04.06. And Forgive our debts, forgive debtors

Chapter VI. “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” No one who uses this prayer can be surprised to find that to the petition for bodily sustenance and the regulation of our earthly life, it is immediately added, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors “. To ask for more puts us in mind of what we have already received. To request the greatest favours from one who may give or withhold at pleasure, forces us to consider our claim, and calculate the probability of our being heard. And if our conduct towards any one has been unworthy, never does conscience make more painful mention of this than when circumstances bring us to acknowledge that we are dependent on this person. Nothing but sheer necessity will induce us to seek the good-will, or implore the aid of one whose past favours we have abused, whose person we have insulted, and of whose excellence and power we cherish a grudging and irritable dislike, rather than a frank and cordial admiration; but if necessity bids us seek the presence and favour of such, we cannot do so without at least a form of apology, which, though it be not willing nor true, is yet under stood to be requisite, and felt to be humbling.

Prudence prescribes, though penitence does not prompt. But there are cases in which the aid we seek is so vital, the gift we receive so munificent, that stiff and hardened pride gives way before genuine humility and contrite gratitude. And so it is when we ask from God our daily bread. “ Continue us in life,” we say to God; and (not from heaven but) from within there comes an answering voice, “ Why should God continue us in life? Is it to cumber His ground; to take up room others might better occupy; to waste His goodness and abuse His forbearance?” Give me this day my bread; but why to me? Am I so useful, so grateful, so considerate? To me; to whom is it I attract the regard of God when I use these words? “ Give me this day my bread; “ and why this day? Is it because yesterday was so well spent? Were all my duties yesterday so discharged that I can with some assurance ask another day? As every moment of it was charged with something from God, was there on my part an unbroken rendering to God of His due? Do I find in yes terday reasons for God’s maintaining me to-day, far outweighing whatever might induce Him to withdraw His support? or, conscious of some deficiency, do I say, “ Give me this new day,” that I may have some chance of paying off the debt I have contracted; that I may this day do more than my duty, and have a surplus to set over against yesterday’s deficit? Who needs to be told that such hopes are vain, that all we can this day perform is already due; that we cannot limit our service to God, nor by greater diligence part of the day free the remainder from all claim; that we cannot serve Him so many hours, and then say, “ Now I have done enough, now I may cease rendering obedience to God “? All that we have for to-day is needed for to-day; it cannot over flow to to-morrow, nor make up for the lack of yesterday. If we misspent yesterday’s bread, we must to-day simply ask forgiveness; if we ran into God’s debt yesterday by omission or transgression, then to-day we cannot make up for that, but must ask His free pardon. And the more we seek for some reason for God’s giving us this day’s bread, the more do we discover reason for God’s calling us to account for what we have already received. Our “ give “ must ever be fol lowed by “ forgive “. The goodness of God leads us to repentance. He overcomes our evil with His good, and never more forcibly reminds us of our ungracious past than when the present shines with His grace. The linking of this petition to the preceding shows us further that forgiveness is a vital thing, as needful for our daily life as the bread it is here connected with. Forgiveness is as much the basis of a day’s duty as bread. If we are to serve on earth, we must have bread; but if we are to serve either on earth or elsewhere, we must have forgiveness. As surely as we faint and die with out bread, so surely do we faint and die from all godly life, and for all godly purposes, if we have not forgiveness. Bread supplies the personal capability and outward opportunity of doing the things which please God: forgiveness supplies the inward condition in which a man can do any thing pleasing to God. Until the matter of sin is finally adjusted, and an understanding come to on this point between God and the soul, there is no willingness, no heartiness, no constancy, nor any acceptance of service. To serve God from any other motive than love has been proved impossible by the lives of so many, that words need not be spent upon the matter. And that a man cannot love God while he is heavily and inexcusably and hopelessly in His debt, is what no one needs to be told who is really seeking for information about service. I know this. Yes; but do I act upon my knowledge, or does not my knowledge condemn my practice? Do I begin each day with a spirit free, unburdened, and lively, running in the way of God’s commandments, as the healthy body delights not in sluggish sauntering, but in vigorous and difficult exercise? As I often take it for granted that the bread will come of itself without any provident interposition of God, do I not also many a day pass by the forgiveness of God as if it would come of itself? But if it comes at all, it comes at my request. And if it do not come to-day, then this day is lost lost for the service and glorifying of Him who gives it, and lost for my own best good. For as bread not only satisfies the appetite which the past has begotten, but also gives strength for time to come, so forgiveness not only clears away what the past has accumulated, but lays the foundation for what is to come. And other foundation than this there is none, as little as there is any way of sustaining life besides eating and drinking. We can as little discover some elixir which shall work in our spirits the same charm as forgiveness, as we can discover some specific or private means of sustaining our bodies, which shall put us beyond the necessity of taking meat like other men. And therefore are we to be sure that we are obtaining this forgiveness, this daily spiritual nourishment; not using this petition lightly, as if we could live quite as well unforgiven as forgiven; as if it would make very little difference whether this day be spent in God’s favour or under His displeasure. And how would God have us view our sins when we seek their forgiveness? As debts. To get at the full iniquity of sin, we need to consider it in various lights; and so in Scripture we find it designated by a variety of names, each of which suggests some peculiar quality of sin. It springs into life from such opposite parts of our nature, and gathers strength from so many different motives; its heinousness is darkened by so many aggravations, and its consequences run out in so many directions, that it is impossible to gather up all its evil and express it in a single word.

