ideal? “Speaking the truth in love” is the acknowledged law of Christian intercourse; speaking lies in hatred were often a more appropriate text for certain large sections of British practice. We ought to pass judgment against our brother on our knees, fearful to offend; we do it rather, not seldom with pride and insolence and impertinence, mounted on the triumphal car of our own conceit, riding rough-shod over the real or imagined faults of our brother. So far does the ideal of Christian love, in the preaching of the {227} Christian apostle, transcend its reality in the lives of men who, if not Christians, at least breathe a Christian atmosphere, and ought to have received some benefit from the inhalation! FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES is one of the special fruits of Christian charity, which has never been denied its due meed of acknowledgment, though not unaccompanied sometimes with the sarcastic observation that the pious zeal of Christian men has generally been more apt to flame into hatred than their love to blossom into forgiveness. No man has yet been able to say of Christians generally, as one may often have remarked justly of Quaker ladies, that they have too much milk in their blood; nor do British and French and German wars seem to have abated very much in intensity for the want of a Christian text saying--_Thou shalt love thy friends and hate thine enemies!_ Perhaps, also, some scholar may be able to string together from the pages of rare old Plutarch a longer chain of pretty specimens of lofty forgiveness of enemies than can readily be picked from modern Christian biographies. In the life of Pericles, by that mellow old Bœotian, I remember to have read that on one occasion this great statesman had to endure for a whole day in the agora a succession of impertinent and irritating attacks from one of those waspish little creatures who love to infest the presence of goodness; and he endured it with such untroubled composure that, without taking the slightest notice of his assailant, he executed quietly some incidental matters of business, whose urgency demanded immediate attention. In the evening the orator returned to his house, still pursued by the gibes and scurrilities of his spiteful {228} little adversary. But the great man remained unmoved; and as he entered his own gate, quietly said to the janitor--_Take a lamp and show that gentleman back to his home!_ A similar but more serious instance of large-minded forgiveness of enemies is recorded by the same author in his life of Dion, the noble Syracusan who about the middle of the fourth century before Christ made a brilliant dash upon Sicily, similar to that which in the middle of the last century Prince Charles Edward Stuart made upon Great Britain, with this difference, that while the one succeeded gloriously in his well-calculated enterprise, the other with his mock-sublime rashness ludicrously failed. This Dion, after having planted himself