09.01 The sense of duty
I. THE SENSE OF DUTY THIS parable cannot, in comparison with many others, claim to rank as one of the most important. It is very short; its relation to the context is hard to construe. But it deals so directly with a characteristic British temperament that I venture to select its main lesson for special consideration.
We need not spend time in discussing whether it was meant to be a caution to the disciples, lest they should presume upon their possession of the power of faith (verse 6); or whether it was meant to be a description of the Jewish religion of works in contrast with the new religion of faith. For there is no difficulty in understanding the main lesson which our Lord enforced. It is that the only limit to the servant’s duty is his master’s will; that there is no point at which he can choose for himself to claim that he has done enough and is entitled to his ease; that the servant is always a debtor of service, the master is never a debtor of reward. And it is this lesson of which our British race stands in very special need. Is it too much to say that our Lord’s conclusion comes as a surprise, that if it had been spoken by the average upright conscientious Englishman, it would have run, “We have done that which was our duty to do; therefore we can claim to be profitable servants”? For our race worships this sense of duty.
It is our national idol. When on the great day of Trafalgar Nelson flung out his brave motto to the breeze, “England expects every man to do his duty,” he was unfolding the national faith. In any audience, at any time, in any part of the world, the words go straight home to the heart of the nation.
England expects every man to do his duty so speaks our national conscience. England gets what she expects this we would fain make our national boast. May we not in some degree claim that the boast is just?
Still, in the main, it is true God grant it may remain true that you can expect the average Englishman to do his duty. Our whole public life rests upon that expectation. We need no despotism to set us in the right road; we do not look to any central office of experts to keep us straight. We entrust large and free powers of self-government to the average conscience of the average man. And our whole English public life would go to pieces unless the national faith had some warrant in fact. But it is, for the most part, abroad, where men confront other and less civilized nations, that this English ideal is best tested. In the public service at any rate the “white man’s burden” is sustained by the sense of duty. A Viceroy of India said the other day that in the midst of his manifold labours he was sustained by a thrill of pride in the thought that a sense of duty, unfailing, all pervading, was the real motive power of the vast machinery of Indian Government. Deep down, unexpressed, but shown by faithful acts, there is in most Englishmen a quiet determination to be just, to keep his word, to do his duty.
Nay, may we not go further? In his mind the word “duty” surely stands for something deeper than it seems to express. Suspicious as he is of emotion, reserved in speech, duty often means to him, God. It is not merely that his duty is his God, but that his God speaks to him in his duty, and there is an instinct of reverence for God in his obedience to it. As Tennyson says in that great ode which is as it were a Psalm of DutyHe that, ever following her commands, On, with toil of heart and knees and hands, Through the long gorge to the far light has won His path upward and prevailed, Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled Are close upon the shining table-lands To which our God Himself is Moon and Sun.”
Yet in spite of all this truth there confronts us this hard saying of our Lord: “We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which was our duty to do.”
It is plain that our Lord discerns something wanting, some germ of danger in this contented devotion to duty. What is it? Is it not this that duty, as it is commonly conceived, apart from its heroic aspect, tends to become simply what is expected or recognized by some limited and conventional standard? It is of this lower, but far more common type of duty, that our Lord is speaking in the parable. And here it is that we touch the defects of our British virtue; for in asking himself, “What is my duty?” the Englishman is apt to find an answer in the standard of public opinion by which he is surrounded. Duty too often means the average expectation in any given condition of life. Thus, at school, when he is a boy, the Englishman follows with ready and resolute determination all the rules and traditions of school life and school morality.
He is half-ashamed and half-afraid to go beyond. In the army or the navy he will say, as I have so often heard said to me, “I am bound to do what the service requires, and to do it well; but when it comes to my private conduct, that is a matter entirely of my own concern.” In business the code of right and wrong becomes too easily what is done by the average good firm. Is. it not, on the lips of men we meet, a frequent apology, “I do what is expected of a man in my position”? He refuses, he scorns, to go beneath the accepted opinion of his class; but he is afraid to rise above it.
TAGS: [Parables]