p. 8The Limits of Duty

It is no easy task to exhaust the contents of the word duty. We have spoken of its meaning and the foundation on which it rests. To-day we propose to say something of its limits, or rather, extent, which, in this matter, is nearly the same thing. Duty covers the whole field of conduct, and is, therefore, conterminous with it.

While still on the threshold of our subject, it is advisable to correct some palpable, though very common, errors about duty. First of all we must not forget that duty has a positive or affirmative side as well as a negative. To a Catholic it means more than merely “ceasing to do evil.” We must also “learn to do well.” “To enter the kingdom of heaven” it is not enough to have empty hands, they must be full. In the weighing of the soul in judgment, duty, on its negative side, i. e., the mere absence of evil, would make a poor show in the way of assets against our life’s liabilities. We can not be said to do our duty unless we are able to say not only that we avoid wrong-doing, but also “leave not undone what we ought to do.”

The young man who is said to do no harm, is far, as yet, from having done his duty. He may be, withal, a worthless and mischievous person. So far he is but an empty vessel at best.

Owing to the long prevalent, though now utterly discarded, belief in the worthlessness and uselessness of good works, quite a distorted notion of duty gained ground in many quarters. To pay no heed to personal efforts, but simply to appropriate the righteousness of another, was an easy way of “fulfilling all justice,” i. e., of doing one’s duty, but it did not long hold. Good sense and sound theology were opposed to it alike. And yet in practise this irrational view of duty is acted upon quite as much, if not more, in Catholic circles as in Protestant. Not merely individuals, but whole classes and nations, are judged and lost, even in this world, through it. The reformation in the north of Europe, the corrupt renaissance and revolution in the south, were the direct outcome of the clergy and people forgetting or failing to act on the principle that duty has its positive as well as its negative side. This error, wheresoever prevalent, spells decadence and degeneracy.

Again, duty is not to be confounded either with ability or heroism. They are quite distinct. A man may be heroic and clever, and yet anything but a model of duty. Some of the greatest scoundrels in history were both heroic and clever, and yet highly immoral in the sense of undutiful. So far from acting on high motives—the very soul of duty—narrow professionalism, gain, greed, or glory, were their main incentives to action. Able they were, patriotic, too, perhaps, but models of duty, in the Catholic sense of the term—the only sound one, rationally, be it observed—never. And yet nothing more common even in books on duty than to find the names of soldiers, sailors, scholars, statesmen, financiers, and merchants, praised as heroes and martyrs to duty—a quality which, if the truth were known, they most lacked, except in a very narrow sense. Their names are trotted out, as if success or eminence in one’s business or profession were the real marks of duty, whereas they are no proofs that their lives were those of duty at all. Duty is simply doing what we ought to do. Hence, even high sanctity is not exactly duty, as it is doing more than one is bound to do by the law and light, both of reason and faith. Indeed, strictly speaking, there are no heroes or martyrs to duty, or rather, we are all, or ought to be, heroes and martyrs to duty, because everyone is bound, i. e., ought, to do his duty in life.

Whether we die on the battlefield or amid the tender cares of home, we should all die martyrs to duty. For duty is being where one ought to be, and doing what one ought to do. All else is accidental.

It is to be observed, however, that all are not called alike. Each post in life has its duties. Light, talent, rank, occupation, modify and determine what one has to do, and ought to do; but all men, without exception, have their duty to fulfil in their respective spheres. None are exempt. Duty is universal; it applies to all. The form, not the substance, of duty changes. Howsoever exalted one’s position, be he king, Pope, ruler, or aught else, duty follows him and claims observance. Indeed, one reason why we, who stand on lower and safer ground, should not envy those who occupy these dizzy heights, is that their responsibilities, in other words, their duties, are higher and more exacting than ours, and a fall from them entails more serious consequences. One thing, therefore, is certain, that none are outside the limits of duty. Whatsoever shape or form it assumes it binds us; and the only difference that God, from whom it receives its binding force, discerns among His children, is the manner in which each one pays the debt he owes in duty. In face of duty there is no favoritism. All are equal. Each and every human being is bound to do what he ought to do.

