Hence companionship with the wise and energetic never fails to have a most valuable influence on the formation of character--increasing our resources, strengthening our resolves, elevating our aims, and enabling us to exercise greater dexterity and ability in our own affairs, as well as more effective helpfulness of others.
"I have often deeply regretted in myself," says Mrs.Schimmelpenninck, "the great loss I have experienced from the solitude of my early habits.
We need no worse companion than our unregenerate selves, and, by living alone, a person not only becomes wholly ignorant of the means of helping his fellow-creatures, but is without the perception of those wants which most need help.

Association with others, when not on so large a scale as to make hours of retirement impossible, may be considered as furnishing to an individual a rich multiplied experience; and sympathy so drawn forth, though, unlike charity, it begins abroad, never fails to bring back rich treasures home.

Association with others is useful also in strengthening the character, and in enabling us, while we never lose sight of our main object, to thread our way wisely and well." [122] An entirely new direction may be given to the life of a young man by a happy suggestion, a timely hint, or the kindly advice of an honest friend.

Thus the life of Henry Martyn the Indian missionary, seems to have been singularly influenced by a friendship which he formed, when a boy, at Truro Grammar School.

Martyn himself was of feeble frame, and of a delicate nervous temperament.