Sometimes it is transgression or trespass, and here we see our reckless wickedness in departing from the straight path of God’s commandments, the “ everlasting way “ that runs on eternally into deeper blessedness. Sometimes it is rebellion against God, as if we took delight in going contrary to Him, irrespective of any pleasure or profit apparently to be gained. And sometimes it is folly, showing us the weakness of our hearts, and their proneness to be deluded, and to miss the aim and end of our being. But when we confess, we are helped by viewing them as debts; an expression which leads us to consider, not so much the evil dispositions from which our sins proceeded, as the relation to God in which they have left us. And manifestly it is this which is most appropriate to be on our minds (and which, in truth, must be on our minds), when we come before God to ask His forgiveness. This view of sin takes us and sets us down in our true position before God as His debtors. It throws into my soul the confession, “ I am connected with God, and the connection is debt”. It is not a word which directly points to the moral evil of sin, but it very distinctly declares the position of the sinner. It may not be that view of sin which most powerfully excites repentance; it is not introspection nor self-loathing which it most directly induces; but it is a word which shows that our sins have to do with more than our selves, which shows that they have connected me with God, which speaks of God and myself in the same word, and at the same time exhibits the relation I presently hold to God. And this is just what we need to see clearly when we pray for pardon; that we are debtors, not only miser able sinners, whose pitiable case may well move God to compassion, but His servants who, in sinning and ruining themselves, have been most grievously wronging and defrauding Him, and whose sins have done as much injury (so He represents it) to Him as to themselves.

Sin, then, is a personal matter between myself and God. My sins have been affecting God. It has been a matter that He has considered, and He has noted a difference when I have done one thing rather than another. He has been expecting, waiting for service at my hand. At great cost He has furnished me with valuable aids and instruments, wherewith to further His purposes; and these I have abused, squandered, or destroyed.

Again and again He has renewed my equipment as His servant, never casting me off as hopeless, but carefully adjusting my circumstances, so as to make opportunities of good easy; and what have I rendered Him again? All my life I have been receiving at His hand; “ what have I that I have not received? “ What should I have, were He to withdraw all the support He is now affording me? What should I be, were He suddenly to banish me beyond His power? And for all I receive (which I can as soon number the hairs of my head as reckon), He expects a return. What return have I made? I hear His voice demanding of me, “ What owest thou to thy Lord? “ I cannot tell; I have never so much as known what I owed: have seldom so much as tried to form a careful, true, and honest estimate of what is due from me to Him; have seldom set myself against the known deceitfulness of sin, and determined that, at least, I should have a clear, definite understanding of what I owe to God, and endeavour, as the one thing which, at all events and at any cost, must be done by my life, to discharge what is due to God, to whom I owe all.

“ Debt “ is a designation of sin which calls to mind a large class of sins, which we are very prone to forget in seeking pardon sins of omission. These have no palpable and visible existence, such as glaring acts of sin possess. While they rival positive acts of wrong-doing in their iniquity, they outrival them in their power of eluding conscience. So that, if there be a man who, when he draws near to God with the purpose of confessing, is at a loss what to say; whose eye, as it turns back to scrutinise his life, is arrested by no startling forms of iniquity, is not glazed with terror, nor sinks in shame from the ghastly phantoms that pursue him, and stretch forth quick and strong hands of vengeance to seize him; let him look once more over that wide and void expanse, and let him turn upon himself and ask what there ought to be there.

