The duty of the Christian business man

THE DUTY OF
THE CHRISTIAN
BUSINESS HAN

,o

Phillips Brooks

1

OF CALIF. ITBBABY, LOS ANGELES

THE DUTY

OF A

CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN

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THE DUTY OF THE

CHRISTIAN
BUSINESS MAN

By
PHILLIPS BROOKS

\s

NEW YORK

DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY
148-156 WEST 23rd STREET

THE DUTY OF THE CHRISTIAN
BUSINESS MAN.

I WILL read to you once again the words which
I have read before, the words of Jesus in the
eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. John :

" As He spake these words, many believed on
Him. Then said Jesus to those Jews which
believed on Him, If ye continue in My word,
then are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall
know the truth, and the truth shall make you
free. They answered Him, We be Abraham's
seed, and were never in bondage to any man:
how sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free? Jesus
answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.
And the servant abideth not in the house for
ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son
therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free
indeed."

I do not know how any man can stand and
plead with his brethren for the higher life, that
71

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T2 PEHFECT FREEDOM.

they will enter into and make their own the life
of Christ and God, unless he is perpetually con-
scious that around them with whom he pleads
there is the perpetual pleading and the voice of
God Himself. Unless a man believes that, every-
thing that he has to say must seem, in the first
place, impertinent, and, in the second place,
almost absolutely hopeless. Who is man that
he shall plead with his fellow-man for the change
of a life, for the entrance into a whole new
career, for the alteration of a spirit, for the sur-
rounding of himself with a new region in which
he has not lived before? But if it be so, that
God is pleading with every one of His children
to enter into the highest life ; if it be so, that
God is making His application and His appeal
to every soul to know Him, and In Him to know
himself, then one may plead with earnestness
and plead with great hopefulness before his
'brethren. And so it is. The great truth of
Jesus Christ is that, that God is pleading with
every soul, not merely in the words which we
hear from one another, not merely in the words
which we read from His book, but in every influ-
ence of life ; and, in those unknown influences
which are too subtle for us to understand or
perceive, God is forever seeking after the souls
of His children.

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 73

I cannot stand before you for the last time
that I shall stand in these meetings, my friends,
without reminding myself and without remind-
ing you of that ; without reminding myself also
and without trying to remind you of how abso-
lutely conformable it is to everything that man
does in this world. The great richness of nature,
the great richness of life, comes when we under-
stand that behind every specific action of man
there is some one of the more elemental and
primary forces of the universe that are always
trying to express themselves. There is nothing
that man does that finds its beginning within
itself, but everything, every work of every trade,
of every occupation, is simply the utterance of
some one of those great forces which lie behind
all life, and in the various ways of the different
generations and of the different men are always
trying to make their mark upon the world.
Behind the power that the man exercises there
always lies the great power of life, the continual
struggle of nature to write herself in the life and
work of man, the power of beauty struggling to
manifest itself, the harmony that is always
desiring to make itself known. To the merchant
there are the great laws of trade, of which his
works are but the immediate expression. To
the mechanic there are the continual forces of

74 PERFECT FREEDOM.

nature, gravitation uttering itself in all its
majesty, made no less majestic because it simply
takes its expression for the moment in some
particular exercise of his art. To the ship that
sails upon the sea there are the everlasting winds
that come out of the treasuries of God and fulfil
his purpose in carrying his children to their
destination. There is no perfection of the uni-
verse and of the special life of man in the uni-
verse until it comes to this. The greatest of all
forces are ready without condescension, are ready
as the true expression of their life, to manifest
themselves in the particular activities which we
find everywhere, and which are going on every-
where. The little child digs his well in the
seashore sand, and the great Atlantic, miles deep,
miles wide, is stirred all through and through to
fill it for him. Shall it not be so then here
to-day, and shall it not be the truth, upon which
(we let our minds especially dwell, and which we
keep in our souls all the time that I am speaking
and you are listening, that however He may be
hidden from our sight God is the ultimate fact
and the final purpose and power of the universe,
and that everything that man tries to do for his
fellow-man is but the expression of that love of
God which is everywhere struggling to utter
itself in blessing, to give itself away to the soul
of every one for whom He cares?

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 75

It is in this truth that I find the real secret,
the deepest meaning, of the everlasting dissatis-
faction of man that is always ready to be stirred.
We moralize, we philosophize about the discon-
tent of man. We give little reasons for it ; but
the real reason of it all is this, that which every-
thing lying behind it really signifies : that man
is greater than his circumstances, and that God
is always calling to him to come up to the ful-
ness of his life. Dreadful will be the day when
the world becomes contented, when one great
universal satisfaction spreads itself over the
world. Sad will be the day for every man when
he becomes absolutely contented with the life:
that he is living, with the thoughts that he is
thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when
there is not forever beating at the doors of his
soul some great desire to do something larger,
which he knows that he was meant and made to
do because he is the child of God. And there
is the real secret of the man's struggle with his
sins. It is not simply the hatefulness of the
sin, as we have said again and again, but it is
the dim perception, the deep suspicion, the real
knowledge at the heart of the man, that there i?
a richer and a sinless region in which it is really
meant for him to dwell. Man stands separated
from that life of God, as it were, by a great,

76 PERFECT FREEDOM.

thick wall, and every effort to put away his sin,
to make himself a nobler and a purer man, is
simply his beating at the inside of that door
which stands between him and the life of God,
which he knows that he ought to be living. It
is like the prisoner hidden in his cave, who feels
through all the thick wall that shuts him out
from it the sunlight and the joyous life that is
outside, who knows that his imprisonment is not
his true condition, and so with every tool that
his hands can grasp and with his bleeding hands
themselves beats on the stone, that he may find
his way out. And the glory and the beauty of
it is that while he is beating upon the inside of
the wall there is also a noble power praying
upon the outside of that wall. The life to which
he ought to come is striving in its turn, upon its
side, to break away the hindrance that is keep-
ing him from the thing he ought to be, that is
keeping him from the life he ought to live.
God, with His sunshine and lightning, with the
great majestic manifestations of Himself, and
with all the peaceful exhibitions of His life, is
forever trying, upon His side of the wall, to
break away the great barrier that separates the
sinner's life from Him. Great is the power,
great is the courage of the sinner, when through
the thickness of the walls he feels that beating

