ath aught against thee"--note
exactly Christ's words; He did not say, "If thou rememberest that thou
hast aught against thy brother"; alas, it is very easy for most of us to
do that; what He said was, "If thou rememberest that thy brother hath
aught against thee." Whom did I overreach in business yesterday? Whose
good name did I drag through the mire? What heart did I stab with my
cruel words? "If thou rememberest that thy brother hath aught against
thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be
reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift."

(2) If the difficulties are great when we have committed the wrong, they
are hardly less when we have suffered it. Thomas Fuller tells how once
he saw a mother threatening to beat her little child for not rightly
pronouncing the petition in the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our
trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us." The child
tried its best, but could get no nearer than "tepasses," and
"trepasses." "Alas!" says Fuller, it is a shibboleth to a child's tongue
wherein there is a confluence of hard consonants together; and then he
continues, "What the child could not pronounce the parents do not
practise. O how lispingly and imperfectly do we perform the close of
this petition: As we forgive them that trespass against us." In the old
Greek and Roman world, we have been told, people not only did not
forgive their enemies, but did not wish to do so, nor think better of
themselves for having done so. That man considered himself fortunate
who, on his deathbed, could say, on reviewing his past life, that no one
had done more good to his friends or more mischief to his enemies. And
though we profess and call ourselves Christians, how strong in many of
us still is the old heathen desire to be "even with" one who has wronged
us, and to make him smart for it. Many of us, as Dr. Dale says,[44] have
given a new turn to an old text. In our own private Revised Version of
the New Testament we read: "Whosoever speaketh a word or committeth a
wrong against God, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh a
word or committeth a wrong against me, it shall not be forgiven him;
certainly not in this world, even if it is forgiven in the world to
come." Resentment against moral evil every good man must feel; but when
with the clear, bright flame of a holy wrath there mingle the dark fumes
of personal vindictiveness, we do wrong, we sin against God.