A Christian's Habits: Chapter Five
A Christian's Habits: Chapter Five
The Habit of Duty (Part Three).
“…the people I look for, the people I read, the people I want to learn from are those who are counter-cultural because they have a wisdom that our own culture has either never learned or has forgotten.”
Introduction
Robert Speer was a rebel…a rebel with a cause. He shocked me when he wrote that duty is nobler than love. Everybody else I’ve read assumes that love is the greatest thing of all. But Speers doesn’t stop there. He tells us that duty takes us deeper into love than compassion ever will and then he says that duty is more effective than winning. This man may have worn a suit and tie to work, but he was a counter-cultural radical.
Some people are radical just to be radical. But the people I look for, the people I read, the people I want to learn from are those who are counter-cultural because they have a wisdom that our own culture has either never learned or has forgotten. Duty, Speer claims, has the power to take us through life unfrightened and unseduced as we do what we believe to be right and true day after day in our everyday lives.
He also embodies another thing I look for in a mentor. Speer doesn’t just “talk the talk” but he “walks the walk.” He lived his life according to the habit of duty and, as a result, madegoodhappen in ways that, not only impacted his day but continue to have a direct impact on our world today. Here are just a few examples:
Since the 1960s the church has declined in the West. At the same time, the church has grown dramatically in the non-West. Speer played a critical role in the growth of the church in the non-West.
For example, he believed in the priority of sharing Jesus with other cultures in a way that made a clear distinction between the Christian faith and the spread of Western culture. As the head of the Presbyterian Mission board his focus was on the spread of the good news of Jesus Christ. The spread of Western culture, and its values, he left to others.
One of the ways we see the above is in his insistence on the development of an indigenous local church led by indigenous pastors when this was an unusual point of view. The goal of mission for Speer was to introduce the story of Jesus into a given culture and then allow it to impact that culture through its own people in a way that would develop a church for that particular country.
This very similar to the approach we are taking in this Substack channel, which is to introduce the gospel once again into the emerging rhythm of life in Western culture. While Speer’s focus was taking the gospel across space, our focus is taking the gospel across time. That is, we are not trying to take Christianity from one country to another but from one time to another. We’re not seeking to rejuvenate or revitalize the 1950s church in the West. We’re seeking a fresh translation of the gospel, developed through our own indigenous experimentation, with faith in our everyday lives. Believing that through a grassroots movement of people experimenting and innovating with faith and live we are planting the seeds of the future church in the West. More on that later.
Getting back to Speer, he also, in his day supported women in ministry and urged churches to confront and solve the problem of racism. This is a far from exhaustive list of the good he made happen through the habit of duty. But it’s enough to give us confidence that this is a man we can learn from to make more good happen in our own lives, our own relationships and our own communities today. So let’s continue to sharpen our own habit of duty in the chapter than follows; the Habit of Duty, Part III.
I. The Purpose of Duty
A recent newspaper article detailing enormous sacrifice of life in the industrial progress of Pittsburg bore the gruesome title, “Riches Soaked in Blood.” In the first five months of 1907 the coroner recorded one thousand and ninety-five deaths, of which three hundred and forty-four came suddenly and violently in the mills and railroads of the city. One life, it was declared, was sacrificed for every fifty thousand tons of coal shipped, one life for every seven thousand tons of iron and steel. Why were these men where death met them prematurely? They were working for the support of their families or were simply busy with the necessary work of the world, and they died where duty placed them and doing what they thought they must. Somewhere along the line of the production of every fragment of the world’s wealth is the blood of a man who fell in his duty with no cry to the world for its praise, but taking what came with his duty as a matter of course.
How did duty get the power to dominate men in this way, and what enables it to assert its power against home and life? Because it is the call of right, and what right bids us to do it is wrong not to do. And right draws its vital authority from God. God is the great personal, living Right, and duty is simply his voice. That is the lofty metaphor of one of our greatest odes. Let each reader turn to his Wordsworth, and read all of the ode of which these lines are a part:
“Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!
O Duty! if that name thou love
Who art a light to guide, a rod
To check the erring; and reprove;
Thou, who art victory and law
When empty terrors overawe;
From vain temptations dost set free;
And calm’st the weary strife of frail humanity!