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 77

life of God, when he knows that he is not work-
ing alone, when he is sure that God is wanting
him just as truly, far more truly, than he wants
God. He bears himself to a nobler struggle
with his enemy and a more determined effort to
break down the resistance that stands between
him and the higher life. Our figure is all imper-
fect, as all our figures are so imperfect, because
it seems to be the man all by himself, working
by himself, until he shall come forth into the
life of God, as if God waited there to receive him
when he came forth the freed ma,n, and as if the
working of the freedom upon the sinner's side
had not something also of the purpose of God
within him. God is not merely in the sunshine ;
God is in the cavern of the mail's sin. God is
with the sinner wherever he can be. There is
no soul so black in its sinfulness, so determined
in its defiant obstinacy, that God has abandoned
his throne room at the centre of the sinner's life,
and every movement is the God movement and
every effort is the God force, with which man
tries to break forth from his sin and come forth
into the full sunlight of a life with God. Do
you not think how full of hope it is? Do you
not see that when this great conception of the
universe, which is Christ's conception, which
beamed in every look that He shed upon the

78 PERFECT FREEDOM.

world, which was told in every word that He
spoke and which was in every movement of His
hand — do you not see how, when this great con-
ception of the universe takes possession of a man,
then all his struggle with his sin is changed, it
becomes a strong struggle, a glorious struggle.
He hears perpetually the voice of Christ, " l>e
of good cheer. I have overcome the world.
You shall overcome it by the same strength which
overcame with Me."

And then another thing. When a man comes
forth into the fulness of that life with God,
when at last he has entered God's service and
the obedience to God's will, and the communion
with God's life, then there comes this wonder-
ful thing, there comes the revelation of the man's
past. We dare to tell the man that if he enters
into the divine life, if he makes himself a ser-
vant of God and does God's will out of obedient
love, he shall then be strong and wise. One
great element of his strength is going to be this :
A marvellous revelation that is to come to him
of how all his past has been filled with the power
of that spirit with which he has at last entered
into communion, to which he has at last sub-
mitted himself. Man becomes the child of God,
becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, and this
marvellous revelation amazes him. He sees that

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 79

back through all the years of his most obstinate
and careless life, through all his wilfulness and
resistance, through all his profligacy and black
sin, God has been with him all the time, beat-
ing himself upon his life, showing him how He
desired to call him to Himself, and that the
final submission does not win God. It simply
submits to the God who has been with the soul
all the time. Can there be anything more win-
ning to the soul than that, anything that brings
a deeper shame to you, than to have it revealed
to you, suddenly or slowly, that from the first
day that you came into this world, nay, before
your life was an uttered fact in this world, God
has been loving you, and seeking you, and plan-
ning for you, and making every effort that He
could make in consistency with the free will
with which He endowed you from the centre of
His own life, that you might become His and
therefore might become truly youself ? Through
all the years in which you were obstinate and
rebellious, through all the years in which you
defied Him, nay, through the years in which you
denied Him and said that He did not exist, He
was with you all the time. What shall I say to
my friend who is an atheist? Shall I believe
that until he comes to a change of his opinions
^nd recognizes that there is indeed a ruling love.

gO PERFECT FREEDOM.

a great and fatherly God for all the world, that he
has nothing to do with that God? Shall I believe
that God has nothing to do with him until he
acknowledges God? God would be no God to
me if He were that, if He left the man absolutely
unhelped until the man beat at the doors of His
divine helpfulness and said, " I believe in Thee
at last. Now help me." And to the atheist there
appears the light of the God whom he denies.
Into every soul, just so far and just so fast as it
is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats
His life and gives His help. That is what makes
a man hopeful of all his fellow-men as he looks
around upon them and sees them in all the con-
ditions of their life.

And this could only be if that were true, if
that is true, which we are dwelling upon con-
stantly, the absolute naturalness of the Christian
life, that it is man's true life, that it is no foreign
region into which some man may be transported
and where he lives an alien to all his own essen-
tial nature and to all the natural habitudes in
which he is intending to exist. There are two
ideas of religion which always have abounded,
and our great hope is, our great assuranc* for
the future of the world is, that the true anc pure
idea of religion some day shall grow and take
possession of the life of man. One idea held

THE DliTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 81

bj very earnest people, embodied in very faith-
ful and devoted lives, is the strangeness of re-
ligion to the life of man, as if some morning
something dropped out of the sky that had had
no place upon our earth before, as if there came
the summons to man to be something entirely
different from what the conditions of his nature
prophesied and intended that he should be.
The other idea is that religion comes by the
utterance of God from the heavens, but comes
up out of the human life of man; that man is
essentially and intrinsically religious; that he
does not become something else than man when
he becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, but then
for the first time he becomes man; that religion
is not something that is fastened upon the out-
side of his life, but is the awakening of the truth
inside of his life; the Church is but the true
fulfilment of human life and society ; heaven is
but the New Jerusalem that completes all the
old Jerusalems and Londons and Bostons that
have been here upon our earth. Man, in the
fulfilment of his nature by Jesus Christ, is man
— not to be something else, our whole humanity
is too dear to us. I will cling to this humanity
of man, for I do love it, and I will know nothing
else. But when man is bidden to look back into
his humanity and see what it means to be a man,

82 PERFECT FREEDOM.

that humanity means purity, truthfulness, ear*
nestness, and faithfulness to that God of which
humanity is a part, that God which manifested
that humanity was a part of it, when the incar-
nation showed how close the divine and human
belonged together — when man hears that voice,
I do not know how he can resist, why he shall
not lift himself up and say, "Now I can be a
man, and I can be man only as I share in and
give my obedience to and enter into communion
with the life of God," and say to Christ, to Christ
the revealer of all this, " Here I am, fulfil my
manhood."

