THUS SPOKE SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
WHAT IS DUTY ?
"Duty is seldom sweet. It is only when love greases its wheel that is runs smoothly; it is a continuous friction otherwise. How else could parents do their duties to their children, husbands to their wives. And vice versa? Do we not meet with cases of friction everyday in our lives? Duty is sweet only through love and love shines to freedom alone. Yet is it freedom to be a slave to the senses, to anger, to jealousies and a hundred other pretty things that must occur every day in human life? The biggest in all these ups and downs that we meet with life the highest expression of freedom is to forbear. Women, who slave to their own irritable jealous tempers, are apt to blame their husbands, and assert their own "freedom", as they think, not knowing that thereby they only prove that they are slaves. So it is with husband who eternally find fault with their wives.
Chastity is the first virtue in man or woman, and the man, who, however he may be strayed away, cannot be brought to the right path by a gently and loving and chaste wife is indeed very rare. The world is not yet as bad as that. We hear much about brutal husbands all over the world and about the impurity of man. But is it not true that there are quite as many brutal and impure women? If this was not the case, I am perfectly satisfied that there would not be one impure man in the world. What brutality is there which purity and chastity cannot conquer?
A good, chaste wife, who thinks of every other man except her own husband as her child and has the attitude of a mother towards all men, will grow so great in power of her purity that there cannot be a single man, however brutal, who will not breath an atmosphere of holiness in her presence.
Similarly, every husband must look upon all women, except his wife, in the light of his own mother, or daughter or sister. That man again, who wants to be a teacher of religion must look upon every woman as mother, and always behave towards her as such.
The position of the mother is the highest in the world, as it is the one place in which to learn and exercise the greatest unselfishness. The love of God is the only love that is higher than a mother’s love; all others are lower. It is the duty of the mother to think of her children first, then of herself.
But, instead of that, if the parents are always thinking of themselves first, the result is that the relation between parents and children becomes the same as that between the birds and their offspring, which as soon as they are fledged, do not recognize any parents.
Blessed, indeed, is the man who is able to look upon a woman as the representative of the motherhood of God . Blessed, indeed, is the woman to whom man represents the fatherhood of God . Blessed, are the children who look upon their parents as divinity manifested on earth."
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