Both faith and forgiveness are factors in regeneration: the one to assist in accomplishing the change, the other to assist in making it permanent. But both the faith and the forgiveness are exceptionally difficult in the case of our personal enemies. _Enemies in the spiritual sense there are and can be none._ Every human being, even one who has done me the most cruel harm, is yet, from another point of view, a fellow member of the spiritual society. But to discriminate between the two relations in which the man stands to me—that in which he is my foe, and the other in which he is my fellow—to be able to put aside as less important the harm he has done, the suffering he has forced me to endure, and to desire with perfect sincerity that the recoil, the transformation, may take place in him, that is the most searching test of one’s own ethical character.[60] The forgiveness of personal foes, when complete, establishes a strangely tender spiritual fellowship between the pardoner and the pardoned. Both have transcended their normal empirical selves, both have become partners in a sublime transaction: the one delivered from the clinging of his baser desires, the other released from his first crude reaction against evil. They will never forget what they thus owe to one another. They will continue to walk hand in hand, the one still leaning, the other supporting and himself unspeakably strengthened by the support he gives. Finally, to forgive is not to forget—quite the contrary. To forgive is to remember the past action, but to remember it as belonging to the past, as the act of one who has since undergone the great change. The miracle of the change of water into wine at the feast of Cana would not have seemed so wonderful to the guests had they not remembered that what was turned into wine had before been water. To forgive is to remember that what was water has become wine. And he, too, who has been forgiven may not forget. The remembrance of the past he will need as a warning and a safeguard.[61] Not to see the essentially divine nature in others, and thus also in one’s self is the essence of the wrong. To teach the guilty to see it is the object of punishment. To forgive is to declare that what before was ignored is now seen and known. FOOTNOTES: [58] I mean that it is usually considered sufficient, for purposes of reformation, to bring the wrongdoer up to the average standard of law-abiding citizenship, to restore him to the bosom of society as a safe and industrious member. Whereas a person who has had the searching experience of deep guilt is a candidate for a higher station in the moral scale. Humanity having fallen in him, he should be helped to rise to a higher than the average altitude. This at least should be the aim. Consider the fact that Jesus selected some of his most spiritual companions from among publicans and harlots.