And do not you see how immediately this
sweeps aside, as one gush of the sunlight sweeps
aside the darkness, do not you see how it sweeps
aside all the foolish and little things that people
are saying? I say to my friend, "Be a Chris-
tian." That means to be a full man. And he
says to mp, " I have not time to be a Christian.
I have not room. If my life was not so full.
You don't know how hard I work from morning
to night. What time is there for me to be a
Christian? What time is there, what room is
there for Christianity in such a life as mine?"
But does not it come to seem to us so strange, so
absurd, if it was not so melancholy, that man
should say such a thing as that? It is as if the

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 83

engine had said it had no room for the steam.
It is as if the tree had said it had no room for the
sap. It is as if the ocean had said it had no room
for the tide. It is as if the inan said that he had
no room for his soul. It is as if life said that it
had no time to live, when it is life. It is not
something that is added to life. It is life. A
man is not living without it. And for a man to
say that " I am so full in life that I have no room
for life," you see immediately to what absurdity
it reduces itself. And how a man knows what
he is called upon by God's voice, speaking to
him every hour, speaking to him every moment,
speaking to him out of everything, that which
the man is called upon to do because it is the
man's only life ! Therefore time, room, that is
what time, that is what room is for — life. Life
is the thing we seek, and man finds it in the ful-
filment of his life by Jesus Christ.

Now, until we understand this and take it in
its richness, all religion seems, becomes to us
such a little thing that it is not religion at all.
You have got to know that religion, the service
of Christ, is not something to be taken in in ad-
dition to your life; it is your life. It is not a
ribbon that you shall tie in your hat, and go down
the street declaring yourself that you have ac-
cepted something in addition to the life which

84 PERFECT FREEDOM.

your fellow-men are living. It is something
which, taken into your heart, shall glow in every
action so that your fellow-men shall say, " Lo,
how he lives ! What new life has come into
him ? " It is that insistence upon the great
essentialness of the religious life, it is the insist-
ence that religion is not a lot of things that a
man does, but is a new life that a man lives,
uttering itself in new actions because it is the
new life. " Except a man be born again he can-
not see the kingdom of God." So Jesus said to
Nicodemus the ruler, Nicodemus the amateur in
religions, who came and said, "Perhaps this
teacher has something else that I can bind into
my catalogue of truths and hold it." Jesus
looked him in the face and said : " It is not that,
my friend, it is not that ; it is to be a new man,
it is to be born again. It is to have the new
life, which is the old life, which is the eternal
life. So alone does man enter into the king-
dom of God." I cannot help believing all the
time that if our young men knew this, religion
would lift itself up and have a dignity and great-
ness— not a thing for weak souls, but a thing
for the manliest soul. Just because of its man-
liness it is easy. "Is it easy or is it hard, this
religion of yours ? " people say to us. I am sure
I do not know the easy and the hard things. I

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 85

cannot tell the difference. What is easier than
for a man to breathe ? And yet, have you never
seen a breathless man, a man in whom the breath-
ing was almost stopped, a drowning man, an
exhausted man ? have you never seen, when the
breath was put once more to his nostrils and
bi ought down once more into his empty lungs,
the struggle with which he came back to it? It
was the hardest thing for him to do, so much
harder for him to live than it was for him to die
But by and by see him on his feet, going about
his work, helping his fellow-men, living his life,
rejoicing in his days, guarding against his dan-
gers, full of life. Is life a hard thing for him ?
You don't talk about its being hard or easy any
more than you talk about life itself. The man
who lives in God knows no life except the life
of God. Let men know that it is not mere
trifling, it is not a thing to be dallied with for
an instant, it is not a thing for a man to con-
vince himself by an argument, and then keep as
it were locked in a shelf : it is something that is
so deep and serious, so deep and serious that
when a man has once tested it there is no more
chance of his going out of it than there is of his
going out of the friendship and the love which
holds him with its perpetual expression, with
the continued deeper and deeper manifestation

86 PERFECT FREEDOM.

of the way in which the living being belongs to
him who has a right to his life.

Now in the few moments that remain I want
to take it for granted most seriously, most ear-
nestly, that the men who are listening to me are
in earnest, and I want to try to tell them as a
brother might tell a brother, as I might tell to
you or try to tell to you if sitting before my fire-
side, I want to try to answer the question which
I know is upon your hearts. " What shall I do
about this?" I know you say. "Is this all in
the clouds? Is there anything I can do in the
right way?" If you are in earnest, I shall try
to tell you what I should do, if I were in your
place, that I might enter into that life and be
the free man that we have tried to describe, of
whom we believe certain special and definite
things. What are they? In the first place I
would put away my sin. There is not a man
listening to me now who has not some trick of
life, some habit that has possession of him, which
he knows is a wrong thing. The very first thing
for a man to do is absolutely to set himself
against them. If you are foul, stop being licen-
tious, at least stop doing licentious things. If
you, in any part of your business, are tricky,
and unsound, and unjust, cut that off, no matter
what it costs you. There is something clear and

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 87

definite enough for every man. It is as clear for
every man as the sunlight that smites him in his
eyes. Stop doing the bad thing which you are
doing. It is drawing the bolt away to let what-
ever mercy may come in come in. Stop doing
your sin. You can do that if you will. Stop
doing your sin, no matter how mechanical it
seems, and then take up your duty, whatever
you can do to make the world more bright and
good. Do whatever you can to help every strug-
gling soul, to add new strength to any staggering
cause, the poor sick man that is by you, the poor
wronged man whom you with your influence
might vindicate, the poor boy in your shop that
you may set with new hope upon the road of life
that is beginning already to look dark to him.
I cannot tell you what it is. But you know your
duty. No man ever looked for it and did not
find it.

