pressed in those
words of William Blake which imply the difficulty which love
finds in overcoming the murderous exactions of the possessive
instinct and the cruel clairvoyance of malice. "And throughout all
eternity, I forgive you: you forgive me: As our dear Redeemer
said--This is the wine: this is the bread."

This "forgiveness" of love does not imply that love, as the old
saying runs, is "blind." Love sees deeper than malice; for malice
can only recognize its own likeness in everything it approaches. It
must be remembered too that this process of laying bare the faults
of others is not a pure process of discovery. Like all other forms of
apprehension it is also a reproduction of itself. The situation, in
fact, is never a static one. These "faults" which malice, in its
reproductive "discoveries" lays bare, are not fixed, immobile,
dead. They are organic and psychic conditions of a living soul.
They are themselves in a perpetual state of change, of growth, of
increase, of withering, of fading. They are affected at every
moment by the will and by the emotion of the subject of them.
They project themselves; they withdraw themselves. They dilate;
they diminish. Thus it happens that at the very touch of this
"discovering," the malice which is thus "discovered" dilates with
immediate reciprocity to meet its "discoverer"; and this can
occur--such is the curious telepathic vibration between living
things--without any articulate act of consciousness.

The art of psychological investigation is therefore a very
dangerous organ of research in the hands of the malicious; for it
goes like a reproductive scavenger through the field of human
consciousness increasing the evil which it is its purpose to collect.
The apostolic definition of "charity" as the thing which "thinketh
no evil" is hereby completely justified; and the profound Goethean
maxim, that the way to enlarge the capacities of human beings is
to "assume" that such capacities are larger than they really are, is
justified also.

Malice naturally assumes that the "faults" of people are "static,"
immobile, and unchanging. It assumes this even in the very act of
increasing these faults. For the I static and unchanging is precisely
what malice desires and seeks to find; for death is its ideal; and,
short of pure nothingness, death is the most static thing we know.

Love is not blind or fooled or deluded when it waives aside the
faults of a person and plunges into the unk