p. 78Habits of Duty

By way of conclusion to all that has been said on the subject of duty, I would fain impress upon you to-day the absolute need of forming, what may be called, a habit of duty. To act on principle is to act on a habit of duty. To do one’s duty in all the various relations of life only “by fits and starts,” or in casual and isolated instances, helps us but little on the way of life. Loose stones, scattered all over a field, no more make a building than do stray acts of duty a dutiful man. What we call a good character is but repeated acts of duty, in one line or many, built up into something fixed, steady, permanent. How expressive is the phrase, “A slave to duty”; yet, if we don’t aim at something like this, we are merely playing with duty. To do our duty properly, it ought to become a necessity; and it can only become so by habit. Not that a habit of duty imposes constraint on the will, as determinists would say. All habits are freely acquired and are the outcome of repeated free acts. We cannot call seeing, hearing, thinking, or digesting our food habitual just because they are not under control; whereas, to work, to pray, to study, to be chaste, sober and economical, are, or may become, habits, for the very reason that they are free and not necessary acts. And yet, if we know a man’s character, i. e., the habits he has freely formed, we can almost as safely predict his conduct and end, as if he were under the spell of fatalism. Habit, therefore, we may say, within the realm of duty, fixes one’s destiny.

We must learn, therefore, to do duty by habit. Then only is duty trustworthy. If a man is good at anything, or for anything, he must be good by habit. We must try to grow into doing our duty unconsciously and automatically, as it were, just as we learn to poise ourselves on foot, on horseback or on bicycle, without hardly knowing when, how, or why we came to do so.

Both in mind and body we are all under the law, or rather the spell, of habit. We are its creatures and thralls. What we usually do, and the same is true of what we usually say and think, has a tendency to recur, so that acts of duty, by dint of repetition, grow easy and natural, or, if neglected, hard and almost morally impossible. The law of habit, in this matter, is, therefore, both a blessing and a danger; for it makes vice easy, as well as virtue. Like the god Janus, habit looks both ways. It is a double-edged sword that cuts on either side. It shapes both saints and sinners, men of duty, or men of pleasure. It hardens and fossilizes the one, till, in the words of Job, “His heart shall be as hard as a stone, and firm as a smith’s anvil” (Job xli, 15), or strengthens the good element in the other till temptation loses almost all power over him. We can, indeed, truthfully affirm of all that they may lapse from duty; yet, of those in whom the habit is deeply rooted, we are sure they never will. As soon might we expect the moon or stars to swerve from their accustomed paths in the sky, as for certain souls whose characters are set in habits of duty, to swerve from the straight course of righteousness: “A young man according to his way, even when he is old he will not depart from it.”

The matter of our discourse to-day will deal, first, with the power of habit in relation to duty; and second, the application of this power to our own growth in habits of duty.

I. Life is but a growth of habits. Our powers of body and soul represent the result of endless repeated acts. To stop using a faculty, i. e., to stop the growth of a habit, is to lose it. All trades and professions are mere habits. To learn a trade, or an art, or any sort of business, is just forming a habit. To play an instrument of music, to speak a language, to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a teacher, to walk, or ride, or swim, is simply to shape our habits in a certain direction, difficult at first, then easy, and finally automatic, almost. It is the same with the Divine art of doing one’s duty. To be dutiful and good is to have acquired virtue, i. e., habits of duty; to be bad and worthless characters, is to have fallen under vicious habits, i. e., habits of neglecting duty.