And then the third thing — pray. Yes, go to
the God whom you but dimly see and pray to
Him in the darkness, where He seems to sit.
Ask Him, as if He were, that He will give you
that which, if He is, must come from Him, can
come from Him alone. Pray anxiously. Pray
passionately, in the simplest of all words, with
the simplest of all thoughts. Pray, the manli-
est thing that a man can do, the fastening of his

88 PERFECT FREEDOM.

life to the eternal, the drinking of his thirsty
soul out of the great fountain of life. And pray
distinctly. Pray upon your knees. One grows
tired sometimes of the free thought, which is yet
perfectly true, that a man can pray anywhere
and anyhow. But men have found it good to
make the whole system pray. Kneel down, and
the very bending of these obstinate and unused
knees of yours will make the soul kneel down in
the humility in which it can be exalted in the
sight of God.

And then read your Bible. How cold that
sounds! What, read a book to save my soul?
Eead an old story that my life in these new days
shall be regenerated and saved? Yes, do just
that, for out of that book, if you read it truly,
shall come the divine and human person. If
you can read it with your soul as well as with
your eyes, there shall come the Christ there walk-
ing in Palestine. You shall see Him so much
greater than the Palestine in which he walks,
that at one word of prayer, as you bend over the
illuminated page, there shall lift up that body-
being of the Christ, and come down through the
centuries and be your helper at your side. So
read your Bible.

And then seek the Church — oh, yes, the
Church. Do you think, my friends, you who

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 89

stand outside the Church, and blame her for her
inconsistencies, and tell of her shortcomings, and
point out the corruptions that are in her history,
all that are in her present life to-day — do you
really believe that there is an earnest man in the
Church that does not know the Church's weak-
nesses and faults just as well as you do? Do you
believe that there is one of us living in the life
and heart of the Church who don't think with all
his conscience, who don't in every day in deep
distress and sorrow know how the Church fails of
the great life of the Master, how far she is from
being what God meant she should be, what she
'shall be some day? But all the more I will put
my life into that Church, all the more I will
drink the strength that she can give to me and
make what humble contribution to her I can
bring of the earnestness and faithfulness of my
life. Come into the Church of Jesus Christ.
There is no other body on the face of the earth
that represents what she represents — the noble
destiny of the human soul, the great capacity of
human faith, the inexhaustible and unutterable
love of God, the Christ, who stands to manifest
them all.

Now those are the things for a man to do who
really cares about all this. Those are the things
for an earnest man to do. They have no power

90 PERFECT FREEDOM.

in themselves, but they are the opening of the
windows. And if that which I believe is true,
God is everywhere giving himself to us, the
opening of the windows is a signal that we want
Him and an invitation that He will be glad
enough to answer, to come. Into every window
that is open to Him and turned His way, Christ
comes, God comes. That is the only story.
There is put aside everything else. Election,
predestination, they can go where they please.
I am sure that God gives Himself to every soul
that wants Him and declares its want by the
open readiness of the signal which He knows.
How did the sun rise on our city this morning?
Starting up in the east, the sun came in its
majesty into the sky. It smote on the eastward
windows, and wherever the window was all
closed, even if it were turned eastward, on the
sacred side of the city's life, it could not come
in ; but wherever any eastward window had its
curtains drawn, wherever he who slept had left
the blinds shut, so that the sun when it came
might find its way into his sleepiness, there the
sun came, and with a shout awoke its faithful
servant who had believed in him even before he
had seen him, and said, "Arise, arise from the
dead, and I will give thee life." This is t«e
simplicity of it all, my friends. A multitude H

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 91

ot»-3r things you need not trouble yourselves
about. I amaze myself when I think how men
go asking about the questions of eternal punish-
ment and the duration of man's torment in
another life, of what will happen to any man
who does not obey Jesus Christ. Oh, my
friends, the soul is all wrong when it asks that.
Not until the soul says, " What will come if I do
obey Jesus Christ?" and opens its glorified
vision to see all the great things that are given to
the soul that enters into the service of the perfect
one, the perfect love, not until then the perfect
love, the perfect life, come in. A man may be
— I believe it with all my heart — so absolutely
wrapped up in the glory of obedience, and the
higher life, and the service of Christ, that he
never once asks himself, " What will come to me
if I do not obey? " any more than your child asks
you what you will do to him if he is not obedi-
ent. Every impulse and desire of his life sets
toward obedience. And so the soul may have
no theory of everlasting or of limited punish-
ment, or of the other life.

Simply now, here, he must have that without
which he cannot live, that without which there
is no life. Jesus the soul must have, the one
yesterday, to-day, and forever; He that is and
'vas and is to be. Men dwell upon what He was,

92 PERFECT FREEDOM.

upon what He is ; I rather think to-day of what
He is to be. And when I see these young men
here before me looking to the future and not to
the pas% — nay, looking to the future and not to
the present, valuing the present only ass it is the
seed ground of the future, the foundation upon
jvhich the structure is to rise whose pinnacle
shall some day pierce the sky, — I want to tell
them of the Jesus that shall be. 'In fuller com-
prehension of Him, with deeper understanding
of His life, with a more entire impression of
what He is and of what He may be to the soul,
so men shall understand Him in the days to be,
and yet He shall be the same Christ still. The
future belongs to Jesus Christ, yes, the same
Christ that I believe in and that I call upon you
to believe in to-day, but a larger, fuller, more
completely comprehended Christ, the Christ that
is to be, the same Christ that was and suffered,
the same Christ that is and helps, but the same
Christ also who, being forever deeper ana deeper
and more deeply received into the souls of men,
regenerates their institutions, changes their life,
opens their capacities, surprises them with them-
selves, makes the world glorious and joyous
every day, because it has become the new incar-
nation, the new presence of the divine life in
the life of man.

