The divine life in three treatises

I might here also remember you how your friends may themselves be overcome with a temptation, and then become the more dangerous tempters of you, by how much the greater their interest is in your affections. If they be infected with error, they are the likest persons to ensnare you: If they be tainted with Covetousness or Pride, there is none so likely to draw you to the same sin: And so your friends may be in effect your most deadly enemies, deceivers and destroyers.

I might here also remember you how your friends may themselves be overcome with a temptation, and then become the more dangerous tempters of you, by how much the greater their interest is in your affections. If they be infected with errour, they are the likest persons to ensnare you: If they be tainted with Covetousness or Pride, there is none so likely to draw you to the same sin: And so your friends may be in effect your most deadly enemies, deceivers and destroyers.

15. And if you have friends that are never so firm and constant, they may prove (not only unable to relieve you, but) very additions to your grief. If they are afflicted in the participation of your sufferings, as your troubles are become theirs (without your case) so their trouble for you will become yours, and so your stock of sorrow will be increased. And they are mortals, and liable to distress as well you. And therefore they are like to bear their share in several sorts of sufferings: And so friendship will make their sufferings to be yours: Their sicknesses and pains, their fears and griefs, their wants and dangers, will all be yours. And the more they are your hearty friends, the more they will be yours. And so you will have as many additions to the proper burden of your griefs, as you have suffering friends: When you do but hear that they are ⟨p. 313⟩dead, you say as Thomas, Joh. 11. 16. [Let us also go that we may die with him.] And having many such friends you will almost always have one or other of them in distress; and so be seldom free from sorrow; besides all that which is properly your own.