"I've heard of hearts unkind,
Kind deeds with coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath left me oftener mourning."
However, Archdeacon Farrar, referring to these words, says, "If Wordsworth found gratitude a common virtue, his experience must have been exceptional." There certainly are hearts unkind that do return coldness for kind deeds. There are children who forget the love and sacrifices of their parents and repay their countless kindnesses, not with grateful affection, honor, obedience, thoughtfulness, and service, but with disregard, indifference, disobedience, dishonor, sometimes even with shameful neglect and unkindness. There are those who receive help from friends in unnumbered ways, through years, help that brings to them great aid in life—promotion, advancement, improvement in character, widening of privileges and opportunities, tender kindness that warms, blesses, and inspires the heart, and enriches, refines, and ennobles the life—who yet seem never to recognize or appreciate the benefit and the good they receive. They appear to feel no obligation, no thankfulness. They make no return of love for all of love's ministry. They even repay it with complaint, with criticism, with bitterness. We have all known years of continued favors forgotten, and their memory wiped out by one small failure to grant a new request for help. We have all known malignant hate to be the return for long periods of lavish kindness.
Ingratitude is robbery. It robs those to whom gratitude is due, for it is the withholding of that which is justly theirs. If you are kind to another, is he not your debtor? If you show another favors, does not he owe you thanks? True, you ask no return, for love does not work for wages. Only selfishness demands repayment for help given, and is embittered by ingratitude. The Christly spirit continues to give and bless, pouring out its love in unstinted measure, though no act or word or look tells of gratitude.
"If thy true service mounted, in its aim,
No higher than the praise that men bestow
On noble sacrifice, there might be shame
That thou hast missed it so.
"But not for selfish gain or low reward,
Didst thou so labor under shade and sun;
But with the conscious sense that for thy Lord
This weary work was done.
"He asked no thanks, no recognition nigh,
No tender acceptation of his grace,
No pitying tear from one responsive eye,
No answering human face.
"To do God's will—that was enough for Christ,
'Mid griefs that make all agonies look dim.
It shall for thee suffice—it hath sufficed,
As it sufficed for him."
Yet while love does not work for wages, nor demand an equivalent for its services, it is sorely wronged when ungrateful lips are dumb. The quality of ingratitude is not changed because faithful love is not frozen in the heart by its coldness. We owe at least loving remembrance to one who has shown us kindness, though no other return may be possible, or though large return may already have been made. We can never be absolved from the duty of being grateful. "Owe no man anything but love" is a heavenly word. We always owe love; that is a debt we never can pay off.
Ingratitude is robbery. But it is cruelty as well as robbery. It always hurts the heart that must endure it. Few faults or injuries cause more pain and grief in tender spirits than ingratitude. The pain may be borne in silence. Men do not speak of it to others, still less to those whose neglect or coldness inflicts it; yet It is like thorns in the pillow.
"Blow, blow, thou winter wind;
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude."