New Testament present two examples, each of which brings before us subject matter for study and meditation. In the one case we have an example of an affection which ended only with life. The other is an instance of that with which human experience makes us but too familiar, of a friendship broken, at least for a time, by a serious difference in opinion, never, it may be, revived in its outward companionship, yet lingering still in the memories of those who were thus divided. It was of that friendship that Cardinal Newman wrote in the lines just quoted

"He bides with us who dies, he is but lost who lives."

It is scarcely necessary to dwell at length on the early companionship of the two disciples of the Galilean lake. They were natives of the same city. They were partners in their earthly calling (Luke v. 10). They must have attended the services of the same synagogue, and "walked in the house of God as friends." Together they searched the Scriptures for the promise of the consolation of Israel, and when the voice of one crying in the wilderness was heard, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord," together they went to the baptism of John. The younger of the two was the first to hear the witness of the Baptist that the Lamb of God had indeed come to take away the sin of the world, and he sought to bring his friend to the feet of the great Teacher in whom he had found the Christ (John i. 41). Together they left their earthly calling to follow the divine Master (Matt. iv. 18-22, Luke v. 11), and before long were placed by Him in the foremost group of the disciples whom He chose to be apostles (Matt. x. 2). Together they were present in the more impressive incidents of the ministry of the Lord Jesus, at the raising of the daughter of Jairus from death to life (Mark v. 37), at the transfiguration (Matt. xvii. 1), at the utterance of the great prophecy in which the destruction of Jerusalem foreshadowed the judgment of the world (Mark xiii. 3). They went together to prepare the upper room for the last Passover (Luke xxii. 8). They shared in the slumbrous sorrow of Gethsemane (Matt. xxvi. 37). They went together into the high-priest's palace to be present at their Master's trial (John xviii. 16). One failed in that hour of trial and denied his Lord, and while his younger friend was standing at the foot of the cross, remained in the solitude of his shame and confusion of face. When all was over he would seem to have sought comfort and sympathy from his comrade. And

they were once again together on the morning of that first Easter day, looking into the empty sepulchre, which told them that their Lord had risen (John xx. 2). From that time they were more inseparable than ever. They shared with the other disciples in the manifestation of the risen Christ. The question which Peter asked after the veil which hid his own future had been in part uplifted, "And what shall this man do?" (John xxi. 21), bore witness of the intensity of his affection. And, so far as we know, nothing ever cooled the warmth of that affection. The two friends were together in the Temple when they healed the crippled beggar (Acts iii. 1). They were joined in the first great expansion of the apostolic work in the journey to Samaria (Acts viii. 14). They were of one mind and heart when they gave the right hand of fellowship to the apostle whose work was to be wider, though not higher or nobler, than their own (Gal. ii. 9.) One was to survive the other by some forty years, but we may believe that he looked back on the memory of his early friend with thoughts in which all that was most precious in the past was illumined with the glow of a new and brighter hope stretching into the eternal future; that those memories must have been with him in their fullest power when he remembered and recorded the question and the answer of which I have just spoken.

Studying, as we may rightly study, the characters of the two apostles, we may, I believe, see in them an instance of the friendship which grows out of the companionship of men whose characters are complementary to each other. The melody which gave its sweetness to their lives was one of harmony rather than of unison. In Peter we note the fervid zeal, the prompt confession, the impetuous friendship which answered to the name which his Master gave him, of the "rock" apostle (Matt. xvi. 18; John i. 42). He is more prompt in speech than any of his fellows, takes the lead in action, and, after his Lord's departure, in government and direction. It is given to him to hold the keys of the kingdom of heaven, to open the door of faith to the Gentiles, as in the case of Cornelius (Acts x. 47, 48), to shut that door on one who was unworthy of admission, as in the case of Simon Magus (Acts viii. 20, 21). But with this impulsiveness to good there was also an impulsive weakness which marred his completeness. He was ensitive to shame and fear. He proved himself of little faith when he found himself on the

stormy waters of the Galilean lake (Matt. xiv. 30), of little courage when he stood in the court of the high-priest's palace, and, in answer to the questions of soldiers and maidservants, denied the Master for whom he had said that he was ready to go with Him to prison or to death (Matt. xxvi. 69–75). The same weakness of nature betrayed him at a later period into a like inconsistency, when he, who had been chosen to admit the Gentiles, shrank, through fear of the party of the circumcision, from the logical consequence of his own act, and took up a position which compromised at once the freedom and the Catholicity of the Church (Gal. ii. 11, 12). In St. John we have, it need hardly be said, a character of a very different stamp. There is a burning zeal which needs-as when he sought to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritan village (Luke ix. 54), or forbad the ministry of one who seemed to him unauthorised and uncommissioned (Mark ix. 38)-to be restrained and purified. There was the temper that seeks great things for itself in the kingdom of heaven, as other men seek great things in the courts of princes (Matt. xx. 20-24), which called for warning and reproof, but there was no weakness. The 'disciple whom Jesus loved" was, we must believe, worthy of His love. If Peter was more forward to confess his Lord, John drank in His words with a more intense eagerness, and a greater capacity for understanding them. To him, and not to Peter, was given the fullest proof of confidence when the words were spoken which made his life for many years one of seclusion rather than activity, "Behold thy mother;" "Woman, behold thy son" (John xix. 26, 27).

