A Christian's Habits: Chapter Four
A Christian's Habits: Chapter Four
The Habit of Duty (Part Two).
“Yes, sir, I’d figured it out at last what bein’ big was, that it was bein’ right, thinkin’ things out straight and then hangin’ on to ‘em because they was right. ”
Introduction
We long for clarity of thought, for peace, and for a good conscience. Yet so many of us, especially post-pandemic, feel guilt and agitation. We just aren’t thinking very well. In our next chapter, Robert Speer argues that the habit of duty will help us find the clarity, peace, and good conscience we’re looking for.
It begins with the idea that we’re part of a story that is much bigger than our individual lives. The bigger story is what’s most important. Sometimes, in our everyday lives, we can see where that story is going. Most of the time we cannot. It’s in these times when we can’t understand how the events of our everyday lives are connected to that bigger story that the habit of duty is most important.
If we understand our lives to be part of a bigger story, we no longer need the events of our everyday lives to make sense. We don’t even need to understand how the immediate events of our lives fit into the larger story. All we need to do is to take the next step that is in front of us. That is our duty. The wonderful thing is that, even in the most challenging times of life, taking that step in front of us will open up the step we need to take after that. When duty becomes a habit we are able to move forward with clarity, peace and good conscience, no matter what is going on around us. We become the kind of people who can makegoodhappen no matter what life throws our way.
I. Duty: Readies Us for the Challenges of Life
How do you prepare for unexpected things that life throws your way?
Done steadily, as the law of life, duty prepares men for whatever tests life may bring. These tests, which are God’s examinations of the soul, come without forewarning, and we may say reverently that there is no cramming for these examinations of God. “The man’s whole life preludes the single deed.”1 We do in the crisis what the hidden principles of our career have foredoomed. There are doubtless exceptions, some real, some apparent, where a profligate life has flowered in a glorious self-sacrifice. But shirking duty in the common is no preparation for its performance in the exceptional, and the man who meets his crisis when it comes is the man who made it sure he would meet it by the solid steadiness of his common duty-seeking and duty-doing. This is the path to power and to whatever greatness God has in mind for us. The writer of some dialect reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln draws out this lesson from the early crisis in that great, plain man’s life:
“I hadn’t been watchin’ him sweatin’ his brains on that question (of slavery) for four years without knowin’. I tell you nobody that didn’t see him often them days, and didn’t care enough about him to feel bad when he felt bad, can ever understand what Abraham Lincoln went through before his debates with Douglas.2 He worked his head day and night trying’ to get that slavery question figured out so nobody could stump him. Greatest man to think things out so nobody could git around him I ever see. Hadn’t any patience with what wa’n’t clear. What worried him most, I can see now, was makin’ the rest of us understand it like he did. …I’d figured out by that time that Lincoln was a big man, a bigger man than Stephen A. Douglas. Didn’t seem possible to me it could be so, but the more I went over it in my mind the more certain I felt about it. Yes, sir, I’d figured it out at last what bein’ big was, that it was bein’ right, thinkin’ things out straight and then hangin’ on to ‘em because they was right. That was bein’ big, and that was Abraham Lincoln all through - the whole of him.”
Doing duty in the small is the road of a man to character. Fret and tempest die out in the life which is solidified and calmed by duty. Consequences may be what they will - of what consequence is it? Our course has been set for us, our start has been given us to steer by. The unseen Captain knows the rest.
“The more we see of life,” wrote Chinese Gordon from Shanghai to his sister3in 1880, “the more one feels disposed to despise one’s self and human nature, and the more one feels the necessity of steering by the Pole Star, in order to keep from shipwrecks; in a word, live to God alone. If he smiles on you, neither the smile nor frown of man can affect you. Thank God, I feel myself, in a great measure, dead to the world and its honors, glories and riches. Sometimes I feel this is selfish; well, it may be so, I claim no infallibility, but it helps me on my way. Keep your eye on the Pole Star, guide your bark of life by that, look not to see how others are steering, enough it is for you to be in the right way.”4
II. Finding Peace and Good Conscience
How do you find peace in your life?
Peace and good conscience come from unity of the life with duty, with the conception of life as duty, the vocation of God. It is nowhere more nobly put than in the closing paragraph of Trench’s “Study of Words” on “vocation”:
“What a calming, elevating, ennobling view of the tasks appointed to us in this world, this word gives! We did not come to our work by accident; we did not choose it for ourselves; but in the midst of much that may wear the appearance of accident and self-choosing, came to it, by God’s leading and appointment. How will this consideration help us to appreciate justly the dignity of our work, though it were far humbler work, even in the eyes of men, than that of any one of us here present! What an assistance in calming unsettled thoughts and desires, such as would make us wish to be something else than that which we are! What a source of confidence, when we are tempted to lose heart, and to doubt whether we shall carry through our work with any blessing or profit to ourselves or to others! It is our ‘vocation,’ not our choosing, but our ‘calling’; and he who called us to it, will, if only we will ask him, fit us for it, and strengthen us in it.”
III. Duty Gives Beauty to Life
Have you ever thought about the connection between duty and beauty?
And, to speak of but one other thing, it is the law of duty which gives beauty to life. Sometimes we doubt. Duty seems harsh and domineering and gray. But it is only seeming.
“I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly;
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A truth and noonday light to thee.”
-Ellen Sturgis Hooper I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beauty
It will be so because beauty is to be found in that which duty is, order, fixed principle, obedience to law.
IV. Heroes of the Habit of Duty
Who do you seek to emulate in the habit of duty?
All of these results of duty-seeing and duty-doing are illustrated in the lives of men who have been known as men of duty. They were seen in Henry Lawrence whose classic epitaph has nerved multitudes to follow the way he went: “Here lies Henry Lawrence who tried to do his duty.” They were seen in Chinese Gordon, whose last letter to his sister from Khartum ends: “P.S. I am quite happy, thank God, and like Lawrence, I have ‘tried to do my duty.’” They were seen in the Duke of Wellington, of whom one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s favorite quotations said, “He did his duty as naturally as a horse eats oats.”
“Every soldier dying on the battlefield is a challenge and a summons to those of us who have accepted the Christ of the Cross, but not the Cross of Christ. If they can give so freely to their lords of death and destruction, why should we not give even more freely to the Lord of Life and Peace?” -Robert Speer, a lecture during World War I. p 147 A Man Sent from God, Wheeler
Soldiers are not the only men who have illustrated the iron supremacy of duty. Missionaries have been even nobler representatives because all their obedience to duty was personal and moral. Human love, comfort, and ambition have whispered to them in vain to turn back. Often deep disgust at the life in contact with which they have had to live and racial antipathy too deep for any overcoming except overcoming of duty, have protested, and perils like the soldier’s perils have threatened - all in vain against duty. Nearer home the trained nurse is every day enduring and subduing what is not the mood of sympathy or any impulse which enables her to meet, but duty only. I know of one who was called just after a serious illness of her own to what she supposed was some ordinary case of need, only to find that it was a poor home where three children were sick with scarlet fever and diphtheria. There were no servants. The mother had one of the children with her in the kitchen. The home was unclean. The bed given her was the bed in which one of the children had died and the bed clothing had not been changed. She stayed and nursed the family. Why? For love’s sake? Her soul revolted from the experience she was passing through. She stayed for duty and duty upheld her.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1875/08/under-the-great-elm/630970/
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/lincoln-douglas-debates
Mary Augusta (Gordon) Blunt