, had not devotion to God and love of God behind it, the
object of one's worship would be a malignant rather than a beneficent
deity, a devil rather than a God. Or let us take the case of a child
who is dangerously ill, and who needs to be carefully and even
devotedly nursed. By whom will he be the more effectively nursed,--by
his mother who loves him passionately, or by a hired nurse who cannot
be expected to love him but who has a strong sense of duty to her
employers? (I am assuming that as regards professional skill, and
the sense of duty to God, the two women are on a level.) Surely the
mother, sustained by love in the endurance of sleeplessness and
fatigue, and in the exercise of that unceasing vigilance which lets
no symptom escape it, will be the better nurse. Love, as a motive to
moral action, has the immense advantage over the sense of duty of
being able to rob the hour of trial of its gloom, by strengthening
the lover to make light of labour and difficulty till at last the
sense of effort is lost in the sense of joy. But if love is the
highest of all motives, is it not well that the child's life should
as far as possible, and for as long as possible, be kept under its
influence, to the exclusion of other motives. We have seen that the
Utopian child takes many things in his stride which other children
would regard as distasteful. If they are not distasteful to him, the
reason is that he does them, not from a sense of duty, but under the
inspiration of love,--love of life, love of Egeria, love of his
schoolmates, love of his school. And the longer he can remain on the
high plane of love, the better it will be for his after life.

And when the time comes for him to yield himself to the "saving arms"
of duty, he will have had the best of all preparations for that hour
of trial, for he will have been braced and strengthened for it by the
most moralising of all disciplines, that of growth. What is the sense
of duty? We too seldom ask ourselves this question. Is it not a
feeling of obligation, of being in debt, to some person, or persons,
or institution, or society, or even to some invisible Power;--to
a friend, for example, a relative, a dependent, an employer, a
"contracting party," a commanding officer,--or, again, to one's trade
or profession, to one's political party, to one's church, to one's
country,--or, in the last resort, to God? And is not this feeling
accompanied by the secret conviction that until the d