There is no friendship so noble, but it is the
product of the time; and a world of little finical
observances, and little frail proprieties and fashions of the
hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union
of spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such
interference. The trick of the country and the age steps in
even between the mother and her child, counts out their
caresses upon niggardly fingers, and says, in the voice of
authority, that this one thing shall be a matter of
confidence between them, and this other thing shall not. And
thus it is that we must take into reckoning whatever tended
to modify the social atmosphere in which Knox and his women
friends met, and loved and trusted each other. To the man
who had been their priest and was now their minister, women
would be able to speak with a confidence quite impossible in
these latter days; the women would be able to speak, and the
man to hear. It was a beaten road just then; and I daresay
we should be no less scandalised at their plain speech than
they, if they could come back to earth, would be offended at
our waltzes and worldly fashions. This, then, was the
footing on which Knox stood with his many women friends. The
reader will see, as he goes on, how much of warmth, of
interest, and of that happy mutual dependence which is the
very gist of friendship, he contrived to ingraft upon this
somewhat dry relationship of penitent and confessor.
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