Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 225, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 October 1917 — THE COST OF FELLOWSHIP [ARTICLE]

THE COST OF FELLOWSHIP

It lathe Discipline of Living With People That Develops Christlikeness. It costs to live with people. We have to give up many of our own preferences to please them. We have to deny ourselves many enjoyments, so as not to give them pain. The price of living with others sweetly and harmoniously is always self-forgetfulness, self-effacement. But this cost is the very gold of life. It is the only antidote for selfishness. It is the way of Christlikeness. People are means of grace to us In many ways, and not in the smallest measure through the selfdenials which we are required to nftike in living with them. It is the self-dis-cipline of friendship and home and human fellowship that makes men and women of us, that makes us at last like Christ. We may thank God, therefore, for what people do for us in life’s contacts. Sometimes we say certain persons are hard to live with. Possibly they find us hard to live with, too. We do not know how many crotchets there are in our disposition and temper, nor how we try our friends, by our selfish ways.—Dr. J. R. Miller.