p. 15Conditions of Duty

To-day I propose to speak of the conditions required for duty. Let me frankly say that I speak of duty in the full, round, Catholic sense of the term. I am not speaking to pagans, or even university scholars, but good believing Christians. Duty is good conduct, the soul of life, and not culture, which is merely varnish. No doubt man is born a moral, i. e., dutiful, just as he is born an intelligent being, and more or less conducts himself as such; yet the theory and practise of duty that go to the roots of conduct are found only in Christian ethics. Away from religion, it is a mere wreck. To divorce duty from God is pulling it up by the roots. When it will wither and die is only a question of time. Christ as man even was admittedly the world’s greatest moralist, and He has put morals, i. e., duty, under the care and guardianship of the Church. In matters of conduct, she is the high court of appeal, as well as in those of faith.

And happily so, because to judge of recent contributions to moral science, the world is going back rather than forward.

Just as Christ came to perfect, not to destroy, the law, so has He elevated and spiritualized the natural elements of duty taught by reason. The old Greek and Roman moralists were, and are, our pedagogues leading to Christ. They drew nearer, immeasurably nearer, the divine fountains of duty in Him, than those who boast to-day of founding a school independent of “God and His Christ.”

Unaided human reason fails to teach even, and much less enable man to live up to, the standard of duty to which he aspires. He is, therefore, naturally supernatural—a state for which he was destined, and in which our faith tells us he was created. Hence we put down grace as a necessary condition for fulfilling one’s Christian duty. Light, liberty and grace are thus the three necessary conditions for duty on its practical side. Grace, so far from destroying nature or reason, perfects it, braces and tones it up.

I. Before touching on these conditions it may be helpful to remind you that the matter of duty is human acts, i. e., acts that are personal—our very own—and for which we are responsible. Man is the only creature on earth, that is a person, which means that he is intelligent, self-conscious, self-centered. He alone cay say or think I and mine. He is said to possess himself—to be his own master. He can call his powers and capacities his own, and acquire other things that he calls his property; have the use of personal and possessive pronouns in all languages. Things and animals are not persons; they are only chattels. They have no sense of duty, nor can they have—except by a figure of speech. They are irresponsible, and have neither rights nor duties. What we call the rights of animals, and our duties toward them, mean that we are bound not to abuse the creatures of God, or turn to evil purposes the supreme dominion He gave us over the rest of creation. Cruelty to animals does not cease to be a sin on our part because animals are not persons and have no rights or claims on us. This cruelty is, on our part, a breach of the duty we owe to God, and therefore a sin—a gross, unmanly sin of cruelty to a helpless, albeit irrational, creature.

This capacity of possession gives a man personal rights that may be either inherited or acquired. Duty is the correlative of right. As every man is born into certain personal rights, and acquires fresh ones in the way of property or otherwise in the course of living, these rights of his impose on everybody else the corresponding duty of respecting them and leaving him in full possession of them. As everyone has rights, so has everyone corresponding duties. Rights imply duties except in the case of almighty God. The great cardinal virtue of justice is the assigning to each one his rights and duties. Duty is, therefore, a form of justice—a giving each person what is due, what we owe him. Hence we aptly call duty a debt that in justice we are bound to pay; and if we don’t, we are consequently unjust. A man who does his duty all round is therefore a just and righteous man—a saint in the full sense of the term. But, as in the complex life we now lead, duty is a tangled web of obligation, often opposed to passion and self-interest, than which nothing is more blinding, we need, as a condition of duty, light, and great light.

We can not, or rather will not, do what is right, unless we see it to be right, and without light we can not see, or what, in the matter of duty, is the same thing, know. Hence we speak of the light of reason or of faith as an essential condition of duty. What it is and whence it springs is not our purpose here to determine. All we want to impress on you is that without this strange light of knowledge duty would be impossible, and, indeed, man would not be man. Let the world cease to be flooded with light and forthwith life, movement, energy cease. Light is the world’s soul. So in the moral order the soul is bathed in light, making clear to even the most degraded human beings the difference between right and wrong, good and evil. Through it duty in rude outline at least is seen and felt by all. The universal sense of sin that oppresses all evil-doers is witness to the universal light or knowledge of duty, of which sin is the breach.

