This little warning was all he then gave, hoping by practical illustration to draw him by and by nearer to the Divine Master whose commands he was endeavoring to obey.
“And you—you make no account of anything? You forgive all those three years—the harm to the girl? How can you?” and the man lifted his earnest, wondering eyes to the grand face at his side.
“Yes, Tom, I can forgive it all,” Earle said; but his face grew pale and a trifle pained at the remembrance of all that those words called up; “and I shall feel that the experience was not in vain if you do not disappoint my expectations. If you will faithfully and honestly strive to overcome whatever there is of evil within you, or whatever may tempt you in the future, I shall feel that your character reclaimed is the ‘good’ that has come out of my ‘sorrow.’ Tom, will you strive to make an honest man, God’s noblest work, of yourself? I want your promise.”
“Sir, from the bottom of my heart I’d like to be an honest man, but—I’m afraid I can’t stand it,” he said, huskily.
“Can’t stand what, Tom?” Earle asked, with a look of perplexity and anxiety.
Were the temptations and habits of the old life so strong that he could not relinquish or overcome them?
“I feel as if a millstone had crushed me; I’m afraid I can’t stand it to face you day after day, with the memory of all I’ve done staring me in the face.”
Earle’s face lighted—this was the best proof he had had of the man’s sincerity.
“Tom, I want to tell you a little story; you will recognize it, perhaps, as you say your mother is a Christian woman. There was once a Man who was crushed beneath the sins of a world. He wore a crown of thorns, and the purple robe of scorn and derision. His tender flesh was pierced, bruised, and mangled by His enemies, and His only cry was, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ There came a time when I realized that my sins helped to do all this, and I felt something, as you say, as if a ‘millstone had crushed me,’ and as if I could never live in His presence with the memory of it ever in my mind. But I read in His word, ‘Thy sins are remembered no more against thee forever; they are blotted out.’ The same word tells me to ‘forgive as I am forgiven.’ Of course we cannot actually forget all that we have suffered, nor who was the immediate cause of it, but we can cherish no evil—we can regard and treat as kindly those who have injured us as if it had never been. That is the way I want to ‘blot out’ all the past between you and me. Do you understand me, Tom?”
“Yes, sir,” Tom Drake said, in scarcely audible tones, but his face was full of feeling and of an earnest purpose.