p. 318 | Forgiving the Particular Enemy: A Christlike Duty

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, May 13, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 20

Forgiving the Particular Enemy: A Christlike Duty

—It is one thing to forgive our enemies as a general class, but it is a very different thing to forgive a particular enemy. No such spiritual strength is needed to make us say that we forgive all “Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics,” as is demanded for our genuine forgiveness of the John Doe who poisoned our dog, or the Richard Roe who told lying stories about us behind our backs. Yet it is the individual who has injured us, whom, after Christ’s example, we are bidden to forgive. The historian Prescott knew and kindly treated, during years and years of suffering, the person whose careless toss of a bread-crust, in the college dining-room, made him virtually blind for the rest of his life. And that godly English-woman known as Sister Dora, who is now winning posthumous honor from all who read the story of her noble life, was privileged to be able to devote the tenderest care in her hospital ward, to a rascal who had stoned her in the open streets of Walsall, and who, when he confessed his fault in penitence and tears, was told by the gentle spirit that she had known his face from the moment he threw the stone that cruelly cut her forehead. Not all of us are called upon to forgive those who have destroyed our eyes, or stoned us in the streets; but do we not know some one who has wronged us? and have we willingly and fully forgiven him?—S. S. Times.