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FORGIVENESS

I said in a previous Chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues But I aht I believe there is one even more unpopular It is laid down in the Christian rule, &039;Thou shaft love thy neighbour as thyself&039; Because in Christian hbour&039; includes &039;thy eneiving our eneiveness is a lovely idea, until they have so the war And then, to er It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible &039;That sort of talk makes them sick,&039; they say And half of you already want to askthe Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?&039;

So do I I wonder very much Just as when Christianity tells ion even to save myself from death by torture, I wonder very much what I should do when it ca to tell you in this book what I could do - I can do precious little - I a you what Christianity is I did not invent it And there, right in the ive those that sin against use&039; There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terive we shall not be forgiven There are no tays about it What are we to do?

It is going to be hard enough, anyway, but I think there are two things we can do to in with the calculus; you begin with simple addition In the sa) to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with soiving one&039;s husband or wife, or parents or children, or the nearest NCO, for so they have done or said in the last week That will probably keep us busy for the ht try to understand exactly what loving your neighbour as yourself means I have to love him as I love myself Well, how exactly do I love ot a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy hbour&039; does not mean &039;feel fond of hiht to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself In fact it is the other way round:theoodout that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are Go a step further In hted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I as I have done with horror and loathing So apparently I as my enemies do Now that I co o that I must hate a bad man&039;s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner

For a long ti distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred tothis all ht dislikehtest difficulty about it In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of s Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atoht to hate them Not one word of e have said about them needs to be unsaid But it does want us to hate the sorry that the , if it is anyway possible, that soain

The real test is this Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper Then suppose that soht not be quite true, or not quite so bad ass it was , `Thank God, even they aren&039;t quite so bad as that,&039; or is it a feeling of disappoint to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, willto wish that black was a little blacker If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything - God and our friends and ourselves included - as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred

Now a step further Does loving your ene ht not to subject myself to punishht Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged It is, therefore, in e to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an eneht so, ever since I beca before the war, and I&039; still think so now that we are at peace It is no good quoting &039;Thou shaft not kill&039; There are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder And when Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke And I a is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery When soldiers ca what to do, he never reht to leave the areant-ht - the Christian in arreat Christian ideas War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken, What I cannot understand is this sort of seives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashanificent young Christians in the Services of so which is the natural accoaiety and whole-heartedness

I have often thought to myself hoould have been if, when I served in the first world war, I and so German had killed each other siether a ine that either of us would have felt any resenthed over it

I iine somebody will say, `Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy&039;s acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?&039; All the difference in the world Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature WeWe may punish if necessary, but weinside us, the feeling of resentet one&039;s own back, must be simply killed I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it any s happen I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves - to wish that he were not bead, to hope that he ood That is what is ood, not feeling fond of hi he is nice when he is not

I ad loveable about the loveable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself God tends us to love all selves in the saiven us the sum ready worked out in our own case to show us hoorks We have en to go on and apply the rule to all the other selves Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco