Chapter 5: Love and Forgiveness

LOVE’S PROFIT

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.

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