In human affairs and in personal relations as well many find it is risky to offend even once. In many occupations of public trust even a single of fense is more than can be tolerated by authorities. Doctors can and do lose their license to prac tice by a single serious act of faulty judgment, without consideration of their good intentions. Even a first failure by the appropriate authority to impose such a penalty is itself a crime of non-feasance, of which a conscientious physician administrator was convicted not long ago. Recently it was reported that a number of army officers of proved ability, because of a failure to act decisively in a compromising situation were heavily punished.
Nature too can be quite unforgiving.
It happens not rarely that a person does irreparable damage to health by taking drugs just once and then falling into a serious psychotic state that became chronic. I have seen such a case. It would be easy to multiply instances where a single failure is treated, by society and by nature, as unpardonable and in one way or another, sometimes at the cost of life itself, is heavily punished. Seven does seem quite a generous, if not even foolish, number of injuries to forgive before giving up on somebody. It seems helpful here to make a distinction between trust, actual forgiveness and readiness to forgive.