furrow than to leave it unfertilized.

How strategic life’s better hours!  One of God’s precious gifts is the luminous hour that denies the lower animal mood.  Mind is not always at its best.  Full oft our thought is sodden and dull.  Then duty seems a maze without a clew and life’s skeins all a tangle.  The mind is uneasy, confused and troubled.  Then men live to the eye and the ear and physical comforts; they live for houses and beautiful things in them; for shelves and rich goods upon them; for factories and large profits by them.  Responsibility to God seems like the faint shadow of a vaguely remembered dream.  The voice of conscience is in the ear like the far-off murmuring of the sea.  The soul is sordid and the finer senses indurated.  The angel of the better nature is bondslave to the worst.  Then enters some element that nurtures the nobler impulse.  Some misfortune, earthquake-like, cleaves through the hard crust.  Or some gentle event, like the coming of an old friend or the returning to the old homestead, stirs old memories and kindles new thoughts.