234. How to Make Friends

How to Make Friends

Pro_18:24 : ’93A man that hath friends must show himself friendly.’94

About the sacred and divine art of making and keeping friends I speak’97a subject on which I never heard of any one preaching’97and yet God thought it of enough importance to put it in the middle of the Bible, these writings of Solomon, bounded on one side by the popular Psalms of David, and on the other by the writings of Isaiah, the greatest of the prophets. It seems all a matter of haphazard how many friends we have, or whether we have any friends at all, but there is nothing accidental about it. There is a law which governs the accretion and dispersion of friendships. They did not ’93just happen so’94 any more than the tides just happen to rise or fall, or the sun just happens to rise or set. It is a science, an art’97a God-given regulation. Tell me how friendly you are to others, and I will tell you how friendly others are to you. I do not say you will not have enemies; indeed, the best way to get ardent friends is to have ardent enemies, if you get their enmity in doing the right thing. Good men and women will always have enemies, because their goodness is a perpetual rebuke to evil; but this antagonism of foes will make more intense the love of your adherents. Your friends will gather closer around you because of the attacks of your assailants. The more your enemies abuse you the better your coadjutors will think of you. The best friends we ever had appeared at some juncture when we were especially bombarded. There have been times in my life when unjust assault multiplied my friends, as near as I could calculate, about fifty a minute. You are bound to some people by many cords that neither time nor eternity can break, and I will warrant that many of those cords were twisted by hands malevolent. Human nature was shipwrecked about fifty-nine centuries ago, the captain of that craft, one Adam, and his first mate, running the famous cargo aground on a snag in the River Hiddekel; but there was at least one good trait of human nature that waded safely ashore from that shipwreck, and that is the disposition to take the part of those unfairly dealt with. When it is thoroughly demonstrated that some one is being persecuted, although at the start slanderous tongues were busy enough, defenders finally gather around as thick as honey-bees on a trellis of bruised honeysuckle. If, when set upon by the furies, you can have grace enough to keep your mouth shut, and preserve your equipoise, and let others fight your battles, you will find yourself after a while with a whole cordon of allies. Had not the world given to Christ -on his arrival at Palestine a very cold shoulder, there would not have been one-half as many angels chanting glory out of the hymn-books of the sky, bound in black lids of midnight. Had it not been for the heavy and jagged and torturous cross, Christ would not have been the admired and loved of more people than any being who ever touched foot on either the eastern or western hemisphere. Instead, therefore, of giving up in despair because you have enemies, rejoice in the fact that they rally for you the most helpful and enthusiastic admirers. In other words, there is no virulence that can hinder my text from coming true: ’93A man that hath friends must show himself friendly.’94

It is my ambition to project especially upon the young a thought which may benignly shape their destiny for the here and the hereafter. Before you show yourself friendly, you must be friendly. I do not recommend a dramatized geniality.

There is such a thing as pretending to be en rapport with others, when we are their dire destructants, and talk against them and wish them calamity. Judas covered up his treachery by a resounding kiss, and caresses may be demoniacal. Better the mythological Cerberus, the three-headed dog of hell, barking at us, than the wolf in sheep’92s clothing, its brindled hide covered up by deceptive wool, and its deathful howl cadenced into an innocent bleating. Disraeli writes of Lord Manfred, who, after committing many outrages upon the people, seemed suddenly to become friendly, and invited them to a banquet. After most of the courses of food had been served he blew a horn, which was in those times a signal for the servants to bring on the dessert, but in this case it was the signal for assassins to enter and slay the guests. His pretended friendliness was a cruel fraud; and there are now people whose smile is a falsehood. Before you begin to show yourself friendly, you must be friendly.

Get your heart right with God and man, and this grace will become easy. You may by your own resolution get your nature into a semblance of this virtue, but the grace of God can sublimely lift you into it. Sailing on the River Thames two vessels ran aground. The owners of one got one hundred horses and pulled on the grounded ship and pulled it to pieces. The owners of the other grounded vessel waited till the tide came in, and easily floated the ship out of all trouble. So, we may pull and haul at our grounded human nature, and try to get it into better condition; but there is nothing like the oceanic tides of God’92s uplifting grace to hoist us into this kindliness I am eulogizing. If, when under the flash of the Holy Ghost, we see our own foibles and defects and depravities, we will be very lenient, and very easy with others. We will look into their characters for things commendatory, and not damnatory. If you would rub your own eye a little more vigorously you would find a mote in it, the extraction of which would keep you so busy you would not have much time to shoulder your broad-ax, and go forth to split up the beam in your neighbor’92s eye. In a Christian spirit keep on exploring the characters of those you meet, and I am sure you will find something in them delightful and fit for a foundation of friendliness.

