When you think these friends are laboring to your disadvantage, then your love for them soon cools off. They don’t answer your purpose. Thus, trifling circumstances make foes of friends. You may test the friendship you think you have for individuals. If a person’s friendship seems to be strong, and he can not enjoy his friendship for another, unless in that other’s society, and he desires to be in the presence of that person, so that he can hear his voice and feel his personal influence, and if, when separated from that friend he is disquieted and unhappy, very much as is the person who uses strong drink or tobacco, and is deprived of his beer, or rum, or tobacco—his friendship has a low basis. But if one has a true friendship, which is high, and holy, and spiritual, one where his whole confidence is merged in that friend, he trusts him with his heart and most secret thoughts, and knows without doubt that he can not be betrayed by that friend; and they hold constant spiritual communion with each other, no matter how far apart—there is a concord of spiritual communion between them that enables them to enjoy each other’s society when separated by hundreds of miles. True friendship is of the spiritual kind that does not regard so gross and physical a friendship as the friendship of the world. I wish to call your attention to the presence of this impulse in you, because perhaps you have not looked at the subject in this light. A word to husbands and wives. A young man, when he contemplates getting married, thinks he will get a wife that will make him very happy. One young man thinks he would like a wife who will be economical; another, one who would make a good housekeeper; and another, an intellectual companion; so they select not so much with reference to the wife, as to the use of the wife. And ladies, on the other hand, select husbands who they think will provide them a good home, afford them protection, etc.; they want a husband for his use; so the union between the man and woman is often based upon the idea of use, and not upon their fitness for companions; and hence their love for each other continues so long as the use continues, and no longer. If a man who desires a good housekeeper finds that his wife is not one, or if a husband finds his wife faulty in any other important particular, just in proportion as she proves faulty his love for her is abated; and at the end of twenty-eight days—the period denominated the “_honey-moon_”—he finds he does not love her near as well as he supposed; and that what he supposed was love, was, after all, but a desire after gratification—that he was loving self instead of his wife.