persecuting you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in
the heavens. (Matthew 5 : 43 , 44 , 45 )To Peter, who was asking how many times he should forgive someone
who was sinning against him—whether he should give forgiveness as
many as seven times—the Lord answered,
I do not say as many as seven times, but as many as seventy times
seven. (Matthew 18 : 21 , 22 )
I have also heard from heaven that the Lord forgives everyone’s sins
and never takes revenge or even assigns spiritual credit or blame, because
he is love and goodness itself. Yet for all that, our sins are not washed
away. Nothing washes our sins away except repentance. Since the Lord
told Peter to forgive up to seventy times seven instances of sin, at what
point would the Lord stop forgiving us?
Since goodwill resides in the inner self, where benevolence is felt, and 410
then extends into the outer self, where good actions occur, it follows that
people’s inner selves are what we should love; and we should love their
outer selves on the basis of their inner selves. Therefore we are to love
people according to the type of goodness they have inside. It is the good-
ness itself, then, that is actually our neighbor.
The following situations may serve as illustration: When we choose
ourselves a household manager out of three or four candidates, or we
hire a servant, we investigate that person’s inner self. We choose someone
who is honest and faithful and prefer that candidate because of those
qualities.
The same is true for monarchs or government officials. Out of three
or four candidates, they select someone suitable for the job and reject the
unsuitable, no matter whose looks they prefer or what the candidates say
or do to win them over.
[ 2 ] Everyone is our neighbor, and people come in an infinite variety.
Since we need to love them all as our neighbor for the type of goodness
they possess, clearly there are genera and species of loving our neighbor,
as well as higher and lower degrees of that love.
Since the Lord is to be loved above all else, it follows that the degrees
of our love for our neighbors depend on their love for the Lord, that is,
on the amount of the Lord or the amount from the Lord that our neigh-
bors possess in themselves. That is also the amount of goodness they pos-
sess, since all goodness comes from the Lord.
§410 goodwill & good actions 505