You invite me to come to your country-seat and spend a few days. Thank you! I arrive about noon of a beautiful summer day. What do you do? As soon as I arrive you take me out under the shadow of the great elms. You take me down to the artificial lake, the spotted trout floating in and out among the white pillars of the pond-lilies. You take me to the stalls and kennels where you keep your fine stock, and here are the Durham cattle and the Gordon setters; and the high-stepping steeds, by pawing and neighing, the only language they can speak, asking for harness or saddle, and a short turn down the road. Then we go back to the house and you get me in the right light and show me the Kensetts and the Bierstadts on the wall and take me into the music-room, and show me the bird-cages, the canaries in the bay-window answering the robins in the tree-tops. Thank you! I never enjoyed myself more in the same length of time. Now, why do we not do so with the characters of others, and show the bloom and the music and the bright fountains? No. We say, come along, and let me show you that man’92s character. Here is a green-scummed frog-pond and there is a filthy cellar and I guess under that hedge there must be a black snake. Come, and let us for an hour or two regale ourselves with the nuisances. Oh, my friends, better cover up the faults, and extol the virtues, and this habit once established of universal friendliness will become as easy as it is this morning for a syringa to flood the air with sweetness, as easy as it will be further on in the season for a quail to whistle up from the grass. When we hear something bad about somebody whom we always supposed to be good, take out your lead-pencil, and say, ’93Let me see! Before I accept that baleful story against that man’92s character, I will take off from it twenty-five per cent. for the habit of exaggeration which belongs to the man who first told the story; then I will take off twenty-five per cent. for the additions which the spirit of gossip in every community has put upon the original story; then I will take off twenty-five per cent. from the fact that the man may have been put into circumstances of overpowering temptation. So I have taken off seventy-five per cent. But I have not heard his side of the story at all, and for that reason I take off the remaining twenty-five per cent.’94 Excuse me, sir, I don’92t believe a word of it.

But here comes in a defective maxim, so often quoted: ’93Where there is so much smoke there must be some fire.’94 Look at all the smoke for years around Jenner, the introducer of vaccination; and the smoke around Columbus, the discoverer, and the smoke around Savonarola and Galileo and Paul and John and Christ, and tell me where was the fire! That is one of the Satanic arts to make smoke without fire. Slander, like the world, may be made out of nothing. If the Christian, fair-minded, commonsensical spirit in regard to others predominated in the world we should have the millennium in about six months, for would not that be lamb and lion, cow and leopard lying down together? Nothing but the grace of God can ever put us into such a habit of mind and heart as that. The tendency is in the opposite direction. This is the way the world talks: I put my name on the back of a man’92s note, and I had to pay it, and I will never again put my name on the back of any man’92s note. I gave a beggar ten cents, and five minutes after I saw him entering a liquor store to spend it. I will never again give a cent to a beggar. I helped that young man start in business, and lo, after a while, he came and opened a store almost next door to me, and stole my customers. I will never again help a young man start in business. I trusted in what my neighbor promised to do, and he broke his word, and the Psalmist was right before he corrected himself, for ’93All men are liars.’94 So men become suspicious and saturnine and selfish, and at every additional wrong done them they put another layer on the wall of their exclusiveness, and another bolt to the door that shuts them out from sympathy with the world. They get cheated out of a thousand dollars or misinterpreted or disappointed or betrayed, and higher goes the wall, and faster goes another bolt, not realizing that while they lock others out, they lock themselves in; and some day they wake up to find themselves imprisoned in a dastardly habit. No friends to others, others are no friends to them. There’92s an island half-way between England, Scotland, and Ireland called the Isle of Man, and the seas dash against all sides of it, and I am told there is no more lovely place than that Isle of Man; but when a man becomes insular in his disposition, and cuts himself off from the main land of the world’92s sympathies, he is despicable, and all around him is an Atlantic Ocean of selfishness. Behold that Isle of Man!

Now, supposing that you have, by a Divine regeneration, got right toward God and humanity, and you start out to practise my text. ’93A man that hath friends must show himself friendly.’94 Fulfill this by all forms of appropriate salutation. Have you noticed that the head is so poised that the easiest thing on earth is to give a nod of recognition? To swing the head from side to side, as when it is wagged in derision, is unnatural and unpleasant; to throw it back, invites vertigo; but to drop the chin in greeting is accompanied with so little exertion that all day long, and every day, you might practise it without the least semblance of fatigue. So, also, the structure of the hand indicates handshaking; the knuckles not made so that the fingers can turn out, but so made that the fingers can turn in, as in clasping hands; and the thumb divided from and set aloof from the fingers, so that while the fingers take your neighbor’92s hand on one side, the thumb takes it on the other, and, pressed together, all the faculties of the hand give emphasis to the salutation. Five sermons in every healthy hand urge us to handshaking.

