Faith & Spirit Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Forgetfulness, in Bierce's hands, isn't the soft-focus mercy we like to imagine; it's a divine loophole engineered for people who refuse to pay what they owe. The line is built like a mock beatitude: "a gift of God" sounds pious and comforting, then Bierce flips it into a sneer by specifying the recipients - debtors - and the real reason for the "gift": they lack a conscience, so Providence compensates with amnesia. It's not theology. It's a scalpel aimed at self-exoneration.

The intent is less to psychoanalyze memory than to indict moral convenience. Bierce treats forgetfulness as an active strategy masquerading as human frailty. "Destitution of conscience" is the key phrase: destitution evokes poverty, making the debtor's moral deficit parallel their financial one. The joke is cruelly efficient: if you can be broke in character, you can be "helped" by forgetting, too. That symmetry is what makes the cynicism land.

Context matters. Bierce wrote in the Gilded Age, when "respectability" was often a costume worn over ruthless economics and social climbing. His Devil's Dictionary persona specialized in exposing the polite vocabulary that lets people keep their self-image intact while stiffing others - literally or figuratively. Read that way, the debtor isn't just someone who hasn't paid cash; it's anyone living on unacknowledged obligations: favors, labor, history. Forgetfulness becomes the sainted mechanism by which society's takers stay untroubled, and the punchline is that we keep calling it human nature instead of what it is: moral evasion with a halo.