Let him say to his soul, Ought there to be no thing more than you see? Was it to do nothing more than you have done, that God gave you this life, and made you what you are? Have you done all for yourself that you could, so that now you are as like to Christ as possible? Have you done all for others that you could, so that none are hungering now, who might have been fed by you; none in sorrow now, whom a word or deed of yours might have relieved; none in bitterness of spirit or enmity against you now, whom a slight humiliation on your part might have saved from sin; none mistaken as to the character of Christ and His religion, who might have known differently had you done what you could? But there is one sin of omission that rises up * from every part of our life, and fills with condemnation the expanse which, to the careless eye, might seem vacant. There is one debt incurred which fills the soul with new and keener shame, however overwhelmed it has been already with a sense of sin. God’s “ unspeakable gift “ has been abused by us. He has spent all upon us, the whole resources of Deity, all that made this world and more, all the wisdom, and the glory, and all (if we may say “all” of what has proved itself infinite) the love of God. Only when we can fathom the humiliation of Christ, only when

*” As at the resurrection men will rise from empty wastes, where it would not have been suspected that any were concealed, let a man look back on all his omissions, and think what the divine law can raise from them against him.”

FOSTER’S Lectures, vol. 1, p. 348. f This idea will be found elaborated in the Patience of Hope, with the usual felicity of the authoress, we can understand what is contained in that expression “ He emptied Himself,” only when we can measure the interval between the throne of God and the tomb in Joseph’s garden, between “the living God” and a dead man, shall we be able to measure God’s gift to us and our debt to Him. And is the world to go on as if the Son of God had never been its inhabitant? Has Christ done all this for us, and is no return expected from us? Is all this to be done before us, and no new feelings to arise in our hearts, no new and wider thoughts, no lasting alteration of conduct? Can one act so closely in our interest, and our relation to Him be as it was? Let us take our stand before the cross, where we may see the freeness of God’s giving at its height, and, standing there, let us say if we have rendered to Him His due. Call sin debt to Christ, and the matter is brought to a very simple issue. Had I myself spent my all upon another, put aside my own interest and prospects, and given my whole life and labour to him; had I, in that life, met with the sorest trouble on his account, and yet never turned aside, and had I been tempted by the most alluring openings for my self, and yet held the interest of the object of this life-long sacrifice so close to my heart, that I preferred bitterness and disgrace for him, to pleasure and profit for myself; and had this resulted in a successful issue, had I achieved prosperity and secure satisfaction for him, should I expect no return, should I not expect so much as some extra thought and regard; nay, would it not be the most unaccountable ingratitude if he did not become my firmest friend, the man on whom I could always count? How the world would hoot such a man; how the world would scorn his excuses! And is all changed when I myself am that man, and Jesus Christ the self sacrificing friend? Is all changed because the sacrifice becomes greater than the most laborious words can describe, and the blessing conferred increasingly rich through eternity? Can our hearts really deceive us thus; can any blindness leave unobserved our debt to Jesus Christ? But for all our debts, what does God demand of us? Are His demands anything like those of the human law of debt, of that old law which claimed the person of the debtor, and handed him over to his creditor, to be cut in pieces if he chose; to be sold with his family and effects, if he chose; to be chained to a life of drudgery, if such were the will of his creditor? Are we at least to suffer some penalty, to feel for a while something of the bitterness of that poverty to which we have brought another? Not so. All that is asked is, that we acknowledge the debt, and accept of its remission. And what else can we do? We can find no way of evading our creditor: “ Though they dig into hell, thence shall Mine hand take them; though they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down; and though they hide themselves in Carmel, 1 will search and take them out thence; and though they be hid from My sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them “. It is not, then, by any evasion of ours that our debts can be got rid of; neither will they pass away by any forgetfulness or waiting of ours. They are not fancies, which the changes of life may put to flight. They are not mere names or suppositions which need not be regarded. They are real; entered in the book of God’s remembrance to the utmost far thing. We cannot live our lives over again; the sins are committed; the debts are contracted.

We cannot now make up for what we have already done wrong and left undone. All our strength is needed for our present duty. The future will do well, if it keeps itself solvent. But “ ask, and ye shall receive “. “ The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart; “ will not the heart send to the lips this one petition, “ Forgive me my debts “? For pardon is one of the things that we can only have by asking. It is a thing which must come from another, from Him, namely, whom we have wronged. It is His to forgive, and nothing we can do can earn it. We cannot pass a free pardon upon ourselves, remit the debts we owe to another, absolve ourselves. But God, whom we have offended, and in whose debt we are, says, we may have pardon for the asking.