Besides this, every day when you start out, load yourself up with kind thoughts, kind words, kind expressions, and kind greetings. When a man or woman does well, tell him so, tell her so. If you meet some one who is improved in health, and it is demonstrated in girth and color, say: ’93How well you look!’94 But if, on the other hand, under the wear and tear of life, he appears pale and exhausted, do not introduce sanitary subjects, or say anything at all about physical condition. In the case of improved health, you have by your words given another impulse toward the robust and the jocund; while in the case of the failing health you have arrested the decline by your silence, by which he concludes: ’93If I were really so badly off he would have said something about it.’94 We are all, especially those of a nervous temperament, susceptible to kind words and discouraging words. Form a conspiracy against us, and let ten men meet us at certain points on our way over to business, and let each one say: ’93How sick you look!’94 though we should start out well, after meeting the first and hearing his depressing salute, we would begin to examine our symptoms. After meeting the second gloomy accosting, we would conclude we did not feel quite as well as usual. After meeting the third, our sensations would be dreadful, and after meeting the fourth, unless we suspected a conspiracy, we would go home and go to bed, and the other six pessimists would be a useless surplus of discouragement. My dear sir, my dear madam, what do you mean by going about this world with disheartenments? Is not the supply of gloom and trouble and misfortune enough to meet the demand without running a factory of pins and spikes? Why should you plant black and blue in the world when God so seldom plants them? Plenty of scarlet colors, plenty of yellow, plenty of green, plenty of pink, but very seldom a plant black and blue. I never saw a black flower, and there’92s only here and three a blue-bell or a violet; but the blue is for the most part reserved for the sky, and we have to look up to see that, and when we look up, no color can do us harm. Why not plant along the paths of others the brightnesses instead of the glooms? Do not prophesy misfortune. If you must be a prophet at all, be an Isaiah, and not a Jeremiah. In ancient times prophets who foretold evil were doing right, for they were divinely directed; but the prophets of evil in our time are generally false prophets. Some of our weather-wise people are prophesying we shall have a summer of unparalleled scorch. It will not be that at all. I think we are going to have a summer of great harvest and universal health; at any rate I know as much about it as they do. Last fall all the weather prophets agreed in saying we should have a winter of extraordinary severity, blizzard on the heels of blizzard. It was the mildest winter I ever remember to have passed. Indeed, the autumn and the spring almost crowded winter out of the procession. Real troubles have no heralds running ahead of their sombre chariots, and no one has any authority in our time to announce their coming. Load yourself up with helpful words and deeds. The hymn once sung in our churches is unfit to be sung, for it says:

We should suspect some danger near,

Where we possess delight.

In other words, manage to keep miserable all the time. The old song sung at the pianos a quarter of a century ago was right: ’93Kind words can never die.’94 Such kind words have their nests in kind hearts, and when they are hatched out and take wing, they circle round in flights that never cease, and sportsman’92s gun cannot shoot them, and storms cannot ruffle their wings, and when they cease flight in these lower skies of earth they sweep around amid the higher altitudes of heaven.

At Baltimore a few days ago I talked into a phonograph. The cylinder containing the words was sent on to Washington, and the next day that cylinder from another phonographic instrument, when turned, gave back to me the very words I had uttered the day before, and with the same intonations. Scold into a phonograph, and it will scold back. Pour mild words into a phonograph, and it will return the gentleness. Society and the world and the Church are phonographs. Give them acerbity and rought treatment, and acerbity and rough treatment you will get back. Give them practical friendliness, and they will give back practical friendliness. A father asked his little daughter: ’93Mary, why is it that everybody loves you?’94 She answered: ’93I don’92t know, unless it is because I love everybody.’94 ’93A man that hath friends must show himself friendly.’94

We want something like that spirit of sacrifice for others which was seen in the English channel, where in the storm a boat containing three men was upset, and all three were in the water struggling for their lives. A boat came to their relief, and a rope was thrown to one of them, and he refused to take it, saving: ’93First fling it to Tom; he is just ready to go down. I can last some time longer.’94 A man like that, be he sailor or landsman, be he in upper ranks of society or lower ranks, will always have plenty of friends. What is true manward is true Godward. We must be the friends of God if we want him to be our friend. We cannot treat Christ badly all our lives and expect him to treat us lovingly. I was reading of a sea fight, in which Lord Nelson captured a French officer, and when the French officer offered Lord Nelson his hand, Nelson replied: ’93First give me your sword, and then give me your hand.’94 Surrender of our resistance to God must precede God’92s proffer of pardon to us. Repentance before forgiveness. You must give up your rebellious sword before you can get a grasp of the Divine hand.

