Those who love know that love is not blind. Love has the truest sight. If you want to know what a person really is, do not ask one who hates him, but one who loves him. Yet love may blind itself. To shut your eyes to the faults of your friend is not the way to lessen those faults. To stand between her and the penalty which her deeds have justly brought upon her is to deprive her of one of the most important means of growth. If your affection is of a poor and narrow sort, you will constantly urge your friend to consult her own pleasure and interests in preference to those of others, in this way stifling in her every altruistic impulse. Acting and reacting upon each other in this way you will find that generous feeling and disinterested affection in both of you will constantly diminish. Any two people who love each other should cherish, each in the other, the spirit of self-forgetful service.
A friendship, like everything else in life, is known by its fruits. "Men do not gather grapes of thorns nor figs from thistles." The fruits of a worthy friendship are higher and ever higher ideals of life and duty. If your friendship has made you less sensitive to other obligations and less responsive to the call of duty, beware of it! If your love for one has lessened your affection for your other friends, it is not a good friendship. Friendship should expand the heart, not contract it. Everything savoring of narrowness and exclusiveness is a hindrance. You must love your friend so much that you love the whole world better because of her. You must respect and reverence her so truly that all human nature is dignified and ennobled through her.
"All things through thee take nobler form And look beyond the earth; The mill-round of our fate appears A sun-path in thy worth."
What is the place of the emotional element in friendship? Not the chief place, it may be confidently asserted. In the richest and most enduring friendships, other things are of more importance. Not that there is an absence of emotion--far from it. The danger, however, of over-emphasizing emotion is that the friendship may descend to mere sentimentality. What is more important than emotion in friendship, do you ask? The unity of spirit that gradually takes place in a fine friendship; the feeling that each is perfectly understood by the other; and the knowledge that each can depend upon the other's loyalty in any and every emergency of life.