The Words of In Jin Moon from 2009
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The Words of In Jin Moon from 2009 |
Good morning, brothers and sisters. How is everyone this morning? I am delighted to see you once again. We just had the Seventh Annual Ambassadors for Peace Awards Ball the other day and were delighted to have such distinguished guests together with us, along with lots of inspired young people. The crowd enjoyed great ballroom dancing, and I heard that quite a few people that I know very well in the audience really boogied down and had a great time. I was delighted to hear that our community can come out together like this in celebration of something wonderful, acknowledging the new chairman of the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), Dr. Hyung Jin Moon. We wish him the best in the years to come, and we know that under his leadership UPF will be taken to a whole new level. I am sure that the Ambassadors for Peace will continue to grow.
My father has never stopped dreaming about world peace ever since Jesus Christ appeared to him when he was a 16-year-old boy and asked him to fulfill Jesus’ mission. Even though he’s well past 90 years of age, not a day goes by, not a minute goes by when my father doesn’t think about what the word peace means to him. In the last years of his life, what he really wants to see is the reunification of the two Koreas. My family, including all my brothers and sisters, is working very hard to see that dream realized, and I know that all of you have been working so hard throughout the years. As a member of the True Family, I would like to thank you for all your efforts and all your sacrifice.
As I was thinking about what I would like to talk about this morning, coming from this wonderful ball where the theme of Generation Peace and the word peace was very much with us throughout the event, I considered the great men and women of history who have decorated and inspired our lives. I would have to start with my parents. When I think about their lives and about what makes them such a great man and woman, there’s one theme that runs through their lives, as well as throughout the lives of all the great people I have met. Everybody who becomes a great person and truly expresses his or her luminous divine light unto the world has a common theme. They, like my father and mother, have a spark of imagination. Webster’s dictionary defines imagination as the power or the act of creating mental images that have yet to exist or are yet to be experienced.
The various religious heritages encourage people to meditate and to visualize. For a lot of us who’ve gone through the flu season or some chronic illness, homeopathic-type doctors have encouraged us to do mental exercises, visualizing our body getting better. I’ve thought about this when I was in the hospital recuperating from an illness or when I was being fed chicken soup during a long bout with the flu. I tried my best to create mental images of wholeness, of a healthy body and wanting to be strong again.
Sometimes I would do little case studies on myself. When I got sick, I would try different methods, but I would always come back to creating mental images in my mind, visualizing where I wanted to be. In my four decades of life and self-discovery, I’ve learned that this process of imagination has an incredible efficacy rate in healing oneself from ailments.
I’ve also noticed that this ability to imagine is usually the spark or the inspiration that causes you to want to be something greater than you are. When I look at my father’s life and when I study his writings and speeches, I see a man who is so inspired because he can imagine the peaceful world that has yet to exist. He can imagine a world where all races, religions, and people of different cultural heritages come together and live together as one family under God, under the same Heavenly Parent.
My father can imagine a world where goodness is not something to strive for because you want some kind of reward or because you don’t want to be a bad person and thus avoid punishment. He can imagine a world where people are good people, “just because”: just because they know they are eternal sons and daughters of God. He imagines a world where there are no suicide bombers. He imagines a world where children are no longer killed as they go to school, wanting only to better their education and their lives. He can imagine a world where the two Koreas are no longer divided. My father can imagine a world where there is no more killing and no more hatred.
He sees, and in seeing he experiences a world that he knows can be a peaceful world, one that we can experience in our lifetime. From the moment my father was inspired by Jesus Christ, he had a dream, and he started to imagine, putting into mental images things that are yet to exist -- like his dream of finding an eternal bride, a woman who was not only beautiful on the outside but beautiful on the inside, who could be his eternal partner and stand together with him as the True Parents of humankind. My father dreamt that dream. He imagined what is yet to exist, but in imagining and in visualizing he could make that dream -- those mental images -- into reality.
