"Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Our wills are ours, we know not how, The divine control of us through faith and love makes possible a true self-control; in the deepest sense the moral man must be the religious man. Our virtues that stand the stress and storm of the world are rooted in our souls' deep sense of God. Temperance is not a mere utilitarian virtue; it is a power and perfection of character the sources of which are the same as the sources of that faith which lifts man triumphant at last over all ills in life and in death. DEBT. THOSE have short Lent who owe money to be paid at Easter. -FRANKLIN. Debt is like any other trap, easy enough to get into, but hard enough to get out.-H. W. SHAW. The man who never has money enough to pay his debts has too much of something else. — J. L. BASFORD. His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate'er he can. And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man. LONGFELLOW. Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it. - Proverbs of Solomon. Owe no man anything, but to love one another; for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. - SAINT PAUL. HE word "debt" is an abbreviation of debi THE tum, a Latin word, the perfect participle of debeo, which means "to owe something, to be in debt," and then, more broadly, " to be under obligation, to be bound by duty." It is probably cognate with the Anglo-Saxon doefe, doefte, "fit or convenient," which appears in our modern English as "deft." Wedgwood in his etymo 66 logical dictionary says, "The Latin debeo is fundamentally to be explained as signifying 'it falls to me to do so and so."" In its general sense, then, debeo means " I owe," or "I ought." The root-idea of these two phrases is the same. Ought" is the old preterite, or past tense, of the verb "owe." Usage has changed so that now we say : present, "I owe;" past, "I owed; ' whereas the old usage was: present, "I owe; past, "I ought." "Ought" has now become a distinct verb, and expresses with greater depth and force than any other word in our language the august authority of the moral idea. "Owe" is the original, from the Anglo-Saxon, of the verb " own," which means "to possess." In old English "owe" was used as we now use "own; as for example, in Shakespeare: "Thou dost here usurp The name thou ow'st not." To owe came to mean, by ellipsis, to possess something for another; so that now that which is owed is something that belongs to another, while that which is owned is a personal possession. Debt is something which is owed to another, that is, owned, held in trust, for another, and which ought to be paid. So "debt" and "duty" are cognate words; for duty means that which is due, is a debt. I have gone somewhat into detail in this study of words in order that you may see clearly how much the word" debt" involves. It is a weighty word, expressing moral obligation and revealing moral law. But for conscience there would be no such word as debt; but for moral law there would be no conscience; but for God there would be no moral law. Many of our commonest words, like this word "debt," strike their roots down into the very foundations of moral life, and bear testimony to man's primal relation, as a moral being, to God. Few people think that every time they use the word "debt " they are unconsciously witnessing to the power of conscience, the authority of moral law, and the being and sovereignty of God. On the other hand, many of our words are involuntary witnesses to human passion and selfishness, to human ignorance and guile, and to the perversion of human life and character by vice and sin. Men shrink sometimes from the seeming exag. geration and injustice of Jesus's saying: "By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned; " but this saying expresses the profoundest insight, and is sup ported by the solidest reasoning. As individual men express their characters in their habitual speech, so a people writes its moral history in its language. A word is but a vibration of the air, a pulse of sound, or a figure stamped on paper, yet it can wound like a knife or heal like balsam; it may shine with the light of truth and love, or glow with the lurid fire of passion and hate; it may be a revelation of virtue and faith, or it may disclose wickedness that has become unconscious habit. "Words are mighty, words are living: I. The word "debt" has a well-known specific meaning. As commonly used, it refers to money or goods or service which one person, on account of an equivalent already received, is under obligation to render to another. This we may call its commercial sense. The consideration of debt falls within the domain of practical ethics, because debt is essentially moral. It could not exist if men were not moral beings; it |