What the Friend Said of Forgiveness

— The noblesse oblige principle is often most cruel and unrelenting in its constructions and applications, and perhaps never more so than in the current distribution of forgiveness. I see that we are forgiven by our friends only for what is adjudged by them to be our own class of failing, our individual bent in sinning. To illustrate : the habitually careful and trusty are not easily pardoned even a single lapse into carelessness, while some notorious disregarder of every charge given him is pardoned seventy times seven times. Again, any one instance of disingenuousness in the habitually truthful is never even forgotten, while the pleasant liar pursues his profession with no reprimand beyond the genial recognition of his mendacity. If gentleness becomes violent or good nature becomes irritable, on some occasion of great stress, what a miracle of apostasy ! Yet violence and irritability, unchecked, keep their own seats in the chimney-corner. From all which might be deduced a rule advantageous to self-seeking humanity : only insist sufficiently upon your own special and favorite fault by its familiar repetition, or by defending it as a matter of “ temperament ” or in some way of individual prerogative, and by so insisting you shall find that any special instances of your baseness, treachery, abuse of power, or aught besides will be treated to a palliation never accorded to the one-time offender in the same line of misconduct.

The so-regarded “ faultless character ” is ever at a great disadvantage in this one respect: so sensitive are his associates for the preservation of their criterion (himself) that they cannot endure disappointment in the least article of the catalogued virtues which they have set to his credit, oftentimes despite his honest protest against apotheosis at their hands. What is the result if any little human deflection is discovered in him ? “ So good that we cannot forgive him ! ” might be the summing-up expression of their attitude towards any such sporadic and unaccountable case of error or of failure. Is it that as one’s excellence is great, so is the degree of his chance offense great and unforgivable, although in the inveterate practicer the offense would be scarcely an appreciable fact ? I dare say there is some adroit sophistry which would explain why the springs of charity should flow with lethean tenderness over the transgression of the perpetual offender, whilst these same springs congeal and hold in merciless crystalline display the occasional lapses of the habitually upright, generous, and just. That Florentine potentate quoted by Bacon in the essay on Revenge seems to whisper significantly in iny ear, as he observes that whereas we are commanded to forgive our enemies, we are nowhere commanded to forgive our friends.

I cannot help thinking that the sacred Word which tells us there is more joy over the one returning sinner than over the ninety and nine that went not astray is often sadly strained to indulge the sinner, while the balance is kept by showing, in a corresponding degree, austerity towards the ninety and nine.