BISHOP MAGEE ON FORGIVENESS.

A SERMON on Forgiveness, preached by the Bishop of

Peterborough before the University of Oxford on October 24th last, and published last January, not by himself, but by a Baptist mission in India which had got hold of the sermon, under the strong impression that it might help to remove rationalistic objections to the doctrine of the Atonement, has ;just rebounded to this country. Like most of Dr. Magee's efforts, it has stuff in it (which, by the way, means just the opposite to saying that it is stuff,—we suppose because the first form of expression does not deny that there is intellectual form as well as stuff, while the latter is intended to do so and it is clear that stuff without form is never of a nature to produce any moral impression at all). The object of the sermon is to show that forgiveness, in any deep and searching sense of the word, is not the simple matter that easy-going benevolence conceives it to be,—that it involves so great an inversion of the whole structure, not merely of the individual nature, but of the social system under which we live, that it may well be the main purpose of so stupendous a divine action as the •in- veznation of God in humanity, so to flush, as it were, all the myriad natural channels of human resentment and vengeance against wrong, as to transform them into agencies of love and mercy. So far, says the Bishop of Peterborough, from for- giveness, true forgiveness, being the simplest thing in the world, it is the nearest thing imaginable to self-contradiction to suppose that, human nature being what it is, and human society being what it is, forgiveness can be realised at all. The text of the sermon is, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors," and the pith of the argument is contained in the following passage :—

" Now, it is quite true that the creditor may remit the penalty to you, and you hold it to ho the very noblest charity if he does. What then ? Is all the penalty remitted P Have you escaped all the pun- ishment of your act ? Ile has forgiven you, but have you, far that reason, forgiven yourself P Nay, is it not often the case that the very fullness and freeness of his forgiveness is a heaping of coals of fire upon your head, and that they are 'kindled and fanned into a flame by the very breath of his compassion ? You know it is so, and in all the bettor and finer natures it is over most keenly so. Already, then, we have discovered this, that between equals there is no abso- lute and entire remission of sin possible. Behind the figure of the creditor,—even of the forgiving creditor,—there already begins to rise up, and to project itself upon our path, the shadow of law,—of law which, because it is law, is pitiless, unforgiving, unchangeable, inevitable.. Even in this simplest and most rudimentary case of for- giveness, there is no absolute remission. Let us pass one step further, to the case of social forgiveness. Suppose you and I are spectators of some cruel martyrdom, and wo hear the martyr, with his dying breath, breathing out his forgiveness and his blessing upon his mur- derers ; would any of you fool disposed to take up that legacy of for- giveness, and to repeat the blessing you had just heard the martyr pronounce P Would you not, rather, feel your heart stirred by the deepest and most righteous indignation, calling for the very passion of justice upon his tormentors I' Aud would you not resolve and vow that you would not know rest and peace until you had avenged him of hie cruel wrong P Why is it that we could not forgive a wrong upon another? Just for this reason,, that it is his wrong, and net ours. We are not merely spectators of the crime ; we are, by the fact of our being there, and of our being members of a society to which he and we belong, judges of the crime; and we have 110 right to remit the penalty. And there is another reason. The instinct of self-preservation is strong in our hearts, as it is strong in the heart of society. A society founded upon mere benevolence and upon a universal forgiveness of offences could not hold together for a day. You see that we have advanced a step. We have still the creditor to bo paid, and we have still the law, and the person or persons who are to enforce the law. But observe to what small dimensions the per- sonal element in this equation has shrunk. You see how great already looms the idea of law. You see that the debtor and creditor are already becoming both together debtors to the great, inexorable, universal law that binds the creditor to punish, and binds the debtor to suffer. In this aspect, you see that human forgiveness is not such an easy thing. The criminal has little to fear from the anger of his judge who is enforcing the law ; but for that very reason, ho has nothing to hope from his compassion. It is law that we are coming more and more in contact with, and less and less with personality."

And then the Bishop goes on to point out that even if the penalty on a social defaulter has been paid, society can never really forgive him in the sense of replacing him in his former position, giving him back his hopes, his prospects, his inherit- ance, or the inheritance of those with whom he has been con- nected and who have suffered through his disgrace. Still less, argues the Bishop, can we imagine God, who has not been and cannot be personally injured by any finite being's wrong-doing, and who is the absolute creator and inward sustainer of the fine and infinitely spreading network of social retribution, to forgive freely in the manner that seems to be thought so easy. For this involves undoing everything that the natural system of society has been specially built up to do, a reversal of the very set and current of all that is most valuable in the organic processes of the social world ; and yet what is desired and craved by the heart, is that he who created that system and planted.

the seeds and watered the roots of those organic pro-

cesses, shall reverse all that he has done. Is not this, asks the Bishop, to require what is in the strictest sense super- natural, and even more than supernatural, since it is in some sense the superseding of Nature, the bringing out from Nature the very opposite result from that which it appears de- signed and carefully constructed to produce P If this can be done at all, is it not a result worthy of so stupendous a miracle as the life and death of God incarnate in man, to

effect it ?

