09.02 The limitations of the sense of duty
II. The Limitations of the sense of Duty
There are two ways in which this real defectiveness of the sense of duty shows itself. The one is that it limits and narrows the life. It keeps it, indeed, within fixed and safe barriers, but the safety and the ease are had at the cost of progress. You see the average good Englishman, upright and honourable. You like and respect him, yet, somehow, he suggests an arrested possibility. He is so suspicious of enthusiasm that he becomes incapable of it; so distrustful of ideals that he would rather do without them. He prefers the safety of the beaten track to the perils and glories of the open hill. He is content to say, “Well, at least, we are profitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.” You like him, you respect him, you trust him:
“Only he knows not God, Nor all that chivalry of His The soldier saints who row on row Burn upward each to his point of bliss.” And the second defect which goes with this common conception of duty is a certain self-satisfaction. The standard is satisfied, the requirement is met; the expectation is answered. What more can be asked? Thus we notice a certain smoothness of complacency sinking down upon the average dutiful man. How hard and impenetrable that smooth surface may become they best know who have tried to approach such a man at the close of life with the strange memory of the cross or with the appeal for some sign of penitence. For ten who will say on reviewing the course of their life, “We have done that which was our duty to do,” there is barely one who will add, “We are unprofitable servants.” When we see the narrowness and self-satisfaction that somehow or other spoils the dutiful man, we realize how near the best of us may come to the Pharisee of the New Testament.
“There is always,” said an eminent French critic, “there is always a touch of the Pharisee in the good Englishman.” That, too, is a hard saying. We resent it. Is it harder than the saying of our Lord in the parable? The spirit of pharisaism is wide.
It ranges from the lowest forms in which instinctively we dislike it up to the highest, in which it comes to have even a certain attractiveness. When we meet the Pharisee who says in the tone of his voice or the posture of his figure, “Thank God, I am not as other men are, or even as this publican,” we know that his spirit is fundamentally wrong. But when we meet a rich young man, eager to do what is right, asking quite sincerely, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” and then saying with honest frankness, “All these commandments have I kept from my youth up,” then we like him, we admire him. It is indeed in the rich young ruler of the New Testament that the most attractive type of English character finds itself, as it were, mirrored, and there it is both loved and judged. “Then Jesus, beholding him, loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, take up thy cross and follow Me.”
TAGS: [Parables]