It is the same with a young physician trying to get a start. All his friends are anxious to lend him a helping hand. They know how difficult it is for one untried, even if thoroughly prepared, to establish sufficient confidence in his skill to induce people to trust him with patients in preference to experienced practitioners. They praise his skill; they tell how sick they were and how quickly he aided them. In a short time the whole neighborhood begins to look favorably on him and, of course, he gets patients.

The case of a young merchant beginning with small capital differs only in kind from that of an author, lawyer, or physician. No matter how honest he may be or how square in his dealings, he is unknown and untried. He has to win his way to the favor of the general public.

The business maxim, “A pleased customer is the best advertisement,” is a tribute to the commercial value of friends, — for one must feel friendly to recommend a store and its goods.

The service, however, that friends render in advancing our material interests is the lowest standpoint from which friendship can be viewed. To choose our friends with an eye to their commercial value to us would be to proclaim ourselves unworthy of the friendship of any noble soul, and indeed incapable of winning any friendship worthy of the name.

It is in relation to their effect on character that the value of friends must be estimated. Dr. Hillis says that, "Destiny is determined by friendship; fortune is made or marred when a youth neglects his companions." Character is tinted by the friends to which we attach ourselves. We borrow their color, black or white. We absorb their qualities, whether they be noble or ignoble. "Men become false," says Charles Kingsley, "if they live with liars; cynics, if they live with scorners; mean, if they live with the covetous; affected, if they live with the affected; and actually catch the expressions of each other's faces."

Beecher said he was never quite the same man again after he had read Ruskin's works. Our best friends often are authors in their books. No one is quite the same again who has been touched by a noble friendship and has felt the expression of a lofty mind stirring the divinity within him and giving him a glimpse of his real self. . Such friends we often gain through reading.

Some people act like a tonic or an invigorating and refreshing breeze. They make us feel like new beings. Under the inspiration of their presence we can say and do things which it would be impossible for us to say and do under different conditions. One stimulates my thought, quickens my faculties, sharpens my intellect, opens the floodgates of language and sentiment, and awakens the poetic within me. While another dampens my enthusiasm, closes the door of expansion, and chills me to the very centre of my being, there emanates from him an atmosphere which paralyzes thought, dwarfs expression.

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Charles Kingsley