Through no disturbance of my soul,
Or strong compunction in me wrought,
I supplicate for thy control;
But in the quietness of thought:
Me this uncharted freedom tires;
I feel the weight of chance desires:
My hopes no more must change their name,
I long for a repose that ever is the same.
Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face:
Flowers laugh before time 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. -Ode to Duty
“It is simply our duty to do our duty. “
II. Developing the Habit of Duty
Because duty is the right thing, the will of God for man, it is sufficient. For its own sake alone, it asks to be done. Itself is its own reward. It asks no other, and there is surely something pitiful about our practice in these days of rewarding and decorating men for doing their duty. Why should they not? Is duty something it is wonderful to find a man doing, so wonderful that he should get extra pay for it or be given a ribboned medal? Surely Fielding’s words in “Tom Thumb the Great” are nobler:
“When I’m not thank’d at all, I’m thank’d enough; I’ve done my duty, and I’ve done no more.”
It is simply our duty to do our duty. It is not the winning of a supererogatory merit with either God or man. It is not a matter of reward. And it is not a matter of comparison with other men’s achievements. Mr. Maydole, the hammer-maker, was an expert.
“I have made hammers,” he told Doctor Gannett once, “for twenty-eight years.” “You might be able to make a pretty good hammer, then, by this time,” was the reply. “No, sir!” came the emphatic answer. “I never made a pretty good hammer - I make the best hammer in the United States.”
This was high, all but the comparison. Duty is not to do better than another man, but to do it all and to the limit on one’s own line, for the eye of God, not for the comparing eye of man. But we live now in a competitive day. In school and university and life the rewards are all for exceeding other men. Industry is organized on that principle. Our athletics rest on competition with others or with the record of others. It may be doubted whether the good old times were as good as our own times, but the spirit attributed to them ought to be the spirit of all times.
“O good old man, how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world,
When service sweat for duty, not for mead!
Thou art not for the fashion of these times,
When none will sweat but for promotion.” -Shakespeare, As You Like It Act 2 Scene 3
This high view of duty is our deep need. There is a place for all true sentiment, for temperament and inclination, but the place of control is for duty. We need to acquire the habit of doing the next thing as duty. Duty is ever with us and calling us. It ought to be done by us simply because it is our duty until the thought of evading or shrinking duty will never come to us and we do instinctively as though nothing else were possible that which is our duty. The habit of duty should become so fixed with us that we should see nothing but duty. There is a story of an archer who was teaching his art. The mark was a bird in a tree. “What do you see?” the archer asked the first man who came forward to shoot. “I see a bird in a tree,” said he. “Stand aside,” said the archer. “What do you see?” he said to the second man. “I see a bird,” replied he. “Stand aside,” the archer said. “And what do you see? he asked the third. “I see the head of a bird,” said he. “Shoot,” the archer cried. We should be blind to all that diverts or obscures. The things that deaden the sense of duty have no place with us. The “Stern Daughter of the Voice of God” will endure no indulgences which stifle her word in our hearts.
III. Right Makes Might
All duty can be done. What we ought to do is the only thing we can do, if we are what we ought to be. “Let us have faith that right makes might,” said Lincoln in his speech in New York in 1859, “and in that faith let us dare to do our duty.” It can be done, however impossible, just because it is our duty to do it. We must believe this if we have any ear for God at all, for, as Emerson wrote in lines inscribed on the wall of the schoolroom of the most efficient school for boys in America:
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’
The youth replies, ‘I can!’ -Voluntaries
“When I was a boy,” said a man recently speaking to boys, “my father gave me a diary on Christmas at the close of a year in which I made changes in my life plans which were at the time a great shock and disappointment to him. He was a reticent man, so that when he did speak we heard. He said little about the matter, but in the diary he had written on the fly leaf, ‘March on to duty.’ If it led away from his desires, well and good, it was duty which was to be followed wheresoever it led.”
A new day will break in the Church and the world, in college and in home, in public and private life when men “march on to duty,” unfrightened, unseduced, obedient, when they will say and live by their word “It is my duty to be about my Father’s business and to finish the work which he gave me to do.” Those men will vanquish death and hell, and, after Christ, will build the walls of the kingdom which is righteousness and duty.
The next chapter: The Habit of Good Thinking