The Holiness of Duty

“Wherefore the law is holy.” — ROMANS vii. 12.

ST. PAUL, in writing to the Jews and urging on them the Revelation of Jesus, encountered a question which is universal, but which came into special prominence among them. It was the question of the relation which the Law of God holds to His immediate personal presence and communion. The Jews had been drilled for years to obey the Law which God had given to them by the hands of Moses. Now Christ had come and said: “I manifest to you the God who gave the Law. Look at me and see, not His will only, see Him Himself, — His qualities, His holiness, His tenderness, His love.” It was a higher life of personal communion which He offered, far above the life of obedience in which they had been living.

And at once Christ’s coming made two classes among the Jews. Some of them rejected Him and some accepted Him. Those who rejected Him said: “We do not need Him. Moses is enough. There can be none greater than Moses. We do not desire any such spiritual life as He offers. Let us do our duty. Let us keep the Law and all is well.”

Of this class were the better and earnest portion of the Pharisees. On the other hand, among those who accepted Christ, there were some who said: “Now Moses is obsolete. A mere servile obedience to law is not for those who have come into personal knowledge of God through His Son. We are the saints. We are above the Law.” There are various indications of such a perversion of the spiritual nature of Christianity, precisely the same that came, at the spiritual revival of the Reformation, among the Anabaptists of the continent and of England. These were the two classes. One class held the Law of Moses to be absolute and final, and thought that obedience to its minute details constituted all of religion. The other class believed that obedience was a mere slavery when one had been admitted to the loftiest spiritual experiences. Against both of these classes St. Paul stands up with his simple as sertion of the holiness of the Law. “The Law is holy,” he declares. To the first class he says: “Obedience to Moses has a spiritual meaning, and if you would allow it, it would lead you on to Christ.” To the second class he says: “No perception of and sympathy with Jesus can free you from the fundamental necessity of keeping God’s Law. The Law and the Gospel belong together. Not merely the Gospel, but the Law, is holy.” Borrowing his figure from the sight that they all saw in the streets each day, the slave leading a little boy to the teacher’s house, he said, “The Law was our schoolmaster, to bring us unto Christ.”

Times have all changed, but man is still the same, and this difference which St. Paul found lies so deep in human nature that there are the same two classes still. There are men of the Law and men of the Gospel still; that is, there are men whose pervading thought is duty, the doing of what they think they ought to do; and there are other men whose pervading thought is piety, the affectionate and spiritual relation of man to God. We know them both. The first man never speaks of anything like the Love of God, never talks about holiness, never struggles for spiritual experience, but he is always looking for what is right and doing it. The other man dwells much on the soul’s life, loves God, and knows that God loves him, prays, reaches out after divine communion. And each of them is liable to the narrowness of his own kind. One of them makes nothing of spiritual experience, and says: ‘To do his duty — that is what a man is for. Let him do that, lovingly or unlovingly, believingly or unbelievingly, and there is the limit of his nature.” The other always tends to count duty as low and says: “Commune with God. Be right at heart. The outward act is of small moment.” This man calls the first man “moralist “; and the first answers back by calling him “pietist.” It is the oldest among all the differences between earnest men. It has its origin in deep differences of character. And it calls for a constant assertion about all duty of what St. Paul asserted about the Law of Moses — that duty leads to piety and that no piety is true which has not the vigor of duty in it. The holiness of duty is a deep truth which both the moralist and the pietist need to know.

I want to speak about that truth to-day. I want to preach of duty in its relation to religion. I think there are a great many of you who are trying to do your duty, who almost anxiously disown having anything to do with religion. I want to show you, if I can, that the two cannot be separated.

There are, then, three possible powers by which the action of mankind is governed. They are the Law of Nature, the Perception of Right, and the Love of God. Government by the first power we call Impulse, by the second, Duty, by the third, Religion. And each of these has its tendencies towards the fuller government that follows it. Impulse, proving its insufficiency, gives way to Duty; and Duty, likewise finding the limit of its power, passes into Religion. Either of the first two that refuses to lead on to its successor, and counts itself the final, perfect government of man, fails and be comes corrupt. If we insist on living by nothing but Impulse, Impulse immediately loses its sacredness and becomes passion and waywardness; if we will own nothing higher than the power of Duty, which is conscience, conscience itself fails us, either by growing weak and indulgent, or by growing so hard and rigid that the passions rebel against it and there is terrible anarchy within. The first growth, the growth of Impulse into Duty, is told in that lofty poem of Wordsworth, the Ode to Duty, the noblest ethical poem of our language. There he recounts his own moral history in its first stage. He tells

( how, beginning simply under the direction of his impulse, doing what he chose to do, he came, not to flagrant vice, but to the dissatisfaction and restlessness and uncertainty of having no master, or rather of having a master who governed by no law that his subjects could know. And then he solemnly gives himself into the keeping of the higher government of Duty, to do not what he chose, but what he knew was right, and declares the peace and light that he expects by such a change of mastery:

Stern Lawgiver! yet them dost wear

The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face:

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,

And fragrance in thy footing treads;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong.