That higher friendship, we may well believe, made him what he was to his earthly companion. He had learnt from his Lord what a true friend should be, gentle, longsuffering, kind, fervent in zeal, clothed in humility. Peter's growth in grace was helped by the deeper experiences of the "beloved disciple." The memory of the "wonderful love" that had drawn them together, was a purifying and sustaining influence in the declining years of St. John.

I summed up the lessons of the friendship of David and Jonathan in the words of one of the great masters of thought. Those which rise out of the friendship of St. Peter and St. John may well be conveyed in the words of one whom he loved with a true affection, though the currents of thought and feeling at last bore them in different directions. It is not too bold a thought to believe

The early friendship of St. Paul and Barnabas is suggested as a natural inference from the facts of their maturer years. When the apostle of the Gentiles returns to Jerusalem for the first time after his conversion, it is Barnabas who brings him to the apostles and guarantees, as it were, the genuineness of that conversion (Acts ix. 27). When the latter finds his expanding work at Antioch growing beyond his strength, he turns to Saul of Tarsus to help him, as the one on whom he could most rely (Acts xi. 25, 26). After working together at Antioch they go forth on the first great missionary enterprise, which was to carry the Gospel to the Gentile as well as to the Jew (Acts xiii. 2). The previous intimacy which these facts suggest was in itself probable enough. The Levite of Cyprus may well have profited by the teaching of the schools of Tarsus, or have sat among the scholars who looked to Gamaliel as their master.

In this case, however, the friendship was, for a time at least, broken. The question whether the disciple who had forsaken them as they were just entering on the threshold of their enterprise, was worthy to be trusted, was in itself, it might seem, a small one; but it was just the "little rift" that widens into a chasm. There came what Newman calls "Paul's strife unblest." The contention, the "paroxysm" (I give the very word which St. Luke used, Acts xv. 39), was very sharp, and each spoke words, the irrevocable words, which made it impossible to work together. With this difference, there was joined the wavering, temporising policy which led Barnabas, for a time, to appear indifferent where his friend was zealous, and to interpose an obstacle to the universality, the true Catholicity, of the Church of Christ (Gal. ii. 13). We do not know whether the friends ever met again, and the probability is that they did not. The only gleam of light on the feelings with which, after their rupture.

one at least of the two looked on the other, is seen in the way in which his old friend's name comes to his lips. When St. Paul speaks of his own life of self-supporting labour, it is in the words "I only, and Barnabas, have we not power to forbear working" (1 Cor. ix. 6). When he commends the disciple, whose change of purpose had been the beginning of the rupture, to the good offices of the Colossians, it is with the reminder that he is "sister's son to Barnabas" (Col. iv. 10).

The friendship now before us presents another instance of characters that are drawn to each other because their temperaments are not identical but complementary. In Saul of Tarsus we have the fiery glow of one whose zeal for God may pass to the very verge of fanaticism or madness (Acts xxvi. 11); keenly sensitive, large and far-reaching in his aspirations and his plans, quickly moved to indignation, to anger, or to tears, with gifts of utterance that enabled him to hold the peasants of Lystra, or the Epicureans and Stoics of Athens, or the multitude of pilgrims and citizens at Jerusalem, in rapt attention (Acts xiv. 14-18; xvii. 2231; xxii. 1-21). Wherever he went, with whatever companions, he was as sure to be conspicuous as the chief speaker, as he was when, on that ground, he was identified with Hermes, the god of eloquence (Acts xiv. 12). The whole nature of Barnabas appears as of a calmer order. There is something significant in the fact that while the name given to him as indicating his special gift might have been rendered son of prophecy," St. Luke, following, we may believe, in the footsteps of the Gentiles and Greek-speaking Jews of Jerusalem and Antioch, gives as its equivalent "son of consolation" (Acts iv. 36). It is a natural inference from this that men missed in him the fiery-winged speech which was the most conspicuous element in the prophetic character, and that they recognised

the presence of the gentle and persuasive power which, starting from the insight of sympathy, is able to adapt its words to the inmost thoughts of men's hearts, to pour in its oil and wine upon the soul's wounds, to bind it, as "with the cords of a man," by the ties of kindness and compassion. Barnabas, as we have seen, felt the need of the more commanding energy, the greater organizing power of St. Paul. Paul, in his turn, must have felt the preciousness of the full confiding trust which he found on his return to Jerusalem after his conversion at his friend's hands. The two gifts which the apostle brings into close juxtaposition as "helps " and "governments" (1 Cor. xii. 28) seem to embody what was specially characteristic of each of the two friends. There is something suggestive, if I mistake not, in the fact that after their separation St. Paul fell back upon the friendship, the filial friendship, of the affectionate and devoted Timotheus. He had lost one who was as a brother; he found, by way of compensation, one who was both a brother and a son.

