from Felix Adler’s “The Essentials of Spirituality”:

Is it a little thing, when a man is sunk in the slough of poverty,
denuded of all the decencies of life, harassed day and night by
grinding cares, knows not whither to turn to find shelter and food,
for some fellow human being, moved by pure human kindness, or
let us rather say moved by respect for the worth which he sees in
his perishing fellow-man, to come to the aid of the latter, to lift
him out of his distress, to place him on sun-lit levels, to put him on
his feet and give him a new chance, to open for him a new career
in which effort may meet with its reward? Such an act of human
helpfulness is not a little thing; the man who does it is rightly
esteemed a great benefactor. Or is it a little thing to save the
imperiled sick, to bring back from the brink of the grave a precious
life, already despaired of? This, too, surely is not a little thing,
and the good physician who accomplishes such a miracle is rightly
esteemed a benefactor to whom lifelong gratitude is due.

But there is a yet greater thing, a benefit, by the side of which even
these—great as they are—appear almost insignificant. To take a
man who is sinking in the moral slough and has no courage left to
rise out of it; to give him back his lost self-esteem, that jewel
without which health and wealth are of little avail; to put him in a
position once more to look his fellow-men straight in the eye; to
place him morally on the sun-lit levels; to put him morally on his
feet—this assuredly is the supreme benefit, and the man who
accomplishes this for another is the supreme benefactor. And a
note of exquisite moral beauty is added if the benefactor be the
same person whom the guilty man had injured. This is what is
meant by forgiveness. This is why forgiveness is so divine a thing.
This is the reason why, when an act of genuine forgiveness occurs,
“the music of the spheres” seems to become audible in our nether
world.