And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.

To humbler functions, awful Power!

I call thee: I myself commend
Unto thy guidance from this hour, — Oh, let my weakness have an end!
Give unto me, made lowly wise,
The spirit of self-sacrifice;
The confidence of reason give;
And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live.

That is the first great step in moral life — from Impulse into Duty. I hope that there are many of you who have taken it. I trust, as I look into these young people’s faces, that I am looking upon many who, having “tired of unchartered freedom” and “felt the weight of chance desires,” have commended themselves to the guidance of the “awful power” of duty, and are trying everywhere to do what is right. And now I want to impress it upon you that this is not the end, that this Duty is not the ultimate and original governor of the human soul, that she is the “daughter of the voice of God,” that she gets its holiness from her relationship to Him, and that no man has fully honored or obeyed Duty who has not seen in her the authority and beauty of her Father, God.

All this appears in various ways. And first of all, I think, in a certain struggle of duty towards personality. See what I mean. It is no doubt possible to conceive of duty as perfectly impersonal. The great conviction of righteousness may seem to seize hold of nothing farther back than a strong current which runs mysteriously through all the world, setting toward the good and away from the bad. There is a certain grandeur in that abstract, impersonal conception. To identify oneself with that current, to be borne on toward goodness by this mysterious tendency that is in all things, to be in harmony with the deepest and best movement of the universe, — I own that that is an ambition which may illumine with its clear cold light the heart of man. We see it sweeping like the power of a voice less, invisible wind across the world. Little and great things alike yield to it. To set oneself against it seems to be monstrous. To yield oneself to it seems to be noble.

We own all this, but then come deeper questions. What is the nature of this world-wide force? All force suggests the one only primary source of force of which we know, which is personal will. The force of gravitation makes us wonder whether there be not, somewhere, some one whose will it is that every atom should seek every other atom. But the force of morality is one that it is far less possible for us to think of as entirely impersonal. It appeals to the most personal and self-conscious part of us, — our conscience. Other tendencies we can, in some moods, fancy to have their lodgment in the very material particles of which the material universe is made, but of the tendency to righteousness our imagination can never picture that. It could come only from the character of some righteous Being, uttering itself in the processes of the world He governs. Let a man own the essential difference of right and wrong, and let him feel that the great central tendencies of this world are such as to foster the right and to repress the wrong, and he can be no atheist. The fact of moral government im plies a moral governor. This is the first expression of the struggle of morality towards religion. This is the beginning of the holiness of duty.

But, again, there is another fact which I would call the spiritual suggestiveness of duty. Let me describe what I mean by that. Every attempt to do right has a tendency to reveal to us more spiritual ways of doing right, and our need of spiritual helps in doing it. For instance, a man determines to be honest. He conceives honesty in its narrowest and hardest form. It is the mere paying of debts to which he has legally bound himself. It is justice without mercy. I do not say that many a man who sets out to be honest remains forever at that point, never gets beyond that first hard, crude justice; but I am sure that when the determination is a truly moral one, when the man means to be honest solely because honesty is right, and not be cause honesty is profitable, there is a perpetual and beautiful tendency of his honesty to deepen and refine itself. He is always being urged on to see that the truly honest man not merely pays his notes, but honors the unwritten rights of all his brethren, is bound to give them what they cannot claim, must have a perfect truthfulness of heart as well as of word. So the ambition of honesty grows within him until it includes all tenderness and truth. It is a condition of the soul and not a habit of the life. If it were a mere habit of the life, it might be made by drill and discipline. If it be a spiritual condition, it can be reached only by spiritual inspiration. And so the man who, seeking honesty, began by making a resolution that he would not steal, by and by, when he recognizes the infiniteness of the task he has begun, is seen with hands reached out after spiritual help, crying, “Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”

Or take the duty of charity. You begin by giving a dollar to a poor man, because you ought to. That satisfies you at first. That is the highest notion of the duty of charity which you have reached. But, bear me witness, O, my friends, how the expansive nature of that duty opens! By and by you see that, not by giving the dollar, only by giving yourself, can you satisfy its claims. A keen, warm

THE HOLINESS OF DUTY 2O?

sympathy that makes your brother’s need your own — nothing short of that is really charity. And to do that charity you must have — before you know it you find yourself praying for the Spirit of Him who gave Himself for us, who for oursakes became poor. That is what I meant by the spiritual suggestiveness of duty. Every duty presses out and demands its highest motive and its fullest action. It must have, therefore, the highest help. It becomes infinite and claims God. In that tendency of it lies another element of the holiness of duty.

