Duty is the most overlauded word in the whole vocabulary of life. Duty
is the cold, bare anatomy of righteousness. Duty looks at life as a debt
to be paid; love sees life as a debt to be collected. Duty is ever
paying assessments; love is constantly counting its premiums.
Duty is forced, like a pump; love is spontaneous, like a fountain. Duty
is prescribed and formal; it is part of the red tape of life. It means
running on moral rails. It is good enough as a beginning; it is poor as
a finality.
The boy who “stood on the burning deck,” and who committed suicide on a
technical point of obedience, has been held up to the school children of
this century as a model of faithfulness to duty. The boy was the victim
of a blind adherence to the red tape of duty. He was placing the whole
responsibility for his acts on someone outside himself. He was
helplessly waiting for instruction in the hour of emergency when he
should have acted for himself. His act was an empty sacrifice. It was a
useless throwing away of a human life. It did no good to the father, to
the boy, to the ship, or to the nation.
The captain who goes down with his sinking vessel, when he has done
everything in his power to save others and when he can save his own life
without dishonor, is the victim of a false sense of duty. He is cruelly
forgetful of the loved ones on shore that he is sacrificing. His death
means a spectacular exit from life, the cowardly fear of an
investigating committee, or a brave man’s loyal, yet misguided, sense of
duty. A human life, with its wondrous possibilities, is too sacred an
individual trust to be thus lightly thrown into eternity.
They tell us of the “sublime nobleness” of the Roman soldier at Pompeii,
whose skeleton was found centuries afterward, imbedded in the once
molten lava which swept down upon the doomed city. He was still standing
at one of the gates, at his post of duty, still grasping a sword in his
crumbling fingers. His was a morbid faithfulness to a discipline from
which a great convulsion of Nature had released him. An automaton would
have stood there just as long, just as boldly, just as uselessly.
The man who gives one hour of his life to loving, consecrated service to
humanity is doing higher, better, truer work in the world than an army
of Roman sentinels paying useless tribute to the red tape of duty. There
is in this interpretation of duty no sympathy with the man who deserts
his post when needed; it is but a protest against losing the essence,
the realness of true duty in worshipping the mere form.
Analyze, if you will, any of the great historic instances of loyalty to
duty, and whenever they ring true you will find the presence of the real
element that made the act almost divine. It was duty,—plus love. It was
no mere sense of duty that made Grace Darling risk her life in the awful
storm of sixty years ago, when she set out in the darkness of night, on
a raging sea, to rescue the survivors of the wreck of “The Forfarshire.”
It was the sense of duty, warmed and vivified by a love of humanity, it
was heroic courage of a heart filled with divine pity and sympathy.
Duty is a hard, mechanical process for making men do things that love
would make easy. It is a poor understudy to love. It is not a high
enough motive with which to inspire humanity. Duty is the body to which
love is the soul. Love, in the divine alchemy of life, transmutes all
duties into privileges, all responsibilities into joys.
The workman who drops his tools at the stroke of twelve, as suddenly as
if he had been struck by lightning, may be doing his duty,—but he is
doing nothing more. No man has made a great success of his life or a fit
preparation for immortality by doing merely his duty. He must do
that,—and more. If he puts love into his work, the “more” will be easy.
The nurse may watch faithfully at the bedside of a sick child as a duty.
But to the mother’s heart the care of the little one, in the battle
against death, is never a duty; the golden mantle of love thrown over
every act makes the word “duty” have a jarring sound as if it were the
voice of desecration.
When a child turns out badly in later years, the parent may say, “Well,
I always did my duty by him.” Then it is no wonder the boy turned out
wrong. “Doing his duty by his son” too often implies merely food,
lodging, clothes and education supplied by the father. Why, a public
institution would give that! What the boy needed most was deep draughts
of love; he needed to live in an atmosphere of sweet sympathy, counsel
and trust. The parent should ever be an unfailing refuge, a constant
resource and inspiration, not a mere larder, or hotel, or wardrobe, or
school that furnishes these necessities free. The empty boast of mere
parental duty is one of the dangers of modern society.
Christianity stands forth as the one religion based on love, not duty.
Christianity sweeps all duties into one word,—love. Love is the one
great duty enjoined by the Christian religion. What duty creeps to
laboriously, love reaches in a moment on the wings of a dove. Duty is
not lost, condemned or destroyed in Christianity; it is dignified,
purified and exalted and all its rough ways are made smooth by love.
The supreme instance of generosity in the world’s history is not the
giving of millions by someone of great name; it is the giving of a mite
by a widow whose name does not appear. Behind the widow’s mite was no
sense of duty; it was the full, free and perfect gift of a heart filled
with love. In the Bible “duty” is mentioned but five times; “love,”
hundreds.
In the conquest of any weakness in our mental or moral make-up; in the
attainment of any strength; in our highest and truest relation to
ourselves and to the world, let us ever make “love” our watchword, not
mere “duty.”
If we desire to live a life of truth and honesty, to make our word as
strong as our bond, let us not expect to keep ourselves along the narrow
line of truth under the constant lash of the whip of duty. Let us begin
to love the truth, to fill our mind and life with the strong white light
of sincerity and sterling honesty. Let us love the truth so strongly
that there will develop within us, without our conscious effort, an
ever-present horror of a lie.
If we desire to do good in the world, let us begin to love humanity, to
realize more truly the great dominant note that sounds in every mortal,
despite all the discords of life, the great natural bond of unity that
makes all men brothers. Then jealousy, malice, envy, unkind words and
cruel misjudging will be eclipsed and lost in the sunshine of love.
The greatest triumph of the nineteenth century is not its marvellous
progress in invention; its strides in education; its conquests of the
dark regions of the world; the spread of a higher mental tone throughout
the earth; the wondrous increase in material comfort and wealth,—the
greatest triumph of the century is not any nor all of these; it is the
sweet atmosphere of Peace that is covering the nations, it is the
growing closer and closer of the peoples of the earth. Peace is but the
breath, the perfume, the life of love. Love is the wondrous angel of
life that rolls away all the stones of sorrow and suffering from the
pathway of duty.