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 93

Men are talking about the institutions in which
you are engaged, my friends, about the business
from which you have come here to worship for
this little hour. Men are questioning about
what they care to do, what they can have to d&
with Christianity. They are asking everywhere
this question . " Is it possible for a man to be
engaged in the activities of our modern life and
yet to be a Christian? Is it possible for a man
to be a broker, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a me-
chanic, is it possible for a man to be engaged in
a business of to-day, and yet love his God and
his fellow-man as himself? " I do not know, I
do not know what transformations these dear
businesses of yours have got to undergo before
they shall be true and ideal homes for the child
of God; but I do know that upon Christian mer-
chants and Christian brokers and Christian law-
yers and Christian men in business to-day there
rests an awful and a beautiful responsibility : to
prove, if you can prove it, that these things are
capable of being made divine, to prove that a
man can do the work that you have been doing
this morning and will do this afternoon, and yet
shall love his God and his fellow-man as himself.
If he cannot, if he cannot, what business have
you to be doing them? If he can, what business
have you to be doing them so poorly, so carnally,

94 PERFECT FREEDOM.

so unspiritually, that men look on them ana
shake their heads with doubt? It belongs to
Christ in men first to prove that man may be a
Christian and yet do business ; and, in the second
place, to show how a man, as he becomes a
greater Christian, shall purify and lift the busi-
ness that he does and make it the worthy occu-
pation of the Son of God.

What shall be our universal law of life? Can
we give it as we draw toward our last moment?
I think we can. I want to live, I want to live,
if God will give me help, such a life that, if all
men in the world were living it, this world
would be regenerated and saved. I want to live
such a life that, if that life changed into new
personal peculiarities as it went to different
men, but the same life still, if every man were
living it, the millennium would be here; nay,
heaven would be here, the universal presence of
God. Are you living that life now? Do you
want your life multiplied by the thousand mill-
ion so that all men shall be like you, or don't
you shudder at the thought, don't you give hope
that other men are better than you are? Keep
that fear, but only that it may be the food of a
diviner hope, that all the world may see in you
the thing that man was meant to be, that is, the
Christ. An, you say, that great world, it is too

THE DUTY OF THE BUSINESS MAN. 95

big; how can I stretch my thought and imagina-
tion and conscience to the poor creatures in
Africa and everywhere? Then bring it home.
Ah, this dear city of ours, this city that we
love, this city in which many of us were born,
in which all of us are finding the rich and sweet
associations of our life, this city whose very
streets we love because they come so close to
everything we do and are, cannot we do some-
thing for it? Cannot we make its life diviner?
Cannot we contribute something that it has not
to-day? Cannot you put in it, some little corner
of it, a life which others shall see and say, " Ah,
that our lives may be like that ! " And then the
good Boston in which we so rejoice, which we
so love, which we would so fain make a part of
the kingdom of God, a true city of Jesus Christ,
we shall not die without having done something
for it.

I linger, and yet I must not linger. Oh, my
friends, oh, my fellow-men, it is not very long
ihat we shall be here. It is not very long. This
iife for which we are so careful — it is not very
long; and yet it is so long, because, long, long
after we have passed away out of men's sight and
out of men's memory, the world, with something
that we have left upon it, that we have left within
it, will be going on still. It is so long because,

96 PERFECT FREEDOM.

long after the city and the world have passed
away, we shall go on somewhere, somehow, the
same beings still, carrying into the depths of
eternity something that this world has done for us
that no other world could do, something of good-
ness to get now that will be of value to us a mill-
ion years hence, that we never could get unless
we got it in the short years of this earthly life.
Will you know it? Will you let Christ teach it
to you? Will you let Christ tell you what is the
perfect man? Will you let Him set His sim-
plicity and graciousness close to your life, and
will you feel their power? Oh! be brave, be
true, be pure, be men, be men in the power of
Jesus Christ. May God bless you! May God
bless you ! Let us pray.

TRUE LIBERTY.

AN earnest appeal to all that enter that Lib-
erty. May I read to you a few words from the
eighth chapter of St. John? " Then said Jesus
to those Jews which believed on Him, If ye
continue in my word, then are ye my disciples
indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the
truth shall make you free."

Let us not think, my friends, that there is
anything strange about the spectacle which we
witnessed this morning. The only strange thing
that there could be about it is that anybody
should think that it is strange that men should
turn aside for half an hour from their ordinary
business pursuits, that they should come from
the details of life to inquire in regard to the
principles, the everlasting principles and pur-
poses of life; that they should turn aside from
those things which are occupying them from day
to day and make one single hour in the week
consecrated to the service of those great things
97

98 PERFECT FREEDOM.

wkich underlie all life — surely there is nothing
very strange. There is nothing more absolutely
natural. Every man does it in his own sort of
way, in his own choice of time. We have chosen
to do it together, on one day of the week during
these few weeks which the Christian Church has
so largely set apart for special thought and prayer
and earnest attempt to approach the God to whom
we belong. It is simply as if the stream turned
back again to its fountain, that it might refresh
itself and make itself strong for the great work
that it had to do in watering the fields and turn-
ing the wheels of industry. It is simply as if
men plodding along over the flat routine of tneir
life chose once in a while to go up into the moun-
tain top, whence they might once in a while look
abroad over their life, and understand more fully
the way in which they ought to work. These
are the principles, these are the pictures which
represent that which we have in mind as we
come together for a little while each Monday in
these few weeks, in order that we may think
about things of God and try to realize the depth
of our own human life. The first thing that we
ought to understand about it is that when we
turn aside from life it is only that we go deeper
into life. This hour does not stand apart from
the rest of the hours of the week, in that we are

