Forgiveness

EMBEDDED in the heart of the Lord’s Prayer is a petition which may well give us pause: ‘Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.’ It is a hard saying, one perhaps never quite capable of fulfillment. Rarely can we estimate dispassionately the harm another has done us, rarely how much we have injured him. About all of which we can be sure is that the two are incommensurable, his guilt generally looking blacker than our own. To expect us, then, to forgive him — that is, to count him clean — seems unreasonable, impossible even. If we do not care for sincerity, we may treat him outwardly as if he had done no wrong. But that would fall far short of forgiveness. It would merely be calling black white, regardless of what we know the fact to be. On account of the clash between honesty and forgiveness to which the petition exposes us, certain scrupulous souls refuse to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus himself perceived a difficulty here, and on this clause alone offers comment: ‘But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’ But unhappily the comment explains nothing. It merely changes the petition to a threat.

Is, then, forgiveness unexplainable? Can we be at once clear-sighted, honest, and forgiving? If one who has professed himself my friend takes advantage of me for personal gain, am I called on to count him upright? Ought I not to be permanently hostile to his evil deed? God is angry with the wicked every day. That is the problem of this paper. What, exactly, is forgiveness, and how is honest forgiveness possible?

Such questions have lately become urgent. Many of us believe that a single nation sought to aggrandize itself at the cost of the rest of the world. To hold it in check took millions of lives and dollars, enough to leave half a dozen nations poor for a century. A crime so colossal was never before known. Ours was the victory. But what should be our attitude toward the conquered nation to-day? If we believe the Prussians as much at fault as is here assumed, shall we forgive them, find excuses for their conduct, and treat them as if nothing had happened? Would that be honest? Would it even be well for society?

But while in recent years the possibility of forgiveness between nations has been the most debated form of our problem, the less-noted perplexities of private forgiveness — that between persons, forgiveness of one’s self, divine forgiveness — have been ever at hand. With these it is better to begin our examination, if we would get our minds clear on the general problem. Believing too that we are hindered in coming to clearness if we do not distinguish the several varieties of forgiveness— all frequent, all honest — and the different occasions for their exercise, I mark out four such varieties and to each give a specific name. Let us call them the Forgiveness of Superiority, the Forgiveness of Oblivion, the Forgiveness of Excuse, and the Forgiveness of Faith. These I arrange in a logical order, each removing some limitation from its predecessor, but each needing supplementation from the one which follows. A common principle underlies them all. As I explain them, my readers will see that I am offering no new truth, but am merely bringing order and daylight into that which has always been obscurely familiar.

To cite a simple case of the Forgiveness of Superiority. It was given me by one who was present at the interview described. A graduate student, older than most, nervous and not in the best health, kept coming to the president of one of our principal colleges and complaining of slights and insults. The president showed little interest, merely pointing out the dangers of oversensitiveness. Finally the student interjected the angry question, ‘I wonder what you do when you are insulted?’ The answer was immediate: ‘There is no one living who could insult me.’ And it was true. In order that an insult may be received it must be accepted, but that president gave no heed to such things. Busied with large affairs he had no time or attention for personal trifles. He was superior to them. So should we all be. It is the mark of a rich man that he is able to keep small things little. If, in making a purchase, he receives less change than is his due and subsequently casually notices it, it does not continue in his thoughts. He passes it by as beneath him to consider.

A nobler instance of this important Forgiveness of Superiority is reported in the Book of Genesis. There we read the exquisite story of Joseph and his half-brothers; how in their dislike they sold Joseph into Egypt; how he rose to be the ruler of all that land; how, when a famine arose, his brothers were obliged to go to Egypt and buy their food of Joseph; how he finally revealed himself to them and overcame them with fear; how he said to them, ‘Fear not . . . ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.’ And he spoke kindly unto them and comforted them.

The Psalmist audaciously attributes this sort of forgiveness to God. Beholding how the futile impieties of men fall back upon their own heads, without damage to Him, he declares: ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.’ So again, comforting the well-intentioned but unstable, he asks, ‘If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, who shall stand?’ We should be treating God with more respect if we bore this thought about Him more steadily in mind. How often in our morbid moods we imagine God to be watching us jealously, offended at every petty forgetfulness on our part! What injustice such thoughts involve! Why not treat him honorably, as we treat one another?

