Music, poetry, and art minister both to our
gratification and our culture. Good books bring to us inestimable
benefits. They tell us of new worlds, and inspire us to conquer them.
They show us lofty and noble ideals, and stimulate us to attain them.
They make us larger, better, stronger. The help we get from books is
incalculable.
Yet the truest and best help any one can give to others is not in
material things, but in ways that make them stronger and better. Money
is good alms when money is really needed, but in comparison with the
divine gifts of hope, friendship, courage, sympathy, and love, it is
paltry and poor. Usually the help people need is not so much the
lightening of their burden, as fresh strength to enable them to bear
their burden, and stand up under it. The best thing we can do for
another, some one has said, is not to make some things easy for him,
but to make something of him.
It is just here that friendship makes most of its mistakes. It
over-helps. It helps by ministering relief, by lifting away loads, by
gathering hindrances out of the way, when it would help much more
wisely by seeking to impart hope, strength, energy. "Our friends,"
says Emerson, "are those who make us do what we can." Says another
writer: "Our real friend is not the man or woman who smooths over our
difficulties, throws a cloak over our failings, stands between us and
the penalties which our mistakes have brought upon us, but the man or
woman who makes us understand ourselves, and helps us to better
things.
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