Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend
who loves in us, _not_ a false imagining, an unreal character, but,
looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the
divine ideal of our nature,--loves, not the man that we are, but the
angel that we may be. Such friends seem inspired by a divine gift of
prophecy,--like the mother of St. Augustine, who, in the midst of the
wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him in a vision, standing,
clothed in white, a ministering priest at the right hand of God,--as he
has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious foresight unveil to us
this resurrection form of the friends with whom we daily walk, compassed
about with mortal infirmity, we should follow them with faith and
reverence through all the disguises of human faults and weaknesses,
"waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God."
But these wonderful soul-friends, to whom God grants such perception,
are the exceptions in life; yet sometimes are we blessed with one who
sees through us, as Michel Angelo saw through a block of marble, when he
attacked it in a divine fervor, declaring that an angel was imprisoned
within it;--and it is often the resolute and delicate hand of such a
friend that sets the angel free.
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