April 29

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. — Prov. xvii. 17.

Mutual conHdence is the morlar which binds the stones in
Avril 29.

society together into a building. It makes the difference

between the lierding together of beasts and the association of men. No

community could keep together for an hour without mutual confidence,

even in regard of the least intimate relationships of life. But it is the very

lifeblood of friendship. You cannot say, “A. B. is my friend, but I do

not trust him.” If suspicion creeps in, like the foul malaria of tropical

swamps, it kills all friendship. Therefore “he was called the friend of

God” is by James deduced from the fact that “he believed God, and it

was imputed to him for righteousness.” You cannot make a friend of a man

that you do not know where to have. There may be some vague reverence

of, or abject reluctant submission to, “the unknown God,” the something

outside of ourselves that perhaps makes for righteousness; but for any vivid,

warm throb of friendship there must be, first a clear knowledge, and then

a living grappling of that knowledge to my very heart, by my faith. Unless

I trust God I cannot be a friend of God’s. If you and I are His friends, we

trust Him, and He will trust us. For this friendship is not one-sided; and

the word, though it may be ambiguous as to whether it means one whom

I love or one who loves me, really includes both persons to the compact,

and there are analogous, if not identical, emotions in each. So that,

if I trust God, I may be sure that God trusts me, and, in Plis confidence,

leaves a great deal to me, and so ennobles and glorifies me by His reliance

upon me.

And so we come to this, that the heavenly and the earthly friend, like

friends on the low levels of humanity, love each other because they trust

each other. I have said that the words “my friend” may either mean

one whom I love or one who loves me, but that the two things are, in the

present connection, inseparable. Only let us remember where the sweet

reciprocation and interchange of love begins: “We love Him because He

first loved us.” “When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by

the death of His Son.” And so we have to turn to that heavenly Friend,

and feel that as life itself, so the love which is the life of life, has its

beginning in Him, and that never would our hearts have turned themselves

from their alienation unless there had poured down upon them the attractive

outflow of His great love. It was an old fancy that, wherever a tree was

struck by lightning, all its tremulous foliage turned in the direction from

which the bolt had come. When the merciful flash of God’s great love

strikes a heart, then all its tendrils turn to the source of the life-giving

light, and we love back again in sweet reverberation to the primal and

original love.