One of the loveliest, most precious unfoldings of God's love towards us is that He has pardoned all our sins, has forgiven us all our transgressions, and having blotted them all out, will remember them no more forever. "Be imitators of God as dear children," and ever keep in view the divine precept teaching the forgiving of offences- "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: and be kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake has forgiven you." Instead of sitting down and brooding over an injustice and a wronged, wounded sensibility, or slighted affection, until the imagination has augmented the injury from a molehill into a mountain, the little rivulet that one step of love might have crossed into an impassable gulf, see if there has been any real cause of offence, any intended injury; and if there dwells in the offender the spirit of Christ, and in you, the offended one, the love of God, both will be prepared, on a mutual understanding, the one to confess the fault and the other as ready to forgive it. Oh, let the dying prayer of Jesus ever linger in our ear amid the assaults of enemies and the woundings of friends- "Father, FORGIVE them!"
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