CHAPTER III FORGIVENESS THERE can be no question at all as to the exceeding prominence of the part, in the Christian religion, which belongs to forgiveness. For ourselves, as we look to Godward, it is the hope, and the faith, without which all else would be to us as nothing. The simplest form of the universal faith is incomplete without this,-"I believe in the forgiveness of sins." The primary type of the universal prayer lays exceptional emphasis upon this,— "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us." In this form of prayer we have already passed from the thought of forgiveness as being, to Godward, our essential hope, to the thought of forgiveness as being, to manward, our indispensable duty. It is, characteristically, both. It is a duty towards men which, almost more than any other duty, stamps those who realize and fulfil it best, with the distinctive seal of the Spirit of the Christ. And it is a hope which may be said -intelligibly, at least, if not with theological exactnessto sum up all the aspiration and desire of Christians. "I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins" is, in its way, a description of the Christian calling as a whole. "Thy sins be forgiven thee," spoken unerringly by the voice of Divine truth and love, comes very near to the consummation of all human yearning. In either aspect, as primary moral duty, or as primary spiritual hope, it stands plainly in the forefront of all that our Christianity means to us. In our creeds, in our prayers, in our teaching of others, in our hopes or fears for ourselves, few ideas, if any, are, or can be, more prominent than such as are represented to men's thought by that familiar and fundamental phrase, the "forgiveness of sins." Without it Christian morality would be destroyed. Without it Christian faith would be annulled. Directly or indirectly, by conscious effort or by conscious default, it is everywhere, upon our lips, in our thoughts, in our lives. And yet; is it so absolutely clear-I do not say whether forgiveness is to us, after all, an assured or familiar experience, but whether we even know what we mean by forgiveness? What is forgiveness? Are we perfectly sure that, upon analysis, we shall be found to be attaching to that most familiar word, any defensible or adequate or indeed any consistent or intelligible—meaning at all? We begin with some obvious experiments, bearing not so immediately upon the grounds for the doctrine, as upon the meaning of the word. A child comes before parent or master for punishment, and the master lets him go free. The slave insults, or tries to strike, his lord; and the lord refrains from either penalty or reproach. In cases like these, if we speak (as we well may) of forgiveness, there is no doubt what we most immediately mean. We mean that a certain penalty is not inflicted. Is this, then, what forgiveness means? A remission of penalty? a forbearing to punish? This is, we may believe, quite genuinely, the first and simplest form in which forgiveness (whatever it may at last be found to mean) begins to make itself intelligible. It would be a great mistake to brush aside with contempt the idea of forgiveness as remission of penalty. It really is in this form that it first comes home to the consciousness of the child. It may fairly be presumed that it was in this form that it first came home to the child-like consciousness D of the race. It may even be doubted, perhaps, whether those who have not first felt something of it in this form are likely to get much further towards the understanding of it at all. We shall notice indeed that forgiveness cannot be apprehended even in this form, until certain earlier conceptions have been obtained. I cannot really feel myself excused from punishment, until I first feel that I have deserved to be punished; until (that is) I have some idea both of wrong as wrong, and of the distress of punishment, and of that righteousness which is expressed in punishment of wrong. But we need hardly now go further back than the conception of forgiveness as remission of punishment. Important, however, as it is to recognize this conception as a necessary stage, and true in its degree, in the process of gradually learning what forgiveness means; it will never do to rest here. The theology which allows itself to be entangled in a theory of forgiveness of which the leading character is remission of penalty, will by and by (as not a few attempts to explain the doctrine of the atonement have shown) be landed in insoluble perplexities. Indeed we may perhaps broadly say that forgiveness cannot really mean as much as this without meaning more. The mind cannot really grasp this explanation without becoming, more or less explicitly, conscious that what it really means by the word has already transcended the limits of this explanation. If, at a certain stage, the explanation was true; yet it dimly implied, even then, a good deal beyond itself. And what was once, in its own way, really true, becomes by degrees, to a maturer consciousness, so inadequate, that if pressed now as an adequate statement of truth, it carries with it all the effect-not merely of incompleteness but of untruth. The explanation does not say enough. Whatever place remission of penalty may have in forgiveness, we all feel that reality of forgiveness contains a great deal beyond this. "I will not punish you,-but I can never forgive," may be an immoral, but is not, on the face of it, a self-contradictory, position. I at least can hate the man whom I would not hurt. Again the explanation says too much. There may be such a thing as infliction of penalty which does not contradict-which may be even said to express-forgiveness. But in any case, the simple idea of not punishing is too negative and external to touch the real core of the matter. But there is another reason, more directly to our purpose, why forgiveness cannot be defined as remission of penalty. Such a definition would blur all distinction of right and wrong. Remission of penalty, as such, requires an explanation and a justification: and according to the explanation which justifies it, the character of not punishing varies infinitely. Now if I speak of forgiveness as a property of God, or a duty for man, I am speaking of something essentially virtuous and good: not of something which may be either good or the extreme antithesis of goodness. I cannot admit either that forgiveness is an immoral action, or that an immoral action can be forgiveness. Remission of penalty must have a justification. If it has no justification, it is simply immoral. I cannot, for the forgiveness of the creed, or of the Lord's prayer, accept a definition which leaves the question still open, whether forgiveness is not the exact contradiction of righteousness. If this man is guilty of a heartless betrayal, and another of a dastardly murder, and a third it may be of an outrage more dastardly than murder; and I, having absolute power, use that power only to remit the punishments wholesale, without other purpose or ground except remission regarded as an end in itself: I am so far from illustrating the righteous forgiveness of God, that I do but commit a fresh outrage against righteousness, in itself as cowardly as it is immoral. Thought is only misled by a use of the word which includes at once its truth and its caricature. The so-called forgiveness which is itself an infamy,-which, in condoning sin, gives the lie to righteousness,-has nothing in common, except mere delusiveness of outward appearance, with the truth of forgiveness. It may look like it in the negative fact of not-punishing, or in the outward gesture and appearance of embracing; but its whole reality of meaning is different. There may be travesties, or imitations, more or less resembling forgiveness. But there is only one true meaning of the word: and that is the forgiveness not of ignorance or of levity, but of righteousness and truth. The only real forgiveness is the forgiveness of God, reproduced in man just so far as man, in God's Spirit, righteously forgives; but caricatured by man, so far as man, otherwise than righteously, does the things which travesty and dishonour forgiveness, sparing penalty and foregoing displeasure-when righteousness does not. "Neither doth he abhor anything that is evil" is a terrible condemnation of the man who is ready to forgive everything alike. Forgiveness does not equally mean the truth and the travesty. Its definition cannot be found in terms merely of remission of pain or of anger, irrespective of the verdict of righteousness. When, and so far as, it is remission at all, it is remission because remission is righteous. It is the Divine reality-in God or in man. We are hampered no doubt by words. But just as with the word "love," while we cannot altogether help verbally using it for that yearning of person towards person which hideously travesties the true spirit of love, we yet educate ourselves towards true insight of soul by protesting that this is the libel not the truth, nor part of the truth, of what love really means; so also with the word forgiveness. If we cannot wholly avoid the use |