Yes, in this case also, we may believe, as in those of David and Jonathan, of St Peter and St. John, that "They sin who tell us love can die," if the love has been in the outset true, unselfish, pure. The history of all times of movement in thought, religious, social, or political, shows us how differences of opinions or of creed may interrupt the old familiar intercourse, the sympathy of heart and will. But the pale, calm spectre of the past has, in such instances, a soothing and a purifying power. It may stir to noble enterprises, strengthen men to resist temptation, or soften the asperities of controversy, and temper the bitterness of dogmatism with the promptings of a wider hope. The friendship wakens out of a death unto the higher potency of a risen life, and "he who lives " is not altogether lost, but abides, loved with a dearer love, for ever.

CHAPTER X.

OHN HOWARTH, builder and timber merchant, was a small man who mistook himself for a big one. He rode nine stone, or thereabouts, and walked with as solid and stolid a deliberation as if he rode twenty.

He dressed as it befitted a big man of the old school to dress-John Bull fashion, in boots and breeches, blue cutaway coat with brass buttons, high false collars scraping at his bit of side whiskers, blue bird's-eye neckkerchief, and a hat rather broader in the brim and lower in the crown than common. Below

his little rotund waistcoat a bunch of seals exuded from a very tight fob, and the builder, putting his small shoulders back with a wonderfully undeceptive air of being six feet, and as broad as a door, fingered the seals constantly.

The inside man corresponded pretty closely to the outside. He was not often of the same opinion for five days together, and was as incapable of a lasting enmity as of a settled idea. But he had somehow arrived at the belief that he was an unshakable, unmalleable, adamantine sort of person, and superior to all such influences as those by which the weak permit themselves to be cajoled or driven.

The summer air in the neighbourhood of Howarth's house was fragrant with the scent of pine-boards, and the spiteful noise made by a circular saw, which bit its steam-driven way through timber in a great shed in the rear of the house, was like the sound of a prodigious wasp in a prodigious passion.

The builder stood, with his shoulders squared and his nose in the air, at his own gate, caressing with the finger and thumb of his right hand a chin shaven as clean as a new-laid egg, whilst his left hand toyed with the bunch of seals. The finger and thumb on the clean-shaven chin conveyed a pleasant sense of personal niceness. The handling of the seals carried, as it always did, a sentiment of wealth and size and importance-a sentiment vague and undefined, but none the less agreeable on that account. There were widespread fields before him, and he looked at them as if he owned them, and felt like the lord of the manor.

When a thing happened to another man the builder knew how to regard it with an eye of tolerable shrewdness, and could estimate its proportions (provided they were such as to be within his grasp at all) as accurately as the general run of men could do. But when a thing happened to himself it took so different a colour from any it could possibly have worn in occurring to another that his judgment became perhaps a trifle confused. If Will Hackett had married another man's daughter, and had run away from her after a mere three months of married life, Howarth, not being quite so adamantine as he fancied himself, would have pitied the man, and have thought the posture of affairs unhappy. But since it was his daughter who was deserted by her husband the fact had little more effect upon him than to make him feel that he was, if possible, of greater importance than ever in the parish, and an object of

profounder interest. His mind was a combination of peep-show and whispering-gallery, and, looking into it and listening in it, he saw and heard grouped neighbours engaged always in one contemplation and discussing one theme. He was not only the centre of the universe to himself, but, to his own unconscious apprehension, to other people also. It was almost a necessity of nature that people should be interested in John Howarth. John Howarth's affairs were so profoundly interesting to himself that it stood to reason that other people should be interested in them.

This innocent misapprehension was mainly responsible for the generally-received opinion that Howarth-though a shrewd man of business, and as good a judge of the worth of standing timber as could here and there be found-was the deadliest bore in five counties.

If there was one point in his characterwhich, being his own, could hardly be less than absolutely flawless-he admired more than another it was his power for dignified reticence about his own affairs. His confidence that he could, when he chose, be as secret as the tomb, gave him, quite naturally, a greater freedom when he chose to be communicative, for it is evident that a man who runs no danger whatever may do more things that look courageous than another man may who knows himself to be in peril. The steel-clad knights of old chopped up their social inferiors in leather with lighter hearts than many of them might have carried if they had been in leather and their social inferiors in steel. Being so perfectly armed as he was against any temptation to grow garrulous about his own concerns, Howarth was at liberty to talk about them when and where he pleased, and to whom he chose. So he talked about them everywhere and always, and to anybody who would listen.

Whilst he stood sunning himself in a conscious rectitude, which made him feel positively benevolent towards the world at large, he heard a footstep, and, turning to the left, saw Hepzibah approaching him with a basket on her arm. He made himself a little bigger than usual, and stepped ponderously-as became a man of his figure-into the road. Hepzibah at once displayed an inclination towards a detour, and struck out into the middle of the horse-road. Howarth, comfortably understanding that a person of Hepzibah's social position would naturally be humble in his presence, took a step or two into the horse-road to encourage her in