“PARDON” and “condemn” are correlative terms and apply primarily to the purely utilitarian field. We start an action to the damage of some individual; then we suspend it and take steps to obviate its consequences: we condemn, and we pardon. In times gone by a criminal was sometimes led to the gallows, and then, with the rope around his neck, he was pardoned, and sent home a free man. It is clear, in such cases, that the death sentence had one purpose in view, the pardon another and different one. The two actions were related but still distinct, each with its separate utilitarian outlook.

But in the moral sphere, the act of censuring and the act of forgiving are not two but one and the same. Every condemnation is a forgiveness in the sense that it is an invitation and an aid to redemption; and every pardon is, in the same way, condemnation (pardon, in fact, has no other meaning). The two things go together and cannot be separated. They are as implicit in each other as negation is implicit in affirmation and vice versa.

The unity of these two phases of the one act people frequently violate in two opposite ways: by condemning without forgiving and by forgiving without condemning. There are some who condemn and abhor even beyond the grave—when, that is, neither censure nor forgiveness is any longer in point but only a dispassionate judgment on the past is called for. And this lays bare their inconsistency. For if, at first, their motive may have been a moral one, they have lost this motive in the time succeeding, clouding it probably with feelings of personal vengeance, descending at any rate from the ethical to the purely utilitarian sphere. Others never condemn—not from goodness of heart (true kindness is concern for another’s best welfare), but to avoid discomfort, to keep out of trouble, to stay friends with everybody. If such may have had a generous impulse at the beginning, they too have eventually lost it to come down to the utilitarian plane. This process of censure and forgiveness, I may say in passing, appears with similar unilateral perversions, quite as much as in relations between different individuals, in the relations of an individual with himself. Some people indeed are over-indulgent toward themselves, and others are merciless self-persecutors. Above them, of course, is the man who condemns himself and then, without losing courage, mends his ways.

The censure that is forgiveness and the forgiveness that is censure are both embraced by the term “expiation,” which implies change of heart, an increasing and a strengthening of the moral fibre. When this has taken place, when we know that the wrong we have done we could never do again, when we think of that wrong as a past wholly detached from us, when we can ask ourselves with honest surprise how we were ever able to do such a thing—then we have truly expiated: we stand redeemed.

The manner and duration of expiation cannot be determined a priori; and this fact is taken into account in certain formulas of religious penance. Some sinners can hardly save themselves with a whole lifetime of rigorous discipline; others are redeemed by a single tear (but how hot a tear, and how cleansing, as it scalds the innermost soul!). Meantime some religious institutions, assuming a juridical attitude parallel with that of the State, determine the manners and the durations of penances—hence the “works” of expiation. All such systems, materialising, externalising the spiritual processes, take the sinner down to the utilitarian plane. Forgiveness becomes a definite concession accorded in exchange for a definite act performed to the advantage of the person wronged or of his representative. Against just this process of materialisation inside the Roman Church (indulgences) the ethical sense of the Reformation rebelled—the first great effort made in modern times to establish a deeper moral consciousness among men.

The wrong done, we commonly say, is cancelled with its expiation; but the phrase means nothing except that the wrong has been expiated. To pretend that the happening which occasioned the expiation has been actually abolished is of course absurd. Not even in the case of a material cancellation—the erasure of a document executed on a piece of paper—can something that has been done be made not done. What has been written has been written. We can render it invisible but not recall the writing of it.

In this case, it might be observed, it is possible to forgive, yes, but not to forget: the wrongs we have done or suffered will forever remain present in our minds.

This, certainly, would be true if by forgetting we were to mean the absolute obliteration of the memory of the wrong, which would imply obliterating the fact itself, removing one of the links from the chain of reality, one of the essential constituents of historical progression. But we can forget in a relative sense. What, after all, do we remember? The things that are worth remembering, things that constitute problems still unsolved! But when a process is complete, we dismiss it from our minds, to a very large extent at least, because we have no active interest in a past that has been closed. We think of the past again only when some one of its problems is reopened in connection with a new problem—when, for an instance in point, an individual falls into an error he has committed before and which he seemed to have expiated.

And who are those who never forget or who always forget? We all know them well: they are vengeful people, on the one hand, and tolerant, spineless or cold-blooded people on the other.

The former say they have forgiven but cannot forget. The fact is that they have never forgiven in full sincerity of heart. The latter say they both forgive and forget. In reality they have nothing to forget, for at no time can they be said to have remembered: they have never condemned wrongdoing but have overlooked it thoughtlessly or frivolously. We often encounter such apparent kindness and generosity; but we always feel suspicious of it. We dislike people who “are not conscious of any offence.” True forgiveness must come from people who do know when they have been wronged.