“There is forgiveness with God;” and were there not forgiveness with Him, then to look for it elsewhere were absurd, for He being the party offended can alone forgive the offence. Forgiveness is with Him, not as being provided by an other, and now put into His power to administer, but as it is dependent on His will solely, whether there shall be any such thing as forgiveness of sin or not. All provision that could be made for our pardon, and all administration of that pardon now, must of necessity depend on and originate in the will of God. And that will is, that we be freely pardoned. And this being so, it is deep dishonour we do to God’s will and word, if we say or think that something must be added to the simplicity of this petition, or that we are not to expect any very wonderful results from this prayer. These words are something more than an appropriate acknowledgment that we owe God much, they are not a charm by the mere repetition of which we win God’s favour; they are the petition of the soul for what we do need and can only have from God. But how does God Himself encourage us to use this petition in faith? He puts into our mouths these words, “ As we forgive our debtors “. And for our encouragement, first of all, these words are surely given us. For here we have the same argument as is elsewhere expanded in that marvellous verse which is instinct with persuasion, and which, as often as we read it, rekindles our faith: “If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him? “ Here, with like force of reasoning, we are taught to say to God, If we, being evil, can forgive our debtors, how much more may we expect forgiveness of Thee, whose name is love, who art our heavenly Father, with whom there is forgiveness, and who hast made Thyself known as “ ready to forgive “? And to set us on the firmest ground, and in an absolutely unassailable position, when we thus pray, there comes further in aid of our plea the idea which God Himself has given us of human forgiveness; and we plead with still greater power, “ If on us who are full of wickedness, and in whom malice and bitterness congenially dwell, Thou Thyself hast laid the injunction to forgive seventy times seven, if our brother offend, what limit dare we put to Thy forgiveness, which is high above ours as heaven is above the earth? “Certainly this is a strong argument which God puts into our lips. Will not He do more than He has commanded us to do? Are we not to expect more from Him than from one another?

Well may our Lord add, “ For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will for give you”. This clause, appended to our appeal for pardon, does not exhaust the reasons there are for assurance of success; we might be encouraged by many other considerations. The likelihood of our obtaining what we ask is grounded on the actual and abundant provision that has been made for our forgiveness, on the express offers of God, and on a number of circumstances made known in Scripture; but the likelihood that is here alone considered is that which arises from the nature of the person appealed to. It is simply God’s matchless readiness to forgive that we here use for our encouragement. We are reminded by the words we use that we are now appealing to one, the forgivingness of whose character is such, that He has impressed this attribute of His distinctly upon His law, and has commanded that, in order to please Him, it is but necessary that we be loving and forgiving. And nothing can more effectually maintain within us the confident boldness which He desires, than thus to under stand the infinite depth of love and length of for bearance that reside in Him with whom we deal, and on whose mercy we hang. It is (need it be said?) very fitting that before we approach God, we should distinctly understand how forgiveness has been prepared for us, and should, by the contemplation of the infinite merit and inexhaustible efficacy of the blood of Christ, encourage our selves to draw near to Him by whose- judgment we stand or fall; but when we actually stand in His presence, and are at length explicitly asking Him for pardon, no encouragement can be more fitting than that which arises from a deep impression of the forgiving nature to which our appeal is made, and nothing can more promptly and effectually create this impression than the remembrance, that forgivingness of disposition is enjoined upon us by God as the prime requisite of character, and that His one commandment is that we love one another. And it is this remembrance which these words of the prayer recall as often as we utter them with understanding. But is this an encouragement that all of us can use? Have we in heart accepted the seventy times seven as our rule, and do we desire to be found in its practice? Dare we thus reason from ourselves to God? Dare we point God to our conduct, and say, “As we forgive, so forgive us”? The words of the petition assure us that whatever may stand in the way of our forgiveness, it certainly is not this, that God is a hard judge who would rather condemn than acquit. But then they remind us of this, only by reminding us that even we ourselves, imperfect though we be, delight rather in the forgiveness than in the punishment of our enemy. But is this the fact? Of course, we expect God’s forgiveness to be of a very different measure from our own; but have we any forgivingness of spirit, even “according to the measure of a man,” from which we can take courage to hope in the wide and perfect and infinite forgivingness of God? Have we the little from which we can reason to God’s much? Or are not some, when they use this prayer, in danger of turning it into an imprecation? Is it not true that many of us are in danger of uttering that most terrible curse upon ourselves, which has been put into language and named “the prayer of the unforgiving man “? * “ O God, I have sinned against Thee many times from my youth up until now. I have often been forgetful of Thy goodness; I have not duly thanked Thee for Thy mercies; I have neglected Thy service; I have broken Thy laws; I have done many things utterly wrong against Thee. All this I know; and beside this doubtless I have committed many secret sins, which in my blindness I have failed to notice. Such is my guiltiness, O Lord, in Thy sight; deal with me, I beseech Thee, even as I deal with my neighbour. He has * By A, W, Hare. not offended me one-tenth, one-hundredth part as much as I have offended Thee; but he has offended me very grievously, and I cannot forgive him. Deal with me, I beseech Thee, O Lord, as I deal with him. He has been very ungrateful to me, though not a tenth, not a hundredth part as ungrateful as I have been to Thee; yet I can not overlook such base and shameful ingratitude.

