‘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.

II.  The cry to which that consciousness gives voice.

We often ask for forgiveness; have we any definite notion of what we are asking for?  When we forgive one another, he who forgives puts away alienation of heart, every cloud of suspicion from his mind, and his feeling and his conduct are as if there had never been a jar or an offence, or are more tender and loving because of the offence that is now forgiven.  He who is forgiven has, on his part, a deeper shame for the offence, which looks far darker now, when it is blotted out, than it did before forgiveness.  Both are eager to show love, not in order to erase the past, but because the past is erased.