d is upon the highest and upon the
lowest. Greatness doth not exempt from it, and meanness doth not exclude
from it. Though commonly great persons fancy an immunity from the
strictness of a holy conservation because of their greatness, and often
mean and low persons pretend a freedom from such a high obligation because
of their lowness, yet certainly all are debt bound this way, and must one
day give account. You that are poor and unlearned, and have not received
great things of that nature from God, do not think yourselves free, do not
absolve yourselves, for there is infinite debt besides. You will have no
place for that excuse, that you had not great parts, were not learned, and
so forth. For as the obligation reaches you all, so there is as patent a
way to the exercise of religion in the poorest cottage as in the highest
palace. You may serve God as acceptably in little, as others may do in
much. There is no condition so low and abject that layeth any restraint on
this noble service and employment. This jewel loses not its beauty and
virtue, when it lieth in a dunghill more than when it is set in gold.

But let us inquire further into this debt. "We are debtors," saith he, and
he instanceth what is not the creditor, by which he giveth us to
understand who is the true creditor, not the flesh, and, therefore, to
make out the just opposition, it must be the Spirit. We are debtors, then,
to the Spirit. And what is the debt we owe to him? We may know it that
same way, we owe not to the flesh so much as to make us live after its
guidance and direction, and fulfil its lusts. Then, by due consequence, we
owe so much to the Spirit, as that we should live after the Spirit, and
resign ourselves wholly to him, his guidance and direction. There is a
twofold kind of debt upon the creature, one remissible and pardonable,
another irremissible and unpardonable, (so to speak,) the debt of sin, and
that is the guilt of it, which is nothing else than the obligation of the
sinner over to eternal condemnation by virtue of the curse of God. Every
sinner cometh under this debt to divine justice, the desert of eternal
wrath, and the actual ordination by a divine sentence to that wrath. Now,
indeed, this debt was insoluble to us, and utterly unpayable until God
sent his Son to be our cautioner, and he hath paid the debt in his own
person, by bearing our curse, and so made it pardonable to sinners,
obtained a relaxation from that woful obligati