There is no part of the earth’s surface that escapes the light. The sun shines for long periods even over its poles; and in his absence other sources of light take his place. In the world of duty, likewise, there is ever shining on men’s souls the mystic light of reason, or faith, that enables every normal person in possession of his faculties to say, I see clearly enough that I ought to do what is right—i. e., I ought to do my duty.

We may compare the two great sources of this divinely spiritual light to the sun and moon, that in turn rule the sky, day and night.

The light needful to know what we have to do in the way of duty may vary in measure and intensity, but is never altogether absent from any healthy mind. As I said, the most degraded nations have an idea of duty, calling some actions good, others bad; one character or line of conduct right and straight, another wrong; thus showing the presence of this all-pervading, needful light. Though there may be, and are, various degrees of it; yet there is not, and never will be, total absence. It is the light “that enlighteneth every man who cometh into this world.” The material world, with its living freight, would not probably survive the extinction of all light for a single day—no more would the moral world the suppression of light of duty. Ordered life would cease and earth would become a pandemonium or a hell.

II. The next postulate of duty is liberty. An act of duty is what is technically called a “human act,” i. e., an act for which he is responsible, an act that he is free to do or omit, and of which freedom, therefore, is a necessary element. Men are never praised or blamed for doing what they can not help; but they are for doing their duty, or leaving it undone; thus showing that they are free. In popular language, we speak of forcing people to do their duty, but if force does not mean persuasion then the result is not duty at all; it is no more than mere mechanical movement, the husk and matter of duty without the soul. As well speak of forcing a steam engine to do its duty because we make it move. Duty is necessarily free service. Otherwise it is only forced movement. An act done under compulsion can not be an act of duty, for the very reason that it is not free. Liberty is of the essence of duty.

Hence beasts have no duties because they are not free agents. We force them to work, but to speak of them doing their duty except as a metaphor is absurd. Though free in their movements, and thus not under compulsion, they are yet irresistibly urged to act as they do under the impulse of instincts they can not resist. Passion in them is not subject to control as in us. They are its slaves, while we are, or ought to be, its masters. We are aware of the double element of necessity and freedom within us, certain functions of soul and body that go on independently of our will, others that we freely determine, and among them all acts of duty.

God frames and rules His creatures according to their nature, rigidly and fixedly in the domain of matter. Without constraint, yet necessarily by compelling instinct, in living irrational creatures; freely, in conscious, intelligent, self-determining agents. These last alone are capable of duty. Many, no doubt, deny us real freedom, saying we are only self-adjusting machines, like clocks or watches. We sway, or swing, in any particular direction under the irresistible force of determining motives, and, in truth, are no more free than a balance spring or pendulum. But all this is gratuitous sophistry that a little reflection soon dissipates. In going through acts of duty we feel that we are acting under a full sense of freedom and personal responsibility, without which indeed duty were an empty sound. Whatsoever the weight of motive, or force, or impulse, we all realize in the depth of our own consciousness—the facts of which are to us, in matters of truth, the last tribunal of appeal—we feel, I repeat, that we are quite free to do or leave undone, to determine on a course of action or refrain even under pressure of the weightiest motives. We are free in the selection of the motives that determine our action. We choose, no doubt, under pressure of what we call the strongest motive; but we know very well that we are free all the time. Duty, as we understand the term, would be inconceivable without liberty. We excuse thieving and killing in babies, idiots and the insane, because they are not free, they are incapable of crime thereby, like animals; but the liar, the forger, and the burglar we condemn because they can avoid, if they choose, the gross breaches of duty that label them what they are.

That man is a free agent, both within and without the sphere of duty, ever is and ever will be the unbroken belief of the race. It is as deeply imbedded in language, law and custom as gold in the rock. No theory of moral necessity has ever held its own in the world of thought, or has ever been professed, much less acted on, by its adherents, outside their own studies. Like abstract scepticism, determination is a mere paper theory.

But men are so merged in matter, their gaze is so fixed on nature and her stern, unbending laws that they hardly cast a thought on the moral and spiritual world around them, wherein God rules and reigns over free subjects by morally binding laws that they ought to observe, yet may or may not obscure. This is the great world of service faithful and free, i. e., of true and earnest duty.

