Article October 18, 1913 Issue

Forgiveness

GEORGE SILAS HADDOCK

The gentle word of forgiveness is sweet to human ears. The child is made happy by it, the friend encouraged, and the heart uplifted. It comes as a soothing, quieting influence, awakening hope, and refreshing with its note of cheer. The forgiveness of human sense is beautiful and denotes a loving spirit, but it lacks in that which is most essential; it fails to recognize and prove the unreality of sin, that it is impossible for a child of God to fall, or for evil to appear in the realm of infinite good.

Admitting the fault, giving credence to the error, the forgiveness of the world comes burdened with a sense of sin's reality, even though accompanied with kindly sympathy, but Christian Science has come to bring the glad message that man made in the likeness of infinite good never can fall from harmony, nor swerve one iota from the law of divine reflection. It looks through the formations of a false sense and judges "righteous judgment," holds to the creation of a loving Father, too good and pure to behold iniquity or create a child capable of evil. It says to the troubled sense: Be of good cheer! Man's true individuality never sinned! Now you are free! How uplifting and inspiring is this forgiveness, and how frail and inadequate the other. One brings quickening and inspiration, a consciousness of freedom and of native worth, while the other, failing to erase the belief in sin as an entity, seeks to tranquilize the human sense with soft and tender words.

The psalmist speaks of the one "who forgiveth all thine iniquities." Here the word rendered forgive means, according to Young, "to send away, let go." The divine forgiveness, then, is the sending away or obliteration of the error, the wiping out of the illusion of material sense, together with the realization that the image, or idea, of Mind could never cease to express good or get out of the radiation of Love and Life. In "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 292) Mrs. Eddy says, "Divine Love eventually causes mortals ... to forgive and forget whatever is unlike the risen, immortal Love; and to shut out all opposite sense." Is not this the very essence of true forgiveness?

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