Article April 8, 1916 Issue

Friendship

J. W. E. GILHESPY

Of all the gifts wherewith God gladdens our earthly pilgrimage there is surely none more noble and beauteous than friendship, that joyous blessing which comes to sow earth's barren places with fragrant flowerets of Love divine. And yet how men have sought to appropriate and distort that which is so fair! How frequently they are heard to speak of friendship as though it were a personal possession, something which they are entitled to bestow or withhold at pleasure, and what misery has not this false view been responsible for in the world's history! Or they have thought of it as a sentiment excited in one individual by certain qualities in another, an attraction exercised by certain personal attributes.

Of such false views of friendship Mrs. Eddy says: "Would existence without personal friends be to you a blank? Then the time will come when you will be solitary, left without sympathy" (Science and Health, p. 266). Note that in this statement the word "personal" is coupled with "friends," else we might conclude that friendship has no place in the divine plan. Such an assumption would be entirely incorrect; for true friendship, far from being contrary to God's design, is actually of God. It is only humanity's false concept of it that has power to harm and that is therefore self-destroyed. As we learn to know it in Christian Science, friendship is a spiritual gift which each of God's children has from the Father, and which cannot be lost, for it is maintained and perpetuated by Love. It is associated with honesty, purity, justice, love.

Some years ago it was the writer's privilege to serve for two years side by side with one who was living in obedience to divine Principle in daily life, and this revealed to him something of the barrenness of his own sense of existence. I remember how I longed for friendship with this Christian Scientist, and yet realized the impossibility of it, for the purely personal qualities, which were all I had to offer as my contribution toward the friendship, seemed valueless in the realm in which he dwelt.

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