Faith & Spirit Quote by James Russell Lowell

Gratitude here isn’t aimed at comfort; it’s aimed at compulsion. Lowell’s line blesses the stubborn fact of obligation, the kind that doesn’t negotiate with your mood. The shrewdness is in the reversal: most morning prayers ask for relief, ease, or inspiration. Lowell advises thanking God for the exact opposite - for a task that will not let you off the hook. The sentence is built like a marching order: “must be done” arrives with a hard click, and the kicker, “whether you like it or not,” strips away the last romantic alibi. In a culture that likes to dress work up as “passion,” Lowell insists that duty is often raw, unglamorous, and still holy.

As a 19th-century poet and public moralist in an America convulsed by reform movements, industrial discipline, and the long argument over slavery, Lowell was steeped in the era’s Protestant work ethic - but he sharpens it into something more psychologically acute. The subtext is that freedom without structure curdles into drift. A day with no “must” becomes a day where your whims run the government, and whims are notoriously corrupt. “Something to do” isn’t busywork; it’s a tether to purpose, community, and self-respect.

The intent, then, is less cheerleading than inoculation: a daily practice of accepting necessity as a gift. Gratitude becomes a form of steel.