^ When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun, and let the sunlight come streaming down upon it, and the flower knows the sunlight for which it was made and opens * Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 82.
ST. JOHN VIII. 32, 36 389
its fragrance and beauty ; when I take a dark pebble and put it into the stream and let the silver water go coursing down over it and bringing forth the hidden colour that was in the bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, the flower and the stone rejoice. I can almost hear them sing in the field and in the stream. What then ? Shall not man bring his nature out into the fullest illumination, and surprise himself by the things that he might do ? ^
2. What is that Liberty which the Truth gives ?
(1) Is it political freedom ? — Christ's gospel did not promise political freedom, yet it gave it; more surely than conqueror, reformer, or patriot, that gospel will bring about a true liberty at last. And this, not by theories or by schemes of constitutions, but by the revelation of truths. God is a Spirit: man is His child — redeemed and sanctified. Before that spiritual equality, all distinctions between peer and peasant, monarch and labourer, privileged and unprivileged, vanish. A better man, or a wiser man than I, is in my presence, and I feel it a mockery to be reminded that I am his superior in rank. Let us hold that truth ; let us never weary of proclaiming it : and the truth shall make us free at last.
(2) Is it intellectual freedom ? — Slavery is that which cramps powers. The worst slavery is that which cramps the noblest powers. Worse therefore than he who manacles the hands and feet is he who puts fetters on the mind, and pretends to demand that men shall think, and believe, and feel thus and thus, because others so believed, and thought, and felt before. There is a tendency in the masses always to think — not what is true, but — what is respectable, correct, orthodox : we ask, Is that authorized ? It comes partly from cowardice, partly from indolence, from habit, from imitation, from the uncertainty and darkness of aU moral truths, and the dread of timid minds to plunge into the investiga- tion of them. Now, truth known and believed respecting God and man, frees from this, by warning of individual responsibility. But responsibility is personal. It cannot be delegated to another, and thrown off upon a church. Before God, face to face, each soul must stand, to give account.
\ We hear much about " free-thought " ; but free-thought is * Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 88.
390 TRUTH AND FREEDOM
realized only in Him who delivers from the illusions of time and matter, and persuades us of the real and abiding universe. He fr es the understanding from the most fatal of errors. He opens our eyes that we may see ; strikes from the soul the fetters of sense ; cleanses our wings from the clogging bird-lime of earthli- ness ; and for the first time we are free, gloriously free like the eagle " ringed round with the azure sky." ^
(3) Is it freedom of the will ? — It is not enough to define the liberty which Christ promises as freedom from sin. Many circimi- stances will exempt from sin which do not yet confer that liberty " where the Spirit of the Lord is." Childhood, paralysis, ill- health, the impotence of old age, may remove the capacity and even the desire for transgression : but the child, the paralytic, the old man, are not free through the Truth. Therefore, to this definition we must add, that one whom Christ liberates is free by his own will. It is not that he would, and cannot ; it is that he can, and will not. Christian liberty is right will, sustained by love, and made firm by faith in Christ. Wherever a man would and cannot, there is servitude. He may be unable to control his expenditure, to rouse his indolence, to check his imagination. Well — he is not free. He may boast, as the Jews did, that he is Abraham's son, or any other great man's son ; that he belongs to a free country ; that he never was in bondage to any man ; but free in the freedom of the Son he is not.
^ An act is free when it is the expression of our own thought and will, when our own nature and our whole nature goes with it. If in what we do we are merely doing blindly another's bidding, following mechanically the directions laid down for us, we may be a useful tool, a convenient instrument of a master's purposes, but our work is not our own, but his ; we are not free. To make us free, the work itself must constitute or contain the motive of our activity. The satisfaction or delight of doing it, and not any ulterior end or object, must be all in all to us. In the measure in which any other motive, — hope or fear, desire of honour or reward, dread of punishment or disgrace, nay, even a sense of duty or obligation, — interferes or intermingles with our activity, in that measure we are not free.*