It sounded much like cruel sarcasm when He told that weak, vacillating Simon that he was a rock. Those who knew Peter best must have smiled; he was more like a jellyfish. But Jesus could see the best that was in a man. He detected the hidden good even in Peter. He proves His own goodness by His faith in the good in every man.
Somewhere in every man there is some good. Overlaid it may be by passion, by habits, by prejudice grown out of wrong and suffering perchance; but still it is there. Faith in this and sympathy, these are the golden keys that unlock the doors to where the good lies buried.
The saviours of society have always been those who looked for the best in it. If you go through life seeking the beast in man, you will find it, and the chances are it will devour you; if you look for the beauty that is from above you will find it, and it will bless you. It is just as necessary to have faith in man as it is to have faith in God. If men cannot become good, then there is no God in the sense of a power that makes for goodness. The optimist not only believes in the best, he creates the better.
Some there are who reluctantly admit that God is a little better than they are, though that may be due to His circumstances, but they have never imagined for an instant that any one else is at all good. Believe that men are wholly bad and they will not disappoint you. Every man somehow responds to the expectations of others. You had better damn a man than despair of him. Neither a church nor an individual can help this world when they have more confidence in the power of evil to become all pervasive than in the power of the Most High to make His purposes felt in every heart as truly as He makes His sun to shine on the just and the unjust. The church first consigns men to perdition and then wonders why they are reluctant to walk with it the other way. So long as you have faith in total depravity you will find some facts to substantiate it.
But there is a better way. Sympathy with men will do more for them than sermons on their sins. Look for the best in them and you will find things better than you expected. There are flower beds as well as garbage heaps in every heart; at least, there are spots where seeds of the fairest flowers of heaven may be sown.
You do not have to be a fool to have faith in your fellows. You do not need to take the padlocks off your house; but you do need to take them off your heart. There may be those whom it would be wrong to trust with your cash box; but it is a greater wrong to withhold from them your kindness. You can show them that you believe the best instead of the worst of them.
The great Teacher told men that He came not to condemn but to give life. His followers have too often occupied themselves wholly with condemnation and then wondered that their sentences saved none. Every soul knows its own sentence; what it needs to feel is that God and all good men are with it, helping it to shake off that sentence, to arise and return to the Father, that, instead of all things conspiring to keep a man down, there is a cloud of witnesses cheering him on, a mighty choir invisible inspiring his heart. And there is nothing any man can do of greater worth to the world than to cheer on another by his faith in him, his high expectation of him, his wise blindness to some little faults, and his propagating approval of the least beginnings of any good. Men are the saviours of men by their faith in men.
THE LAW OF FORGIVENESS
A silly interpretation often leads to the utter rejection of a law. Sentimentalists have caused men of sense to pronounce Christ's law of forgiveness an impractical one. Yet we indorse it every time we utter the Lord's prayer, and still we hope to be forgiven whether we find it possible to forgive or not. If this law means the mental flabbiness that sends bouquets to bloody criminals and petitions the pardon of murderers and the release of the foes of humanity, we must reject it as the utterance of one unacquainted with the rugged facts of life.
But forgiveness and pardon are two different things; forgiveness is between man and man; pardon is a matter of executive power. You can forgive a child and still punish him. The forgiveness that does away with consequences would make this an immoral world. No greater wrong can be done to a man than to protect him from the deserts of his evil deeds. This is as unjust as to withhold the rewards of the right.