When the great apostle of the Gentiles laid down the rule for those who had put on "the Lord Jesus Christ," that they were to "owe no man any thing, but to love one another," he went on to explain, with the grave responsibility of a teacher sent by God, why this exalted ideal was to be practised: "For he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law." This comprehensive command for the, Christian's conduct, which surely must have been the outcome of Paul's own immovable faith and his conviction of man's spiritual sonship, concerning which he says, "There is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things," contains no sanction, no license whatever for either borrowing or lending. The restriction unhesitatingly enforced by the apostle upon Christian believers is to "owe no man any thing, but to love."
We are told by the psalmist that "the wicked borroweth, and payeth not," and when the wise man propounded the proverb, "The borrower is servant to the lender," he expressed much wisdom and moral insight. Amid the inspired sayings of his prophetic book Isaiah writes, "The Lord maketh the earth empty, . . . and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. And it shall be, ... as with the lender, so with the borrower; . . . because they have . . . broken the everlasting covenant." There must be very few of us, if any, who have not at some time or another suffered the bitter experiences consequent upon borrowing or lending. Oh, the humiliation, the wreck that we made of our righteous pride, when we went to borrow, from some long-neglected relative perhaps, or of an overindulgent friend, a sum of money deemed indispensable at the moment to save us from impending ruin or disgrace! Oh, the blinded vision with which we charged all our debts and misery to a perverse fate, when the careless extravagance, the sins and shortcoming of our improvident lives perchance accounted for our inability to meet our pressing obligations.
Or it may be that some friend or relative approached us with the same object, and although we were fully aware of a better, a far higher way of meeting our brother's need than by saddling him with an additional debt, nevertheless, simply because we felt unwilling to sacrifice ourselves and our time to the service of true charity, we complied with his demand, this being t lie line of least resistance. We!! might conscience indeed rebuke such inconsiderate dealing, for as the covenanters of Love we knew that we had the higher right to offer our neighbor those priceless riches and possessions to be found in the inexhaustible treasuries of Truth, which are open and free to all. Therefore, as the lender, so with the borrower, both had forgotten the "everlasting covenant" of Love. England's immortal bard has this to say about these perplexing problems,—