So universal is this debt of duty that in its primary precepts it can not be dispensed with, even by God himself. For to do right and shun wrong is founded in the very nature and essence of things, the opposite of which would be a contradiction and unthinkable, and thus irreconcilable with God’s attributes. To understand this we must bear in mind that there are certain truths and laws founded on unchangeable relations, such as geometrical truths or those of number; and which we can not conceive to be otherwise than they are. They do not depend on the will of God, but were ever present as true in the divine Mind. The divine Will or action does not, and can not, terminate in unreality or nonentity. He can not contradict himself. There are certain other facts or laws, however, such because God wills they should be so—such as the laws of nature, attraction, movement, chemical combination, and the rest. These may be conceived as otherwise, had God so ordained. It is not unthinkable that the present distribution of land and water, or the shape and character of plants and animals on our earth, should be reversed, if God so willed it; but on the supposition that He made man a moral and intelligent being, we could not, without entangling ourselves in a contradiction, conceive God not willing that a man should escape. He is necessarily a God of order, and duty is the ordered conduct of a rational creature—the living up to and in accordance with his faculties. Duty, in fact, is the being and living true to our nature.

Moral truth, i. e., the principles of duty, are absolute and unchangeable. The different views that have prevailed as to what is right and wrong merely indicate that the application of these truths or principles has varied, not the principles themselves. Cruel and vicious actions, or what appear so to us now, have, in some times and states of society, been regarded as right, but never cruelty or vice as such. By a law of his nature, man ever seeks good in the abstract, even though the thing is bad in the concrete. Sinful pleasure is only indulged in because apparently good. In the same way, if to do a wrong thing is, or ever has been, deemed a duty, it is done not as wrong, but as a matter of duty.

But, you may say, if even God can not exempt a man from doing his duty, how is it we hear so much in the Catholic Church of dispensations from certain religious duties, prayer, fasting, hearing Mass, and the rest? In reality, this does not touch the point of duty at all. The general law of doing what we ought to do, i. e., our duty, remains intact. The Church, like any other society, endowed with authority to make laws, can dispense, not from divine, but from human laws, of her own framing; and it may be even a duty to accept and act upon such dispensation. The broad principle of duty ever binds, even though special conventional forms of it are dispensed with, changed, or modified. As I said, the form and particular application may vary; but the essence of duty remains ever the same. Though in certain circumstances we may not be bound to hear Mass on Sundays, abstain from meat on Fridays, or fast in Lent, we are not released from duty for all that. The human element in duty ceases, but the divine remains. Indeed, conflicting duties often meet, when it is sometimes difficult for conscience to decide which binds. One thing is certain in duty, “we must obey God rather than man.” The human must ever give way to the divine. The bell rings out, for example, for holy Mass, or any other form of divine service on Sunday, but a child falls ill, or a fire breaks out, endangering human life and property. Now common sense and the voice of conscience tell us that the divine duty of brotherly love is more binding than the human one, though grave, of worshiping God at a particular hour on a specified day. Duty binds on that occasion as strong as before, but under a new form.

Life, therefore, is a network of duties. We live in a world where it presses in upon us from every side. We can no more get away from duty than from the planet we live on. We are, of course, free and may discard it, but it binds notwithstanding. It is not limited by space, though, like the air and the soil, it may vary. We find duty awaiting and imperatively claiming observance in every region of the globe—north, south, east, and west. We may change our home and country, adopt new professions, enter into fresh complicated relations with others, but wherever we go, or wherever we are, there duty stares us in the face. Men differ in habits and views, they are at variance as to art, politics, literature and religion, but all agree as to the imperative claims of duty. That duty binds the conscience, is thus a truth, recognized by all mankind whatsoever their differences in other respects. They may call things by wrong names, as we think; one may look upon as a duty what another would call a sin; Christians may eat as clean what Jews and Brahmins shrink from as unclean; what may be thought right in one place, or age, is deemed wrong in another; but is not all this a confession of the very power and universality of duty? Duty makes all things sacred, and is a world-wide avowal of the force of moral law and the existence of a divine Lawgiver, who alone can bind the conscience by the universal sense of duty. Light to distinguish wherein it lies in certain complex circumstances, or grace from without to act up to a high standard of it, may be altogether wanting, or at least vary much, in strength and intensity; still the knowledge of it, conveyed by conscience as a controlling and impelling force, is never altogether absent from any normal healthy mind.

Again I repeat, it is no valid objection to the universality of duty to say that men’s ideas of duty differ with time and clime—that duty conveys one meaning to a Catholic, another to a Protestant—one thing in one age, or country, another in another; for wherever there is the use of reason there can never be perpetual darkness in regard to the main obligations of the moral law and man’s duty to observe them. All men, whether “Jew, Greek or Barbarian,” have, and ever had, a standard of right and wrong, and owned it was their duty to live up to the requirements of this standard.

