iving. 'Forgiving
one another, even as also God in Christ hath forgiven you. Be ye
therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.'

Our continuous possession and conscious enjoyment of God's forgiveness
will be contingent on our forgivingness. He who took his fellow-servant
by the throat and half choked him in his determination to exact the last
farthing of his debt was, by the act, cancelling his own discharge and
piling up a mountain of debt, against himself. Our consciousness of
forgiveness will be most clear and satisfying when we are forgiving
those who trespass against us. We shall pardon most spontaneously and
fully when our hearts are warm with the beams of God's pardon.

'LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION'

'And lead us not into temptation.'--MATT. vi. 13.

The petition of the previous clause has to do with the past, this with
the future; the one is the confession of sin, the other the supplication
which comes from the consciousness of weakness. The best man needs both.
Forgiveness does not break the bonds of evil by which we are held. But
forgiveness increases our consciousness of weakness, and in the new
desire which comes from it to walk in holiness, we are first rightly
aware of the strength and frequency of inducements to sin. A man may by
mere natural conscience know something of what temptation is, but only
he understands its strength who resists it.

The sense of forgiveness and the new desires and love thereby developed,
lead to the falling of the mask from the deceitful forms that gleam
around us. He who is forgiven has his eyesight purged, and can see that
these are not what they seem, but demons that lure us to our
destruction. It is true that the sign of the Cross compels the foul
thing to appear in its own true form. 'Then started up in his own shape
the fiend.' The love which comes from forgiveness and the new sympathies
which it engenders are the Ithuriel's spear. What a wonderful change
passes upon the siren tempters when we believe that Christ has pardoned
us, and have learned to love Him! Then the fishtail is seen below the
sunlit waters.

Forgiveness is one of the chief means of teaching us our sin. The
removal of all dread of personal consequences, which it effects, leaves
us free to contemplate with calmed hearts the moral character of our
actions. The revelation of God's love which is made in forgiveness
quickens our consciences as well as purges them, and our standard of
purity