In few, if any, treatises on ethics nowadays do we find any mention of grace as a necessary factor of duty, yet it is the factor. God is not alluded to in books of science to-day; yet if divine action and influence in the material universe that science deals with were withdrawn for an instant, it would instantaneously perish. He is the mainstay of all that is, but more especially in the moral and spiritual order. Both “to will and to act” are His, and “without His aid,” i. e., His grace, “we can do nothing.” What we ought to do, and in duty are bound to do, that with the grace, and only with the grace, of God we can do. Even scientifically ethics more than any other branch of knowledge has its roots in theology. It finds the basis of duty in God seeing the need of order in conduct, and willing and commanding us to observe it. Duty in the full sense of the word—duty, I mean, that does not rest in the mere outward body of moral action, but goes down to intention, to motive, the very soul of conduct, is the joint effect of grace and free will. No doubt we are naturally good; we find within us a love of the ideal, an inborn approval of righteousness as opposed to wickedness; still we were stricken in the fall. Man is like a wounded bird, made to fly, but forced to hop and tumble over the ground. He can no longer raise himself above the earth without help from on high. Duty is a gigantic task if carried out fully, and overtaxes the powers of unaided nature. It is like trying to meet a huge debt with nothing or next to nothing in the till. Duty with us is not narrowed down to mere outward good conduct, or, at best, a fulfilment of the claims of natural justice. So far from being distinct from religion, it covers the same practical ground as religion. It is whole-souled service. It has not dwindled into a branch of human law, but, under the guidance of the Church, has expanded into a great tree. It no longer deals with the body of conduct, but the soul also. It surveys the whole field of the heart.

Three nations have made their mark in history and given shape to actual life, the Greek, the Roman and the Jewish. All three had lofty notions of duty—but duty based on widely different motives. The Roman grounded duty on law and force, the Greek on culture, the Jew, or Hebrew, on God. Rome, once strong, just and so far dutiful, sank to a mere name. The only idea of duty we inherit from her is blind, enforced obedience to law. It is cold and lifeless, effectual only when backed by material force. To Greece we owe an ideal of duty, based on culture, but, alas! it is an ideal that saved neither herself nor her imitators from the most debasing sensuality. Refinement and education are but veneer and enamel. They often serve but to cloak the base material underneath. Culture trains the head, but leaves the heart and will, seat and center of duty, uncleansed. Judea, on the other hand, in and through Christ the Messias, has given us the loftiest and noblest idea of duty the world ever received—a view of duty that permeates the whole moral being—that makes the true liver and doer, that makes all men who rise to it pure, upright, transparently truthful to the inmost recesses of the heart. Old Rome was masterful, Greece intellectual, Palestine, or rather the Church, the outcome of Judaism, spiritual.

Christ by the grace He has won for us, the light wherewith He has enlightened us, and the liberty of the children of God, which He has purchased for us, has put new life into duty, or the moral law, He has made its observance possible and feasible. From a dead and lifeless theory duty, under His magic touch, has grown up into a living force. From a mere department of human law, it has become glowing, vital, personal conduct.

Duty elevated and sanctified by grace is no longer a mere affair of correct behavior, a code of rules, written in a book or traced in brass and stone, cold, lifeless and motionless—but engraven on the the heart, vivified by the spirit of God—it brings us into close personal union with the living God, making us His true children. “Whosoever are led by the spirit of God they are the sons of God.”

In conclusion, then, hold as a life-long principle that man is born into this world, not to seek selfish ease and pleasure, but to do God’s will, i. e., His duty. Be assured that there is no genuine peace, rest, or contentment away from duty. God put them in duty, and who dare or can put them elsewhere? All calculations of worldly prudence or personal gain must be laid aside when conscience rings out a clear call to duty. It is strange, yet true, that the happiest, and at the same time the most trying, moments of life are those passed in doing our duty. Ever to strive for what is right, ever to dare to be what we ought to be, ever to be bold enough and fearless enough to say no when tempted to swerve from duty, this is true manliness, because conduct alone worthy of a man.

Let us beg, therefore, the great Father, whose children we are, to give us that light of intelligence, that freedom of will from slavery of passion, and, above all, that grace, that divine force, needful to do His holy will, in which lies our duty.