Deal with me, I beseech Thee, O Lord, as I deal with him. I remember and treasure up every little trifle, which shows how ill he has behaved to me. Deal with me, I beseech Thee, O Lord, as I deal with him. I am determined to take the very first opportunity of doing him an ill turn.

Deal with me, I beseech Thee, O Lord, as I deal with him.” The encouragement of this petition, then, is not a mere commonplace which any one may safely use. A true cordial it is, but if applied to the wrong condition may prove deleterious and deadly. The boldness we have before God must not be the superficial presumption of sentimentalism, but it must be of a piece with the tenor of our life. For there is one thing we need in prayer as much as encouragement, and that is sincerity. We must be thrown back upon our real desires. That encouragement which is not backed by our true state of heart, and which does not consist with our conduct, is mere delusion. The only right confidence before God is that which the Apostle commends, and which can only be enjoyed “when our own hearts condemn us not “; that is, when we ask God, not for those things which we know we ought to desire, but for those things which are ever floating before our hopes, and drawing forth our hearts affections, and the efforts of our lives. If it is a fictitious desire, or a desire got up for propriety’s sake, which we present before God, our hearts condemn us, and we have no confidence. And what is to be carefully marked as the key to the encouragement in this petition is this: that in point of fact every one who is set upon obtaining forgiveness does forgive his neighbour, and therefore every one who uses the petition in sincerity, in the truth of the heart, as the expression of the fixed bent of his soul, does receive the encouragement which is laid up in the appended clause. This encouragement is not for those who have a merely occasional and passing impression of their need of forgiveness; it is not for those who prize God’s favour to-day but to-morrow forget it; it is not for the insincere, who hold this petition as a veil between God and their souls; nor for the double-minded, who love this life, but would also secure themselves against the next. It is not for any who can thoughtlessly and almost flippantly ejaculate this petition merely from the lip; but it is for all on whose heart God reads the deeply cut consciousness of their immeasurable debt, and the earnest and abiding desire for pardon. This appended clause has, therefore, a twofold use. Wrapt up in its encouragement there is a check to conscience. We are not to be allowed to present the petition at all, unless it be from the deepest sense of our need, and of the greatness of the gift we seek; a sense which is in reality equivalent to true repentance, and which brings with it, as its uniform and necessary fruit, love to our neighbour. And every one who knows how apt we are to become either hypocrites or careless formalists in prayer, will recognise the suitableness of such a check, and will appreciate the propriety of its being appended to this petition rather than any other. For this, more than any other, has been a lip-deep petition, and has been shame fully abused by self-satisfied or careless petitioners, by ourselves when we ask forgiveness, as we often ask it, without any considerate remembrance of the cost of it, thinking it the easiest thing for God to give, and forgetting that this has been prepared for us at a far greater expense, at a more personal expense, than anything else we can implore. It has been the endeavour of many teachers to persuade us, and yet we need to be reminded, that a word would create and beautify a world, and “an act of will bestow it upon us,” but it has cost God the humiliation and suffering of His well-beloved Son to grant the boon which now we ask. And therefore we are here suddenly startled out of all dreamy and indifferent prayer, and are aroused by being brought face to face with our own real desires and our own real life; we are reminded that our prayer had far better be unsaid, if it is not of a piece with our state of heart; that we cannot pray as one person and live as another; that we do not look as earnestly as we ought for the remission of our debts (and therefore need not expect it), unless we be doing what we can to avoid contracting new ones; that, in short, we have no encouragement whatever to present this petition, unless conscience assures us that the love of God, on which we hope, has entered our souls and changed them, and has become the principle and law of our lives.