TRUE LIBERTY. 99

dealing with things in which the rest of the week
has no concern. He who understands life deeply
and fully, understands life truly ; he has forever
renewed his life; and if there comes into our
hearts, in the life which we are living, a perpet-
ual sense that life needs renewal, a richening and
refreshing, then it is in order that we may go
down into the depths and see what lies at the
root of things — things that we are perpetually
doing and thinking. It is this that brought us
together here: it is that we may open to our-
selves some newer, higher life. It is that we
may understand the life that we may live, along
side of and as a richer development of that life
which we are living from day to day, which we
have been living during the years of our life.
How that idea has haunted men in every period
of their existence, how is it haunting you, that
there is some higher life which it is possible to
live! There has never been a religion that has
not started there, lifted up its eyes and seen, afar
off, what it was possible for man to do from day
to day, in contrast with the things which men
immediately and presently are. There is not
any moment of the human soul which has not
rested upon some great conception that man was
a nobler being than he was ordinarily conceiving
himself to be ; that he was not destined to the

100 PERFECT FREEDOM.

things which were ordinarily occupying his life ;
that he might be living a greater and nobler life.
It is because the Christian Scriptures have laid
most earnestly hold of this idea, it is because it
was represented not simply in the words which
Christ said, but in the very being which Christ
was, that we go to them to get the inspiration
and the indication, the revelation and the enlight-
enment which we need. I have read to you these
few words in which Christ declares the whole
subject, the whole character of which His life is
and what His work is about to do, because it
seems to me that they strike at once the key-note
of that which we want to understand. They let
us enter into the full conception of that which
the new life which is offered to man really is.
There are two conceptions which come to every
man when he is entering upon a new life, chang-
ing his present life to something that is different
from the present life, and being a different sort of
creature and living in a different sort of a way.
The first way in which it presents itself to him
— almost always at the beginning of every re-
ligion, perhaps — is in the way of restraint and
imprisonment. 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

TRUE LIBERTY. 101

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."
You see how 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 neighbor's goods." That is the first
conception which comes to a man of the way in
.vhieh 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 imprison-
ment, restraint. So it is with all civilization.
It is perfectly possible for us to represent civil-
ization as compared with barbarism, as accepted
by mankind, as a great mass of restrictions and
prohibitions that have been laid upon human
life, so that the freedom of life has been cast
aside, and man has entered into restricted, re-

102 PERFECT FREEDOM.

strained, and imprisoned condition. So it is
with every fulfilment of life. It is possible for
a man always to represent it to himself as if it
were the restriction, restraint, and prohibition of
his life. The man passes onward into the fuller
life which belongs to a man. He merges his
selfishness into that richer life which is offered
to human kind. He makes himself, instead of a
single, selfish man, a man of family; and it is
easy enough to consider that marriage and the
family life bring immediately restraints and pro-
hibitions. The man may may not have the free-
dom which he used to have. So all development
of education, in the first place, offers itself to
man, or seems to offer itself to man, as prohibi-
tion and imprisonment and restraint. There
is no doubt truth in such an idea. We never
lose sight of it. No other richer and fuller idea
which we come to by and by ever does away with
the thought that man's advance means prohibi-
tion and self-denial, that in order that man shall
become the greater thing he must cease to be the
poorer and smaller thing he has been. But yet
there is immediately a greater and fuller. When
we hear those words of Jesus, we see immediately
that not the idea of imprisonment but the idea
of liberty, not the idea of restraint but that of
setting free, is the idea which is really in His

TRUE LIBERTY. 103

mind when he offers the fullest life to human
fcind. Have you often thought of how the whole
Bible is a Book of Liberty, of how it rings with
liberty from beginning to end, of how the great
men are the men of liberty, of how the Old
Testament, the great picture which forever
shines, 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, the psalmist, are ever preaching and
singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of
the life of man, that man was not imprisoned in
order to fulfil himself, but shall open his life,
and every new progress shall be into a new
region of existence which he has not touched as
yet. When we turn from the Old Testament to
the New Testament, how absolutely clear that
idea is! Christ is the very embodiment of
human liberty. In His own personal life and
in everything 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. It it th«

104 PEUFECT FREEDOM.

acceptance of that idea, it seems to me, that
makes us true disciples of Christ and of that
great gospel, and that transfigures everything.
When my friend turns over some new leaf, as we
say, and begins to live a new life, what shall we
think of him? I learn that he has become a
Christian man, that he is doing something, that
he is working in a way and living a life which
I have not known before. What is my impres-
sion in regard to him? Is not your impression,
as you look upon that man, that somehow or
c;; her he has entered into a slavery or bondage,
that he has taken upon his life restrictions and
imprisonments which he did not have before?
And you think of him, perhaps, as a man who
has done a wise and prudent thing, who has done
something that is going to be for his benefit
some day in some distant and half -realized world,
but as a man who, for the present, has laid a
burden and bondage upon his life. That is
never the tone of Christ; it is never the tone of
the Christian gospel. When a man turns away
from his sins and enters into energetic holiness,
when a man sacrifices his own self-indulgence and
goes forth a pure seryant of his God and his fel-
low-men, there is only one cry in the whole gos-
jpel.of that man, and that is the, cry of freedom.
As soon as M fcBtoBttek &&£•£&& sopn as I .can

TRUE LIBERTY. 105

feel about my friend, who has become a better
man, that he has become a larger and not a
smaller, a freer and not a more imprisoned man,
as soon as I lift up my voice and say that the
man is free, then I understand him more fully,
and he becomes a revelation to me in the higher
and richer life which is possible for me to live.
But think of it for yourselves, for a moment, and
ask what freer life really is. Try to give a defi-
nition of liberty, and I know not what it can be
said to be except something of this kind : Liberty
is the fullest opportunity for man to be and do
the very best that is possible for him. I know
of 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 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 enfranchise-
ment, is the bringing forth of him to a fuller
liberty. You see a man coming forward and
offering himself as one of the defenders of his
country in his country's need. You see him

