(1) To desire the truth is the beginning. We might almost call it the end as well. The desire, if it is genuine, will inevit- ably teach a man the true road to follow. For the genuine desire to see and hold the truth is bound up with the longing for excellence which our Lord calls the hunger and thirst after righteousness. " If any man willeth to do God's will," our Lord says, " he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." To desire to see the truth is one condition of seeing it ; to will to do God's will is the other. The truth is revealed to those who are straining towards their Father in heaven. Heavenly aspirations, earnest desire for goodness, the face turned towards Christ, the desire ever to live by whatever within us is highest and best, the willing obedience to our own best thoughts, the cheerful, the glad resolution to do whatever shall seem to us kindest, truest, justest, purest, noblest — that is the life which opens the eyes, and, when- ever God reveals any part of the excellence of His holiness, as He will assuredly reveal it to each man in fitting time, that is the life which catches the light, and that is the man whom the truth conducts to perfect freedom.
(2) The light of truth is, in some degree, like the light of heaven. It comes by God's ordinance for the most part, and not wholly by man's seeking. The pearl of great price was found by the man who was seeking goodly pearls. He sought for truth, and he found in the course of his search the one truth of all. But the treasure hid in a field was found by one who was not seeking at all. The truth was given in the course of God's Providence, and looked as if it came by chance.
^ He accepted with his whole heart and soul the Christian representation of man as originally a child in the house of the
* John Gaird, University Sermons, 206.
ST. JOHN viii. 32, 36 385
Infinite Father, who speaks truth to him in a voice he can recognize as His. This representation he was ^^ell aware rests upon two vast assumptions, 1st, that man actually knows God, and, 2nd, that he is able to recognize His voice. He always frankly admitted that he could not prove these positions, but he held them fast as the main support of his intellectual and moral life. He strongly held that man reaches highest truth only when God utters it to his soul by His Word and Spirit. Through learning and science we get subordinate truths; but through Divine teaching alone the highest truth. This conviction, which took full possession of him, produced a beautiful intellectual humility. No one ever imbibed more of the levelling spirit of the Gospel that calls the sage to sit beside the little child in the school of Christ.^
III.
The Libekty that Truth Gives.
The whole Bible is a book of liberty. It rings with liberty from beginning to end. Its great men are the men of liberty; and the Old Testament is the emancipator, leading forth out of imprisonment the people of God, who were to do the great work of God in the very much larger and freer life in which they were to live. The prophet and the psalmist are ever preaching and singing about Liberty, the enfranchisement of the life of man. When we turn from the Old Testament to the New Testament, how absolutely clear that idea is! Christ is the very embodi- ment of human liberty. In His own personal life and in every- thing that He did and said, He was for ever uttering the great gospel that man, in order to become his completest, must become his freest ; that what a man did when he entered into a new life was to open a new region in which new powers were to find their exercise, in which he was to be able to be and do things which he could not be and do in more restricted life.
1. What is Liberty ? Try to give a definition of liberty, and it will be something of this kind : Liberty is the fullest opportunity for man to be and do the very best that is possible for him. There is no definition of liberty, that oldest and dearest phrase of men, and sometimes the vaguest also, except that. It has been perverted ; it has been distorted and mystified, but that is what
^ David Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 381. ST. JOHN — 25
386 TRUTH AND FREEDOM
it really means — the fullest opportunity for a man to do and be the very best that is in his personal nature to do and to be. It immediately follows that everything which is necessary for the full realization of a man's life, even though it seems to have the character of restraint for a moment, is really a part of the process of his enfranchisement, is the bringing forth of him to a fuller liberty.
(1) Man thinks of every change that is to come to him as in the nature of denial of something that he is at the present doing and being, as the laying hold upon himself of some sort of restraint, bringing to him something which says : " I must not do the thing which I am doing. I must lay upon myself restraints, restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions. I must not let myself be the man that I am." The Old Testament comes before the New Testament, the law ringing from the mountain-top with the great denials, the great prohibitions, that come from the mouth of God. Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other. Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods. That is the first conception which comes to a man of the way in which he is to enter upon a new life, of the way in which the denial in his experience is to take effect. It is as if the hands were stretched out in order that fetters might be placed upon them. The man says : " Let some power come that is to hinder me from being this thing that I am." And the whole notion is the notion of imprisonment, restraint.