The meaning of all this is unmistakable. No child could miss the point of the solemn parable to which I have referred. At the same time, it may not be out of place to point out that there are not a few instances in which people may feel themselves wronged, which, nevertheless, do not come within the scope of Christ's teaching about forgiveness. An illustration will best explain my meaning. It sometimes happens, both in business life and in the Church, that two men, equally honourable and true, but with almost nothing else in common, are often thrown into each other's company. They have to deal with the same facts, but they look upon them with wholly different eyes, they approach them from wholly different points of view. The results are obvious. There are not only widely differing opinions, but occasional misunderstandings, and sometimes sharper words than ought ever to pass between Christian men. Now, to say broadly that one is right and the other wrong, that the one owes confession and the other forgiveness, is simply not true; what is true is that the men are different, different in temperament, different in training, different in their whole habits of thought and life. And what is needed is that each should learn frankly to recognize the fact. This is not a case for rebuking, and repenting, and forgiving, but for mutual forbearance. There are multitudes of good people, people whose goodness no one who knows them would ever question, whom yet we cannot take to our bosoms, and treat as intimate personal friends. Even religion does not all at once straighten out all the twists in human nature, nor rub down all its hard angularities. And, as I say, it is our simple, common-sense duty to recognize the fact; and if sometimes we find even our fellow--Christians "very trying," well, we must learn to bear and forbear, always remembering that others probably find us no less trying than we sometimes find them. But where grave and undeniable injury has been done, immediately Christ's teaching comes into operation. The injured one must banish all thought of revenge. Never must we say, "I will do so to him as he hath done to me; I will render to the man according to his work." Rather must we strive to overcome evil by good, and by the manifestation of a forgiving spirit to win the wrong-doer to repentance and amendment.

II

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.

III

It would be easy to go on enumerating difficulties, but long as the enumeration might be, Christ's command would still remain in all its explicitness, the Divine obligation would be in no way weakened. We must forgive; we must forgive from our hearts; and there must be no limit to our forgiveness. Nor is this all. The whole law of forgiveness is not fulfilled when one who has done us an injury has come humbly making confession, and we have accepted the confession and agreed to let bygones be bygones. We should be heartless wretches indeed, if, under such circumstances, we were not willing to do as much as that. But we must do more: "If thy brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault between thee and him alone; if he hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother." We, we who have been wronged, must take the first step. We must not wait for the wrong-doer to come to us; we must go to him. We must lay aside our vindictiveness, and earnestly, patiently, making our appeal to his better self, by every art and device which love can suggest, we must help him to take sides against the wrong which he has done, until at last forgiving love has led him captive, and our brother is won. This is the teaching of Jesus. Let me suggest, in conclusion, a three-fold reason why we should give heed to it.

Let us forgive _for our own sake_. A man of an unforgiving spirit is always his own worst enemy. He "that studieth revenge," says Bacon, "keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well." "If thou hast not mercy for others," says Sir Thomas Browne, "yet be not cruel unto thyself; to ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon injuries, is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies." There is no misery worse than that of a mind which broods continually over its own wrongs, be they real or only fancied. There is no gloom so deep and dark as that which settles on a hard and unrelenting soul. And, on the other hand, there is no joy so pure, there is none so rewarding, as that of one who, from his heart, has learned to say, "I forgive." He has tasted the very joy of God, the joy of Him of whom it is written that He delighteth in mercy. Just as when a sea-worm perforates the shell of an oyster, the oyster straightway closes the wound with a pearl, so does a forgiving spirit heal the hidden hurt of the heart, and win for itself a boon even at the hands of its foe.

