other the deep feelings of your heart, you have realised a strength of purpose, an energy in holiness, and a determination to overcome some conscious fault in a way that you never knew before. I would suggest to you to act upon this as a principle and try the effect; make the covenant with each other, to do right and to serve GOD.

Two of you, perhaps, have an inclination to use wicked expressions, or, in an unguarded moment, to take GOD's Name in vain. Make an agreement between yourselves that, with GOD's help, you will not for a given time offend; try the effect of the covenant with one another for holy purposes. Perhaps your tendency may be to anger, to querulousness or to revenge. There may be instances at hand, occasions when you may be tempted to yield; make them then the object of your covenant, that under GOD you will not break His law. You little know the influence of the act. In a moment there will come a thaw: a warm, soft, vernal hope of doing right springing from the mere fact of having acknowledged to each other the good feelings which heaved within you, but in vain, to find a crater, and you will provoke each other to good works. A righteous

emulation will be excited in you to vie with each other in self-mastery, and you will have reason to thank GOD for the "covenant that is between you." Many great men in days gone by have discovered the power of this principle, when they have banded together, united by the bonds of good resolutions and sacred co

venants.

d. And again; there is something very grand in the long pause in the personal communications between David and Jonathan. They loved each other as boys and as youths. When David walked forth fresh and ruddy from the wilderness of Bethlehem, and Jonathan shone in all the lustre of the son of a great king, the prince and the shepherd boy loved each other. They took delight in telling their love one for the other, and made their covenant before GOD in the field of Ezel, and their souls were satisfied. They saw each other no more in the passage of years. Indeed, David's eye rested not on the countenance of his friend, until it was brought a corpse from the streets of Bethshan. Trouble of all kinds marked the interval. The house of Jonathan was at war with David, and his father pursued him as a partridge on a hill; the skirt had been rent at

Engedi, and the spear had been taken from the bolster; the priests of the LORD had been slain by Doeg, and Abiathar had fled a fugitive to David; the ears of Jonathan had heard nothing but execrations on the son of Jesse, and the young men who followed David had made Saul and his family a byword. Nevertheless, all this sufficed not to shake the foundations of Jonathan's love for David. They never met again; still, at the news of the battle of Gilboa, the cry of David was more tender than even at the beginning; "very pleasant wert thou, my brother Jonathan, dearer than the love of woman."

It is a very poor and narrow view, to imagine that real friendship should need constant expression. It is a deep, wide, lasting thing, whose seed is sown, as in some cases, in the period of boyhood, and may spring up into a plant which may shadow a long-after day, though the interval that elapses between the ratification of that friendship and the hour of death, may be marked by a long suspension of intercourse: aye! and even by circumstances comparatively hostile to the very existence of friendship at all.

e. Another lesson that we learn from the friendship of these two youths is, that true

friendship exists in a desire to discover points of beauty and nobility in everything, however otherwise defective or polluted. Through the outward circumstance of a lineage opposed to the present and future interest of David, he was able to perceive, to value, and to love the noble qualities of Jonathan. While in the shepherd boy, whose destiny had been already declared by an unerring voice to be one which would finally eclipse the house of Saul, Jonathan was able to see the lustre of those qualities which eventually made David "the sweet psalmist of Israel" and "the man after GOD's own heart;" and seeing them, he had the disinterestedness to love them, and to ally himself to them.

Do you go and do likewise; and, if from the dark background of family animosity, ancestral feud, absence of high intellectual power or physical beauty, poverty of circumstance, the qualities of true nobility "stand fiery out," delight in them, love them, ally yourself with them! This is the true province of Christian friendship, which, like the loadstone passing over the vast and varied mass, instantaneously attracts and assimilates with itself every metallic portion from it.

Schoolboy friendship is one of the happiest and holiest opportunities of youth; cherish and cultivate it. Let the rules of your covenant be simple yet true, borrowed from Scripture, not from the code of the world. Incite each other to courage, generosity, unselfishness, and defence of the injured. Ally yourselves to each other by the bonds of love; let the eye and the look be sufficient to remind each other of the covenant; let the consciousness of each other's presence in the room, in darkness, or in light, be a check to sin and an incentive to holiness.