If now a man of his own discretion dictates penance to another, after which he declares the other's sins to be remitted, he deceives himself and also the man who came to seek his help, whether he is conscious of the fact or not, and unscrupulously sets himself far above Divinity Itself!

If men would at last only think of their God in a more natural way, of the God Whose Volition created living nature! But in their blind and erroneous faith they build up a picture of Him which is a delusion, something which is much less than they imagine it to be. It is just in the Natural Perfection or Perfect Naturalness of God, the Primordial Source of all being and the Starting Point of all that lives, that His Magnitude is so overwhelming and beyond the grasp of the human spirit! Many of the teachings, however, contain so much wilful distortion and confusion as to make it unnecessarily difficult and sometimes quite impossible for man to preserve a pure belief because of the lack of all naturalness! And how many incredible contradictions are contained in some of them!

For instance, one frequently finds as a basic tenet the Omniscience and Perfection of the Will of God and the Word that issues from It! Quite naturally this must carry with it an unchangeableness that cannot be moved by hair's breadth, because Perfection cannot be thought of in any other way!

The actions of many religious ministers, however, indicate doubt in their own teaching, because they stand in direct contradiction to it, and by their deeds they openly disavow its basic tenets. For example, the hearing of confession and the imposition of penance, the sale of indulgences whether for money or for prayer, which is supposed to be followed by the immediate forgiveness of sins, and other similar customs, are, if considered calmly, a denial of the Divine Will resting in the Laws of Creation. He who does no more than merely engage in a desultory consideration of these practices will see in them nothing else but an absolute belittlement of the Perfection of God!

It is quite natural that man's erroneous presumption in considering himself capable of forgiving sins, and similar transgressions against the Perfection of the Divine Will, were bound to lead to gross abuse! How much longer will man continue under the foolish delusion that he is able to drive such an unsavoury bargain with the just God and His unalterable Will!

When Jesus the Son of God once said to His disciples: "Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them...", these words were not meant as a general licence to act arbitrarily.

That would have been equivalent to upsetting the Divine Will as embodied in the immutable power of reciprocal action, which in its active working carries reward and punishment with incorruptible and Divine (and therefore perfect) Justice. It would have meant a permitted interruption of this law!

This Jesus could never have done, neither did He do it, because He had come to "fulfil" the laws, not to overthrow them!

With these words He meant the lawful operations which rest in the Creative Will, whereby one human being can forgive that injury which he has suffered at the hands of another human being! Being the victim he has the right and also the power to forgive! His sincere forgiveness will turn aside and break the power of the karma which would otherwise surely develop for the other through reciprocal action, and in this actual happening lies at the same time real forgiveness!

This forgiveness of the culprit can only come from the person who suffered the offence, not otherwise! It is for this reason that there is so much blessing and deliverance in personal forgiveness when it is honestly meant and intuitively felt.

A person not immediately involved is quite naturally excluded from the threads of reciprocal action and therefore cannot actively and effectively intervene because of this fact. He can only intercede by prayer in such cases, the effect of which, however, depends on the condition of the souls of those immediately concerned. He himself must remain on the outside and therefore cannot bring about forgiveness! This alone rests in God's Will,  which reveals Itself in the laws of just reciprocal actions, against which He Himself would never act, because they were perfect from the beginning according to His Will.

It lies in the justice of God that whatever will happen or has happened can only be forgiven by the injured person, either here on earth or later in the Ethereal World. Otherwise the weight of reciprocal action must hit the offender to such effect that the debt would then be redeemed. Simultaneously this reaction would in some way bring about the forgiveness of the injured person, whose attitude is interwoven in the working of karma. There is no other possibility, as until this happens the connecting threads remain unbroken. This is not only an advantage for the offender, but also for the person offended, because the latter could not wholly enter into the Light without first having granted this forgiveness. His unrelenting attitude would inevitably retain him.