every generation since our Lord was here, who have served and suffered
because they loved Him and followed. Hidden away in the rocks and caves of
France from the fires of persecution, the Huguenots sang their favourite
hymn:

"I have a friend so precious,
So very dear to me,
He loves me with such tender love,
He loves so faithfully.

I could not live apart from Him,
I love to feel Him nigh,
And so we dwell together,
My Lord and I."

When I was in China a year ago, my heart caught some of the distant echoes
of that sort of singing, by Chinese Christians, in the midst of the fiery
persecutions of the Boxer time. And I heard the same sad, glad undertone
last year out in Corea, in the homes we visited, whose loved ones were
behind prison bars for their Friend's sake.

One of the latest chapters of this friendship's outcome is only just
closed in the story of that quiet, young friend of the Lord Jesus, William
Whiting Borden, who sat down a little while ago, and so placed the wealth
left him that the world might learn of his Friend, and then went out and
laid down his life in Egypt in this same passion of friendship. So the
earth's sod in every corner has known the fertilizing of such friendship
blood, and shall some day know a wondrous harvest under our great Friend's
own gleaning.