p. 14 | The Art of Being a Friend

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 21, 1911

The Art of Being a Friend

THERE are some persons who make professions of intense love for all the human race, with whom it is nevertheless exceedingly difficult for individual representatives of the race to live. It is always an easier matter to be filled with a lofty sentiment of universal fraternity than it is to exhibit even ordinary patience with the man who stands beside you.

That love for man which is the best evidence of one’s love for the Most High may be a much simpler and a much rarer quality than we sometimes think. It is by no means certain that it is all summed up and expressed in foreign and home missionary offerings, or even in reform and charity organizations, or that it is the exclusive property of those who write and sing about the brotherhood of man.

It is really an easy matter to learn to love the ideal and fictitious man, the creature of the poet’s imagination. He makes no assaults on your nerves, olfactory or others; and when you get tired of him, you can just shut your mind to him; he will not shiver on your mental doorstep.

Some of the most pugnaciously selfish persons in this world seem to take delight in dreams of the federation of the nations of the world, when all the peoples shall love one another, all the flags be furled, and the cannon be converted into flower-pots. But that universal fraternity would be quite a different matter to them if it became practical, and affected the interest on government bonds or the price of furs and feathers.

Some of the most disagreeable persons in the world, candidates for heavenly homes, are prodigious reservoirs of emotional verse and phrase on brotherhood and the love of our fellow beings. But the fellow-being sentiment is not made to embrace their servants and neighbors, who would be quite happy if one possessed of such angelic ideals would take an angelic habitation permanently.

Then you will find some ordinary persons, rough, perhaps, on the exterior, and even sometimes seemingly untroubled by high ideals, about whom their fellow beings gather like iron filings to a magnet, to whom they cling in times of trouble like limpets to a rock. They may have heard nothing of poetry on brotherhood; they are simply brothers, that’s all.

There are others who seem, as we say, to have a faculty for getting along with all kinds of folk; they make friends, and they hold them. They are found among all kinds of people and in all walks of life; they are the cement of society everywhere. They are not often brilliant, and they are seldom burdened by theories of social improvement, but they are just brothers, making us all a family.

Now, there is nothing at all mysterious about this power that some have to win friends and to bind us all together. It simply means that they have learned to look for the essential things in people; they like us for our own sakes; they set their hearts on the souls of men, the real self in each of us. They get along with the hobo because they see through his rags, and with the king because they do not see his regalia.

The trouble with many of us is that when we talk about brotherhood, we mean we would take all men into our family if they would acquire our tastes and habits. When we look at the other man, we are thinking how unlike he is to what we are, and therefore to what he ought to be. We miss the man himself because we can not see through his conditions and clothes.

While we are seeking to save religion from evaporation in sentiment, shall we not seek to save fraternity from the same fate? Brotherhood means many a hard lesson, means doing many a difficult thing, means paying a big price. But it means finding a great reward; it means the discovery of humanity; it means learning to live with other people, and so finding the greatest wealth in the world,—that which lies in human hearts and minds.—Selected.