Luke 11:4 And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation… There is not so naked, so penurious a thing as man. "Naked was he born, and naked shrill he return," divested of all but his sins. We have no peculiar but this, nothing that we can call ours, but only our faults. Except that luckless patrimony, I know not what we can lay claim to, either that is without us, or in us. Bona Fortunce, wealth acknowledgeth no sovereign but fortune, we are not masters of it; and though it abide with us as a hireling, perhaps till the end of our days, then it surely takes leave, often before that, becoming any one's save his whose it it last was. Nothing of all we had goes along with us but our winding sheet; for other things we have gathered, the Psalm says, "We know not who shall enjoy them"; sure we are, we shall not. And for that form which makes so many enamoured of themselves, can any call it theirs? when all the Parget's art hath invented are not able to coat it against the violence of time and weather, nor by all their fillings to repair those decays and bleaches which sickness hath wrought upon it. The breath we draw, is that ours? Is it not sucked and borrowed from the next air? Our best part, the soul, is it any more than a loan, deposited for some years with the body, after whose expiration it reverts to I-lira that gave it. And, lastly, for our body, is it anything else but a lump of walking clay, a little earth inanimated; the certain restitution whereof we owe unto the dust from whence it was taken. What is there, then, of our whole selves which we can call ours, unless our sins? These are effects springing from our own depraved nature, the fruits of a vicious crooked will, our true legitimate issue, though born against all law, both human and Divine. They are nostra, "ours," by many assurances, curs by all titles both of right and possession. (Archdeacon King.) Parallel Verses KJV: And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. |
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