My mother often told me that her mother married her father because a wise old woman in her village said, “If you two come together in matrimony and have a child, you will have the messiah. A messiah will be born in your lineage.” That is why my mother’s father and mother came to be together. Because my mother was born in the context of a patriarchal society, where the value of the son was more important than the value of a daughter, when my mother was born, her father was deeply disappointed. He had been promised a messiah and therefore was expecting a son. But God sent him a daughter. My mother grew up never knowing her father because he left my grandmother.
The same wise old woman headed a group of prayer ladies who ran a church that existed because its members believed that the messiah would come in their lifetimes, and it would be their duty to clothe and feed him, to support his ministry. Their whole purpose was to await the messiah and to be there for him as the main foundation for his ministry.
This lady came upon my mother when my grandmother took her to this church. There was something very precious and special about my mother. When this senior lady saw my mother, she felt compelled to pray. She had never done this before over a young girl she’d never met, but she felt overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit and felt that there was something unique and special in this child. I think she felt or imagined that this was an extraordinary woman in the making. In fact, I’m sure she experienced mental images of what my mother was going to be. So she offered a prayer, blessed her, and anointed her in the Christian tradition as a woman of God, someone who was born to do great things.
Even though my mother was very young and didn’t really understand the full significance of this prayer when she received it at eight years old, she kept this feeling, this dream that she was supposed to be a servant of God. In fact, she imagined her life to be that of someone like Mother Teresa, someone who would live her whole life for Jesus Christ and for the Lord, maybe not even marrying. This is how serious my mother was about her dream, her mental images of what she wanted to be. She kept this dream alive within her.
Of course, God works in mysterious ways. Her mother joined the Unification movement, and my father soon came to know her. My grandmother told me a story about the first time she brought my mother to the church. “Your father was talking to a group of brothers and sisters, but I think he felt something in the air. He looked up and saw this young girl. Then he prayed, murmuring, ‘Thank you, Heavenly Father, for sending such a lovely representative as your daughter.’”
My grandmother loved to tell me this story when I was growing up, that my father recognized something special in my mother. Of course, she grew up and became my father’s partner in marriage, and together they started their ministry as the True Parents of humankind in 1960. Since then they have worked tirelessly to bring peace.
My father and mother often told their children, “How do we create a world of peace? There are many ways to create peace. If we think about the family as the school of love, probably the most effective way to bring about peace is international marriage, with people from different backgrounds coming together in holy matrimony as eternal partners because they are committed to our Heavenly Parent, they are committed to humanity as brothers and sisters, and they accept that we belong to the same family under God.”
Over the years my father has blessed thousands of couples from opposite backgrounds -- from enemy countries of Japan and Korea, for instance. Because I grew up in the beauty of our international community, I never realized how deep is the hatred between Japanese and Koreans until I went to college and then started having kids. My mother was kind enough to find me a nanny to help take care of the kids while I was finishing my education.
When I encountered my Korean friends on campus and they realized that my children were being cared for by a Japanese nanny, their mouths dropped open. This was in the mid-1980s. I had no idea how deep the hatred was between Koreans and Japanese. These friends were from the educated elite of Korea. They came to study abroad at the best American university; they were the future movers and shakers of Korea. They said to me, “How can you allow your child to be raised by Japanese hands?” I said, “What are you talking about?” They said to me, “Japanese people used us as slaves for 40 years when they occupied our country. They stole and raped our women. They took our women and put them in brothels for the enjoyment of Japanese soldiers as they went about conquering different countries. How can you allow a Japanese person to raise your Korean child?” I said to my classmates, “First of all, I was raised not to see myself as a Korean. I was raised to be proud of my Korean heritage, but I was raised to be proud that I am the eternal daughter of God, that I am more than a single nation. I am not raising my child to be just a Korean boy; I am raising him to be a great son of this world, a great son of our community.”
