We are told that duty is what we owe. It is to be remembered that when we have done all we are unprofitable servants. The talent hid in a napkin was duteously safe. But there is a higher duty to Him who gathers where He has not scattered. What is due is, in fact, greater than what we owe. The educative and evolutionary quality of our experience depends upon this. And it is here that the distinction between the higher and lower duty may be found. It is a principle in chancery law that he who seeks equity must do equity. Similarly those who desire to ascend or progress must fulfil all the lower stages of growth and be free of what they owe before they can undertake the rendering of their due. Renunciation also begins here. The old story of the servant, forgiven a large debt, and turning on his fellow and debtor illustrates this. The ceremonial law of the Jews for example, was an educative force in the direction of insuring the recognition of those in authority, crude symbols of the divine. Our modern taxes and tariffs have precisely the same educative effect as the tithes and offerings of old, the modern method reaching a more practical result.
There is a Principle or Power in the Universe which provides for all creatures. It is generally known as Providence. It is called God and Karma and the Law. When men consciously ally themselves with this Power they also become Providers. They learn that it is more blessed to give than to receive. They also learn which is the river, the water or the banks that confine the water. The promptings of evolution, of the Kumara, the immortal One that ensouls a man and makes him divine, carry him forward along the line of least resistance. It is the business of the river to reach the ocean, not to break down the banks. All this implies action, and the formation of character. While Fohat is in manifestation, duty means to act, to do. To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly before the inner god. To love that Holy One with all the heart and mind and strength, and to see in one's brothers the same object of devotion is to conform to the will of the Higher Self. Duty on the lower levels of life is a means for the development of the lower manas or brain mind.
Ben Madighan.
Let us dissect away certain overgrowths which obscure this point. Obedience to duty is often only conscious, half conscious, or unconscious fear of the consequences of neglect. A child who has burned his finger thereafter dreads the flame, and the dread persists when the memory of the burn has died out of his practical consciousness. Many honest people do not steal because they retain an unconscious memory of the disgrace attending a revealed theft in childhood or in a previous incarnation. Fear, hope of reward or commendation, these two, whether conscious or existing in their effects as the fixed habit of performance, must be eliminated as inspirers of action before we can see how much remains. It is possible that with most of us not much of the pure golden sense of duty would remain in the bottom of the crucible.
Actions whose performance is a duty are not always unpleasant. For instance, to eat is a duty, because at a proper time the Law, manifesting as hunger, demands it.
The Law arises twofold; outwardly it manifests as circumstance, presenting at every moment a tangled maze of paths of which any one may be selected; internally as the impulsion to select one particular path of these many. In his spiritual thought, the inner man has already traversed that path. In outer fact it remains for the terrestrial man to imitate in the concrete. The sense of duty is the reflection in the outer consciousness of this picture of action existing in the inner, which picture, in the inner world, is action. It may be dimly or brightly mirrored, the sense of duty weak or strong; its concrete imitation may be effected or not, duty done or not.
Herbert Coryn.
YOUNG FOLKS' DEPARTMENT.
A CHRISTMAS STORY.
BY M. S. L.