For this elementary species of forgiveness is practised by us every day. Without it society would go to pieces. Wherever two or three are gathered together, frictions are sure to arise, and will be set aside by men of sense. Suspicion, touchiness, the thin skin, are contemptible. The young person must early learn how these check human intercourse. He must acquaint, himself with degrees of importance and come to practise the Forgiveness of Superiority as a matter of course.

Yet a defect attends this species of forgiveness. It is scornful. The forgiver sets himself above the forgiven. He takes the better part at every meeting, allowing the wrongdoer to feel that his acts are not worth notice. That is not a complete moral attitude, nor does a well-trained man often allow it to arise. He passes over small frictions without noticing them. For larger ones the two parties should meet as equals, come to as clear an understanding as possible, and agree that henceforth the supposed wrongdoing shall not be allowed to block their intercourse. The forgiver promises to put it out of mind and offers the forgiven a fresh start. Many of our moral differences may thus be wisely left unsettled, if only a clear path be provided for beginning anew. Hence arises a second form of honest forgiveness, the Forgiveness of Oblivion, admirably stated by the Psalmist: ‘As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.’

Divisions in time seem contrived to assist this variety of forgiveness. As we wake each morning, how delightedly we welcome the opportunities of a new day. Darkness and sleep have wiped away much of the unpleasantness of yesterday. Still more fully does a new week close accounts with a poor past. On New Year’s Day most of us feel that a turning-point has been reached where wise plans, greater steadiness, and fuller attendance on duty will be less hindered by what has gone before. We take courage and, undismayed by the mixture of good and evil behind us, form resolutions for a better future. However many of these are broken, the inclination to form them lies deep in us all and shows how greatly we value the fresh start. When this is granted by our fellows, and not merely by empty time, we experience the Forgiveness of Oblivion. Time should remind us to exercise it oftener. A trainer of the young especially sould be skillrd in knowing what not to notice, when to look the other way, Frequent correction is damaging. Jesus seems to have had something of this sort in mind when warning his disciples against pulling up tares in the wheat-field. Much that is good might be lost. Good and evil are so intertwined that often they may wisely be left undiscriminated till time shall put them to the test.

Yet while, when we see wrong done which is perhaps not acknowledged by the culprit, it is often well to offer him this Forgiveness of Oblivion and assure him that we will put it out of our thoughts, he will seldom be satisfied. Will it stay put? he will be asking. Whenever he comes into our presence will he not be uncomfortable, remembering his misdeed and suspecting that we do too? Even if I, the forgiver, desire forgetfulness, I may not be able to secure it. It is not easy to remember to forget. At best such forgiveness is half-hearted and settles nothing.

let it be observed too that in both of the forms hitherto considered forgiveness comes through a separation of the forgiver and the forgiven. In the first kind I put myself too far above him to notice his evil act; in the second I intentionally shut out that aspect of the case from my mind. Both fall short of that coöperation with the neighbor which is the ideal of ethics.

In the Forgiveness of Excuse I take a precisely opposite course. Instead of putting myself away from the sinner I try to come close to him. I imagine the circumstances under which the wrong was done. I put myself in the other’s place, and soon it seems that condemnation would not be honestly possible. The wise proverb says that to understand is to forgive. Our prodigality of blame, especially of our public men, may be induced by the general corruption of our day; but much of it springs from our own stupidity, the inability or unwillingness to examine the facts of the case imaginatively.

We should remember that readiness to meet misconception is pretty generally a condition of doing anything for the public good, and we should summon our imagination to make the amount of this misconception small. Readiness to interpret kindly conduct which admits of two constructions is one of the simplest and most beautiful manifestations of the Forgiveness of Excuse. My friend came to town yesterday. It was long since I had seen him and I was counting on his calling. He did not call and I was annoyed. But he may have been helplessly busy or may not even have known that I had returned from the country.

A case of weightier import is the following. A greatly admired friend came to me a while ago with a story of a disgraceful transaction in which he had been involved. He was much disturbed, and I had to acknowledge that it was thoroughly bad business, quite unworthy of him. He began to go over it in detail — not, however, seeking to diminish his guilt. Apparently his only comfort was the disgust he felt for himself. But as he proceeded my disgust declined, until when the whole tale was told I had to say, ‘Bad indeed! But if I had been in your shoes, I am afraid I should have done what you did.’ ‘That is the miserable revelation the affair brought me,’ he answered; ‘I learned how weak we all are.’

