(3) Civilization has been tried. Civilization does free; in- tellect equalizes. Every step of civilization is a victory over some lower instinct. But civilization contains within itself the elements of a fresh servitude. Man conquers the powers of nature and becomes in turn their slave. The workman is in bondage to the machine which does his will; his hours, his wages, his personal habits are determined by it. The rich man fills his house with luxuries, and cannot do without them. A
* John Morley, Oliver Cromwell ^ 513.
378 TRUTH AND FREEDOM
highly civilized community is a very spectacle of servitude. Man is there, a slave to dress, to hours, to manners, to conventions, to etiquette. Things contrived to make his life more easy become his masters. Therefore Jesus did not talk of the progress of the species or the growth of civilization. He did not trust the world's hope of liberty to a right division of property. He freed the inner man, that so the outer might become free too. " Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
^ If there were any doubt as to Christianity being truth, that complete freedom, which cannot be oppressed by anything, and which a man experiences the moment he makes the Christian life-conception his own, would be an undoubted proof of its trutL^
2. Only the Truth can make us free. We must be true in our attitude to ourselves and to our fellow-men.
(1) Of course the Truth meant is not mere information. In that sense, the wisest of men can know only a little ; he has to content himself with being ignorant of all but a fraction of what is knowable. And, what is more important, true wisdom does not depend upon the extent of a man's information. There cannot indeed be wisdom without information, gathered from books and from communication with others ; but such information is but the raw material out of which wisdom has to be extracted ; and often a mind that is not possessed of any great store of knowledge, and whose experience is very limited, shows itself able to draw more light out of it than others who have had a wide intercourse with men and things.
(2) Nor, again, is the Truth referred to the holding of correct doctrines in theology, or in any other subject. It has been one of the most fatal mistakes to regard such correctness according to some standard of orthodoxy as the root of the matter, and to suppose that the one thing needful was, by whatever measures might be necessary — by violence or constraint, by hindering men from speaking and thinking freely, by narrowing their lives, and so preventing the natural action of their minds — to confine them to one set of opinions. Opinions, however right, are mere pre- judices, unless they spring from a living root in our own experi- ence and thought. We have many opinions which have come to
* Tolstoy, The Kliigdom of Ood is Within You {Complete Works, xx. 220).
ST. JOHN VIII. 32, 36 379
US, we might almost say, in our sleep — by imitation of those around us, by the fact that we have heard things said and never heard them controverted, or at best, by a superficial exercise of our understanding upon first appearances. Such opinions there- fore sit upon us very lightly, and we could part with them with- out much loss or change. We should not feel diminished, nor would our lives be essentially altered, if they were turned into their opposites.
(3) There is, however, a deeper kind of conviction than this, which is continually forming itself within every man, and constitutes for him the genuine result of his experience; a conviction as to the real meaning of his life in this world, what is most to be sought for, and what is most to be avoided, what he himself would wish to be, and what attitude he should take up in relation to his fellow-men ; a conviction which may be said to constitute his real religion or to determine what he really worships. This conviction may not come readily to our lips, and indeed it often needs a kind of self -analysis, to which most men are very averse, to recognize it at all ; yet it is continually shaping itself more and more definitely within us, and every act we do, and every serious thought we think, is a contribution to its growth. Every one is continually, by every action and thought, building up within him a true or a false view of his own nature and of the world, a view which puts him into a right or a wrong attitude to himself and to his fellow-men. Now, if we ask the secret of success or failure in this process, looking at conspicuous instances of either, what do we find ? It is that success seems to depend upon a certain inward sincerity of soul, a willingness to apprehend the real facts of the case and to accept their lesson, upon a hatred of falsehood and illusion and a desire to stand in the clear light of day, and to understand the real meaning of the experience which life brings to us ; while failure seems to be the result of a certain unwillingness to admit any- thing we do not like, a readiness to accept anything as true that flatters our desires, and an obstinate shutting of our ears to anything that opposes them.