'Debt' and 'duty' are one word. 'Owe' and 'ought' are one word. Duty is
what is due. Ought is what we owe--to some one or other. We are under
obligations all round, which conscience tells us that we have not
fulfilled. The unfulfilled obligation or duty becomes a debt. We divide
our obligations into duties to God, our neighbours, and ourselves; but
the division is superficial, for whatever we owe to ourselves or to men,
we owe also to God, and the non-fulfilment of our obligations to Him is
sin. 'No man liveth to himself, ... we live unto God.' Our consciences
accuse us of undone duties to ourselves, the indulgence of evil tempers,
a slack hand over ourselves, a careless husbandry which leaves furrows
full of weeds, failure to bend the bow to the uttermost, to keep the
mirror bright. It accuses us of undone duties to our neighbours,
unkindness, neglect of opportunities of service, and many another ugly
fault. Duties undone are debts not only to ourselves or to our fellows,
but to God. The great Over-lord reckons offences against His vassals as
crimes against Himself.
That graver aspect of our faults as being sins may seem a gloomy
thought, but it is really one full of blessing, for it lodges the true
power of remission of our burdensome debts in the hands of the one true
creditor, whom the prayer has taught us to call 'Our Father.'
That consciousness of sin should be as universal as the sense of bodily
hunger; but, alas! it is too often dormant. It is especially needful to
try to awake it in this generation, when the natural tendency of the
heart to ignore it is strengthened by talk of heredity and environment,
and by the disposition to think of sin with pity rather than
reprobation. Men are apt to regard a consciousness of sin as morbid.
They will acknowledge failure or imperfection, but there is little
realisation of sin, and therefore little sense of the need for a
deliverer. If men are ever to be brought to a saving grip of Jesus
Christ, they must have learned a far more heart-piercing consciousness
of their sin than this morally relaxed age possesses.