Let us forgive _for our brother's sake_. "What," asks George MacDonald, "am I brother for, but to forgive?" And how much for my brother my forgiveness may do! All love, not Christ's love only, has within it a strange redemptive power. We often profess ourselves puzzled by that hard saying of Jesus concerning the binding and loosing of men's sins. Yet this is just what human love, or the want of it, is doing every day. When we forgive men their sins, we so far loose them from them; we help them to believe in the power and reality of the Divine forgiveness. When we refuse to forgive, we bind their sins to them, we make them doubt the love and mercy of God. Have we forgotten the part which Ananias played in the conversion of Saul of Tarsus? St. Augustine used to say that the Church owed Paul to the prayers of Stephen. Might he not have said, with equal truth, that the Church owed Paul to the forgiveness of Ananias? For three days, without sight, and without food or drink, Saul waited in Damascus, pondering the meaning of the heavenly vision. Then came unto him, sent by God, the man whose life he had meant to take: "Ananias entered into the house; and, laying his hands on him, said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, who appeared unto thee in the way which thou earnest, hath sent me." "_Brother_ Saul"--how his heart must have leapt within him at the sound of the word! It was a voice from without confirming the voice within; it was the love and forgiveness of man sealing and making sure the love and forgiveness of God. Wherefore, let us take heed lest, by our sullen refusal to forgive, we be thrusting some penitent soul back into the miry depths, whence, slowly and painfully, it is winning its way into the light and love of God.

Let us forgive _for Christ's sake_, because of that which God through Him has done for us. When, day by day, we pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us," what we are asking is, that God will deal with us as we are dealing with others. Do we mean what we say? Are we showing a mercy as large as we need? Chrysostom tells us that many people in his day used to omit the words, "As we forgive them that trespass against us." They did not dare to ask God to deal with their sins as they were dealing with the sins of those who had wronged them, lest they brought upon themselves not a blessing but a curse. And would it not go hardly with some of us, if, with the measure we mete, God should measure to us again? Yet there is no mistaking Christ's words: "If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." Therefore, let me think of myself, of my own sin, of the forgiveness even unto seventy times seven which I need; and then let me ask, can I, whose need is so great, dole out my forgiveness with a grudging hand, counting till a poor "seven times" be reached, and then staying my hand? Rather, let me pray, Lord,

"Make my forgiveness downright--such as I Should perish if I did not have from Thee."

"Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing, be put away from you, with all malice; and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you."

"O man, forgive thy mortal foe, Nor ever strike him blow for blow; For all the souls on earth that live To be forgiven must forgive, Forgive him seventy times and seven: For all the blessed souls in Heaven Are both forgivers and forgiven."

* * * * *

CONCERNING CARE

"My spirit on Thy care,
Blest Saviour, I recline;
Thou wilt not leave me in despair,

For Thou art Love Divine.

In Thee I place my trust,
On Thee I calmly rest;
I know Thee good, I know Thee just,

> And count Thy choice the best.

Whate'er events betide,
Thy will they all perform;
Safe in Thy breast my head I hide,

Nor fear the coming storm.

Let good or ill befall,
It must be good for me,
Secure of having Thee in all,

Of having all in Thee."

H.F. LYTH.

* * * * *

XII

CONCERNING CARE

"_Be not anxious for your life_ ... _nor yet for your body_.... _Be not anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? ... Be not anxious for the morrow._"--MATT. vi. 25, 31, 34.

I

"_Take no thought for_ your life" is the more familiar rendering of the Authorized Version. And if the words conveyed the same meaning to us to-day as they did to all English-speaking people in the year 1611, there would have been no need for a change. A great student of words, the late Archbishop Trench, tells us that "thought" was then constantly used as equivalent to anxiety or solicitous care; and he gives three illustrations of this use of the word from writers of the Elizabethan age. Thus Bacon writes: "Harris, an alderman in London, was put in trouble, and died with _thought_ and anxiety before his business came to an end." Again, in one of the _Somer's Tracts_, we read, "Queen Katharine Parr _died of thought_"; and in Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_, "_Take thought_ and die for Caesar," where "to take thought" is to take a matter so seriously to heart that death ensues.[46] In 1611, therefore, the old translation did accurately reproduce Christ's thought. To-day, however, it is altogether inadequate, and sometimes, it is to be feared, positively misleading. For neither in this chapter nor anywhere in Christ's teaching is there one word against what we call forethought, and they who would find in the words of Jesus any encouragement to thriftlessness are but misrepresenting Him and deceiving themselves. Every man, who is not either a rogue or a fool, must take thought for the morrow; at least, if he does not, some one must for him, or the morrow will avenge itself upon him without mercy. What our Lord forbids is not prudent foresight, but worry: "Be ye not _anxious_!" The word which Christ uses ((Greek: merimnate)) is a very suggestive one; it describes the state of mind of one who is drawn in different directions, torn by internal conflict, "distracted," as we say, where precisely the same figure of speech occurs. A similar counsel is to be found in another and still more striking word which only Luke has recorded, and which is rendered, "Neither be ye of doubtful mind." There is a picture in the word ((Greek: meteorizesthe)) the picture of a vessel vexed by contrary winds, now uplifted on the crest of some huge wave, now labouring in the trough of the sea. "Be ye not thus," Christ says to His disciples, "the sport of your cares, driven by the wind and tossed; but let the peace of God rule in your hearts, and be ye not of doubtful mind."

It cannot surprise us that Jesus should speak thus; rather should we have been surprised if it had been otherwise. How could He speak to men at all and yet be silent about their cares? For how full of care the lives of most men are! One is anxious about his health, and another about his business; one is concerned because for weeks he has been without work, and another because his investments are turning out badly; some are troubled about their children, and some there are who are making a care even of their religion, and instead of letting it carry them are trying to carry it; until, with burdens of one kind or another, we are like a string of Swiss pack-horses, such as one may sometimes see, toiling and straining up some steep Alpine pass under a blazing July sun. Poor Martha, with her sad, tired face, and nervous, fretful ways, "anxious and troubled about many things," is everywhere to-day. Nor is it the poor only whose lives are full of care. It was not a poor man amid his poverty, but a rich man amid his riches, who, in Christ's parable, put to himself the question, "What shall I do?" The birds of care build their nests amid the turrets of a palace as readily as in the thatched roof of a cottage. The cruel thorns--"the cares of this life," as Jesus calls them--which choke the good seed, sometimes spring up more easily within the carefully fenced enclosure of my lord's park than in the little garden plot of the keeper of his lodge. On the whole, perhaps, and in proportion to their number, there is less harassing, wearing anxiety in the homes of the poor than in those of the wealthy. And what harsh taskmasters our cares can be! How they will lord it over us! Give them the saddle and the reins, and they will ride us to death. Seat them on the throne, and they will chastise us not only with whips but with scorpions. It is no wonder that Christ should set Himself to free men from this grinding tyranny. He is no true deliverer for us who cannot break the cruel bondage of our cares.

II

Let us listen, then, to Christ's gracious argument and wise remonstrances. What, He asks, is the good of our anxiety? What can it do for us? "Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto his stature? If, then, ye are not able to do that which is least, why are ye anxious concerning the rest?" "But, the morrow! the morrow!" we cry. "Let the morrow," Christ answers, "take care of itself; sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof; learn thou to live a day at a time." "Our earliest duty," says a great writer of our day, "is to cultivate the habit of not looking round the corner;" which is but another version of Christ's simple precept. And the saying, simple and obvious as it may seem, never fails to justify itself. For one thing, the morrow rarely turns out as our fears imagined it. Our very anxiety blurs our vision, and throws our judgment out of focus. We see things through an atmosphere which both magnifies and distorts. We remember how it was with Mr. Fearing: "When he was come to the entrance of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I thought"--it is Greatheart who tells the story--"I should have lost my man: not for that he had any inclination to go back,--that he always abhorred; but he was ready to die for fear. Oh, the hobgoblins will have me! the hobgoblins will have me! cried he; and I could not beat him out on't." Yet see how matters fell out. "This I took very great notice of," goes on Greatheart, "that this valley was as quiet while he went through it as ever I knew it before or since." And again, when Mr. Fearing "was come at the river where was no bridge, there again he was in a heavy case. Now, now, he said, he should be drowned for ever, and so never see that face with comfort, that he had come so many miles to behold." But once more his fears were put to shame: "Here, also, I took notice of what was very remarkable: the water of that river was lower at this time than ever I saw it in all my life. So he went over at last, not much above wet-shod."

And even though the morrow should prove as bad as our fears, Christ's precept is still justified, for the worst kind of preparation for such a day is worry. Worry, like the undue clatter of machinery, means waste, waste of power. Anxiety, it has been well said, does not empty to-morrow of its sorrows, but it does empty to-day of its strength. Therefore, let us not be anxious. Let us climb our hills when we come to them. God gives each day strength for the day; but when, to the responsibilities of to-day we add the burdens of to-morrow, and try to do the work of two days in the strength of one, we are making straight paths for the feet of failure and disappointment. All the many voices of reason and experience are on Christ's side when He bids us, "Be not anxious."

