| Making the Most of Life |
Chapter 20 |
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Yet while love does not work for wages, nor demand an equivalent for its services, it is sorely wronged when ungrateful lips are dumb. The quality of ingratitude is not changed because faithful love is not frozen in the heart by its coldness. We owe at least loving remembrance to one who has shown us kindness, though no other return may be possible, or though large return may already have been made. We can never be absolved from the duty of being grateful. “Owe no man anything but love” is a heaven word. We always owe love; that is a debt we never can pay off.
Ingratitude is robbery. But it is cruelty as well as robbery. It always hurts the heart that must endure it. Few faults or injuries cause more pain and grief in tender spirits than ingratitude. The pain may be borne in silence. Men do no speak of it to others, still less to those whose neglect or coldness inflicts it; yet it is like thorns in the pillow.
“Blow, blow, thou winter wind;
Thou art no so unkind
As man’s ingratitude.”
Parents suffer unspeakably when the children for whom that have lived, suffered, and sacrificed, prove ungrateful. The ungrateful child does not know what bitter sorrow he causes the mother who bore him and nursed him, and the father who loves him more than his own life; how their hearts bleed; how they weep in secret over his unkindness. We do not know how we hurt our friends when we treat them ungratefully, forgetting all they have done for us, and repaying their favours with coldness.
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