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