To return to Luke 12:10: is the refusal of forgiveness contained in it a condemnation to irrecoverable impenitence? Strange righteousness would be the decree that because a man has done wrong, he shall forever remain wrong!

There are two sins, both of spiritual condition, which cannot be forgiven; that is, which cannot be excused, passed by, made little of by the tenderness even of God, inasmuch as they will allow no forgiveness to come into the soul, they will permit no good influence to go on working alongside of them; they shut God out altogether...

When a man’s evil is fading out of him, and he is growing better and better, that is the forgiveness coming into him more and more...

God is forgiving us every day, sending from between him and us our sins and their fogs and darkness...

Let us consider human forgiveness as between a father and a son. For although God is so much more to us, yet fatherhood is the last height of the human stair whence our understanding can see him afar off...

One man will say, “I forgive, but I cannot forget. Let the fellow never come in my sight again!” This is a sending away of the penalties which the wronged believes he can claim from the wrong-doer. But there is no sending away of the wrong itself from between them...

Our Lord had no design of constructing a system of truth in intellectual forms. The truth of the moment in its relation to him, The Truth, was what he spoke. He spoke out of a region of realities which he knew could only be suggested, not represented, in the forms of intellect and speech. His words invade our darkness with vivid flashes of life and truth...

To mistake the meaning of the Son of man may well fill a man with sadness. But to care so little for him as to receive as his what the noblest part of our nature rejects as low and poor, or selfish and wrong, that surely is more like the sin against the Holy Ghost that can never be forgiven, for it is a sin against the truth itself...

Better to refuse even the truth for a time, than, by accepting into our intellectual creed that which our heart cannot receive, not seeing its real form, to introduce hesitation into our prayers and a misery into our love.