The Empire of Love | Page 9

William J. Dawson
would have infallibly driven the penitent boy back to the comradeship of harlots, and have refused the penitent harlot the barest chance of reformation. Is not this enough to make the least discerning of us all suspect that Pharisees and elder brothers, for all their immaculate respectability of life, are by no means qualified to pass judgment on these tragedies of life with which they have no acquaintance, and cannot have an understanding sympathy? Does not the entire failure of legal justice with all its apparatus of punishment and repression, to give the sinner a vital impulse to withdraw from his sin, drive us to the conclusion, or at least to the hope, that there must be some better method of dealing with sinners than is sanctioned by conventional justice? There is another method--it is Christ's method. And the thing to be observed is that whereas conventional justice must certainly have failed in either of these crucial instances, the romantic justice of Jesus--if we must so call it--completely succeeded. The woman who was a sinner sinned no more, and the penitent son henceforth lived a new life of purity and obedience. In each case love is justified, and proves itself the highest justice.

LOVE AND FORGIVENESS

LOVE'S PROFIT
What profits all the hate that we have known The bitter words, not all unmerited? Have hearts e'er thriven beneath our angry frown? Have roses grown from thistles we have sown? Or lucid dawns flowered out of sunsets red? Lo, all in vain The violence that added pain to pain, And drove the sinner back to sin again.
We had been wiser had we walked Love's way We had been happier had we tenderer been, We had found sunlight in the cloudiest day Had we but loved the souls that went astray, And sought from shame their many faults to screen Lo, they and we Had thus escaped Life's worst Gethsemane, And found the Garden where the angels be.
For One there was who, angry, drew no sword, Derided, wept for those who wrought Him wrong, And at the last attained this great reward, That those who injured Him acclaimed Him Lord, And wove His story into holiest song. So sinners wrought For Him the Kingdom He had vainly sought, And to His feet the world's frankincense brought.

V
LOVE AND FORGIVENESS
In these instances it is the singular completeness of Christ's forgiveness which is the most startling feature. It would be a libel on human nature to say that men do not forgive each other, but human forgiveness usually has reservations, reticences, conditions. Jesus taught unlimited forgiveness, and what He taught He practiced.
"Then came Peter, and said to Him, 'Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Until seven times?' Jesus said unto him, 'I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.'"
It is a vehement reply, in which a quiet note of scorn vibrates; not scorn of Peter, but scorn of any kind of love that is less than limitless. But whose love is limitless? Do we not commonly speak of love as being outworn by offense or neglect? In the compacts which we make with one another in the name of love, do we not specifically name certain offenses as unpardonable? Thus one man will say, "I can forgive anything but meanness," and another says, "no friendship can survive perfidy"; and in the relations between men and women unfaithfulness is held to cancel all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem. Now and again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different music. Shakespeare, for example, in his famous one hundred and sixteenth sonnet, boldly states that
Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.
But who listens, who believes? Yet, if it should happen to us to be placed in the position of the offender, we need no one to convince us that a true love should be, in its very nature, unalterable. How astonished and dismayed are we, when eyes that have so many times met ours in tenderness harden at our presence, and lips which have uttered so many pledges of affection, speak harshly! We do not deny our fault, indeed; but we think we can discern reasons why it should be regarded mercifully, why the very memory and sacredness of old affection should make harsh judgment impossible; nay, more, why a deeply generous love should even rejoice in the opportunity to forgive, and so should sanctify our very shame with the healing touch of pity, and pour our tears into the sacramental cup which ratifies a new fidelity.
It is so the sinner argues, his vision of what love ought to be growing clearer by his offense against love. It is he alone, the sinner,
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