The other sighed. "Nearly everything goes out, except duty. If that went out, I don't think I should have much pleasure in life."
"No, you would be dead, without the hope of resurrection. If there is anything comes direct from the Creative Force, from
'La somma sapienza e il primo amore,'
it is the sense of duty, 'the moral law within us,' which Kant divined as unmistakably delivered from God to man. I use the old terminology."
"Don't apologize. It still serves our turn; I don't know that anything else serves it yet. And you make me think of what dear old M.D. C—— told me shortly after his wife died. He had wished, when they both owned that the end was near, to suggest some comfort in the hope of another life, to clutch at that straw to save his drowning soul; but she stopped him. She said, 'There is nothing but duty, the duty we have wished to do and tried to do.'"
The friends were silent in the pathos of the fact, and then the first said, "I suppose we all wish to do our duty, even when we don't try or don't try hard enough."
The other conjectured, "Perhaps, after all, it's a question of strength; wickedness is weakness."
"That formula won't always serve; still, it will serve in a good many cases; possibly most. It won't do to preach it, though."
"No, we must cultivate strength of character. I wonder how?"
"Well, your Stoics—"