But there is one thing more. Duty leads men into the presence of God, is the schoolmaster to bring us to Christ even more by its failures than by its triumphs, even more by what it cannot do than by what it lacks. What Duty lacks is the power of repair and restoration. I do not know what limit there is to the career over which the power of Duty might carry a man who was perpetually obedient, and never fell. Her hands are on his shoulders always. She guides him along, and hurries him from virtue into virtue. The course in which she leads him grows more and more spiritual. He is amazed and fascinated at the new visions of goodness that she opens to him. Hand in hand the man and Duty, the man led by Duty, they go sweeping along, triumphant, almost defiant, in their strength. So all goes well, till the man falls. He is disobedient. He sins. And then how everything is changed! Then Duty’s power to help him is gone. Nay, it almost seems as if her will to help him is gone. She who led him stands over him, as he lies there; she cannot raise him up; she seems almost pitiless as she looks down upon him and says: “You are not what I thought you. I did not know how weak you were. I can do nothing more for you. Some one stronger than I must help you.” And then, in that weakness which Duty has made manifest, but cannot cure, the man reaches past the exacting Duty to the forgiving and restoring God. O, my dear friends, if you have ever struggled bravely, enthusiastically, and then, in breaking down and sinning, have discovered that you needed something which struggle could not give you, then you know what all this means. You look back on that old struggle, and it seems beautiful and sacred to you; but its chief beauty and sacredness in your eyes is this — that it showed you your weakness and sent you to the strength of God to get what it could not give. As Duty stands upon the farther limit of her power, and sends the soul, for which she can no longer do what the soul needs, to Christ, — there is where Duty in her failure is noblest, and shows her completest holiness.

These, then, are the holy tendencies of trying to do right. No man really enters on that struggle but before him there loom up, dim and beautiful in the distance towards which his face is set, the highest attainments of the spiritual life. They are not to be reached by the mere powers which that struggle involves. They require, as we have seen, that that struggle should show its incompleteness, and should fail, in order that other powers may be found needed and be summoned to the soul ’s help. But still, partly by what it is to bring itself, and partly by what, through its manifested incompleteness, it is to set the man to seeking somewhere else, the struggle after righteousness is the gateway to the profoundest spiritual life.

How shall we think about the man of duty, the moral man, as he is commonly called? First of all, we must define him clearly to ourselves. We must not give the name where it does not belong. He is not a moral man who simply falls in with right practices because they are the settled standards of the community he lives in, or because on the whole he perceives that they tend to a man’s prosperity. A very large part of the confusion which, in other days more than now, has broken out in pulpit denunciations of what were called “merely moral men,” came, I think, just in this way — by allowing the name to men who were not moral men at all. A man is not a good man simply because he does good things. The moral man is he who does good things because they are good, who loves righteousness for itself, who obeys his conscience, who is willingly and heartily in the power of the current which sets through and under all things to uprightness, the man who means and tries to be good. Of such a man all that I have said is true. He is always being led towards the thought of a personal God. He is always discovering on some new side the infiniteness and spirituality of duty. He is always finding that as duty becomes more spiritual he needs more manifestly a spiritual helper. And as his efforts fail he is always being driven to seek a Saviour, some one who can rescue and repair his life. I do not believe that any man can be truly moral and yet be merely moral. His struggle to do right must bring him into the Divine Presence. “I will wash mine hands in innocency,” says David, “and so will I go to Thine altar”; or as our Lord Himself declared, “If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine.” That is the holiness of duty.

This connection between the moral and the spiritual life is the key to all the history of the Jews and gives it all its interest. We ordinarily say that the Old Testament history was a preparation for the Messiah, the Law made ready for the Gospel. That is true, but that is not all. It was not simply that for two thousand years God was preparing for an event which only came when those two thousand years were over. It was that all through those two thousand years the Law of God was leading souls on into the Gospel which all the time was awaiting them. It was that always Moses was the door by which men came to a Christ who was always present. Through all those years, as any man tried to do what was right, the doors of spirituality opened before him, and he entered into some knowledge of the spiritual redemption. David said: “O, how I love thy Law ’ ‘; and straightway he was led on to all those Psalms which are full of the anticipated spirit of Christianity. Obedience and spiritual vision brighten and darken together in perfect correspondence — that is the beauty of the Old Testament. ‘The path of the just is as a shining light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” And when at last the supreme spiritual manifestation came, and Christ appeared, it was because the Jews had disobeyed the moral Law that they rejected the spiritual Gospel. In the description of our Lord’s own parable, it was because the laborers had seized the vineyard for themselves that they killed the owner’s son who came to claim it.