I said, “We cannot hold our ancestors forever in all the things that have gone wrong. We are a new generation. We have to think about forgiving, and we have to think about how we are going to inspire our children to imagine a world of peace without being bogged down by a cultural heritage where deep-seated hatred between different countries exists. If we really want our children to be raised as one family under God, as people belonging to a worldwide community, as people who see the different nationalities as their brothers and sisters, we must concentrate on the fact that we all come from God. And despite what has gone on in the past, we must make the world a better place for our kids.”
I continued, “I am honored that Japanese hands can raise my kids. If Koreans hate Japanese and Japanese hate Koreans as much as they do, I am honored that that Japanese lady is willing to love my child, and not as a Korean. She is willing to love my child because she knows that my child is also a child of God, a son of God.”
I remember telling one particular friend, “If we cannot imagine a peaceful world, if we cannot believe in our own dreams of what our world can be, then we are just going to be mere receptacles from one generation to another, basically inheriting and not digesting the baggage of what came before. Maybe the baggage was old and tattered and full of hate, jealousy, and murderous thoughts, but we know who our Heavenly Parent is. Because we know who we are as eternal sons and daughters, we can be the agents of change that take this baggage of difficulty and transform it into blossoms of true love that can inspire, that can empower, that can encourage the new generation to want to live as if we belong to one family.” When I had that conversation with my classmate -- which turned into an ongoing conversation and we became lifelong friends -- I realized back then that the ability to imagine is really the spark that gets the engine going.
But then we need to do a little more. My mother always emphasized to her children, “To dream is the first step. The rest is up to you.” The great churches of Christianity have singled out three words that I love -- conceive, believe, and achieve. My mother has always emphasized the importance of dreaming, envisioning a concept in your mind of what you want to do with your life. But then she encouraged us children to not only imagine, but through a lifetime of experience to turn our dreams into real images, real experiences. She said that the gulf between concept and belief is bridged by faith: “You must have faith in yourself. First your faith in God, but the next important thing is to have faith in yourself.”
She frequently told me that we can be our own worst enemy; we can be the one always making ourselves fail. But if we believe in God, then we must believe in ourselves because we are his children. We are divine, just like he is. If we believe that we are divine, then we realize we have infinite value, having qualities and characteristics like God’s, those of being eternal, unique, absolute, and unchanging. If we believe in that, then we can, with our sheer effort, dedication, and tenacity, achieve what we’ve long imagined. We can accomplish what we have dreamed.
Martin Luther King had a dream, too. He imagined a world where a white man and a black woman could walk down the street and not be stoned. I’m sure he imagined a world where one day black men and women would sit on the Supreme Court and be senators and congressmen, and maybe one day a black man would sit in the White House. Martin Luther King had this dream; he imagined this reality. He could see in his mind the images, that what he imagined could be accomplished. So he turned the impossibility into a possibility because he believed and because he had faith.
One of the greatest things that I know about my father and mother is that they are eternal dreamers, an incredible man and woman of imagination. They think out of the box. How many men from my father’s generation of Koreans would put their wife out front? It simply does not happen. My father is 90 years old, so take yourselves four generations back to the old provincial villages of Korea. No one from that generation would ever support a woman, let alone his wife, to be a worldwide leader. Nobody from his generation would encourage his daughters to go beyond being great wives. He encouraged us to get the best education, to be the best that we can be. In fact, both my parents challenged the daughters in the family to beat our brothers in everything they did -- in academics, in sports. It was relentless. But they pushed us because they believed that women had a role to fulfill in society, as well as in their families.
Think about a man who has the ability to imagine, to revolutionize the health industry of America. My father introduced ginseng to the American people in the 1970s. He introduced the importance of having more fish, more raw fish. Ninety percent of the best sushi that is served in America is provided by the True World Foods group. He thought outside the box. He thought about making Americans healthier when at that time the vogue was Burger King and McDonald’s.
At a time when nobody thought that water would be sold as a product, my mother championed the importance of having enough water in our diets. She gave an interview in the late 1970s to a prestigious women’s magazine in Korea. When the interviewer asked her, “How is it you are past middle age but you look so young?” my mother gave two answers. “The best way to keep your youth is to smile,” which she does so beautifully, “and to drink a lot of water.”