God knows it too, says the Psalmist. ‘He knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.’ Truly great minds are charitable. The sublimest case of forgiveness recorded, the one which rises in the minds of us all as typical whenever the subject is mentioned, is an instance of this Forgiveness of Excuse. It comes from the Cross. ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’

But we have not yet come to the end of our chapter, or to its most difficult and important section. There remains the Forgiveness of Faith. Hard as this is to comprehend, and still harder to practise, it underlies all other kinds and gives them their sanctity. But it cannot, like them, be outwardly observed. At least primarily, its meaning must be learned through the inner experience of self-forgiveness, where it is attended by repentance — something with which the earlier forms have no necessary connection. It was really with this Forgiveness of Faith that my friend was wrestling, and he accordingly found cold comfort in my offering him the Forgiveness of Excuse. A sense of guilt was upon him which could not be analyzed into circumstance. He faced a stained self and from it could not escape. It walked the street with him. It was in his bed at night, a being whom he abhorred and with whom henceforth his relations must be intimate. How could he have faith in himself hereafter, how recover self-respecting confidence when experience had shown him to be not the sort of person he supposed himself?

The Apostle Paul encountered this perplexity and indicates this method of meeting it, in a letter to the Romans: ‘The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.’ That is, he refuses to identify himself with the one who did the wrong. By repentance he puts it away from him and him from it.

Just so my friend clung to the abominable character of the act he had committed and was unwilling to let me attenuate it. In this way he felt it more remote from him. He hated it, held that he had no part or lot in it. He longed to be assured that his true self was the kind of being he was acquainted with in all his previous life. Only by such repudiation could he forgive himself and have faith in his future. So after lesser wrongdoings we often express ourselves: ‘I forgot myself’; ‘I was false to myself’; ‘I was beside myself with anger.’

And this is what we mean by repentance. In it I declare that sin belies me, substituting transient and casual reactions from the outside world for any continuously directing principle within. But this is the true self, the other a fiction. So long as I hold to this insight I can still have faith in myself in spite of — or the more for — my previous wrongdoing. Others, too, who count my repentance genuine, need not abandon their faith in me, and their trust is a powerful steadying influence. But we cannot accept the Forgiveness of Faith lightheartedly. It lays a heavy burden upon us. Henceforth we live under a conscious pledge. This is what the Psalmist is thinking of: “But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.’

That fear cannot be escaped. Having been base once, we may be so again. There is no mechanic certainty in the moral life. It is a glorious adventure. But we know that there is much in us besides baseness and that this ‘much else’ includes all that we love and desire to be. When we have learned how to apply the Forgiveness of Faith to ourselves, we may see that, with suitable modifications, it is applicable to others also. In them we cannot be directly aware of repentance, as we can in our own hearts. We merely infer it. But our experience should guard us against the common error of supposing that a man’s true character is disclosed in a single act. In spite of appearances we may find surer grounds for judgment in the general trend of his conduct. It is wiser to interpret an act by character than character by an act.

Many years ago a minister who had been a prodigious force for righteousness in this country and England was charged with misconduct toward a lady of his church. The evidence was conflicting, the most damaging feature of it being his own letters. Most of those who believed him guilty asserted that the man’s real character was here revealed, and that accordingly he was proved a hypocrite during his previous life. But hypocrisy is rare. To practise it continuously demands a higher artistic power than most men possess. What made it difficult in this case to condone a wrong and keep our faith in the man was that he gave no sign of repentance. He maintained that his conduct had been altogether upright. Whoever, then, could not take this view, and saw impropriety in the letters, was compelled to find blind spots in the man’s generally high, but perhaps too ardent, character.

To apply these conclusions to the case with which we set out: can we honestly forgive the Germans, welcome them again to our friendship, and, while not counting those mistaken or unworthy of supreme honor who opposed them, still have faith in their future and put them back into pretty much the place they had before? To all these questions I, an ardent proAlly, both formerly and at present, answer yes.

Obviously the first form of forgiveness has no applicability here. America has never looked down on Germany. President Wilson advised us to do so and hoped that by proclaiming ourselves ‘too proud to fight’ we might leave to other people the vindication of justice. But the ingenious phrase — like his later one, that we must remain neutral in feeling as well as in act — imposed on no one. It was understood as a mere cowardly excuse for delay. The solid grounds for forgiving Germany are to be found in the last three of the varieties here listed.