So powerful is the force of habit, in one way or the other, that it will actually turn downright repugnance and pain into pleasure. Look at the feats of skill and agility to be seen in a gymnasium or a circus that make us shrink and squirm to witness, so hard and painful do they seem. And yet they are but acquired knacks, mere tricks of habit. Touching on comparisons more in accord with our subject, an unaccustomed palate, as in the case of a child, or even an animal, will turn away with loathing from alcohol or tobacco, in both of which devotees to the habit revel with delight. So is it in the vital affair of duty. Habit alone can root it in the soul. In this matter, too, we are faced with a serious alternative, viz., the growth of vices. The soul of man is like a garden. If we cease to grow good and useful plants, weeds grow of themselves. They spring up unbidden. Sin or vice is the antithesis of duty—a breach of it. How pained and shocked we were at our first sin, our first conscious breaking away from duty. How the transgression of duty first stings and burns the untainted conscience as the remorse it awakens sweeps through the fallen soul like fire or plague. But let this breach of duty by sin become habitual, and it becomes not only easy but a pleasure. The abandonment of duty hardens into vice, or rather, vices, for sins go in groups, and by degrees crystallize into a set character. It is thus the devil’s chain is wound round the soul, and we become “fast bound with the ropes of our own sins.” God’s forgiveness, it is true, we may be always sure of; but every fresh breach of duty weakens the will—lessens its power of resistance. The acts of sin involved in these breaches of duty grow into those habits out of which character is woven; and we know that under the sway of character for evil the poor will becomes well-nigh paralyzed. A tree, when a sapling, may be bent, twisted and shaped as you like; but once full-grown and set, the very tempest that uproots it and hurls it to a distance cannot alter its shape. Hence, the need of early training in habits of duty, if we are to escape the fate of getting “rooted in evil,” when all that is left us is to cry out with St. Paul, “Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death” (Rom. vii, 24). For “habit,” in the way of duty, or its opposite, “is a second nature”; or, as St. Augustine expresses it, “Custom, unresisted, hardens into necessity”; “If the Ethiopian can change his skin and the leopard his spots, so may you also do well when you have learned evil.” “A young man according to his ways, even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Escape from the evil habits of neglecting duty is, humanly speaking, hopeless. As well might the struggling bird get free from the fowler’s net, or the quivering fish from the baited hook, as we cast off the devil’s fetters, when sinful pleasure, and not duty, is the law and measure of our lives. “His own iniquities catch the wicked, and he is fast bound by the ropes of his own sins.” On forming a habit of duty, therefore, depends the loss or gain of life. To live in the only true sense of the word, is to train the conscience to act up to duty; in other words, to do right by habit, not by mere fitful impulse.

I would here warn you as good Catholics against taking a part for the whole. By a habit of duty I do not mean the observance, merely, of some duty, but of all. The “whole duty of man,” as many appear to think, does not consist in being a good citizen, or an honest tradesman, or a brave soldier, or keeping out of debt or jail. All this is only a very small fraction of the whole sum of duty. We must pay the whole debt of duty to the last cent. The doing so, or striving to do so, with God’s help, is what we mean by forming the habit of duty. This is “fulfilling all justice,” it is making “our justice exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees” with which the world is still full, who seem to think that all duty consists in man’s willing response to the bugle cry from camp, office, workshop, or field, quite oblivious of the fact that “these things they ought to have done, and those not left undone,” that the habit of duty takes in the regular discharge in thought, word, and deed, of all that we owe to God, our neighbor, and ourselves.

II. So much for the influence of habit on duty and its opposite. We have next to speak of its application to our own lives and those of others. It may well fill us with dismay when we reflect on our own habits and those of our fellow men, to note what a small space in our lives, duty, in the full sense of the term, occupies. We hardly ever, perhaps, gave the matter a thought, except in a very hazy or perfunctory way. And yet we are, and must be, individually, an agglomeration of good or bad habits. Each man has his character and ways; in other words, he is a tangled growth of habits. Are they habits of duty or of neglect of duty? There is no middle course. If good, so much the better for us; if bad, is there any hope? Can we rise from the slough of despond, of neglected duty, to be again children of light? Furthermore, is there any hope for the crowds of hardened sinners worse than ourselves, dead to all sense of duty in the Catholic sense of the term? We hopefully answer, yes. In the holy religion we profess there is no fatalism, no insuperable barriers of naturalism that ruthlessly bar resistance to habit, and entangle poor sinners in the nets of their own weaving. We believe in free will, and, what is more, free will aided by grace. There is no unpardonable breach of duty, no criminal neglect of it, no habit of disregarding it, that the sacramental power of grace, joined to our own good will, may not reach and heal. We are not chained to moral goodness, neither are we, happily, to moral evil. If cripples through long neglect of duty, we may yet, at the Divine command, “arise and walk.”

There is no door closed against us that the keys given to Peter, and ever bright with daily use, will not unlock. There are no incurables whom the fountains, gushing forth the healing waters of life, cannot restore. Howsoever far one may have wandered from the path of duty, were one as deeply sunk in crime as the thief on the cross, the publican in the temple, or the poor degraded creature about to be stoned, could one say with David before his conversion, “My iniquities have gone over my head,” yet, with grace, may he be saved and healed, and walk again in the straight paths of duty and righteousness. Habits of pride, anger, gluttony, and lust, may paralyze the will and extinguish all sense of duty to such an extent as to make all hope of delivery seem chimerical; yet, there is no hopelessly fatal spell woven round the soul: “Dum spiro, spero”: Whilst there is life, there is hope. There is no hoary prodigal even “living on the husks of swine,” wandering naked of virtue and deeds of duty, like the madman of the tombs, that may not yet “arise and go to his father,” and get clad again with the habits of a dutiful son.

