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Updated: August 22, 2024
Indeed, no word of compliment could be compared to this expression of praise and commendation, whereby, thanks be to God, you both have distinguished yourselves as the devoted servants of His divine Threshold and as the sincere, the self-sacrificing bond-slaves serving at the door of His mercifulness.
It is hard enough to bear 'the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, without one spot of red in the cheek, one perturbation or flush of anger in the heart; and to do that might task us all to the utmost. But that is not all that Christ's ethics require of us. It is not sufficient to exercise the passive virtue of meekness; there must be the active one of mercifulness.
But you say: 'Have you not just been telling us that this sense and experience of God's mercy must precede my mercy, and now you say that my mercy must precede God's? No; I do not say that it must precede it; I do say that my mercifulness is, as it were, lodged between the segments of a golden circle, and has on one side the experience of the divine mercy which quickens mine by thankfulness and imitation; on the other side, the larger experience of the divine mercy which follows upon my walking after the example of my Lord.
And I afterward to be likewise in wisdom, when that I was come the more to strength, and to mind that I suffer vainly for that which did have no surety, as I have shown; and moreover I did have no power upon the past, either to learn aught or to mend aught; so that I did go the way of an Human, and did shake free from these broodings, and strove unto forgetfulness; which, in truth, doth be both a Terror and a Mercifulness, as doth chance.
The obvious contrast is too much for their pride; mercifulness of disposition does not mitigate its pungency. An abatement in the rigour of the law unfortunately flatters their prejudices, and loosens the tie by which their passions are feebly bound under a sense of duty and fear. The consequences are shocking and unavoidable.
"North Americans! May the Lord grant you a peaceful and long life and prosperity to your land, and may your fields be filled with abundant harvest Christ is risen. Your mercifulness gives us a helping hand. Through your charity you have satisfied the starving.
Thus they surpassed their neighbors in mercifulness as well as valor. All the Algonquin tribes stood, in this respect, much on the same plane.
But, however that may be, we may note that common-sense and practical sagacity should guide our mercifulness. Kindly impulses are good, but they need cool heads to direct them, or they do more harm than good. It is useless to set lame men to work an estate, even if they get a gift of it. And it is wise not to put untried ones in positions where they may plot against their benefactor.
God prays, the Talmud says; and his prayer is this, 'Be it my will that my mercy overpower my justice. And so with men, with or without their will, their mercifulness overpowers their logic. And not their mercifulness only, but all their good impulses overpower their logic.
But it is not that natural, instinctive sentiment which is partially unreliable, and has little power apart from the reinforcement of higher thoughts to carry itself consistently through life that our Lord is here speaking about; but it is a mercifulness which is more than an instinct, more than a sentiment, more than the natural answer of the human heart to the sight of compassion and distress, which is, in fact, the product of all that has preceded it in this linked chain of characteristics and their blessings.
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