Praise the Lord, I tell myself; with my whole heart, I will praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, I tell myself, and never forget the good things he does for me. He forgives my sins and heals all my diseases. He ransoms me from death and surrounds me with love and tender mercies.

Having chosen [his people], he called them to come to him. And he gave them right standing with himself, and he promised them his glory.

The essential act of mercy was to pardon; and pardon in its very essence involves the recognition of guilt and ill-desert in the recipient. If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves punishment, it cannot be pardoned. How can you pardon a man for having a gumboil or a club foot? But the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it. This means that you start being “kind” to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which no one but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties. You have overshot the mark. Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice: transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety.
C. S. LEWIS in God in the Dock

Quoted in The Quotable Lewis edited by Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root (Tyndale House) p 426

Not what thou art, nor what thou hast been, doth God regard with his merciful eyes, but what thou wouldst be.
JULIAN OF NORWICH

Content is derived from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation and other publications of Tyndale Publishing House