The Pulpit Speaks: May 31, 1958

An article written by my father, the Rev. C. Thomas Paige, as it appeared in the Tri-State Defender on the date shown.

What price friendship! One question, that constantly plagues my mind is how far one should go to maintain friendship. Only a few minutes ago I heard a man mention that many people today dare not be different. We live in a day of conformity. The whims and wishes of the crowd are, in the final analysis, what determines the human behavior.

Our friendships are based in our ability to conform to the “mass mind.” In modern society, it does not pay too much to be different, so we find everyone forsaking the basic teachings of the home and wandering off into the peculiar behavior that serves to make them popular.

In this day of social approval and social acceptance, one easily finds himself in a quandary as to what steps to take. Ofttimes we find ourselves asking ourselves how far shall I go with this person or that person?

Sometime down the line, we must decide whether it is more rewarding to have friendship than to be right. Daily we hear people saying that it is not what you know but who you know; therefore, we find many people striving to win friends and influence people at all cost.

Man is the product of many forces at work on him simultaneously. In the course of a day he finds himself constantly choosing between those forces that would make him acceptable and popular or those forces that would see him rejected and walking alone.

Facing the possibility of walking alone, the average person will soon find himself going along with the majority. We are prone to throw away those well established and taught behavior patterns and accept those forces that will make for our acceptance to the crowd.

How tragic it is that those forces that make for popularity are so contrary to those forces that make for the individual being accepted in the higher type of society. It is my deep-seated belief that in the desire to satisfy the crowd and be accepted by all is very cancerous to our day and time. Apparently, we have thrown away the most meaningful things in life in pursuit of those things that will make for the acceptance of all of the color and fame that comes with being popular. The day has come when, in interest of a better world, one must choose his friends with a certain amount of cultural and moral finesse. We must turn our hearts to those intangible forces in life that will establish us as well accepted people in all phases of society for all days.

Tragically, many young people, in their lust for many friends, have chosen those things that will make them acceptable for a few days rather than for life.

How admirable are those people who for a lifetime are able to get friends and maintain a cluster of them throughout life because they have such characteristics that all who come in contact with them are able to do nothing but admire them.

True and lasting friendships are not based on fleeting fancies. Daily we see people who rise up for a few hours only to return to insignificance because the things that made them popular are not the things that the better thinking people can appreciate over a period of time. In not so many words, our friendships must be based upon those things that will keep us acceptable before the people for ever and ever.

The man or woman who has come to grips with those forces in life that will make him or her stand out as a real person will, in the final analysis, be a man or a woman who will be a real friend.

We must not fool ourselves in the unfounded belief that friendship will be a lasting and meaningful thing for all with whom we come in contact. The price of friendship is really wrapped up in the way we conduct ourselves according to the highest moral and spiritual behavior patters that, over a period of years, the friendship circle will grow, not because of popularity, but because of an exhibition of the higher forces for worthy living and action.