2. We may call this principle of life a sense of responsibility. The word is perhaps stiff and abstract, and yet I think it helps us to part of the truth. " I must be about my Father's business," or, if we take the E.V., " in my Father's house " ; it comes to nearly the same thing. '* I must be." He is not His own. He belongs to His Father. He owes to Him His life and its powers. How it reminds us of what He said afterwards to others — that
^ T. V. Tyiunis, The Private RelationsJdps of Olirist^ 59. '^ George Frederic Waits, i. 17. ST. LUKE — 8
114 ALWAYS AT HOME
except a man become as a child he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God ; and of what St. John said about Ilim — that He brought those who believed on Him to become sons of God ! Responsibility, then, answerableness to another for His life and His use of it, but that other His Heavenly Father, whom it was the joy of His loving heart to serve — there is the principle and purpose which we find at the heart of Him at twelve years old ; it will go with Him through life. It will be there still when with dying lips He will cry, " It is finished ! " — finished, the work God gave Him to do ; " Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."
^ A few days before the first number of the War Cry was sent out to the world, General Booth gave a remarkable address at Darlington, which is recorded in this issue under the title of " The Baptism of Fire," and in which he said : " I want to say something this morning that will help you in the personal conflicts of your daily experience, and in the great warfare you are waging with the principles and principalities and devilries around you. You are the soldiers of Salvation, and the responsibilities of the war are all upon your heads. Now there is in English law a curious fiction by which no man who once becomes a clergyman of the Church of England can ever cease to be one. If he goes into the greengrocery line he is still a reverend : if he goes to prison he is still a clergyman : and I suppose, nay, I am sure, he will go up to the judgment-bar to be dealt with in the light of all the solemn responsibilities implied in such a position. Now, although by cowardice, or unfaithfulness, or disobedience, or other infamous action, you may be deemed unworthy of your position and drummed out of God Almighty's Army — covered with disgrace and infamy — still the memories of your position and the responsi- bilities of what you might have accomplished in it, will cleave to you, and grow upon you, and haunt you, and harrow you for evermore. How important, then, for you to be faithful."^
3. In the Son we are made free with the freedom of the Son. And, at certain special hours of our life, this freedom will assert itself. But then, let us be sure of this— that this heightened freedom must heighten also the severe responsibility with which it is exercised. It is this that we are so apt to forget. " Freedom," "liberty," — the words sound to us as if they set us loose from responsibilities. Yet, claimed as they are by us, not in our individual capacity, but as children of God, as members of Christ's
1 T. F. G. Coates, The Prophet of tlie Poor, 107.
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Body, they must be held in trust to the Father who gave them ; in trust to the Son, " the Head," in whose name we act.
^ Boys and girls, and for that matter grown folks too, some- times have curious notions of liberty. To be free they think is to be able to do just what one pleases. But true freedom is the power to do what we ought to do. A dead leaf falling from a bough has power to do just what it pleases, because it is dead, and no one cares how much it eddies or where it falls. But the big earth in travelling round the sun is very careful not to get outside its appointed path, for if it should wander even a little from the path which God has marked out it would upset all the life upon its surface. The earth is far freer than an autumn leaf. It gets its freedom from the sun. If we were only dead autumn leaves we could drift and eddy hither and thither and do anything we pleased ; but being immortal souls, created in God's image, we have a mighty work to do and should keep the orbit which our Father's love has traced.^
4. Always to the free man must the concerns of God be paramount. ** What doth the Lord require of thee ? " is the first and last question. Still it cannot be denied in any thoughtful consideration of the subject that the concerns of men are the concerns of God. Our place is in a human world, and all our palpable relations are human relations. Our conceptions of duty can be framed only by the suggestions which our contact with men affords. But here we encounter the fact of individual responsi- bility. Life is serious. Each one must decide for himself, acting from the intuitions of his own soul, and in the light which comes from the circumstances by which he is surrounded. The seductive voices of ease or temporal advantage must be unheeded. Not even may public opinion in such exigencies control. The choice must be made under the behest of conscience. The voice of God is the only voice which may bid the soul be still and listen ; and when the choice is made the interrogatory may be fearlessly put to all the world : " Wist ye not that I must be in my Father's house ? "