Be still indebted to somebody or other, that there may be somebody always to pray for you, that the giver of all good things may grant unto you a blessed, long, and prosperous life; fearing, if fortune should deal crossly with you, that it might be his chance to come short of being paid by you, he will always speak good of you in every company, ever and anon purchase new creditors unto you; to the end, that through their means you may make a shift by borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and with other folk’s earth fill up his ditch.
You can hardly imagine how glad I am, when every morning I perceive myself environed and surrounded with brigades of creditors—humble, fawning, and full of their reverences. And whilst I remark that, as I look more favourably upon and give a cheerfuller countenance to one than to another, the fellow thereupon buildeth a conceit that he shall be the first despatched and the foremost in the date of payment, and he valueth my smiles at the rate of ready money, it seemeth unto me that I then act and personate the god of the passion of Saumure, accompanied with his angels and cherubims.
These are my flatterers, my soothers, my clawbacks, my smoothers, my parasites, my saluters, my givers of good-morrows, and perpetual orators; which makes me verily think that the supremest height of heroic virtue described by Hesiod consisteth in being a debtor, wherein I held the first degree in my commencement. Which dignity, though all human creatures seem to aim at and aspire thereto, few nevertheless, because of the difficulties in the way and encumbrances of hard passages, are able to reach it, as is easily perceivable by the ardent desire and vehement longing harboured in the breast of everyone to be still creating more debts and new creditors.
Yet doth it not lie in the power of everyone to be a debtor. To acquire creditors is not at the disposure of each man’s arbitrament. You nevertheless would deprive me of this sublime felicity. You ask me when I will be out of debt. Well, to go yet further on, and possibly worse in your conceit, may Saint Bablin, the good saint, snatch me, if I have not all my lifetime held debt to be as a union or conjunction of the heavens with the earth, and the whole cement whereby the race of mankind is kept together; yea, of such virtue and efficacy that, I say, the whole progeny of Adam would very suddenly perish without it. Therefore, perhaps, I do not think amiss, when I repute it to be the great soul of the universe, which, according to the opinion of the Academics, vivifieth all manner of things. In confirmation whereof, that you may the better believe it to be so, represent unto yourself, without any prejudicacy of spirit, in a clear and serene fancy, the idea and form of some other world than this; take, if you please, and lay hold on the thirtieth of those which the philosopher Metrodorus did enumerate, wherein it is to be supposed there is no debtor or creditor, that is to say, a world without debts."