p. 1 | Friendship

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · May 17, 1877

Friendship.

It is the province of friendship to censure and reprove. Perhaps the willingness to see faults in those we love, and the courage to speak of them, is the grandest test of friendship that can exist. Flattery is not the mark of interest which we all ardently desire our friends to have in us. True, it is pleasant, and there are few of us who do not like to listen to it; but it has been the one thing that has allured thousands to destruction, and, when it had accomplished its ruinous work, those who made use of it to win the esteem of their victims, threw off their disguise and showed that they had never been aught but enemies.

Severe reproof, and more especially from a dearly loved friend, is withering and blistering; it pierces the tenderest depths of the soul; it lacerates until great drops of blood and floods of tears gush forth. But there is a sweet peace that follows this agitation—a bright morning that swallows up the gloom of this night. It is the after thought that it was loving friendship that prompted the castigation, and that the guardian care which prompted it may have been the barrier that stood between us and ruin.