When, now, we take these precepts of Jesus and lay them side by side
with the life of the world, or even with the life of the Church, as day
by day it passes before our eyes, our first thought must be, how little
yet do men heed the words of Jesus, how much mightier is the pagan
spirit of revenge than the Christian spirit of forgiveness. Indeed, of
all the virtues which Christ inculcated, this, perhaps, is the most
difficult. True forgiveness--I do not speak of the poor, bloodless
phantom which sometimes passes by the name:
"Forgive! How many will say 'forgive,' and find
A sort of absolution in the sound
To hate a little longer,"
--not of such do I speak, but of true forgiveness, and this, I say, can
never for us men be an easy thing. Perhaps a frank consideration of some
of the difficulties may contribute to their removal.
(1) One chief reason why Christ's command remains so largely a dead
letter is to be found in our unwillingness to acknowledge that we have
committed an injury. That another should have wronged us we find no
difficulty in believing; that we have wronged another is very hard to
believe. Look at the very form of Peter's question: "How oft shall my
brother sin against me, and I forgive him?" "My brother" the wrong-doer,
myself the wronged--that is what we are all ready to assume. But what if
it is I who have need to be forgiven? But this is what our pride will
not suffer us to believe. That "bold villain" Shame, who plucked
Faithful by the elbow in the Valley of Humiliation, and sought to
persuade him that it is a shame to ask one's neighbour forgiveness for
petty faults, or to make restitution where we have taken from any, is
always quick to seize his opportunity. And he is especially quick when
acknowledgement is due to one who is socially our inferior. If an
employee be guilty of some gross discourtesy towards his master, or a
servant towards her mistress, the master or mistress may demand a prompt
apology on pain of instant dismissal. But when it is the servant or
employee who is the injured person he has no such remedy; yet surely, in
Christ's eyes, his very dependence makes the duty of confession doubly
imperative. "If," Christ said, "thou art offering thy gift at the altar,
and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee"--note
exactly Christ's words; He did not say, "If thou rememberest that thou
hast aught against thy brother"; alas, it is very easy for most of us to
do that; what He said was, "If thou rememberest that thy brother hath
aught against thee." Whom did I overreach in business yesterday? Whose
good name did I drag through the mire? What heart did I stab with my
cruel words? "If thou rememberest that thy brother hath aught against
thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be
reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift."
(2) If the difficulties are great when we have committed the wrong, they
are hardly less when we have suffered it. Thomas Fuller tells how once
he saw a mother threatening to beat her little child for not rightly
pronouncing the petition in the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our
trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us." The child
tried its best, but could get no nearer than "tepasses," and
"trepasses." "Alas!" says Fuller, it is a shibboleth to a child's tongue
wherein there is a confluence of hard consonants together; and then he
continues, "What the child could not pronounce the parents do not
practise. O how lispingly and imperfectly do we perform the close of
this petition: As we forgive them that trespass against us." In the old
Greek and Roman world, we have been told, people not only did not
forgive their enemies, but did not wish to do so, nor think better of
themselves for having done so. That man considered himself fortunate
who, on his deathbed, could say, on reviewing his past life, that no one
had done more good to his friends or more mischief to his enemies. And
though we profess and call ourselves Christians, how strong in many of
us still is the old heathen desire to be "even with" one who has wronged
us, and to make him smart for it. Many of us, as Dr. Dale says,[44] have
given a new turn to an old text. In our own private Revised Version of
the New Testament we read: "Whosoever speaketh a word or committeth a
wrong against God, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh a
word or committeth a wrong against me, it shall not be forgiven him;
certainly not in this world, even if it is forgiven in the world to
come." Resentment against moral evil every good man must feel; but when
with the clear, bright flame of a holy wrath there mingle the dark fumes
of personal vindictiveness, we do wrong, we sin against God.
Nowhere in Scripture, perhaps, have we such a lesson on the difficulty
of forgiveness as in the reference to Alexander the coppersmith, in St.
Paul's last letter to Timothy. Even if we read his words in the modified
and undoubtedly accurate form in which they are found in the Revised
Version, we still feel how far short they come of the standard of
Christ. "Paul," says Dr. Whyte, "was put by Alexander to the last trial
and sorest temptation of an apostolic and a sanctified heart."[45] And
with all the greatness of our regard for the great apostle, we dare not
say that he came out of the trial wholly unscathed. Did ever any man
come out of such a fire unhurt--any save One? Yet it is not for me to
sit in judgment on St. Paul; only let us remember we have no warrant
from God to hate any man and to hand him over to eternal judgment even
though, like Alexander, he heap insult and injury, not only upon
ourselves, but upon the cause and Church of Christ.
(3) And then to this native, inborn unwillingness to forgive there comes
in to strengthen it our knowledge of the fact that forgiveness is
sometimes mistaken for, and does, in fact, sometimes degenerate into,
the moral weakness which slurs over a fault, and refuses to strike only
because it dare not. Nevertheless, though there be counterfeits current,
there is a reality; there is a forgiving spirit which has no kinship
with cowardice or weakness or mere mushiness of character, but which is
the offspring of strength and goodness and mercy, in short, of all in
man that is likest God. And it is _this_ not that which God bids us make
our own; and not the less so because in the rough ways of the world that
so often passes for this.