But these were His contemporaries. It was easy for THEM to be
influenced by Him, for they were every day and all the day together.
But how can we mirror that which we have never seen? How can all
this stupendous result be produced by a Memory, by the scantiest
of all Biographies, by One who lived and left this earth eighteen
hundred years ago? How can modern men to-day make Christ, the
absent Christ, their most constant companion still?

The answer is that

Friendship is a spiritual thing.

It is independent of Matter, or Space, or Time. That which I
love in my friend is not that which I see. What influences me in
my friend is not his body but his spirit. He influences me about
as much in his absence as in his presence. It would have been an
ineffable experience truly to have lived at that time--


"I think when I read the sweet story of old,
How when Jesus was here among men,
He took little children like lambs to his fold,
I should like to have been with Him then.

"I wish that His hand had been laid on my head,
That His arms had been thrown around me,
And that I had seen His kind look when he said,
'Let the little ones come unto me.'"