Our continuous possession and conscious enjoyment of God’s forgiveness will be contingent on our forgivingness.  He who took his fellow-servant by the throat and half choked him in his determination to exact the last farthing of his debt was, by the act, cancelling his own discharge and piling up a mountain of debt, against himself.  Our consciousness of forgiveness will be most clear and satisfying when we are forgiving those who trespass against us.  We shall pardon most spontaneously and fully when our hearts are warm with the beams of God’s pardon.

‘LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION’

     ’And lead us not into temptation.’—­MATT. vi. 13.

The petition of the previous clause has to do with the past, this with the future; the one is the confession of sin, the other the supplication which comes from the consciousness of weakness.  The best man needs both.  Forgiveness does not break the bonds of evil by which we are held.  But forgiveness increases our consciousness of weakness, and in the new desire which comes from it to walk in holiness, we are first rightly aware of the strength and frequency of inducements to sin.  A man may by mere natural conscience know something of what temptation is, but only he understands its strength who resists it.

The sense of forgiveness and the new desires and love thereby developed, lead to the falling of the mask from the deceitful forms that gleam around us.  He who is forgiven has his eyesight purged, and can see that these are not what they seem, but demons that lure us to our destruction.  It is true that the sign of the Cross compels the foul thing to appear in its own true form.  ’Then started up in his own shape the fiend.’  The love which comes from forgiveness and the new sympathies which it engenders are the Ithuriel’s spear.  What a wonderful change passes upon the siren tempters when we believe that Christ has pardoned us, and have learned to love Him!  Then the fishtail is seen below the sunlit waters.

Forgiveness is one of the chief means of teaching us our sin.  The removal of all dread of personal consequences, which it effects, leaves us free to contemplate with calmed hearts the moral character of our actions.  The revelation of God’s love which is made in forgiveness quickens our consciences as well as purges them, and our standard of purity is raised.  The effort to live rightly, which is the sure result of God’s love believed, first teaches us thoroughly how wrong we are.  We know the strength of the current when we try to pull against it.  Looking to God as our Father, our blackness shows blacker against the radiant purity of His white light.