All difficulty vanishes from this clause, once we recognise the point of fact, that a man humbled before God is invariably and necessarily charitable to his neighbour. The spirit of pride and the spirit of hatred are one; they stand and fall together. Do I find it hard to forgive the little offences of my fellow-servant, the few pence he owes me? Then do I, indeed, understand what it is I ask God to do, when I ask Him to cancel that debt of mine of ten thousand talents? For how can I have the heart to challenge another with his offences against me, when my own misdeed and sin against God is pressing upon my soul, and forcing me to cry for pardon? Myself helpless and keenly sensible that I am utterly dependent on the forbearance and free grace of God, alive to the shamefulness of my wrong doing against Him, and crying for mere mercy without a shadow of hope that I can make the slightest reparation, I cannot, I really cannot, harbour hard and unforgiving thoughts against my neighbour, nor insist upon my claims. The words of the evangelist Mark are therefore by no means alarming to one who really longs for pardon of his great debt, though they, even more distinctly than the words of Matthew, require that, before receiving the forgiveness of God, we forgive others. He quotes our Lord as saying, “ When ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any; that your Father also, which is in heaven, may forgive you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.” As if He said, “ Your act of forgiveness must precede the act you hope that God will perform “. There is some thing standing in the way of your forgiveness which you must remove. Something is to be done before God can forgive you, which you must do. But, then, it is a thing which you cannot but be doing, if you are compelled to seek God’s forgiveness from any just sense of your own sin. For just in proportion as your own sin against God appears great, so will the offences of others against yourself appear small.

It is not that our forgivingness of spirit wins the forgiveness of God, but that pure unforgivingness cannot accept the forgiveness of God. By for giving others we do not earn our own forgiveness, but most assuredly we cannot receive that forgiveness until we forgive others. We are not prepared to seek it; we have not seen our own great debt, and are merely asking God for we know not what, unless humility and joy in the hope of God’s pardon have excluded from our hearts all malice against our neighbour. So that this clause merely forms a demand that, when we ask God for forgiveness, we shall know what we ask for. If we know what we ask for, we will ask it, and cannot but ask it, in the spirit here required. We come approving the law of forgiveness; it is all our hope for our selves, and we act upon it towards others. With divine skill and kindness these words, which we are to repeat as often as we ask forgiveness, bid us think how great a gift we seek, and forbid us to deceive ourselves with a merely verbal petition, and so to defraud ourselves of God’s pardon.

They refuse to let us near God, until we realise the vastness of His gift, and are prepared to claim it. When we feel unable sincerely to use this petition, we are not to turn our attention to our neighbour, and endeavour to kindle love in our hearts by extenuating his offences and magnifying his good deeds. Not at all. We are to bend our thoughts to our own state, to count up our debts to God, to set them in the light of His countenance, and thus measuring our own great debt, and learning that marvellous love which gives ground of hope even to such debtors, our hearts drink in a humility, a peace, and a joy with which hardness towards our fellow-men cannot dwell. And so invariably does the one feeling flow from the other, that we may learn the presence of the one from the fact of the other’s presence. An infallible test is thus graciously put into our hands, by which we may learn whether we are asking enough from God. If there is still in our hearts any bitterness towards man, then there is too little desire for pardon. If there is too vivid a consciousness of our claims upon others, there is too low an estimate of God’s claims upon us.

If the wrong done us by others seems greater than we can forgive and forget, then our own wrong-doing is affecting us less than it should; the mind of God and our mind still view very different objects, when our sins are spoken of. But God would fully pardon us. He would not have us live with a single debt uncancelled, and therefore He gives us a test by which we may always learn whether, when we use this petition, we are indeed seeking that all our great debt be forgiven. He gives us these words, certainly not to make our prayer impossible, but to preserve us from verbally asking for what He would have us seek with our whole soul; and because He would have us, indeed, receive what we ask, when we say,” Forgive us our debts”.

“Alas! alas!

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. How would you be, If He, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are? O 1 think on that; And mercy then will breathe within your lips, Like man new made.”