Before determining, however, the appropriate forms of forgiveness, let us be sure that there is something to forgive. I hold that there is. The sentimentalists of to-day are exclaiming: ‘We are all alike responsible for the war.’ This has a pious sound. But as no specifications are given we cannot say what France, England, Russia, and the United States did or did not do to bring on the monstrous calamity. Of course few would assert, as the Treaty of Versailles did, that Germany was exclusively guilty. The world is too closely joined together to-day for anyone to stand alone. For fifty years the great nations have had divergent aims and corresponding suspicions. But none of these nations contemplated war or had used war as a means of reaching its present power. Prussia alone had through it made herself the dictator of Central Europe. After her subjugation of Austria, overthrow of Napoleon, unification of Germany under her lead, seizure of the French provinces, building of strategic railroads along the Belgian border, maintenance of the largest army known in modern times, her refusal to join with England and suspend for a year the building of ships of war, — perhaps we should add the unblushing attempt to placate the Germans in America so that they might hold back the United States whenever war should come,— it must have been evident to anyone not blind or biased that Prussia had long contemplated world dominion. It is true that after France was crippled and plundered in 1870 Frenchmen talked for many years of revenge. But this was long ago. I was in Paris just as the war was breaking out. On every hand I heard astonishment expressed that so hideous a thing should happen, and a belief that even at the last moment some way would be found to prevent it. But after Austria’s impossible ultimatum was sent to Serbia, only one man could prevent it — Kaiser Wilhelm. He not only refused prevention but declined to sit in a conference pressed on him by England and France. Prussia has much need, then, for forgiveness. It should be granted her honestly, heartily, but with no glossing over of her crime.

Prussia, I say, for I do not believe the other German states would ever have brought about the war. Imperialism did it, and that was almost as much distrusted within Germany as without. In 1807-69 I was a student at the University of Tübingen in Württemberg. I became very fond of the Germans, a liking since increased by many visits to all parts of Germany and by a number of German friends in this country with whom I have been peculiarly intimate. Few races are so generally lovable, few so unselfish, hard-working, dutiful, peace-loving, and intelligent. It is unfair to count them responsible for the war. How, then, did they come to be in it? Their very virtues brought them there. They were obedient, submissive, romantic, with small political experience, the little kings and grand dukes of their many states managing the government for their peoples, who for the most part contentedly attended to their domestic, agricultural, or scholarly affairs. The Prussians were of a different temper — restless, militaristic, dictatorial. Under the leadership of Bismarck they gained control of a United Germany and throughout it inspired thoughts of a wider empire still. When the convulsion came, a docile people, accustomed to take orders, could not oppose Prussian schemes and stand apart from their brothers. The call of a legendary Fatherland was irresistible.

It will now easily be seen how well the last three varieties of forgiveness apply to Germany. The only hindrance to their complete application is that, as in the case of my ministerial offender, there is as yet no repentance. But why on that account refuse a fresh start? Should not debate about degrees of guilt be suspended for the present? To assign them requires a more dispassionate temper than either side can now command; a fuller publication, too, of papers still in the archives. The Forgiveness of Oblivion is needed for the peace of the world, nor need it bring any lack of honesty if, for a time at least, both sides agree to suspend and officially forgive and forget.

For those of us who feel that the fall of a great people from a position of the first nation in the world is a tragedy so colossal that the human mind cannot withhold its judgment, I have pointed out the excuses for erroneous conduct that are to be found in the very character— so beautiful, so uncontentious, so easily led — of the generality of the German people. The average German is a better follower than leader. Let us remember, too, that the naïve and domestic Germans — unlike the calculating French — had allowed their country to become overpopulated; while, since it is encompassed on every side by strong nations, it could not expand or obtain the raw material its best growth was thought to require. On these and many more accounts the Germans are entitled to the Forgiveness of Excuse.

But we can do more than find excuses for them. We can trust them, have faith in them, set them back in the place long theirs. That passion for conquest which, by skillful propaganda, was made for a time dominant did not really belong to them. It was, in Paul’s phrase, merely sin dwelling among them, a temporary and destructive craze, not representative. The ancestral German nature —sweet, reasonable, industrious, if occasionally coarse —must gradually return as the smart from defeat and poverty grows less. Obnoxious Prussianism has been discredited, shown not even to have lasting power under modern conditions. The imperial delirium has gone. Bewilderment remains. While Germany is coming again to herself, let the world have patience and a generous faith. She has not lost our love.