tice? We might at
least remember that what we call practicable justice has never yet
attained the gracious results of Christ's romantic justice. Simon the
Pharisee knows no more how to deal with "this woman" than the elder
brother knew how to deal with the prodigal. Such sense of justice as
they possessed would have infallibly driven the penitent boy back to
the comradeship of harlots, and have refused the penitent harlot the
barest chance of reformation. Is not this enough to make the least
discerning of us all suspect that Pharisees and elder brothers, for all
their immaculate respectability of life, are by no means qualified to
pass judgment on these tragedies of life with which they have no
acquaintance, and cannot have an understanding sympathy? Does not the
entire failure of legal justice with all its apparatus of punishment
and repression, to give the sinner a vital impulse to withdraw from his
sin, drive us to the conclusion, or at least to the hope, that there
must be some better method of dealing with sinners than is sanctioned
by conventional justice? There is another method--it is Christ's
method. And the thing to be observed is that whereas conventional
justice must certainly have failed in either of these crucial
instances, the romantic justice of Jesus--if we must so call
it--completely succeeded. The woman who was a sinner sinned no more,
and the penitent son henceforth lived a new life of purity and
obedience. In each case love is justified, and proves itself the
highest justice.

LOVE AND FORGIVENESS

_LOVE'S PROFIT_

_What profits all the hate that we have known
The bitter words, not all unmerited?
Have hearts e'er thriven beneath our angry frown?
Have roses grown from thistles we have sown?
Or lucid dawns flowered out of sunsets red?
Lo, all in vain
The violence that added pain to pain,
And drove the sinner back to sin again._

_We had been wiser had we walked Love's way
We had been happier had we tenderer been,
We had found sunlight in the cloudiest day
Had we but loved the souls that went astray,
And sought from shame their many faults to screen
Lo, they and we
Had thus escaped Life's worst Gethsemane,
And found the Garden where the angels be._

_For One there was who, angry, drew no sword,
Derided, wept for those who wrought Him wrong,
And at the last attained this great reward,
That those who injured H