But not only is duty universal in point of space, i. e., all the world over, it is so, too, in point of time. It binds always, at least on its negative side. This is the same as to say that a man should ever conduct himself well. He must be always on duty. He may be off work, but never off duty. There is always something that a man ought to be and do, and that is duty. The best form of recreation, Mr. Gladstone used to say, and act on, is a change of work. In regard to duty there is, morally, no other choice. To be free from duty, if it means anything, means simply a change of duty. The duties of public life give way to those of the home. The duties of the tradesman, the clerk, the teacher, the workman, have ceased; but those of the father, the husband, the son, or the brother, begin. A man’s work is done for the day. He comes home from mart, or farm, or office, or factory, fagged out and tired. With a sigh of relief, perhaps, he says the day’s duties are over. But are they? Far from it. A new set of duties face him there. There is something that he owes or ought to be to his parents and neighbors, or wife and children. There is a duty of kindness, patience, good example, to be discharged, just as important as the duty he has left behind. A knocking off duty, as is sometimes said, no more means a cessation of duty than a change of air means a stoppage of breathing. Ever present, duty follows one all through life.

A man, for example, is born rich, or, by a stroke of good luck, rapidly grows rich. He never did and never needs to do a stroke of hard work in his life for a living. Has he thereby escaped duty? Is he free from all responsibility? Far from it. Like every one else, he owes a debt of duty to God, his Church, his country, his family, and all depending on him. He, too, is in this world meshed in a network of duties. Increase of wealth, indeed, brings increase of duties. And if a man neglects these duties, lives as if in nowise indebted to God or his neighbor, then he is dishonest and fraudulent. He shirks his work, his life duty, and is no better in the sight of almighty God than an ablebodied tramp, who has work to do, and won’t do it.

What is called the day of rest comes round. We are glad that the duties tying us to counter, mill, or office, are over; but even Sunday brings its duties too—the most important of all, those specially dealing with public worship, such as the hearing of holy Mass, and the rest. There is no day of rest from duty—as well escape the air around us as fly from it. What seems farthest away from it—sleep, pleasure, amusement—must all be regulated by duty. Or to take another instance: A man is stricken down with illness. He has to knock off work and resign his post. All life and energy seem gone. Brain, and nerve, and muscle, strike work, and he is simply fit for nothing. Yet he is fit for duty, nay, bound to it. It follows him into the sickroom, tells him to be patient and resigned to God’s will under suffering; and show himself grateful to the devoted wife, sister, or nurse, who out of a sense of duty also devote themselves to caring for him.

Or, again, opportunities are offered us of easily winning fame, wealth, and pleasure, at the expense of principle. A word has to be said, a deed done, that duty tells us is wrong. The tempter is at hand to whisper, “All these things that eye and heart crave for shall I give thee, if falling down thou wilt adore me.” To whom must he listen? The call of the tempter, or the call of duty? No choice is left a true man. He must follow duty, cost what it may. Temptation to, and opportunities for, wrongdoing abound. What is to hinder us enjoying or profiting by them? No human eye sees. No human voice or arm is raised to interrupt our unholy work. But there is one voice that no human being can silence—the voice of conscience in defense of duty, crying out, even though it be in the wilderness, that we must do our duty, ever do what is right, and ever shun what is wrong.

Duty, therefore, shadows us all through life. It has no limits of time or place. It is in extent boundless. Like God, it is present everywhere. It has a sentry in every human soul watching over its due performance, and ever giving a warning signal when neglected or badly done. This still, small voice within us is a high witness not only of the Spirit of God within us, but also reminds us of the ever present and ever pressing calls of duty. Even in the midst of our sinful excesses it ever reminds us of what we ought to be and are not. It reminds us of the urgent duty of repentance. Seeing that we can not escape duty, let us make up our minds as reasonable beings to accept the inevitable. We can not prevail against God—no more can we against duty.

Let us divest ourselves of the idea that a life of duty is a life of dulness and hardship. In reality it is a life of pleasure, and the only possible one. Our own experience, as of all the world, testifies to the “hard ways of sin,” which every life is that is not one of duty. But it must be duty, as we have described it to-day, in the full extent of the term—and not limited to some favorite or congenial form of duty. What happiness is comparable to that of the man who feels he is doing his duty, and can look back on duty already done? All misery is the result of duty left undone by some one or other. Let us gird ourselves, then, to the great task of doing our duty, in thought, word, and deed, to God, our neighbor and ourselves. In truth, there are no limits to duty. The limits of duty are the limits of life.