Now, we should heartily agree with the Bishop of Peter- borough's drift, if he did not seem to us to confuse, to a certain extent, the remission of penalty with the forgiveness of sins,—two totally different, though very closely connected things. No doubt, it is very easy for men to feel after the following manner :—" So far as this injury which I have suffered is simply an obliteration of the happiness of my own life, I would ignore it ; but it is not, and could not be, merely that. It involves disloyalty to human society, encouragement to all who break the divine laws of that society ; it is the seed of anarchy, and must bear a harvest of new wrong ; it is a duty not to forgive it,—at all events without evidence of such a complete change of heart and life as could alone fix any limit to the mischief." And no doubt, in such a state of feeling

as that, the confusion between the duty of exacting penalty, and unforgivingness of feeling is so subtle and profound, that the point where the one passes into the other is quite indiscernible. But for all that, the two things are, really and morally, perfectly distinct. Forgiveness is certainly possible without a remission of the penalty, for in some sense no purely natural penalties, no penalties except those imposed at the discretion of free beings, are over remitted by the system of Providence, so that all personal forgiveness by God, is forgiveness in spite of the rigid .exaction of all those penalties entailed by the natural con- sequences of wrong. And what genuine forgiveness means, as distinguished from the actual remission of penalties, is, we take it, this,—that be who genuinely forgives is eager for the moment when any remissible penalty may be safely remitted, instead of slow and loth to recognise that that moment has arrived. When, then, the Bishop implies—if he does imply, as we understand him in the following passage—that there is a positive difficulty in conceiving of a forgiving God, we can- not follow him. God, he writes, "Is the Author of that very constitution of things, of those inexorable and unalterable laws, -under which we have seen that forgiveness is scarcely conceiv- able. Are we to suppose, then, that he will deflect those laws, and turn them aside, at our bidding P Are we to suppose that those mills of God, which, as the ancients said, grind so slowly and grind so very small that nothing escapes them, at the last will be stilled by our prayer P Where is there any room, amidst -this moral constitution of the universe, ruled by a moral ruler,— where is there any room for the forgiveness of sin P Where can you find the idea of the easily forgiving God which at first seemed so natural P Do you not see that all this magniloquent end windy talk about a merciful and compassionate God, so facile in his forgiveness, is the poor conception of modern Theism—the poorest and lowest conception you can form of God P—that it does not rise above the low thought of the savage, which pictures him merely as the angry and offended man P Rise but one degree above that,—riso in your thought to the conception of him as tho Judge of the earth and the Author and Controller of the moral universe, and all this talk about easy, good-natured forgiveness, vanishes as the cloud- wreath vanishes at the rising of the sun." Surely it is not only conceivable, but necessary to conceive, that while God has created all this great system which entails so much sufferingnpon those who transgress the moral laws of society, he is, nevertheless, quite full of that desire to bring about and recognise any change of a kind to jnstify a limit to this suffering, which unforgiving men do not feel, and which they justify themselves for not feeling under the pretext of indignant justice. It does not seem to us to be at all true that it takes any miracle to convince those of us who understand the word " God" at all, that he is in this sense full of forgiveness,—namely, that whatever the rigidity of his laws and the irrevocability of his sentences, he is always intent to foster in us the spirit which redeems us from the operation of the severest of those laws, and saves us from incurring the most terrible of those sentences, and that ho watches for the moment when the accumulation of further penalties may safely stop, more tenderly than any father watches for the moment when

he may safely stay the suffering of his child. It seems to us to need no miracle at all to convince us that whatever may be the difficulty in releasing sinful beings from the proper penalties of

their sins, God, as God, seeks to breathe into us the spirit which arrests iu us the disposition to incur those penalties, promotes in us the yearning for a mode of life which avoids them, and instead of holding us fast in the iron fetters of evil habits, constantly endeavours to dissolve those evil habits in the glow of a higher inspiration. It is not difficult to distinguish widely between the spirit of for- giveness and the actual remission of ponalties,—which the Bishop has too much mixed up together. The clear test of the former is, the wish to hasten the moment when all penalties may be safely remitted; and this desire we always do ascribe, as the

prophets always did ascribe it, to God. Of the latter, of course we are no judges, except in the smallest possible way, in mat- ters chiefly concerning injuries to ourselves ; but any man who

finds himself dwelling with anything like satisfaction on the duty he owes to society not to remit penalty, instead of dwell- ing on it with keen pain, may be sure that he is wholly -destitute of the divine spirit of forgiveness.

Where we differ, then, from the Bishop of Peterborough—if, indeed, we do differ from him—or, at all events, differ from the meaning which his language suggests to us, is only in this,—

that we cannot see the least pretence for the frequent assertion of a certain school of theologians that there is anything requi- site to be done or suffered by God, before God could forgive sin to those who are penitent, in the only sense we attach to the word. "forgiveness,"—a sense not in the least involving the remission of a certain class of natural penalties. The Atonement cannot be in any sense a condition sine quct non of divine forgiveness for the truly penitent. Whatever it be, it can only be something essential for producing in men the frame of mind requisite for God's forgiveness, not something requisite for producing in God the willingness,—nay, if we may so speak, the divine passion,—to forgive, so soon as that state of mind is produced. That is the falsehood against which, as we understand it, those who dislike and dread many of the Evangelical statements of the signi- ficance of the Atonement, so earnestly protest.

For the rest, we go heartily with Dr. Magee in thinking that there is an infinitely greater difficulty in producing in men, on. the one hand, that state of genuine penitence which alone deserves forgiveness, and, on the other, the human power to forgive, than the Rationalistic philosophy supposes. Nothing short of the conviction that there is what we have called a passion to forgive in God, will overcome the deadness and despair of those who realise fully that they can never undo the evil that they have done, iu the sense of wiping out its far-reaching moral consequences. And nothing short of such a conviction will overcome that freezing and stony anger against evil with which the heart of the self-righteous "elder son" of the parable, was overflowing. If to overcome these two hardly surmountable barriers to genuine penitence and genuine forgiveness, be the object of the Incarnation, if it be to demonstrate, as nothing else could. demonstrate, the passion of God for the reclamation of the sinner, then we understand the meaning of the Bishop ; but wo have, and can have, no sym- pathy with the theology which would. make it appear that even before God can yearn to see true penitence, to see the true opportunity for divine forgiveness, some great transaction or other must take place within his own nature, in order to enable him to feel, that which we could not believe him to be God. if ho had not felt from the first moment of the existence of moral evil in the Universe.