For true satisfaction of the heart, there must be a fount of sympathy
from which to draw in all the vicissitudes of life. Sorrow asks for
sympathy, aches to let its griefs be known and shared by a kindred
spirit. To find such, is to dispel the loneliness from life. To have
a heart which we can trust, and into which we can pour our griefs and
our doubts and our fears, is already to take the edge from grief, and
the sting from doubt, and the shade from fear.
Joy also demands that its joy should be shared. The man who has found
his sheep that was lost calls together his neighbors, and bids them
rejoice with him because he has found the sheep that was lost. Joy is
more social than grief. Some forms of grief desire only to creep away
into solitude like a wounded beast to its lair, to suffer alone and to
die alone. But joy finds its counterpart in the sunshine and the
flowers and the birds and the little children, and enters easily into
all the movements of life. Sympathy will respond to a friend's
gladness, as well as vibrate to his grief. A simple generous
friendship will thus add to the joy, and will divide the sorrow.
The religious life, in spite of all the unnatural experiments of
monasticism and all its kindred ascetic forms, is preeminently a life
of friendship. It is individual in its root, and social in its fruits.
It is when two or three are gathered together that religion becomes a
fact for the world. The joy of religion will not be hid and buried in
a man's own heart. "Come, see a man that told me all that ever I did,"
is the natural outcome of the first wonder and the first faith. It
spreads from soul to soul by the impact of soul on soul, from the
original impact of the great soul of God.
Christ's ideal is the ideal of a Kingdom, men banded together in a
common cause, under common laws, serving the same purpose of love. It
is meant to take effect upon man in all his social relationships, in
the home, in the city, in the state. Its greatest triumphs have been
made through friendship, and it in turn has ennobled and sanctified the
bond. The growth of the Kingdom depends on the sanctified working of
the natural ties among men. It was so at the very start; John the
Baptist pointed out the Christ to John the future Apostle and to
Andrew; Andrew findeth his own brother Simon Peter; Philip findeth
Nathanael; and so society through its network of relations took into
its heart the new message. The man who has been healed must go and
tell those who are at home, must declare it to his friends, and seek
that they also should share in his great discovery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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