106 PERFECT FREEDOM.

standing at the door where men are being re«
ceived as recruits into the army of the coun-
try. He wants liberty. He wants to be able
to do that which he cannot do in his poor, per-
sonal isolation here at home. He wants the
badge which will give him the right to go forth
and meet the enemies of his country, and he
enrolls himself among these men. He makes
himself subject to obligations, duties, and drill.
They are a part of his enfranchisement. They
are really the breaking of the fetters upon his
slavery, the sending him forth into freedom.
He is like a bit of iron or steel that lies upon
the ground. It lies neglected and perfectly free.
You see it is made by the adjustment of the end
of it so that it can be set into a great machine
and become part of a great working system. But
there it lies. Will you call it free? It is bound
to be nothing there. It is absolutely separate,
and with its own personality distinct and indi-
vidual and all alone. What is to make that bit
of iron a free bit of iron, to let it go forth and do
the thing which it was meant to do, but the tak-
ing of it and the binding of it at both ends into
the structure of which it was made to be a part?
It seems to me the binding of a man, — it seems to
me that the binding of the iron is not the yield-
ing of its freedom. It is not merely after finding

TRUE LIBERTY. 107

its place within the system that it first achieves
its freedom and so joins in the music and par-
takes of the courses with which the whole en*
ginery is filled. Is not it, then, for the first time
a free bit of iron, having accomplished all that
it was made to do when it came forth from the
forge of the master, who had this purpose in his
mind? This, then, is freedom; everything is
part of the enfranchisement of a man which
helps to put him in the place where he can live
his best. Therefore every duty, every will of
God, every commandment of Christ, every self-
surrender that a man is called upon to obey or
to make — do not think of it as if it were simply
a restraint to liberty, but think of it as the very
means of freedom, by which we realize the very
purpose of God and the fulfilment of our life.
It is interesting to see how all that is true in
regard to the matter of belief, doctrine, and opin-
ions which we are to accept. How strange it
very often seems that men go to the Church, or to
one another, and say : " Must I believe this doc-
trine in order that I can enter into the Church? "
" Must I believe this doctrine in order that I may
be saved? " men say, with a strange sort of notion
about what salvation is. How strange it seems,
when we really have got our intelligence about
us and know what it is to believe ! To believe

108 PERFECT FREEDOM.

a new truth, if it be really truth and we really
believe it, is to have entered into a new region,
in which our life shall find a new expansion and
a new youth. Therefore, not " Must we believe ? "
but "May I believe?" is the true cry of the
human creature who is seeking for the richest
fulfilment of his life, who is working that his
whole nature may find its complete expansion
and so its completest exercise. We talk a great
deal in these days and in this place about a
liberal faith. What is a liberal faith, my friends ?
It seems to me that by every true meaning of
the word, by every true thought of the idea, a
liberal faith is a faith that believes much, and
not a faith that believes little. The more a man
believes, the more liberally he exercises his
capacity of faith, the more he sends forth his
intelligence into the mysteries of God, the more
he understands those things which God chooses
to reveal to his creatures, the more liberally he
believes. Let yourselves never think that you
grow liberal in faith by believing less ; always
be sure that the true liberality of faith can only
come by believing more. It is true, indeed, that
as soon as a man becomes eager for belief, for the
truth of God and for the mysteries with which
God's universe is filled, he becomes all the more
critical and careful. He will not any longer, if

TRUE LIBERTY. 109

he were before, be simply greedy of things to
believe, so that if any superstition conies offer-
ing itself to him he will not gather it in in-
discriminately and believe it without evidence,
without examination. He becomes all the more
critical and careful, the more he becomes assured
that belief, and not unbelief, is the true condition
of his life. The truth that God has entered into
this world in wondrous ways and filled its life
with Jesus Christ, the truth that man has a soul
and not simply a body, that he has a spiritual
need, that God cares for him and he is to care
for himself, that there is an immortal life, and
that that which we call faith is but the opening
of a gate, the pushing back of a veil, — shall a
man believe those things as imprisonments of his
nature, and shall it not make him larger? Shall
it not be the indulgence of his life when he enters
into the great certainties which so are offered to
his belief, believing them in his own way? Let
us always feel that to accept a new belief is not to
build a wall beyond which we cannot pass, but is
to open the door to a great fresh, free region, in
which our souls are to live. And just so it is when
we come to the moral things of life. The man puts
aside some sinfulness. He breaks down the wall
that has been shutting his soul out of its highest
life. He has been a drunkard, and he becomes a

110 PERFECT FREEDOM.

sober man. He has been a cheat and becomes a
faithful man. He has been a liar and becomes
a truthful man. He has been a profligate, and
he becomes a pure man. What has happened to
that man? Shall he simply think of himself as
one who has crushed this passion, shut down
this part of his life? Shall he simply think of
himself as one who has taken a course of self-
denial? Nay. It is self-indulgence that a man
has really entered upon. It is an indulgence of
the deepest part of his own nature, not of his
unreal nature. He has risen and shaken himself
like a lion, so that the dust has fallen from his
mane, and all the great range of that life which
God gave him to live lies before him. This is
the everlasting inspiration. This is the illumi-
nation. I don't wonder that men refuse to give
up evil if it simply seems to them to be giving
up the evil way, and no vision opens before them
of the thing that they may be and do. I don't
wonder that, if the negative, restricting, impris-
oning conception of the new life is all that a man
gets hold of, he lingers again and again in the old
life. But just as soon as the great world opens
before him then it is like a prisoner going out
of the prison door, is there no lingering? Does
not the baser part of him cling to the old
prison, to the ease and the provision for him,

