What profits all the hate that we have known
The bitter words, not all unmerited?
Have hearts e'er thriven beneath our angry frown?
Have roses grown from thistles we have sown?
Or lucid dawns flowered out of sunsets red?
Lo, all in vain
The violence that added pain to pain,
And drove the sinner back to sin again.

We had been wiser had we walked Love's way
We had been happier had we tenderer been,
We had found sunlight in the cloudiest day
Had we but loved the souls that went astray,
And sought from shame their many faults to screen
Lo, they and we
Had thus escaped Life's worst Gethsemane,
And found the Garden where the angels be.

For One there was who, angry, drew no sword,
Derided, wept for those who wrought Him wrong,
And at the last attained this great reward,
That those who injured Him acclaimed Him Lord,
And wove His story into holiest song.
So sinners wrought
For Him the Kingdom He had vainly sought,
And to His feet the world's frankincense brought.

V

LOVE AND FORGIVENESS

In these instances it is the singular completeness of Christ's forgiveness which is the most startling feature. It would be a libel on human nature to say that men do not forgive each other, but human forgiveness usually has reservations, reticences, conditions. Jesus taught unlimited forgiveness, and what He taught He practiced.

"Then came Peter, and said to Him, 'Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Until seven times?' Jesus said unto him, 'I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.'"

It is a vehement reply, in which a quiet note of scorn vibrates; not scorn of Peter, but scorn of any kind of love that is less than limitless. But whose love is limitless? Do we not commonly speak of love as being outworn by offense or neglect? In the compacts which we make with one another in the name of love, do we not specifically name certain offenses as unpardonable? Thus one man will say, "I can forgive anything but meanness," and another says, "no friendship can survive perfidy"; and in the relations between men and women unfaithfulness is held to cancel all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem. Now and again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different music. Shakespeare, for example, in his famous one hundred and sixteenth sonnet, boldly states that

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

But who listens, who believes? Yet, if it should happen to us to be placed in the position of the offender, we need no one to convince us that a true love should be, in its very nature, unalterable. How astonished and dismayed are we, when eyes that have so many times met ours in tenderness harden at our presence, and lips which have uttered so many pledges of affection, speak harshly! We do not deny our fault, indeed; but we think we can discern reasons why it should be regarded mercifully, why the very memory and sacredness of old affection should make harsh judgment impossible; nay, more, why a deeply generous love should even rejoice in the opportunity to forgive, and so should sanctify our very shame with the healing touch of pity, and pour our tears into the sacramental cup which ratifies a new fidelity.

It is so the sinner argues, his vision of what love ought to be growing clearer by his offense against love. It is he alone, the sinner, who can really sympathize with Christ's conception of love, for he alone feels that this is the kind of love he needs. The elder brother does not understand, Simon the Pharisee does not understand, because neither has sinned in such a way as to be flung helpless at the feet of love. Peter did not understand when he put his question to Christ. He spoke just as the average man would speak, who has never sounded the tragic depths in life, has never known the misery of weakness, and therefore has no fellow feeling for the weak. Love as such men know it is less a passion than a compact. It is a bond of mutual advantage, guarded from abuse by swift penalty and forfeit. It is the reward of qualities, it gives no more than it gets, it exists by an equal equipoise of service. If this equipoise is disturbed its obligations are dissolved. It is easily affronted, and under affront becomes resentful, bitter, even vindictive. How oft shall I forgive my brother? Only as oft as a sense of duty shall demand, only up to the point which is sanctioned by social custom, so that I may save my reputation for magnanimity, always excepting certain sins for which no pardon can be legitimately asked. But the hour was not far off when Peter himself was to commit the very sins for which customary love has no pardon. He was to be guilty of those offenses which just and good men say they cannot forgive—meanness, cowardice, perfidy, denial. That bitter hour revealed the true nature of love to Peter. He knew that in spite of his sin against Jesus, he still loved Him, and since love was unalterable in him, he expected an unalterable love in Christ. It was the seventy times seven forgiveness that he needed then; and how sweet to recollect in that hour that Jesus had taught a love that knew no limit. "Lovest thou Me?" was the one word his Master uttered when they met in the quiet morning light beside the sea. "Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee," was the swift reply. Storms disturb the sea but the central tides run on. Peter found with equal astonishment and gratitude that not even perfidy was able to separate him from the love of Christ, for that love was unalterable as the morning star which hung above the lake, and cleansing as the soft waves that lapped its shore.

The self-righteous man will never understand these things. Men and women of meagre natures, with whom love is a compact, not a passion, will vehemently disapprove them. People of smooth lives, ignorant of strong temptations, will refuse even to discuss them. Jesus was well aware of their implacable indifference or cold hostility, and boldly said that for such people He had no gospel. His mission was not to the whole, but to the sick. The Gospel of Jesus is in truth not designed for people of comfortable lives. He has little to say to the children of compromise, whose emasculated lives attain the semblance of virtue by the cautious exercise of niggard passions. They can take care of one another, these righteous ones, whose very righteousness is a negation.

But Christ's Gospel is for a tragic world. It is for the disinherited, the weak, and the strong who have become weak; for those who have been wrecked by folly and passion, and too much love of living; for those whose capacities for good and evil, being both rooted in passion, are equally a peril and a potency—it is to these Christ chiefly speaks. To them the Gospel of unlimited forgiveness and unalterable love is the only vital, because the only efficacious Gospel. The man whose very virility of nature makes him the easy prey of murderous joy; the man shut up in prison, who hears from the lips that once spake love to him, the sentence of inexpiable disgrace; the outcast from honour, gnawing the bitter husks of hated sin in far lands, and tortured in his dreams by the sweetness of recollected happiness; these, and all like these, will understand Jesus, for it is to them He speaks. Their very sin interprets Him. To their forlorn ears the love He teaches will sound not strange, for it is the only kind of love that can redeem them; nor foolish, for it is the only love that dare stoop low enough to lift them up. These will not fail to understand what conventional righteousness finds so difficult; these, and also all good women who have had acquaintance with either deep love or real grief, because it is a loving woman's sweet prerogative and divine disposition to forgive, and to draw from her grace of forgiveness a more tender and maternal power of loving.