I think it is an interesting and a profitable speculation to consider what would come to pass if every thing we call “religion” were to disappear from the earth to-day, and only conscience, only duty, should be left behind. It is what some people seem to desire. Imagine everything that belongs to the thought of God — all love to Him, all trust, all application for forgiveness — nay, even the knowledge of His existence, to be taken away, and what is left is conscience, the sense of right, and the impulse to do right which is in the human heart. What would the consequence be? I think there is no doubt. Either the conscience would be swept away, unable to stand alone, and mankind become a race of devils; or else conscience in its sore need would reach out its hands into the darkness and find for itself religion. We fear the first alternative; we fear, with almost certain apprehension, that what would come would be the moral devastation of the race. But, if in any way conscience proved itself too strong for that, then it would be a most interesting sight that we should see. The race would try in all its best parts to obey this mysterious monitor within. Men here and there and everywhere would be found trying to do right, not for any clear reason they could give you, but because something within them told them it was the thing for a man to do. But by and by, not starting from any one man’s bold guess, but growing up as a misgiving and a hope in countless hearts, — as when before the sunrise millions of half-awakened particles of air are filled with dim suspicions of the coming sun, — there would be found moving among men the thought, struggling into a belief, that all this impulse of righteousness must be the echoing will of some righteous One, — the first conception of a God. And then, as Conscience went on, she would find the duties to which she gave birth outgoing her. They would put forth wings and fly where she could not follow them. And so their new needs would begin to guess at new supplies. Since here are spiritual tasks, somewhere there must be spiritual help.

And then would come failure and sin. Conscience would prove too weak. Her power would break, and yet her will would still be undiscouraged. Unable to give up her great attempt, and yet finding in herself no power of repair, it is inconceivable that she should not with one bold leap, bracing herself for it on the divinest instincts that she found in man toward his fellow - man, guess at forgiveness. She could not tell its method. She could not invent for herself the divine wonder of the Cross; but some how, somewhere, she must hope that pardon and repair were waiting, and in the dim smoke of some altar she must send up her hope towards heaven — a God, a Guide, a Saviour. These would be her dreams, forced on her by the overwhelming necessities of the task she had undertaken. And these are religion.

If among such a race there stood some keen observer, some one who knew of the old religion which had been taken out of the race to make room for this experiment of “mere morality,” and who had seen it go with pleasure, how familiar would appear to him these thoughts and hopes as they issued from the heart of this struggling human nature — a God, a Guide, a Saviour! “Ah!” he would say, “Here are the old superstitions back again. The eradication could not have been quite complete. Some roots must have been left below when the tree was cut down to the ground.” But no! That is not it. It would be something far more significant than that. It would be the holiness of duty declaring itself. It would be the human conscience by its divine necessity claiming religion.

And why should not that be true in a man which is true in a race? If all religion seems to be gone out of a man, if nothing spiritual lights up his life, what will you do? Pray for him? Yes, pray with all your might, with all your heart. But what will you try to get him to do? First of all, most of all, to do his duty, the duty that he sees. That duty, thoroughly done, must bring him into sight of God. There are a thousand cases where the unwillingness to do some right, the clinging to some old known sin, is what hinders the man from all the richness of the spiritual life. The giving up of the sin will not make the man spiritual. It is not taking off the stone that makes the grass grow where it lay; it only lets the grass grow. Here is perhaps the secret of the spiritual blight that is upon your life. Oh, if you are not spiritually minded, do not wait for mysterious light and vision. Go and give up your dearest sin. Go and do what is right. Go and put yourself thoroughly into the power of the holiness of duty.

We have reached, then, what is the beginning of light in all the darkness of the moral world. That darkness meets us everywhere. It is a sign not of clear-sightedness, but of superficiality and blindness, when a man says lightly and easily that all the world is clear to him, that the thick-crowding questions do not trouble him. They trouble most men sadly. How are the evil and the good distributed? Why, if goodness is the only joy, is goodness made so hard for men to reach? Why should truth be at once so necessary and so uncertain to the human soul? What is the meaning of all the seeming failures, the attempts that never come to anything, the souls that earn a little goodness and then lose it all, the lives that start upward and are beaten back by cruel circumstances? If there is a God and He is good, why is the world so full of wretchedness? I think there is an answer to every one of these questions, taken by itself, but all together they come flocking up about us, and the air is thick with them. You can kill every separate gnat easily enough, but the whole host of them together darkens the sun.

