“Partners in cares” the old Romans called true friends. True friendship implies mutual helpfulness. It is not all on one side; where such friendship is there are always two shoulders under every burden. Friendship knows no limit in serving; it gives all, life itself, if need be. Its yearning is not to receive, but to give; not to be ministered unto, but to minister. The cynic sneers at the thought of friendship, but there are holy human friendships whose beauty and splendour remind us, amid the world's selfishness and hardness, that man was made in the image of God, that fragments of that image yet exist even in fallen lives, and that it is possible at last, through God’s grace, to restore the heavenly lustre.