illed the law."

Indebtedness was to be avoided as compromising the faith in the eyes
of others and detrimental to the development of grace in the
disciples.

This was the direct command of Paul. This commandment required the
payment of all honest obligations. The Christian then as now who
failed to acknowledge his obligations and meet them in full as he was
able was wanting in the spirit of righteousness and unfaithful to his
own convictions of right and duty.

The payment of a debt was the return in full of the loan received.

Any Christian conscience at that time would have been satisfied with
the settlement approved and commanded by Nehemiah. The debt was fully
discharged when payments equaled the loan by whatever name those
payments were called.

This text also required that they keep out of debt. By no distortion
of the text can it be made to mean less. Chalmers on this passage
comments as follows: "But though to press the duty of our text in the
extreme and rigorous sense of it--yet I would fain aspire towards the
full and practical establishment of it, so that the habit might become
at length universal, not only paying all debts, but even by making
conscience never to contract, and therefore never to owe any. For
although this might never be reached, it is well it should be looked
at, nay moved forward to, as a sort of optimism, every approximation
to which were a distinct step in advance, both for the moral and
economic good of society. For, first, in the world of trade, one can
not be insensible to the dire mischief that ensues from the spirit
often so rampant, of an excessive and unwarrantable speculation--so as
to make it the most desirable of all consummations that the system of
credit should at length give way, and what has been termed the
ready-money system, the system of immediate payments in every
commercial transaction, should be substituted in its place. The
adventurer who, in the walks of merchandise, trades beyond his means
is often actuated by a passion as intense, and we fear too, as
criminal, as is the gamester, who in the haunts of fashionable
dissipation, stakes beyond his fortune. But it is not the injury
alone, which the ambition that precipitates him into such deep and
desperate hazards, brings upon his own character, neither is it the
ruin that the splendid bankruptcy in which it terminates brings upon
his own family.

These are not the only evils which we deprecate--for over and ab