1[ Ezekiel was once led to a place where, through a hole broken in the wall, there was shown him an inner chamber, on the walls of which were painted the hideous idols of the heathen. And there, in the presence of the foul shapes, stood venerable priests and official dignitaries of Israel, with their censers in their hands, and their backs to the oracle of God. There is a chamber like that in all our hearts ; and it would be a great deal better that we should go down, through the hole in the wall, and see it than that we should live, as so many of us do, in this fool's paradise of ignorance of our own sin.^
(2) The unconsciousness may be due to the force of habit. A slave may be only all the more a slave that he is insensible to his bondage. There is no sense of bondage when the instincts of freedom are unrepressed ; but neither is there any when despotism has lasted long enough to kill them out. A man's nature may have become so thoroughly habituated to slavery that he has ceased to know or think of anything better. On the other hand, the very consciousness of bondage is a kind of emancipation. He who has begun to know and feel the irksomeness of his hmits, is already, in a sense, beyond them. There must be in him at least some measure of, and sympathy with, what transcends the bounds that hem him in, before he can feel them as bounds. Pain is the proof that vitality is not extinct. Shame is the witness that the soul is ixot utterly lost to goodness. And the blush on the slave's cheek and the sense of degradation in his heart are at least the sign that he is not all a slave.
^ A. Maclaren.
^^y6 TRUTH AND FREEDOM
IT In the closing stanzas of that most graphic yet touching poem, " The Prisoner of Chillon," Byron well expresses the dead- ness of soul, the hopelessness, and even carelessness concerning life and freedom, begotten in those who have too long worn the chains of slavery. For the canker of such fetters eats more deeply into the soul than into the enchained limbs.
It might be months, or years, or days,
I kept no count, I took no note, I had no hope my eyes to raise
And clear them of their dreary mote; At last men came to set me free,
I asked not why, and reck'd not where, It was at length the same to me, Fetter'd or fetterless to be
I learn'd to love despair. And thus when they appear'd at last, And all my bonds aside were cast, These heavy walls to me had grown A hermitage — and all my own ! And half I felt as they were come To tear me from a second home.
IL
The Truth that Liberates.
All truth gives freedom. We hardly need to prove this in the present day. We know that in every sphere ignorance is bondage, and knowledge is power. So sure are we of it that we fearlessly argue from effect to cause. That which fetters is not true, that which frees us and gives us power cannot be false.
1. The craving for liberty lies deep in human nature, and many means have been tried to satisfy it.
(1) Force has been tried. Wherever force has been used on the side of freedom we honour it ; the names which we pronounce in boyhood with enthusiasm are those of the liberators of nations and the vindicators of liberty. Israel had had such — Joshua, the Judges, Judas Maccabseus. Had the Son of God willed so to come, even on human data the success was certain. Let us waive the truth of His inward Deity, of His miraculous power, of His power to summon to His will more than twelve legions of angels.
ST. JOHN VIII. 32, 36 377
Let us only notice now that men's hearts were full of Him, ripe for revolt ; and that at a single word of His, thrice three hundred thousand swords would have started from their scabbards. But had He so come, one nation might have gained liberty ; not the race of man. Moreover, the liberty would only have been independence of a foreign conqueror. Therefore as a conquering king He did not come.
^ Cromwell was strong that things obtained by force, though never so good in themselves, are both less to the ruler's honour and less likely to last. " What we gain in a free way is better than twice as much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and our posterity's " ; and the safest test of any constitution is its acceptance by the people. And again, " It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it." The root of all external freedom is here.^
(2) Legislation has been tried. Perhaps only once has this been done successfully, and by a single effort. When the names of conquerors shall have been forgotten, and modern civilization shall have become obsolete, when England's shall be ancient history, one Act of hers will be remembered as a record of her greatness, that Act by which in costly sacrifice she emancipated her slaves. But one thing England could not do. She could give freedom, but she could not make fit for freedom, she could not make it lasting. The stroke of a monarch's pen will do the one, the discipline of ages is needed for the other. Give to- morrow a constitution to some feeble Eastern nation or a horde of savages, and in half a century they will be subjected again. Therefore the Son of Man did not come to free the world by legislation.