15 APRIL 1916, Page 14

MAURICE AND FORGIVENESS.

[TO THE EDITOR OP THE " SPEOTATOR.1

Sra,—There are those who demand reprisals against the Germans. We are to become baby-killers, I suppose. That is one extreme. There are those who bid us forgive the Germans their horrid crimes. That is the other extreme. Both are equally un-Christian. In connexion with the latter sentiment, certain words of Maurice, written in 1857, might be studied with profit. "To make the forgiveness of God—and we are to forgive as He forgives, and only as He forgives—into tolerance of evil, is to pervert its nature fatally. The forgiveness which does not hate crime and seek for the extinction of it, which shrinks from the punishment of the crime, is devilish forgiveness, not Divine."—I am,