1. The Spirit of Christ gives liberty in the sphere of thought. The mind is led into the truth. " Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Such is the freedom known and realized when we become spiritually enlightened. It is like the morning dawn — the light breaks into our inner being, and we become conscious that we have been brought into an illuminated atmosphere. We know and feel that our mental being has found its true element. What the air is to the bird, and what the water is to the fish, the truth of God is to our minds. As the bird spreads its wings, so our powers and faculties expand, and find in this new element a liberty, an enlargement, that fills our souls with a peculiar gladness.
And we may grow in freedom. We may be learning how to think ; we may be casting out or bringing under sharp control the tendencies that trouble and confuse us, we may be redeeming our intellect from all that enslaves, dishonours and enfeebles it. And for all this we certainly need help and guidance ; we need that
* Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, ii. 196.
2 COR. III. 17 73
some Presence, pure and wise and strong beyond all that is of this world, should bend over us, should come to us, should lead us into the light. The truth must make us free. For the powers that are to grow in freedom must be keen and vivid ; their liberty must be realized and deepened and assured in ordered use ; they must be ever winning for themselves fresh strength and light as they press along their line of healthful growth towards the highest aim they can surmise. And so there can be no liberty of thought without the love of truth — that quickening and ennobling love which longs for truth, not as the gratification of curiosity, not as the pledge of fame, not as the monument of victory, but rather as that without which the mind can never be at rest, or find the meaning and the fulness of its own life — a love more like the love of home ; a love sustained by forecasts of that which may be fully known hereafter; by fragments which disclose already something of truth's perfect beauty, as its light streams out across the waves and through the night, to guide the intellect in the strength of love and hope to the haven where it would be.
2. The Spirit of Christ gives liberty in the sphere of conduct. On the face of dark and troubled waters the Spirit moves ; moves because it must. The Spirit — for wind and spirit are alike in the Greek — the Spirit bloweth. And to men stifled in the atmo- sphere of precedent and prejudice welcome are the breezes that blow from the Alpine heights of some strong nature in whom the Spirit dwells. The Spirit bloweth where it listeth, not in the wake of some other spirit, but where it will ; for it is original and free. Jesus breathed His Spirit upon twelve unheard-of men : and ancient faiths crumbled at their touch. He breathed upon a German miner's son; an old church tottered, and a new world burst into being. If He breathe upon us, may not we do things as great as these ?
(1) This implies deliverance from the bondage of sin. Guilt on the conscience will rob the soul of all liberty. There can be no freedom of utterance, no holy boldness, no liberty in the presence of God, if sin, in its guilt and defilement, lies on the con- science. " Having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience " is essential in order to enter into the " holiest of all." An eman-
74 THE LIBERTY OF THE SPIRIT
cipated conscience is a purged conscience. When this is realized, the soul is in an atmosphere of peace. It is in this peace that the conscience finds its freedom. But it is only through "the blood of his cross " that this can be known. When we see the meaning of Christ's death, when we accept it as that which brings us into a relation of reconciliation with God, we know what peace means. We see then that we not only stand on the work of peace, but have been brought into Him who is our peace. The conscience finds its freedom in the atmosphere of Divine peace.
^ Dora Green well tells us that she once saw the hymn, " I lay my sins on Jesus," printed out in large text hand and firmly pinned on the pillow of a dying factory woman, "so that she might be sure it was always there " — even as a hand holding out a leaf from the Tree of Life.^
^ We sometimes see old leaves on a tree all the winter through, clinging with a strange tenacity to the boughs. The fiercest storms do not loosen them, nor do the keenest frosts. But when spring comes round, and the sap begins to rise, the old, ansightly leaves do not need to be torn off; they drop off themselves, they are pushed off by the new power flowing through every branch ; the new life displaces the old. How many old leaves of sinful habits and sinful lusts and sinful desires and sinful ambitions linger in the soul, and show a strange tenacity, and defy all outward influences to tear them off ! How are they to be got rid of ? Only by the rising of the new life within. Let the Spirit of Life take possession of us, and these things will drop away almost before we know.2