Full forgiveness is an ideal of the true Christian. Like a bright thread, forgiveness runs through the record of those Old Testament characters who prefigured the coming of Christianity and advanced the true idea of worship. One notes the forgiving spirit in Abram's dealings with selfish Lot. This kindliness found further expression two generations later when Jacob and Esau settled their differences in a spirit of forgiveness. Jacob could say to his brother (Gen. 33:10), "I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God, and thou wast pleased with me."

And Esau graciously accepted a gift from Jacob.

Few Scriptural incidents are more moving than those of Joseph forgiving his brethren, caring for their needs in time of famine, and providing security for them. Instead of retaliating for their crime of selling him into slavery, he said to his brothers (Gen. 45:5), "Be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life."

Moses suffered much and forgave much as he faithfully established a truer sense of worship through obedience to God's law. David was another who learned to express something of the spirit of forgiveness. These instances show the place that forgiveness has played in the unfolding of the true sense of God and man to the world.

Christ Jesus taught and lived full forgiveness. Not seven times but seventy times seven—a metaphor denoting completeness—was the Master's instruction on the subject (see Matt. 18:22). And he followed this statement with a parable which showed the unfruitfulness of the unforgiving mind: the servant who would not forgive his debtors could not obtain forgiveness of his own debts but was tormented until he had paid all. The Master was here explaining a sequence which indicates inexorable law. Again and again, Jesus pressed home the Christian demand for full forgiveness.

Christian Science works out Jesus' instructions concerning forgiveness on the scientific basis that because God is All and His creation is perfect, both offender and offense are unreal. God's man, His image, is sinless and incapable of offending or of being offended. To perceive spiritual man where an offender seems to be is to purify one's own consciousness and to be nearer the demonstration of one's true selfhood, which sees only spiritual concepts.

Scientific forgiveness is a state of understanding which is established in thought even before an offense is committed. Such a state refuses to accept a concept at variance with Truth, or God, and finds refuge from injustices and persecutions in the vastness of Truth. In this state there can be no response to evil. Mary Baker Eddy could forgive her enemies fully because she understood the truth of being so perfectly that she could not accept a lie about man. She says in her Message to The Mother Church for 1902 (p. 19), "I say it with joy,—no person can commit an offense against me that I cannot forgive."

The necessary part of forgiveness, as Christian Science teaches it, is that one must win his own pardon. One must wipe out his belief in a mortal self and stop justifying the entertainment of physical senses, which seem to be his own but which constitute the lies of evil. One must approach God with "clean hands, and a pure heart" (Ps. 24:4), with a mind free from misjudgments and latent, materialistic beliefs about man. Then he will know the true meaning of forgiveness and be able to see his fellow men as God makes them.

Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 542), "The belief of life in matter sins at every step." The whole world needs our scientific forgiveness as long as a vestige of the belief of life in matter remains. For the world is sunk in the sins of materialism exactly to the extent that the physical sense of being, or the belief of life in matter, dominates human thought. But an understanding of the real world and of the universal perfection of man brings the light of Truth to the whole mass of human thought and helps mankind throw off the burden of the physical senses.

In Science we learn that the willful acceptance of the lies of material sense is sin and and that a sinner is the concept of this false sense. For this reason, the Scientist's task is to realize patiently and persistently that in reality there is no sinner because there is no sinful sense. Mrs. Eddy makes this plain in "Retrospection and Introspection," where she says (p. 64): "Sin ultimates in sinner, and in this sense they are one. You cannot separate sin from the sinner, nor the sinner from his sin. The sin is the sinner, and vice versa, for such is the unity of evil; and together both sinner and sin will be destroyed by the supremacy of good."

The fullness of Christian forgiveness, then, entails a love of Truth that is pure enough to realize the nothingness of the false sense of life and wide enough to embrace the whole world. Such forgiveness rises above small-minded, personal quibbling over insignificant offenses and does its work on the grand scale which envisions the ultimate purpose of Christianity—to unveil the kingdom of heaven, where all identities are controlled by divine Love and where God's perfect will is done.

Helen Wood Bauman