appear almost insignificant. To take a
man who is sinking in the moral slough and has no courage left to
rise out of it; to give him back his lost self-esteem, that jewel
without which health and wealth are of little avail; to put him in a
position once more to look his fellow-men straight in the eye; to
place him morally on the sun-lit levels; to put him morally on his
feet--this assuredly is the supreme benefit, and the man who
accomplishes this for another is the supreme benefactor. And a
note of exquisite moral beauty is added if the benefactor be the
same person whom the guilty man had injured. This is what is
meant by forgiveness. This is why forgiveness is so divine a thing.
This is the reason why, when an act of genuine forgiveness occurs,
"the music of the spheres" seems to become audible in our nether
world. And this is also the reason why we often see such a strange
kind of tie springing up between a person who has been chastised
and the one who has chastised him in the right spirit and then
forgiven him--a tie into which there enters shame for the wrong
done, gratitude for the unmerited good received, and a reverence
akin to idolatry toward the one upon whose faith in him the sinner
rebuilt his faith in himself.

There should be some organ of the State to exercise this office of
forgiveness toward criminals, this pardoning power in the finer
sense of the term. The prison warden, if he be a man of the right
stamp, sometimes exercises it. The Society for the Befriending of
Released Prisoners has here an appropriate function open to it;
also the employer who after due inquiry has the courage to dismiss
suspicion and to give work to the released prisoner.

The methods and principles which I have described in the case of
the criminal are used for illustration, not that I am interested today
in discussing the special problem of the criminal, but because
principles can best be exemplified in extreme cases. The same
methods, the same maxims should control punishment in general;
our dealings, for instance, with the misdeeds of which our own
children are guilty. Here, too, there should be by no means
unvarying gentleness and pleading, but when need arises the sharp
check, that evil may be instantaneously stopped. Here, too, there
should be the temporary disgrace, the clear presentation of the
magnitude of the fault, if it have magnitude, the humiliation that
calls forth penitence and good resolutions. Here, too, th