Rosina Bulwer Lytton

“ What then is to be done, since oblivion is the only seed from which forgiveness can spring, but one thing: pray to God, to give us that forgetfulness which will enable us, not merely in words, but in truth and in spirit, to forgive those who have chronically and irreparably injured us? And oh! what a blessed anchor is it, in life's most worst amongst us, to remember that even that great omnipotent God of Mercy was once also A Man of Sorrow! ”

“ While then forgiveness of injuries depends so entirely upon the oblivion of them, there are some injuries so chronic, concrete, and ubiquitous, that they are incorporated with not only every source but with every channel of our existence, and therefore we must forget it, before we can forgive them. ”

“ But so indispensable is this Lethean process to forgiveness that with the ungratefully treacherous or the criminally weak who yield to or connive at the misdeed of others, against their own better natures, we often find,—that it is part of the inscrutable subtlety of God's chemistry of retribution that they cannot forget, and consequently cannot forgive themselves. ”