I remember back then when the interview first appeared, a lot of women were puzzled. We don’t really drink water in Korea; we drink barley tea or other teas. But here was this beautiful, elegant woman, a very youthful-looking woman, championing the importance of drinking water. When my father created a pharmaceutical company that produced ginseng extract and tea, it was on the advice of my mother, who said that one day water would be a very precious product, that we started bottling the spring water that we own in Korea, which continues to this day.
Again, she was a person who thought out of the box. Great men and women always do. They are ahead of everybody. When you grow up with parents like that, you realize it may not be a good idea to follow trends. In fact, when the trends are being followed, it’s already too late. You need to come up with original ideas.
When I became responsible for the American movement, there was a trend in a certain direction. But because my father and mother have trained me well, I want to imagine something different; I want to dream something a little different. Because my parents have taught me well, I want to think outside the box. When we first started Lovin’ Life Ministries, many people said it could not be done, not in Midtown Manhattan. “What are you thinking?” Nobody’s praying at the services.”
When we first started Lovin’ Life Ministries, I received many supportive e-mails, but the not-so-happy people who wanted to continue a certain trend that our movement was following said, “Where are the prayers? We need at least three prayers.” I said, “I believe that our life is a prayer, and I believe prayer can come in many forms. It can come in unison prayer, where we’re all crying together, shouting out, holding up our hands. But I also think listening to a beautiful song is a prayer. So we have three prayers. There are always more than three songs before the sermon.”
Then others told me, “When we come to church, we need to suffer. We need to feel the pain, to know how horrible we are, to feel guilty sometimes to get ourselves in shape and do better.” My take on it, having raised five kids, is that when you have that philosophy in your family and tell your kids that our job as eternal sons and daughters is to suffer, feel the pain, burn every day, and be serious and miserable, your children, if they are like my children, are not going to be inspired to imagine and dream.
I feel that the best way to inspire ourselves to want to do good is to realize how beautiful each and every one of us is. We are so beautiful because each and every one of us is a masterpiece of our Heavenly Parent. We need to celebrate this masterpiece, and we need to appreciate ourselves for being such a great gift to the world. All of you, all of us, have a wonderful ability to change the world. We are the masterpieces that God has created for each other.
One of my favorite poets is William Blake, of the Romantic Age, who was also a fabulous illustrator. Some of the artists who have come to appreciate his illustrations are calling him one of the greatest artists of England. He created collections of poetry that he called Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. One poem in particular I like to reread from time to time is the most famous and the most enigmatic poem in the collection Songs of Experience, which was published in 1794. Its title is “The Tyger.” When I feel the pressure and burdens of the world on me, I like to read this poem because it reminds me of the importance of imagination. It reminds me that we are all divine beings and that we have within our power this incredible creativity. In fact, it’s this wonderful creativity that allows us to be God-like, that allows us to be immortal.
It starts out, “Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night.” Why does an English poet, who knows the word tiger very well, spell tiger not with an I but with a Y? He goes on to talk about how the tiger is fearful, something that incites awe and wonder. He cajoles the reader into thinking about who made this tiger. In fact, the question is repeated throughout the six stanzas. Blake is provoking us, toying with us by continually asking.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright, In the
forests of the night.
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame
thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt
the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the
hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what
art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart
began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In
what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare
its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their
spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his
work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the
forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy
fearful symmetry?
Looking at the first stanza, you see that the first syllable is ty, and that the last syllable of the word symmetry is seemingly try. But if you look at the word right above it, you realize that the last word of the third line of the first stanza is eye. But because there’s the word eye, it pushes you to read symmetry as symmetr-eye.
The first syllable is ty, and the last syllable of the first stanza is try. So already you get the feeling that the tiger might not be an actual animal. In fact, Blake is giving us hints all throughout this poem that it might be a metaphor for something else. If he wanted it to be a tiger, he really should have spelled it with an I. The letter I is missing, but the pronounced I is very prominent. There is something about I, meaning me, in the syllable ty and in the syllable try that is repeated again and again.
Mythologically the fire or furnace has been linked to creativity. The fire burning bright -- when I read that I thought, if it were some kind of catharsis or purgation that is taking place, then the poet would have alluded to a termination as an end result, but there is no allusion to that. In fact, “burning bright,” such a present and active verb, is very powerful. It starts in the first stanza. In the sixth stanza it’s a fearful symmetry in that the sixth stanza mirrors exactly what the first stanza says, except one word. In the first stanza you have “Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forest of the night. What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry.”
Then in the sixth stanza you have the exact same thing, except that could changes to dare. “What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” So you realize that something that is a could, something that can be imagined, a supposition, has become something that is actually there, that is actually done, that it may be actually completed.
A lot of scholars who have dissected this poem have said that it’s about good and evil. Some have ventured to say it’s a poem that elucidates the Old Testament prophets and their understanding of what the fire meant, namely the burning wrath of God. The tyger becomes God’s judgment unto the world of experience. Some have alluded to the idea that it might be totally scientific. They understand the poem to explain the astronomical explanations or questions of the universe.
But when I read the poem and see the fearful symmetry that exists in the beauty of how he constructed these six stanzas, I realize that when Blake is asking us who created the tyger, the answer he is seeking from us is that it’s Blake himself who created the tyger. The tyger is not an animal but something that was formed through the furnace of his creativity, something that came out of the forest of the night. It’s the burning bright, it’s the imagination, the spark of creativity that is burning bright that tied his imagination to his hands and his eyes. With his effort and his trying he created a masterpiece that not only shows how incredible God, our Heavenly Parent, is but also points to the fact that every man and woman is an artist who, just like God, has the power to create something beautiful.
Many scholars have looked at the third and fourth stanzas of this poem and suggested that the poet juxtaposes a lot of drama in the context of each stanza because he’s playing around with caesura, which is a pause like a rest within a line. In Stanza Three, “And what shoulder, & what art,” he breaks that line very abruptly, but in the next line he tones it down a little bit by saying, “Could twist the sinews of thy heart?” In the third and fourth lines he reverses that.
What you get when you look at the third stanza is a pattern like A, A, B, B. And in the fourth stanza we have C, C, D, D. But the rhyme is constantly changing. The third stanza, for example, is a trochaic spondee, but then the second one is iambic. The third line is iambic, but then it’s back to trochaic spondee. He plays with different rhymes and meters to create a tension of something being formed out of nothing. In the third stanza, you get the image of an artist as a sculptor with powerful shoulders, using physical exertion to create something beautiful. Then in Stanza Four comes the image of an artist as a blacksmith, where the art is chained to an anvil, being molded and shaped, just the way a blacksmith takes a hot rod of iron and bends and molds it to whatever he would like it to be. Under the white heat of creativity, something beautiful and awesome is being created.
In the fifth stanza Blake brings in an almost-cosmic drama of the stars spewing spheres and the heavens being drenched in glory. What he wants us to realize is that whenever we take part in creative imagination, we are engaging in something of cosmic proportion.
When I addressed the Ambassadors for Peace and encouraged them that our job is to inspire the young people, the children of the world, to aspire to greatness, it’s because I believe very strongly that there is no future without great kids. If we can ignite our ability to imagine and inspire young people to see themselves as something other than a “show me the money” generation who live for more than the pursuit of money, power, and their own glory, then we can truly be a phenomenal movement. We can almost guarantee a future when responsible young men and women, inspired by their own dreams and imagination of what they can be, come together as a family wanting more than anything to build a wonderful world of peace. In that way, I believe, my father’s dream can be realized.
William Blake provoked and cajoled us, asking in the fifth stanza, “Did he smile, his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Most academics know that the poem “The Tyger” is a sister poem of a poem called “The Lamb” in the collection Songs of Innocence. But we can also understand “the lamb” in a theological context. If the creator of the poem is asking, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” we can understand that to mean that he could be God. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Did he who created Jesus Christ make you, “The Tyger,” the poem, or you, the reader?