It is when the soul’s light is really darkened by such questions that the real holiness of duty is made manifest. Then let Conscience speak. Then listen to her voice implicitly. However all these questions may be answered, whether or not they have an answer, *’/ is right to do right, it is right to be honest, to be kind, to sacrifice yourself for others, to be pure. // is wrong to do wrong. It is wrong to be cowardly, or cruel, or dishonest, or impure. Take Duty by the hand and go where she will lead you. Then you have one strong thing to hold to in the midst of the confusion.

If this were all, if it led to nothing more, it would not satisfy us. Merely to go on doing duty, with no light — nothing to which the soul might fasten its affections, no answer opening to its questions any where — this could not satisfy a man who is both soul and conscience. The satisfaction comes as, gradually, Duty proves herself to be the usher to something greater than herself. It is very strange, I think, to see how very apt any strong sense of duty is to become religious. I turned over not long ago the pages of the Harvard Biographies, which many of you know, the lives of the graduates of Harvard who died in the war; and I could not but be struck by seeing how many of them, as their life grew deeper and more intense, became more and more religious, honored God as their Lord, trusted Him as their Father, and made His Son their friend, It was not fear of pain or death. They were not that kind of men. It was that, stung to higher duty than they had known before, all their best needs and powers had come out and, realizing the fulness of the nature God had given them, they had found in deed that “nor man nor nature satisfy whom only God created.”

*l6 THE HOLINESS OF DUTY

Suppose a moral man in Palestine, In Christ’s days, in one of those remote and dingy villages, a man who, with small light, with Pharisees wearying him with their minute and meaningless ceremonial, and with a Sadducee or two singing scepticism into his ears, had still been trying to do right. He had struggled against temptation. He had been sober, honest, kind, and pure. A hard life and a noble one. But now suppose that Christ comes through that village, and, “as His custom was,” the Saviour goes into the little synagogue or stops under the shadow of a house and talks with those who come. As He tells about His Father’s house, about the grace that brings men back to God, about the inextinguishable love in the Divine Heart, about Him self as the Saviour, and repeats perhaps the parable of the prodigal son; especially as He stands there by His very presence offering Himself as the fountain out of which whosoever thirsts may drink, — who is the first who feels His power and answers to His call? Will any one come before that anxious man who has learned his needs by trying to do his duty? We can almost see his face settle into the repose of peace, and the lines of his anxious questioning fade out ‘of it. Here is the solution of his problems, the satisfaction of his wants. He looks back and sees how all his struggles have been preparing for the day when he should meet this Saviour. The Law, his schoolmaster, has brought him to Christ. He looks back and is thankful for the holiness of duty.

I think that this is just the truth which many people need. You say: “I am not — I cannot be — religious. There is nothing spiritual in me. I can do nothing holy.” Oh, you are wrong! God has not made any soul destitute of that deepest and best prerogative of humanity, — the power to live by the unseen, to worship and love Him. But be you wrong or right your immediate course is clear. However you may think that holiness is closed to you, duty is open. You can do, to-day and to-morrow, what you know you ought to do. And O, my friend, remember that as long as you do not go in through that first and outmost vestibule, you have no right to complain that you do not reach’ the in most chamber. As long as you are leaving plain duty undone, you have no right to say that you cannot be religious.

There is great beauty in the dignity with which this truth clothes the ordinary things of life. Duty is busied with small things. But to the things which Duty works with she imparts her own holiness. When her work is perfect and she has brought her souls to the completeness of Christ, they must look back and see a sacredness in everything over which they once conquered a temptation and made them selves do what they did not want to, but knew they ought to. And as any promise of that consummation opens to them now, they must already see some beginning of that sacredness in the material on which their daily task is done.

4 The Law is holy.” Count your law holy. See what your duty is, and count that duty sacred. Let no hardness or sordidness upon the face of it blind you to the great and blessed things which it can do for your soul, — and will, if you will only let it. First give yourself to it completely. Do it with all your strength. And then let it lead you beyond yourself. Or let it introduce you to your deeper self, to the needs and powers which require and can appropriate Christ. Let it bring you to the help of the Mercy Seat and the pardon of the Cross. Duty shall never pass away. The hardness will be all gone out of it in heaven. But still there we shall do the right because we know we ought to do it; and thereby we shall be made more and more capable of the knowledge and the love of God to all eternity.