With his emphasis on tenderness we may group his teaching on forgiveness. He makes the forgiving spirit an antecedent of prayer--"when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses" (Mark 11:25). "If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift" (Matt. 5:23, 24). The parable of the king and his debtor (Matt. 18:23), painfully true to human nature, brings out the whole matter of our forgiveness of one another into the light; we are shown it from God's outlook. The teaching as ever is Theocentric. To Peter, Jesus says that a man should be prepared to forgive his brother to seventy times seven--if anybody can keep count so far (Matt. 18:21-35). He sees how quarrels injure life, and alienate a man from God. Hence comes the famous saying: "Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matt. 5:39). He would have men even avoid criticism of one another (Matt. 7:1-5). Epigrams are seductive, and there is a fascination in the dissection of character; but there is always a danger that a clever characterization, a witty label, may conclude the matter, that a possible friendship may be lost through the very ingenuity with which the man has been labelled, who might have been a friend. It is not a small matter in Jesus' eyes, he puts his view very strongly (Matt. 5:22); and, as we must always remember, he bases himself on fact. We may lose a great deal more than we think by letting our labels stand between us and his words, by our habit of calling them paradoxes and letting them go at that.