Impossibilities

(George MacDonald - found here)

“No man who will not forgive his neighbor, can believe that God is willing, yea wanting, to forgive him. . . . If God said, ‘I forgive you’ to a man who hated his brother, and if (as impossible) that voice of forgiveness should reach the man, what would it mean to him? How much would the man interpret it? Would it not mean to him ‘You may go on hating. I do not mind it. You have had great provocation and are justified in your hate’? No doubt God takes what wrong there is, and what provocation there is, into the account: but the more provocation, the more excuse that can be urged for the hate, the more reason, if possible, that the hater should be delivered from the hell of his hate. . . . The man would think, not that God loved the sinner, but that he forgave the sin, which God never does [i.e., What is usually called ‘forgiving the sin’ means forgiving the sinner and destroying the sin]. Every sin meets with its due fate—inexorable expulsion from the paradise of God’s Humanity. He loves the sinner so much that He cannot forgive him in any other way than by banishing from his bosom the demon that possesses him.”

~George MacDonald