ld lasts, absolute, irreconcilable, mortal; and the clergyman's
first message to his people of this day is--if he be faithful--"Choose
ye this day whom ye will serve."

Ever faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.

X.

[Greek: kai aphes hemin ta opheilemata hemon, os kai hemeis aphiemen
tois opheiletais hemon.]

_Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus
nostris._

BRANTWOOD, _3rd September._

240. DEAR MR. MALLESON,--I have been very long before trying to
say so much as a word about the sixth clause of the Pater; for whenever
I began thinking of it, I was stopped by the sorrowful sense of the
hopeless task you poor clergymen had, nowadays, in recommending and
teaching people to love their enemies, when their whole energies were
already devoted to swindling their friends.

But, in any days, past or now, the clause is one of such difficulty,
that, to understand it, means almost to know the love of God which
passeth knowledge.

But, at all events, it is surely the pastor's duty to prevent his flock
from _mis_understanding it; and above all things to keep them from
supposing that God's forgiveness is to be had simply for the asking, by
those who "willfully sin after they have received the knowledge of the
truth."

241. There is one very simple lesson also, needed especially by people
in circumstances of happy life, which I have never heard fully enforced
from the pulpit, and which is usually the more lost sight of, because
the fine and inaccurate word "trespasses" is so often used instead of
the single and accurate one "debts." Among people well educated and
happily circumstanced it may easily chance that long periods of their
lives pass without any such conscious sin as could, on any discovery or
memory of it, make them cry out, in truth and in pain,--"I have sinned
against the Lord." But scarcely an hour of their happy days can pass
over them without leaving--were their hearts open--some evidence written
there that they have "left undone the things that they ought to have
done," and giving them bitterer and heavier cause to cry, and cry
again--forever, in the pure words of their Master's prayer, "Dimitte
nobis _debita_ nostra."

In connection with the more accurate translation of "debts" rather than
"trespasses,"[166] it would surely be well to keep constantly in the
mind of complacent and inoffensive congregations that in Christ's own
prophecy of the manner of the last judgm