Oh, what a glorious state of things to have the friendship of God! Why, we could afford to have all the world against us if we had God for us. He could in a minute blot out this universe, and in another minute make a better universe. I have no idea that God tried hard when he made all things. The most brilliant thing known to us is light, and for the creation of that he only used a word of command. As out of a flint a frontiersman strikes a spark, so out of one word God struck the noonday sun. For the making of the present universe I do not read that God lifted so much as a finger. The Bible frequently speaks of God’92s hand and God’92s arm and God’92s shoulder and God’92s foot; then suppose he should put hand and arm and shoulder and foot to utmost tension, what could he not make? That God, of such demonstrated and undemonstrated strength, you may have for your present and everlasting friend, not a stately and reticent friend, hard to get at, but as approachable as a country mansion on a summer day when all the doors and windows are wide open. Christ said: ’93I am the door.’94 And he is a wide door, a high door, a palace door, an always open door.

My four-year-old child got hurt and did not cry until hours after, when her mother came home, and then she burst into weeping, and some of the domestics, not understanding human nature, said to her: ’93Why did you not cry before?’94 She answered: ’93There was no one to cry to.’94 Now I have to tell you that while human sympathy may be absent, Divine sympathy is always accessible. Give God your love, and get his love; your service, and secure his help; your repentance, and have his pardon. God a friend? Why, that means all your wounds medicated, all your sorrows soothed, and if some sudden catastrophe should hurl you out of earth it would only hurl you into heaven. If God is your friend, you cannot go out of the world too quickly or suddenly, so far as your own happiness is concerned. There were two Christians last Tuesday who entered heaven; the one was standing at a window in perfect health watching a shower, and the lightning instantly slew him; but the lightning did not flash down the sky as swiftly as his spirit flashed upward. The Christian man who died on the same day next door had been for a year or two failing in health, and for the last three months had suffered from a disease that made the nights sleepless and the days an anguish. Do you not really think that the case of the one who went instantly was more desirable than the one who entered the shining gate through a long lane of insomnia and congestion? In the one case it was like your standing wearily at a door, knocking and waiting, and wondering if it will ever open, and knocking and waiting again, while in the other case it was a swinging open of the door at the first touch of your knuckle. Give your friendship to God, and have God’92s friendship for you, and even the worst accident will be a victory.

How refreshing is human friendship; and true friends, what priceless treasures! When sickness comes and trouble comes and death comes, we send for our friends first of all, and their appearance in our doorway in any crisis is reinforcement, and when they have entered, we say: ’93Now, it is all right!’94 Oh, what would we do without personal friends, business friends, family friends? But we want something mightier than human friendship in the great exigencies. When Jonathan Edwards in his final hour had given the last good-by to all his earthly friends, he turned on his pillow and closed his eyes, confidently saying: ’93Now, where is Jesus of Nazareth, my true and never-failing friend? Yes; I admire human friendship as seen in the case of David and Jonathan, of Paul and Onesiphorus, of Herder and Goethe, of Goldsmith and Reynolds, of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Cowley and Harvey, of Erasmus and Thomas More, of Lessing and Mendelssohn, of Lady Churchill and Princess Anne, of Orestes and Pylades, each requesting that himself might take the point of the dagger, so the other might be spared; of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, who locked their shields in battle, determined to die together; but the grandest, the mightiest, the tenderest, friendship in all the universe is the friendship between Jesus Christ and a believing soul. Yet after all I have said I feel I have only done what James Marshall, the miner, did in 1848 in California, before its gold mines were known. He reached in and put upon the table of his employer, Captain Sutton, a thimbleful of gold dust. ’93Where did you get that?’94 said his employer. The reply was: ’93I got it this morning from a millrace from which the water had been drawn off But that gold dust, which could have been taken up between the finger and the thumb, was the prophecy and specimen that revealed California’92s wealth to all nations. And today I have only put before you a specimen of the value of Divine friendship, only a thimbleful of mines inexhaustible and infinite, though all time and all eternity go on with the exploration.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage