“Until Seventy Times Seven.”
By Margaret E. Sangster
“I SHOULD have to be changed through and through before I could believe in her again,” said Mabel, with emphasis. “I may forgive her in time, but I never can respect her as I used to. She has forfeited my esteem, and we are much better apart for the future.” So spoke Louise, her dark eyes lit with a gleam of resentment. One who remembered that the Master said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” had been striving to quiet the quarrel, which, beginning with a misunderstanding between these two, had been fanned by one breeze and another until it had become a steady flame, not likely to die in either heart. Two lovely girls, favorites with all their friends, had gradually drifted apart, and it seemed as though they would never be reconciled. And the end of the last effort at placating the disturbed elements was reached in the sentences quoted above. Dear Mabel, I wonder if you knew what a profound truth you stated when you impulsively declared that you would have to be changed through and through before you could fully forgive one who had offended you. I wonder whether the numbers of people who go about nursing grievances, cherishing animosities, and refusing to pardon a wound which has touched their vanity, realize how unlike Christ is precisely this hardness of heart. He enjoins upon us the duty of forgiving the sinner until we cease to count the number of times that forgiveness may be necessary. He forgives us over and over again, there being no limit to our ill-desert, as there is no limit to his loving-kindness. With him there is no half-way pardoning either. We are restored to the fullest favor, and to the most entire confidence. With us, too often, the forgiveness is like that of Louise—grudgingly conceded, and with always that reserve which cannot forget the injury, and which implies that the alienation is no longer the cause of pitched battles and bristling fortifications, but that, instead, an armed neutrality exists, or a flag of truce has been lifted. We must be changed through and through before our human nature can put on so much of the divine that we can forgive grandly. There are natures large enough to do this, and they have become so through assimilation to His whose forgiving pity was outpoured from the cross on those who nailed him there. Think of the forgiving spirit as a test of discipleship. Are we in doubt as to the reality of our love for the Saviour? Are we his, or are we not? Do we cry, wishing that by a sign from Heaven he would take away the doubt, and give us the joy of assurance? Here is a way of discovering what we long to know. If fully, freely, readily, and once for all, we can forgive one who has injured us; if we can so humble our pride as to meet the person halfway, or, rather, to seek the restoration of amity in the first place, we are showing the fruits of discipleship. It may easily be that, among my readers, there are those who are kept away from the Saviour, and linger outside the kingdom, just because they have not learned to forgive, because they refuse to learn the lesson in Christ’s way.—“Changed through and through!” Yes, the change is needful and vital. Beware, too, of the beginning of strife. “It is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute.”
—Margaret E. Sangster.