"Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" (Matthew 6:12).

Forgiveness as a duty is an attitude of mind, rather than an act. In this, forgiveness is more than pardon. A pardon, even in a legal sense, requires the action of two parties—the pardoner and the pardoned. A pardon is not complete until it has been accepted. But forgiveness is complete in the mind of the forgiving one, whether it be asked for, or be recognized by the offender, or not. A pardoner remits all penalties consequent upon an offense. Forgiveness does away with all severity or harshness of feeling against the offender. But neither a pardon nor forgiveness in itself settles the estimate which is to be had of the guilty one’s personal characteristics and trustworthiness. Forgiveness makes the wrong against the forgiver as if that wrong as a wrong had been done. But forgiveness does not make the forgiven one such a person in himself as he would have been if he had not committed the offense which is forgiven. And the forgiver’s estimate of the forgiven one’s character will naturally be formed in view of the added knowledge of that character which the offense has furnished.

A man who shows himself thoughtless or forgetful, and thereby injures one who committed a trust to him, may be forgiven for that failure, so that he is held as dear as if he had not failed. But it may be the forgiver’s duty to prefer another person for a similar trust in a new emergency. Although, again, it may be thought that the lesson of this failure is in itself an added guard for the future. For example, if a trusted clerk in a merchant’s counting-room has stolen money from his employer, that employer can so thoroughly forgive the clerk that he will even have a new and more loving interest in the one who has yielded to temptation and is now penitent for it. It may be that he will trust him again in his own service. So far, the forgiven one is restored to favor as though he had never fallen. But the employer could not trustfully recommend that clerk for a responsible position in a banking house, as a person who had never wavered in his honesty of purpose or of action.

When we seek God’s forgiveness, we do not ask Him to look upon us henceforth as those who are strong against temptation, and to believe that we are in no special danger of sinning again; but we do ask Him to forgive us for the sins we have committed, and to look upon us so far as if we had not sinned. Similarly we ought to forgive those who have wronged us, looking upon them in a spirit of forgiveness, and forgetting their trespasses against us. This is what forgiveness is—as a duty. How to attain to the unvarying spirit of forgiveness is another matter. That involves our possession of the Spirit of Christ, and our charitable and sympathetic recognition of the same moral weakness in others which we bemoan in ourselves.

“If there have been difficulties brethren and sisters—if envy, malice, bitterness, evil surmisings, have existed, confess these sins, not in a general way, but go to your brethren and sisters personally. Be definite. If you have committed one wrong and they twenty, confess that one as though you were the chief offender. Take them by the hand, let your heart soften under the influence of the Spirit of God, and say, ‘Will you forgive me? I have not felt right toward you. I want to make right every wrong, that naught may stand registered against me in the books of heaven. I must have a clean record.’ Who, think you, would withstand such a movement as this?”1