ABSTRACT
In an 1896 article, the then Bishop of Winchester, Anthony Thorold, offered eight purposes of friendship: counsel, defence, appreciation, correction, society, intercession, aid, sympathy. Elsewhere in the same pamphlet he referred to Christ’s love for his apostles as combining ‘the two essentials of friendship everywhere – the intimacy of companionship, and the readiness for sacrifice’ (Thorold, 12). Similarly, in 1893 Sir Maxwell Herbert commented that ‘In friendship, as in love, the test of reality is the readiness to sacrifice – sacrifice of time, of money, of exertion, or whatever else. Sacrifice lies at the root of the primitive idea of devotion’ (Herbert, 406).
