the forgiveness of righteousness and truth; and if this forgiveness is sure, invariable, even (as it were) self-acting,— in God, and in man too, just so far as man is identified with righteousness and truth; we are thrown back more than ever, in desiring to understand what forgiveness means, upon that condition in the personality of the forgiven, upon which the righteousness of his forgiveness depends.

But when we venture to give to the word forgiveness any meaning of this character at all, we are met, no doubt, by one or two very real difficulties of thought. Thus the question suggests itself, if forgiveness (with whatever provisoes) is made to be simply correlative to forgiveableness; and if to say that a man is forgiveable means not merely that he may be, but therefore ipso facto that he ought to be, nay must be, forgiven: if forgiveness, that is, is a sort of automatic and necessary consequence of a certain condition of the culprit's personality; are you not exactly taking out of forgiveness all that it ever had distinctively meant? Are you not precisely and completely explaining it away? When you say you forgive, you are merely recognizing the growth towards righteousness of those who are already becoming righteous. You may call it forgiving only those who deserve to be forgiven. Is it really more than this, that you acknowledge the goodness of the good; or, at all events, the imperfect goodness of the incompletely good? You merely do not continue to condemn those who no longer ought to be condemned? So far as they are still wicked, you refuse to forgive them. So far as they are becoming righteous, they do not need any act of yours to forgive them. In other words, there is no place left for forgiveness. Eitner, in accordance with truth, you still condemn. Or else, in accordance with truth, you acquit and accept. Where does forgiveness come in? Justice this may be.

But has not forgiveness, as forgiveness, dropped out altogether? Either there is nothing that can be called forgiveness at all; or, if there is, it is a forgiveness which can be said to have been, by deserving, "earned”: and is not forgiveness that is earned exactly not forgiveness ?

We must be content to make, for the present, suggestions towards the answer to this question, in two somewhat different ways. This first: that words like "earning" or "deserving" are, in any case, unfair words. They are unfair because they imply that the condition of the personality which can be said, in any sense, to deserve forgiveness, is a condition which is originated by, and for which the credit is primarily due to, the person in whom it is found. But if that condition of the personality of the culprit, which is capable of responding to forgiveness, and to which forgiveness is correlative; if the germinal possibilities of penitence in him, should be found, after all, to be due, in their first origins, to the loving righteousness,-not his nor of himself,-which is working for him to produce in him that forgiveableness which it will forthwith meet with the embrace of forgiveness: then it may be that this not unnatural attempt to show that a forgiveness which is perfectly righteous involves a contradiction in terms, will be found to break down after all. We do not, in our view of forgiveness, undervalue the freedom and completeness of the action of God's love, or overvalue the power of man's initiative, in the mystery of atoning redemption. That at least is a charge to which we have no occasion to plead guilty. Had we laid down that human capacity of penitence, even in its faintest and most germinal beginnings, began from man's self, or belonged to his natural powers, such a charge might conceivably lie. But any such suggestion is incompatible with the whole scope of our argument. Meanwhile, whatever we may have further to suggest in relation to the

possibilities of penitence, we can hardly be wrong in insisting on the mutual relation between penitence and pardon penitence, so far as it is penitence, never, by any possibility, failing of pardon; pardon being essentially that Divine acceptance,-nay anticipation, in acceptance, of the first divinely enabled identification of the personality with any movement towards penitence, in the light and warmth whereof alone the plant of penitence can grow or bear fruit.

And secondly, leaving for the moment the abstract difficulty, we must ask whether, after all, it does not, for whatever it is worth, attach on any shewing, to any explanation of forgiveness which we can by any possibility accept: to any forgiveness, that is, which is not selfcondemned as arbitrary and unrighteous, but is, or can possibly be, the act of God, who is unchanging righteousness and truth. If there are times when it seems that forgiveness would lose all its meaning if it could be called the necessary act of righteousness as righteousness; it is certain, on the other hand, that we cannot really save the idea of forgiveness, by making it either not the act of righteousness, or the act of righteousness not as it is righteous, but as it is something else, not ultimately identical with righteousness.

Yet even this instinct against which we are arguing represents a truth. That truth is exhibited to us, with a terrible emphasis, in the parable of the unforgiving servant. The most obvious teaching of that parable is that the fullest forgiveness of God towards man, in the conditions of the present life, is provisional, and may be revoked and reversed. This is one characteristic of forgiveness, as we have known it, upon which it is well to lay stress. As there is, upon earth, no consummated penitence, so neither is there any forgiveness consummated.

The forgiveness which we receive in the Church upon

earth,-in baptism, in absolution, and so forth,-takes for granted, and is dependent on, certain conditions. It is the recognition, by anticipation, of something which is to be, something towards which it is itself a mighty quickening of possibilities; but something which is not, or at least is not perfectly, yet. Present forgiveness is Inchoate, is educational: it is the recognition indeed of something in the present, but a something whose real significance lies in the undeveloped possibilities of the future; a something which is foreseen, and is to be realized, but which, in the actual personality, is not realized as yet.

Earthly forgiveness-real in the present, but real as inchoate and provisional-only reaches its final and perfect consummation then, when the forgiven penitent-largely through the softening and enabling grace of progressively realized forgiveness-has become at last personally and completely righteous. It is not consummated perfectly till the culprit is righteous: and love does but pour itself out to welcome and to crown what is already the verdict of righteousness and truth.

Meanwhile the living power of God's forgiveness in the present life grows more and more towards that consummation. But,-if the consummation be never reached; if the growth towards it be broken, and the conditions necessary for it rebelled against, and the personal progress turned into a progress in and towards unrighteousness: then that which had been forgiveness, inchoate, provisional, educational,-is forfeited and is reversed. It is not that it was unreal from the first. It was forgiveness, received and, in a measure, realized as such. But this is just the point of the catastrophe. The very realization of the provisional forgiveness, in proportion as it was realized, turns into the material of the condemnation. "Thou wicked servant, I forgave thee," that is the point of guilt -the forfeited forgiveness is the fatal wickedness--“ and

his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors

till he should pay all that was due. So shall also my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not every one his brother from your hearts."1

The forgiveness, if its consummation be rebelled against, becomes, in itself, condemnation. On the other hand, if and when its consummation is perfectly reached -"Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy lord "—the forgiveness may be said to be wholly merged in the glad welcome of an undimmed love. It is, then, of forgiveness not yet consummated, but inchoate and provisional: perhaps we should rather say it is of Love in its provisional and anticipatory stage,recognising possibilities not yet realized, and by this anticipatory recognition marvellously quickening them; it is of Divine Love at this stage, and under these conditions, that we do characteristically use the word "forgiveness." There is no difference at all between Divine forgiveness and Divine love; save in the atmosphere of conditions around and through which it is for the present working. Forgiveness is love, in its relation to a personality which, having sinned, is learning, and to learn, what the sin-consciousness of penitence means.

In this sense the instinct which would shrink from regarding forgiveness as a necessity of righteousness may, in part, be justified. Love is a necessity of righteousness; and forgiveness only is an aspect of love. But love wears the form, and carries the name, of forgiveness-in its anticipatory and provisional relation to the penitent. We do call love forgiveness just when, and just because, the penitent, whose very life it is, yet makes and can make no claim to deserving it. In this sense it may still perhaps even be true that forgiveness is correlative to non-deserving. But love, under the conditions, could not not have forgiven.

1 Mat. xviii. 32-35.