But if that is what William Blake was asking, then he would have capitalized the letter h in he. But he distinctly makes a point of not capitalizing the letter h, while he does capitalize the l in Lamb. The way I understand it, “The Lamb” is the title of the poem that William Blake wrote in the Songs of Innocence. When he is cajoling and provoking the reader by writing “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” he’s giving the reader a hint: “Look, it’s me, the artist. By tapping into my divinity, I am becoming immortal, just like God.”
Again, when the first syllable starts out with ty again, there’s the letter I implicit in the first syllable. And also, at the end, the last word is symmetry. Implicit in the syllable try is the letter I. These are the hints that Blake gives us, saying, “It’s me, the artist, who has created the tyger, and the tyger is a metaphorical thing. It is not the scary creature, but the awesome and the wondrous poem that will allow me to be immortal, just like God, because I have tapped into this creativity that comes only from God.”
Just as William Blake through this poem reminds us of our own divinity, I want to encourage the congregation to remind ourselves -- and I will remind myself -- that we are all divine. Just as a poem like “The Tyger is wondrous and powerful in its symmetry,” we can be incredibly powerful in what we do by deciding to become agents of change, by deciding to imagine what most people do not want to imagine; by wanting to believe what most people are not ready to believe; and by wanting to be what maybe a lot of people think we cannot be.
We can imagine and we can believe by having strong faith. We need faith in those times when we are believing because life is wonderful, but also difficult. The Bible reminds us in II Timothy 2:12, “If we endure hardships, we will reign with him.” Meaning, if we can actually go through this difficult process of creativity, this hot, burning furnace where our shoulders are worn weary, where we are exerting incredible effort because we want to create something beautiful, we are like that sculptor and that blacksmith, exerting everything we have in order to create something beautiful.
But if we can have faith and endure, just as the Good Book reminds us, then we will be looking into the face of the beautiful word achieve. Everything that we dreamed, everything that we imagined can and will be accomplished with our effort, our determination, and our faith.
Brothers and sisters, I’m hoping that on this Sunday morning you can think about all your loved ones seated around you and really love each other as divine human beings, as masterpieces of art that have been handed to you from God, to share and delight in. Here at Lovin’ Life Ministries we want to celebrate our life. We want to celebrate our own divinity. We want to celebrate everything that we can be, and everything that we will be.
Just as my father dreamed for 90 years that world peace will be accomplished, we here at Lovin’ Life already imagine. We are already dreaming. We are already believing. This means the world of peace is just around the corner.
God bless you, and have a great week.
1: You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus,
2: and what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.
3: Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.
4: No soldier on service gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to satisfy the one who enlisted him.
5: An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules.
6: It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops.
7: Think over what I say, for the Lord will grant you understanding in everything.
8: Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, descended from David, as preached in my gospel,
9: the gospel for which I am suffering and wearing fetters like a criminal. But the word of God is not fettered.
10: Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain salvation in Christ Jesus with its eternal glory.
11: The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we shall also live with him;
12: if we endure, we shall also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us;
13: if we are faithless, he remains faithful -- for he cannot deny himself.
14: Remind them of this, and charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers.
15: Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.
16: Avoid such godless chatter, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness,
17: and their talk will eat its way like gangrene. Among them are Hymenae'us and Phile'tus,
18: who have swerved from the truth by holding that the resurrection is past already. They are upsetting the faith of some.
19: But God's firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: "The Lord knows those who are his," and, "Let every one who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity."
20: In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver but also of wood and earthenware, and some for noble use, some for ignoble.
21: If any one purifies himself from what is ignoble, then he will be a vessel for noble use, consecrated and useful to the master of the house, ready for any good work.
22: So shun youthful passions and aim at righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call upon the Lord from a pure heart.
23: Have nothing to do with stupid, senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels.
24: And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to every one, an apt teacher, forbearing,
25: correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth,
26: and they may escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.