Article January 15, 1916 Issue

Forgiveness

SOPHIE R. WEINERT

The successful effort to overcome anger or resentment for wrongs experienced, though an important and necessary step toward the solution of a problem, is not all there is to forgiveness. On page 497 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy sounds the key-note of the whole matter when she says, "We acknowledge God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal." The terms of this forgiveness, so plainly stated in the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors;" leave no loophole for misunderstanding or mistaking the way. We can forgive our debtors only as God forgives, that is, by "the destruction of sin." Science is very definite in its statement that "evil is nothing, no thing, mind, nor power;" that it "has no reality. It is neither person, place, nor thing, but is simply a belief, an illusion of material sense" (Science and Health, pp. 330, 71). Then where can sin be destroyed save in a supposititious mortal consciousness, in the believer's belief of sin?

We are all familiar with the expression, "I can forgive but cannot forget." Could we picture God as forgiving our sins and yet holding in thought the remembrance of them? On this point the Word saith, "I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins." Can we in any sense claim to have forgiven a debt that has not been canceled? Is it not this very forgetting of evil because we remember the allness of good, which constitutes forgiveness?

A recent experience brought this lesson home quite forcibly to the writer. Suffering one day from a peculiar sense of fatigue and depression for which she could not account, a search in memory for its incipience brought to remembrance a conversation from which a deep sense of injury had arisen. As the probe sunk deeper in the process of analysis, of a sudden the error lay uncovered, and she was enabled to see clearly that the cause of her suffering was not the act of another, as she had imagined, but her own magnified impression of it. Who was the real sinner? Had she not believed in the reality of error, trusted sense-testimony, and identified evil with a brother man? As the light of Truth illumined this occurrence, all sense of fatigue and depression vanished and the incident was put out of mind. The following day, when business relations again brought the person to her, she was surprised and delighted by the cordial greeting of her fellow worker, and it was thus proved to her that "God's forgiveness of sin" had been made manifest "in the destruction of sin."

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