But Christianity has done even more than this for friendship. It has
superseded its name by fulfilling its offices to a degree of perfectness
which had never entered into the ante-Christian mind. Man shrinks from
solitude. He feels inadequate to bear the burdens, meet the trials, and
wage the conflicts of this mortal life, alone. Orestes always needed and
craved a Pylades, but often failed to find one. This inevitable
yearning, when it met no human response found still less to satisfy it
in the objects of worship. Its gods, though in great part deified men,
could not be relied on for sympathy, support or help. The stronger
spirits did not believe in them, the feebler looked upon them only with
awe and dread. But Christianity, in its anthropomorphism, which is its
strongest hold on faith and trust, insures for the individual man in a
Divine Humanity precisely what friends might essay to do yet could do
but imperfectly for him. It proffers the tender sympathy and helpfulness
of Him who bears the griefs and carries the sorrows of each and all;
while the near view that it presents of the life beyond death inspires
the sense of unbroken union with friends in heaven, and of the fellow-
feeling of "a cloud of witnesses" beside. Thus while friendship in
ordinary life is never to be spurned when it may be had without
sacrifice of principle, it is less a necessity than when man's relations
with the unseen world gave no promise of strength, aid, or comfort.

Experience has deepened my conviction that what is called a free
translation is the only fit rendering of Latin into English; that is,
the only way of giving to the English reader the actual sense of the
Latin writer. This last has been my endeavor. The comparison is, indeed,
exaggerated; but it often seems to me, in unrolling a compact Latin
sentence, as if I were writing out in words the meaning of an algebraic
formula. A single word often requires three or four as its English
equivalent. Yet the language is not made obscure by compression. On the