(3) The voluntary bonds of friendship entail somewhat vaguer obligations, since the closeness of the tie is not clearly fixed, as it is in the case of blood relationship.  But “once a friend always a friend” is the truehearted man’s motto.  “Assure thee,” says one of Shakespeare’s heroines, “if I do vow a friendship, I’ll perform it to the last article.”  No one who has won another’s friendship, and, however tacitly, pledged his own, is thenceforth free to ignore the bond.  Here are for most men the happiest opportunities for fellowship, for inward growth, and for service; for if the love of wife surpasses that of friends, it is not only on account of the fascination of sex, but because marriage may be the supreme friendship.  Emerson declared that “every man passes his life in the search after friendship”; and the greatest of Stevenson’s three desiderata for happiness was — “Ach, Du lieber Gott, friends!” Human beings, even when brought up in a similar environment, are so infinitely divergent in temperament and ideal, that the near of kin seldom meet a man’s deepest needs, and he must wait and watch to find one here and there with whom he can clasp hands in real mutual comprehension and accord.  Want of this spontaneous comradeship sadly limits a life; nothing pays more in joy than the circle of friends that a man can draw about him.  Nothing, likewise, is more morally stimulating.  “What a friend thinks me to be, that must I be.”  This linking of our lives to others draws us out of ourselves, corrects our cramped and distorted vision, and reinforces our wavering aspirations.  Hence those who are so critical and fastidious as to make few friends ill serve their own interests.  A certain heartiness and fearlessness of trust is necessary; reproaches and suspicions, accusations and demands for explanations, must not be indulged in, even if wrong is actually done.  A presumption of good intentions must always be maintained, even if appearances are black.  It is more shameful, as La Rochefoucauld said, to distrust a friend than to be deceived by him.  Indeed, these deceptions and disillusions are oftenest the result of our own mistaken idealization; we must expect neither perfection nor those particular virtues in which we ourselves are especially punctilious, and undertake to love and cleave to a mortal, not an angel.  Friendship requires not only that we lend a hand when help is needed; it implies patience and tact and the endeavor to understand.  Through common experiences, repeated interchange of thought and observation, mutual enjoyment of beauty and fun, particularly in expressing common ideals and working together for common causes, there grows to maturity this wonderful relationship “the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen.”