tself conscience in Herod, and in the hearts of
the priests who denounced their God, and of the soldiers who executed
their overlord, and of Judas who betrayed his friend, in all these there
was surely a certain uneasiness--such an uneasiness is actually recorded
of the first and the last of the list--a certain faint shadow of
perception and knowledge of what it was that they had done and were
doing. And, for the natural man, it would have been comparatively easy
to forgive such injuries on that account. "I forgive them," such a man
might have said from his cross, "because there is just a glimmer of
knowledge left; there is just one spark in their hearts that still does
me justice, and for the sake of that I can try, at least, to put away my
resentment and ask God to forgive them."

But Jesus Christ cries, "Forgive them because they do _not_ know what
they do! Forgive them because they need it so terribly, since they do
not even know that they need it! Forgive in them that which is
unforgivable!"

III. Two obvious points present themselves in conclusion.

(1) First, it is _Divine_ Forgiveness that we need, since no sinner of
us all knows the full malice of sin. One man is a slave, let us say, to
a sin of the flesh, and seeks to reassure himself by the reflection that
he injures no one but himself; ignorant as he is of the outrage to God
the Holy Ghost Whose temple he is ruining. Or a woman repeats again
every piece of slanderous gossip that comes her way and comforts herself
in moments of compunction by reflecting that she "means no harm";
ignorant as she is of the discouragement of souls of which she is the
cause and of the seeds of distrust and enmity sown among friends. In
fact it is incredible that any sinner ever _knows what it is that he
does_ by sin. We need, therefore, the Divine Forgiveness and not the
human, the pardon that descends when we are unaware that we must have it
or die; the love of the Father Who, _while we are yet a great way off,
runs to meet_ us, and Who teaches us for the first time, by the warmth
of His welcome, the icy distances to which we had wandered. If we
_knew_, anyone could forgive us. It is because we do not that only God,
Who knows all things, can forgive us effectively.

(2) And it is this _Divine_ Forgiveness that we ourselves have to extend
to those that sin against us, since only those who so forgive can be
forgiven. We must not wait until wounded pride is made whole by the
co