Yet, true as all this is, how inadequate it is! When the tides of care are at the flood they will overrun and submerge all such counsels as these, as the waves wash away the little sand-hills which children build by the sea-shore. "We know it is no good to worry," people will tell us, half-petulantly, when we remonstrate with them; "but we cannot help ourselves, and if you have no more to say to us than this, you cannot help us either." And they are right. Care is the cancer of the heart, and if our words can go no deeper than they have yet gone, it can never be cured. It is an inward spiritual derangement, which calls for something more than little bits of good advice in order to put it right. And if, again, we turn to the words of Jesus, we shall find the needed something more is given. The care-worn soul, for its cure, must be taken out of itself. "Oh the bliss of waking," says some one, "with all one's thoughts turned outward!" It is the power to do that, to turn, and to keep turned, one's thoughts outwards that the care-ridden need; and Christ will show us how it may be ours.

"Be not anxious," says Jesus; and then side by side with this negative precept He lays this positive one: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God." Christ came to establish a kingdom in which "all men's good" should be "each man's rule," and love the universal law. When, therefore, He bids the anxious seek the kingdom, what He means is that they are to find an escape from self and self-consuming cares in service. "When you find yourself overpowered by melancholy," said John Keble, "the best way is to go out and do something kind to somebody or other." And thousands who are sitting daily in the gloom of a self-created misery, with all the blinds of the spirit drawn, if they would but "go out" and begin to care for others, would speedily cease their miserable care for themselves. "When I dig a man out of trouble," some one quaintly writes, "the hole he leaves behind him is the grave in which I bury my own trouble."[47] This is not the whole cure for care; but if the mind is to be kept from burrowing in the dark of its own fears and anxieties, it must be set resolutely and constantly on those nobler ends to which Christ in His gospel summons us all.

The care-worn, Christ says, must think of others; and, most of all, they must think of God. "Let not your heart be troubled ... believe." This is the great argument into which all other arguments run up. This is the larger truth, within whose wide circumference lie all Christ's words concerning care. We are not to care because we are cared for, cared for by God. There is, Christ teaches us, a distribution of duties between ourselves and God. We, on our part, make it our daily business to get God's will done on earth as it is done in heaven; He, on His, undertakes that we shall not want.

"Make you His service your delight, He'll make your wants His care."

Once more we see how fundamental is Christ's doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood. It is not so much because our anxiety is useless, or because it unfits us for service, but because God is what He is, that our worry is at once a blunder and a sin. It is mistrust of the heavenly love that cares for us. The sovereign cure for care is--God.

III

But now a difficulty arises. Christ's doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood is, without doubt, fundamental; but is it true? A God who clothes the blowing lilies with their silent beauty, without whom no sparrow falleth to the ground, who numbers the very hairs of our head--it is a glorious faith, if one could but receive it. But can we? It was possible once, we think, in the childhood of the world; but that time has gone, and we are the children of a new day, whose thoughts we cannot choose but think. So long as men thought of our earth as the centre of the universe, it was not difficult to believe that its inhabitants were the peculiar care of their Creator. But astronomy has changed all that; and what once we thought so great, we know now to be but a speck amid infinite systems of worlds. The old question challenges us with a force the Psalmist could not feel: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou are mindful of him? and the son of man that Thou visitest him?" The infinity of God, the nothingness of man: the poor brain reels before the contrast. Is it thinkable, we ask, that He whose dwelling-place is eternity should care for us even as we care for our children? So the question is often urged upon us to-day. But arguments of this kind, it has been well said, are simply an attempt to terrorize the imagination, and are not to be yielded to. As a recent writer admirably says: "We know little or nothing of the rest of the universe, and it may very well be that in no other planet but this is there intelligent and moral life; and, if that be so, then this world, despite its material insignificance, would remain the real summit of creation. But even if this be not so, still man remains man--a spiritual being, capable of knowing, loving, and glorifying God. Man is that, be there what myriads of worlds there may, and is not less than that, though in other worlds were also beings like him.... No conception of God is less imposing than that which represents Him as a kind of millionaire in worlds, so materialized by the immensity of His possessions as to have lost the sense of the incalculably greater worth of the spiritual interests of even the smallest part of them."[48]

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