ST. JOHN VIII. 32, 36 371
is in bondage to it, and needs liberty, even the liberty which I, the Truth, alone am capable of giving him ; which he can receive from no other hands save only from Mine. If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed ; otherwise, you are slaves and servants, and such must continue to the end. The text, there- fore, deals with —
I. The Need of Liberation. II. The Truth that Liberates. III. The Liberty that the Truth gives.
The Need of Liberation.
Christ's aim was to make all men free. He saw around Him servitude in every form — man in slavery to man, and race to race; His own countrymen in bondage to the Eomans — slaves of both Jewish and Roman masters, frightfully oppressed; men trembling before priestcraft ; and those who were politically and ecclesiastically free, in worse bondage still — the rich and rulers slaves to their own passions. Conscious of His inward Deity and of His Father's intentions. He, without hurry, without the excite- ment which would mark the mere earthly Liberator, calmly said, " Ye shall be free."
1. First, then, we have to face this fact, that we are in bondage. — The Jews felt their political position acutely; they writhed under foreign dominion, and again and again broke out into rebellion, seeking an external freedom by casting off the hated Roman yoke. It was intolerable to them to be considered the slaves of Caesar, and the most horrible scenes attended their several patriotic uprisings. The purpose of our Lord was to convince them of an underlying slavery, which accounted for their political servitude, and to confer upon them the spiritual liberty which contains the potency and promise of all freedoms. The essential slavery is interior ; political coercion may imprison the body or intellectual error degrade the mind, but by far the most abject and fatal bondage is that of the soul under the dominion of ignorance, passion, and wilfulness.
(1) The bondage of the mind is one source and method of the
372 TRUTH AND FREEDOM
essential slavery, the bondage of the mind being the tyranny of materialism. Our Lord often speaks of sin as unbelief, unbelief in the spiritual universe — blindness to God, to the spirituality of the law, to the rewards and retributions of the life beyond ; and this unbelief, blocking out the spiritual universe, leaves us slaves of the senses. We are caged in by the body, limited by the bars of circumstance, victims of the material, the worldly, and the temporal. The carnally-minded may fancy themselves possessed of a large liberty, but earth and time at their widest are narrow bo the spirit. To be governed from below is the essential slavery. To obey only animal impulses, to seek sensuous pleasure, to hope for nothing beyond social promotion, to find our motive and end in earthly things, and, in a word, to surrender ourselves to the fatalism of circumstance, is an infinitely worse slavery than to be bound hand and foot. In this cruel bondage thousands live and die without one great thought, principle, or hope in their maimed and fettered life.
^ A recent writer upon the London Zoological Gardens refers to " the spacious aviary " provided for the eagles. Spacious aviary ! One would like to know what the eagles think of that. Surely the amplest artificial horizon is narrow and the loftiest dome mean to creatures born to range the skies and seek the sun. The noble birds must feel in dull, strange ways the loss of their native heaven ; the most spacious aviary can only grievously and mysteriously fret them. So the world, and the things of the world, painfully cramp the creature in whose heart God has set eternity; his cage is narrow even when the stars are its gilded wires. It is said that a bird of the north, confined in a yard, and longing for his arctic haunts, has been known in spring to migrate from the southern to the northern side of his narrow confines. And, however men doom themselves to the straitened life of sense, the instinct of eternity pathetically asserts itself within absurd limits, and distracts the soul with morbid repinings.^
(2) The "bondage of the will is another part of the essential slavery. All see what an awful tyranny sin is when it has once become the habit of life. Some kinds of sin are coarser, others less offensive, but thousands who have committed sin find them- selves miserably incapable of shaking off its tyranny; they are victims of vanity, envy, covetousness, ambition, temper, im- * "W. L. "Watkinson, The Bam and the Antidote, 228.
ST. JOHN VIII. 32, 36 373
patience, or sensual indulgence, and they struggle unavailingly with the despotism which holds them down. He who unwittingly grasps the handles of an electrifying-machine soon writhes in pain and shrieks for deliverance. Why does he not let go the torturing thing ? He cannot ; he is at the mercy of the operator, and is the butt of the crowd. It is thus with multitudes who have committed sin : they are its slaves ; they are astonished at themselves, ashamed of themselves, filled with grief and remorse, yet utterly unable to break the infernal spell. There is often more hope for the poor wretch agonizing in the tentacles of the devil-fish than there is for some of these victims of vice.