Free thou thy mind in bondage pent ; Depose the fetish, and proclaim
The things that are more excellent.^
2, Genuine liberty, therefore, is found only in surrender to a higher will. All created things, even those we call the most free, are subject to law and rule and order. The sun who rejoices to run his course, yet knoweth his going down. The winds and storm fulfil God's appointed word. The waves of the sea have their bounds set, whence they cannot pass. For God is a God of order. In the world of politics, the freedom of a nation, such as England, does not mean that its citizens do as they please in everything. In the true home, where family life is seen at the best, there is the perfect model of freedom. There the children do not think and act just as they please. Order, rule, method, direction, are all well known and valued, and acted upon. What, then, is the liberty of the family ? What gives to family life its freedom, or makes it no place of bondage ? The simple, natural unconscious blending of the father's mind with that of his children, and the children's will with that of their father ; the instinctive correspondence of their hearts, the sympathy of their aims, the union of their interests. The children obey, but their obedience is not dreary and dull, for the father's mind and the father's wishes express what they increasingly know to be their own true mind and their own best good. The freedom of children just means this : the power to obey gladly.
^ Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us ; for, by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and by our very acknowledg- ment make manifest that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it.^
^ Mazzini, Life and fFriHngs, iv. 313.
» William Watson, » Goethe.
2 COR. III. 17 69
Love, we are in God's hand. How strange now, looks the life He makes us lead; So free we seem, so fettered fast we are ! I feel He laid the fetter : let it lie ! ^
3. Christ exemplified in His own life and conduct the highest liberty. He came to do not His own will, but the will of His Father. He was under authority, under orders. That was one side of His life. But the other side was one of perfect freedom, for His own will and the Father's will made one music. The Father's good pleasure and His good pleasure were one, and never crossed or clashed. Every step that He took was the step of a free man ; every act that He did was done willingly, of His own choice. There was no necessity laid upon Him. He was not compelled to be poor; He elected to be poor. He was not compelled to suffer hunger, hardship, loneliness, man's spite, thankless toil, and tears; He could have escaped all that, but He took it, by deliberate choice, cheerfully. He was not compelled to lay down His life on the cross ; He was master of death, and could have turned it aside. Of His own will He let men slay Him with cruel hands, not because He must, but because He freely gave Himself. The whole charm of that life was its willingness. The glory of it was its freedom. He walked and worked and taught and healed and suffered, just as His own glad, great, loving Spirit led Him.
Christ's commandments are Himself ; and the sum of them all is this — a character perfectly self-oblivious, and wholly penetrated and saturated with joyful, filial submission to the Father, and uttermost and entire giving Himself away to His brethren. That is Christ's commandment which He bids us keep, and His law is to be found in His life. And then, if that be so, what a change passes on the aspect of law, when we take Christ as being our living embodiment of it. Everything that was hard, repellent, far-off, cold, vanishes. We have no longer tables of stone, but fleshy tables of a heart ; and the Law stands before us, a Being to be loved, to be clung to, to be trusted, whom it is blessed- ness to know and perfection to be like. The rails upon which the train travels may be rigid, but they mean safety, and carry men smoothly into otherwise inaccessible lands. So the life of Jesus ^ |L Browning, Andfea del Sartp,
70 THE LIBERTY OF THE SPIRIT
Christ brought to us is the firm and plain track along which we are to travel ; and all that was difficult and hard in the cold thought of duty becomes changed into the attraction of a living pattern and example.
^ In every art the master is free. He can create and control. Rules do not determine him ; precedents do not bind him. Where the spirit of the master is, there is liberty. He breaks old laws, and makes new ones. He even dispenses with laws, not because he despises them, but because he is a law unto himself. The law is in his heart, and he expresses it as he will. His fingers move across the organ keys, and he fills the listening air with forms, now soft as the moonlight, now wild as the storm. They are born, not of rule, but of the spirit. And as in art, so in life. Where the Spirit of the Master is, there is liberty.^