“How did you make yourself do it? How?”
He would have evaded if he could. “I only know the old way,” he said humbly, for the Bishop was shy in speaking of some things, as one is shy in speaking about any friend in his presence.
“Tell me how!”
“I only know one way,” he repeated simply. “We all get at the truth from different angles, so there may be many ways to learn to forgive, but I can only tell you about the way that I have tried.” The Bishop was so old that often, as now, his eyes showed the reflection of the harbor-lights in view. As always in his sermons, he had now lost, in his very consciousness of their needs, the presence of his audience in the overwhelming Presence of which he forced himself to speak, “The way I have found is to try always to see through His eyes. I think He is always very near us, trying always to lift us to the level of His eyes, so that we can look forth from that point of view. I think He is always trying and trying to say things to us to excuse—the people who have hurt us. If only we could clear our ears to hear Him! If only we could stand at the level of His outlook into souls! Then we should see so much that’s pitiable and excusable, so many handicaps and mistakes, so much to make us sorry for them that we couldn’t help forgiving. He always saw enough in every soul to make Him patient, and if we don’t see enough to make us patient, too, we have to trust His vision and insight, and forgive because He does.
“Yet it is hardest,” the Bishop’s face showed a passing shadow, as he looked inward upon past struggles and forward to that next interview of his Christmas Day, “to forgive those who hurt Him, His work. Yet he forgave even that, upon His cross. When we remember that, I do not know how I—how we—dare not to forgive.” He paused, while his fingers on the black knobs tightened, then the shadow of his face was struck away by the quick sunshine of reassurance. He looked toward Mrs. Graham, “You see,” he said, “it seems to me that if God in all His eternity has no time to be stern, then perhaps we—who have such a little while! have no time for anything but loving. Don’t you,” he pleaded, “don’t you think so, too?”
The ruddiness had paled from her cheeks. She was looking at him with wide, intense eyes.
“That’s your way, Bishop. But it’s what I couldn’t—ever climb up to,—I guess.” She had to fight to speak, against her choking breath, “I’m one of those you’ll have to forgive, I’m afraid, for not doing what you want. I wish I could, on your account. But it don’t seem as if I could make up with Florence. But I can’t bear that you should look like that, Bishop,—disappointed! Don’t, please don’t, mind! It’s just that I’m a mother who’s lost her boy, and wants him back and can’t get him, him and his baby!”
“And yet,” he answered, “they are all there, all ready for you, waiting, wanting you, all there! It is, it is, too bad!”
“Florence!” she whispered.
“Needing and wanting you most of all. Seeing, by the way her little one needs her, how much she needs a mother. Perhaps mothering is your way of forgiving. Couldn’t you try it? Florence has never had a chance, has she, to learn many things, if she has been a motherless girl? Perhaps she did hate you once. I don’t believe she hates anyone now. It’s very hard to hate when there’s a baby in the house. She sent the picture. She needs you. She knows she needs you, for she knows now what a child can miss who has no mother. Let us think of all she has missed, and not be too hard on her, you and I, any more.”