Duty and Impulse | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 17, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 51.

Duty and Impulse.

To the man who educates himself to follow duty at all hazards, the first impulse in time of crisis or danger will be to do duty. The mind will act along familiar lines. The man who has sought his own interest, pleasure, or profit, will, in time of danger, flee from duty. The former is illustrated by a recent event in a colliery in England. An engineer fifty years of age, while lowering the cage containing twenty-four men into his mine, suddenly received an apoplectic shock, from which he died almost immediately. But before he fell, the dying man seized the lever, stopped the engine, and so saved the lives of his fellow-workmen, while his own went out in darkness. It was duty first, and he did it in the crisis. Jesus illustrates the same principle thus: “He that is a hireling and not a shepherd, beholdeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth, and the wolf snatcheth them.” But “the good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep.” That is his purpose, his work, his duty. The engineer was not simply a hero in his death; he was a duty hero all his life, and his heart failed not in the crisis.