^ When I am a pupil at school I begin by learning rules, but when I have mastered the science I forget the rules. I forget them in the very act of observing them — keep them most perfectly when I am unconscious of their presence. I no longer think of my scales and exercises, I no longer think of my stops and intervals ; these belonged to the days of law, but I am now under grace. The master-spirit of the musician has set me free — not free from the law, but free in it. I travel over the old scales and exercises, ov^ the old stops and intervals, unconscious that they are still on the wayside. I pass unnoticed the places of my former pain ; I go through undisturbed the scenes of my youth's perplexity, for the spirit of music has made me free, and its law is most destroyed when it is most fulfilled,^
II.
The Sphere of Liberty.
" Where the Spirit of the Lord is." The Spirit of the Lord is everywhere, but He is specially in those who believe in Christ. His presence is accentuated in the Christian. The believer is the shrine of the Holy Spirit. And therefore in Christianity alone is true freedom to be found. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty " — and nowhere else. The religion of the Saviour has a monopoly of genuine liberty.
' J, E. McFadyen, The Divine Pursuit, 75. ' 6, Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 178,
2 COR. III. 17 71
The specific liberty which is here more particularly in question consisted in the " taking away of the veil," which had hidden from the Jew the deeper, that is the Christian, sense of the Old Testament. It is not merely liberty from the yoke of the law. It is liberty from the tyranny of obstacles which cloud the spiritual sight of truth. It is liberty from spiritual rather than intellectual dulness ; it is liberty from a state of soul which cannot apprehend truth. The Eternal Spirit still gives this liberty. He gave it, in the first age of the gospel, to those Jews whom, like St. Paul himself, He led to the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ.
But the text covers a much larger area than is required for the particular conclusion to which it is a premiss. It is the enunciation of a master-feature of the gospel. It proclaims a great first principle which towers high above the argument, into which it is introduced for the purpose of proving a single point. " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Freedom is not an occasional largess of the Divine Spirit ; it is not merely a reward for high services or conspicuous devotion. It is the invariable accompaniment of the Spirit's true action. Or rather, it is the very atmosphere of His presence. Wherever He really is, there is also freedom. He does not merely strike off the fetters of some narrow national prejudice, or of some antiquated cere- monialism. He does not descend from Heaven to subvert an earthly despotism. He comes not that He may provide for "the freedom of man's outward individual action, consistently with the safety of human society." His mission is not to bestow an external, political, social freedom. For no political or social emancipation can give real liberty to an enslaved soul. And no tyranny of the State or of society can enslave a soul that has been really freed. Nor is the freedom which He sheds abroad in Christendom a poor reproduction of the restless, volatile, self- asserting, sceptical temper of pagan Greek life, adapted to the forms and thoughts of modern civilization, and awkwardly ex- pressing itself in Christian phraseology. If He gives liberty, it is in the broad, deep sense of that word. At His bidding, the in- most soul of man has free play ; it moves hither and thither ; it rises heavenward, like the lark, as if with a buoyant sense of un- fettered life and power. This liberty comes with the gift of truth ;
72 THE LIBERTY OF THE SPIRIT
it comes along with that gift of which in its fulness the Eternal Spirit is the only Giver. He gives freedom from error for the reason; freedom from constraint for the affections; freedom for the will from the tyranny of sinful desires. Often has human nature imagined for itself such a freedom as this ; it has sketched the outlines more or less accurately ; it has sighed in vain for the reality. Such freedom is, in fact, a creation of grace: the sons of God alone enjoy it. " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
^ If the Spirit of God is not within a man's reach, so that he may make use of it in the apprehension of Divine truth, he is incapable of apprehending it, and therefore cannot easily be con- sidered responsible for not doing it. I am thus led to conclude that the Spirit is in such a way and sense present in every man, that the man, if he will yield himself up to its instruction, giving up his own self-wisdom, may so use it as to apprehend the things of God by it. And I believe further that the Spirit is there for that very end, and it is pressing itself on the attention and acceptance of every man, and that the man's continuance in dark- ness and sin is in fact nothing else than a continued resistance to the Holy Spirit.^