Even apart from grace, the law of habit, as I said, cuts both ways. It has, therefore, an encouraging, as well as a discouraging, side. It tells powerfully as well in the casting off of bad habits, as in adopting new, so that under it “where sin abounded, grace may more abound.” p. 82To a great extent man is master of his own destiny. The shaping of his character is largely in his own hands. He is a plastic and adaptable creature, and, given the two factors of grace and free will working together, like horses in a team, he may guide himself in any direction. He can turn right round from bad roads to good ones. The first effort in the way of long neglected duty is hardest; but each succeeding effort is easier. Every temptation to evil, resisted, diminishes the force of the next; and so on, till the habit of duty and self-restraint gains the victory over self-indulgence and neglect. The tendency of our nature, doubtless, is downward. The weight of flesh and blood pulls us to earth and earthly ways and habits; but all the same we can, and by duty ought to, resist. “The lust,” i. e., the desire of, or consent to, sin, “shall be under thee and thou shalt have dominion over it” (Gen. iv, 7). The growth and choice of habits is, in some respects, as much under our control as the crops we plant in our gardens and fields. It is futile, a mere attempt to escape responsibility, in fact, to say that we are powerless against passion and other evil influences weighing down on our weak wills. We are free agents. We control and select amongst conflicting motives, and so determine our own choice. We feel ever conscious, no matter how powerful the motive under which we are acting, that we are still its master, and can stop or go on with it at will. Hence, we are responsible for our habits, inasmuch as they are built up of our own free and oft-repeated acts. If bad, they were freely adopted, and can, therefore, be freely abandoned. And if we find “the world, the flesh and the devil too strong for us,” the resources of Grace, i. e., the whole power of God, is at our command, “seeing,” like St. Paul, “another law in our members fighting against the law of our minds,” we may have lost heart; but like him we can also say, “I can do all things in Him, who strengtheneth me.” All our efforts hitherto, perhaps, to get back again to habits of duty and good conduct, may have ended in dismal failure and disappointment. But let us seek help from without. We live in God’s Kingdom, and all its resources are ready in our defense. The forces marshaled in our favor are stronger and braver by far than those drawn up against us. The whole heavenly army is with us when we engage in sincere and earnest prayer.

Most of us say daily, if not with heart at least with lips, the “Our Father,” and at its close ask to be delivered from evil. Now, the saddest and worst of all evils is the habit of sin—the state of those who neglect their duty. Many there are who say this prayer with utter insincerity, not wishing to be delivered. They are thralls to sin, who hug and kiss the chains that bind them. Of them we can say nothing. God will not, and, be it said in all reverence, cannot, save them against their will. In the ordinary course of Providence the will is never forced, for it is free. But there are many waiting for the “stirring of the waters,” many who would fain cast aside their sticks and crutches and walk in the full light of day—act freely and habitually in the full discharge of their Christian duties. They feel rapidly drifting down the stream of tendency, that is set, “opposite to God.” They feel hopeless or apathetic, and yet, by a sort of contradiction, long too for “the coming of the Kingdom of God,” by His reign, through the habit of full Christian duty, in their hearts. Mere naturalism will not save them and cannot cure them. A life of grace, of sustained Divine help, is what they seek and need.

“Unless your justice exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” said our Lord. But our justice, i. e., our goodness, our piety, rarely comes up to that of the Scribes and Pharisees. What can we do? Our Lord furnishes the answer in telling us of the new birth. But, “how can a man enter his mother’s womb and be born again when old,” answered Nicodemus, doubtingly. This moral miracle, this utter change of habits, this new birth, is effected daily in those who cast aside the garb of sin and walk forth into life clad in Christ, ever acting from a sense and habit of duty—duty in its ideal and Christian standard.

Let us, then, be up and doing. Let us pray for good will and ever cooperate with grace offered us. A noble and truly Christian character is the highest reward of a sustained habit of duty. It means peace, happiness—the Kingdom of God, both here and hereafter. How hard people strive and toil to build a house, found a business, merely to leave a decaying and perishable monument behind. Shall we do nothing to build the house of God, found His Kingdom, mirror the likeness of His Son, the ideal man in our hearts. This can be only done by “putting off the old man and clothing ourselves with the new”; in other words, let us uproot bad habits and plant new ones. This is the purpose and aim of all that has been said on the subject of duty. It is good to know its meaning and worth; but the really important thing is to do it, i. e., to carry out or fulfil all justice. This can only be effected by ever cultivating and acting out of the habit of duty.