TRUE LIBERTY. Ill

to the absence of anxiety and of energy? I
think there can hardly be a prisoner who, with
any leap of heart, goes out of the prison door,
when his term is finished, and does not even look
into that black horror where he has been living,
cast some lingering, longing look behind. He
comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life,
to the necessity of making himself once more a
true man among his fellow-men. But does he
stop? He comes forth, and if there be the soul
of a man in him still, he enters into the new life
with enthusiasm, and finds the new power?
springing in him to their work. And if it be
so with every special duty, then with that great
thing which you and I are called upon to do —
the total acceptance by our nature of the will of
God, the total acceptance by our nature of the
mastery of Jesus Christ. Oh! how this world
has perverted words and meanings, that the
mastery of Jesus Christ should seem to be the
impiisonment and not the enfranchisement of
the soul! When I bring a flower out of the
darkness and set it in the sun, and let the sun-
light come streaming down upon it, and the
flower knows the sunlight for which it was made
and opens 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

112 PERFECT FREEDOM.

bringing fortli the hidden color that was in the
bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them,
the flower and 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? Oh! the littleness
of the lives that we are living! Oh! the way in
which we fail to comprehend, or when we do
comprehend, deny to ourselves the bigness of
that thing which it is to be a man, to be a child
of God! Sometimes it dawns upon us that we
can see it opening into the vision of these men
and women in the New Testament. Sometimes
there opens to us the picture of this thing that
we might be, and then there are truly the trial
moments of our life. Then we lift up ourselves
and claim our liberty or, dastardly or cowardly,
slink back into the sluggish imprisonment in
which we have been living. How does all this
affect that which we are continually conscious
of, urging upon ourselves and upon one another?
How does it affect the whole question of a man's
sins? Oh! these sins, the things we know so
well! As we sit here and stand here one entire
hour, as we talk in this sort of way, everybody
knows the weaknesses of his own nature, the sins
of hia own soul. Don't you know it? What

TRUE LIBERTY. 113

shall we think about those sins? It seems to me,
my friends, that all this great picture of the
liberty into which Christ sets man, in the first
place does one thing which we are longing to see
done in the world. It takes away the glamour
and the splendor from sin. It breaks that spell
by which men think that the evil thing is the
glorious thing. If the evil thing be that which
Christ has told us that the evil thing is — which
I have no time to tell you now — if every sin
that you do is not simply a stain upon your soul,
but. is keeping you out from some great and
splendid thing which you might do, then is
there any sort of splendor and glory about sin?
How about the sins that you did when you were
young men? How can you look back upon those
sins and think what your life might have been
if it had been pure from the beginning, think
what you might have been if from the very
beginning you had caught sight of what it was
to be a man? And then your boy comes along.
What are the men in this town doing largely in
many and many a house, but letting their boys
believe that the sins of their early life are glori-
ous things, except that tf'ose things which they
did, the base and wretched things that they were
doing when they were fifteen and twenty and
twenty-five and thirty years 'old;' '-'are the true

114 PERFECT FREEDOM.

career of a human nature, are the true entrance
into human life? The miserable talk about sow-
ing wild oats, about getting through the neces-
sary conditions of life before a man comes to
solemnity! Shame upon any man who, having
passed through the sinful conditions and habits
and dispositions of his earlier life, has not car-
ried out of them an absolute shame for them,
that shall let him say to his boy, by word and by
every utterance of his life within the house
where he and the boy live together, " Refrain,
for they are abominable things ! " To get rid of
the glamour of sin, to get rid of the idea that it
is a glorious thing to be dissipated instead of
being concentrated to duty, to get rid of the idea
that to be drunken and to be lustful are true and
noble expressions of our abounding human life,
to get rid of any idea that sin is aught but
imprisonment, is to make those who come after
us, and to make ourselves in what of life is left
for us, gloriously ambitious for the freedom of
purity, for a full entrance into that life over
which sin has no dominion. And yet, at the
same time, don't you see that while sin thus
becomes contemptible when we think about the
great illustration of the will of God and Jesus
Christ, don't you see how also it puts on a new
horror? That which I thought I was doing in

TRUE LIBERTY. 115

the halls of my imprisonment I have really been
doing within the possible world of God in which
I might have been free. The moment I see what
life might have been to me, then any sin becomes
dreadful to me. Have you ever thought of how
the world has stood in glory and honor before
the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ? If any
life could prove, if any argument could show on
investigation to-day that Jesus did one sin in all
his life, that the perfect liberty which was his
perfect purity was not absolutely perfect, do you
realize what a horror would seem to fall down
from the heavens, what a constraint and burden
would be laid upon the lives of men, how the
gates of men's possibilities would seem to close
in upon them? It is because there has been that
one life which, because absolutely pure from sin,
was absolutely free ; it is because man may look
up and see in that life the revelation and possi-
bility of his own; it is because that life, echoing
the great cry throughout the world that man every-
where is the son of God, offers the same purity —
and so the same freedom — to all mankind;
it is for that reason that a man rejoices to cling
to, to believe in, however impure his life is, the
perfect purity, the sinlessness of the life of Jesus.
When you sin, my friends, it is a man that sins,
and a man is a child of God; and for a child of

116 PERFhCT FLEE DOM.

God to sin is an awful thing, not simply for the
stain that he brings into the divine nature that
is in him, but for the life from which it shuts
him out, for the liberty which he abandons, for
the enthrallment which it lays upon the soul.
There is one thing that people say very care-
lessly that always seems to me to be a dreadful
thing for a man to say. They say it when they
talk about their lives to one another, and think
ibout their lives to themselves, and by and by
very often say it upon their death-bed with the
last gasp, as though their entrance into the eter-
nal world had brought them no deeper enlighten-
ment. One wonders what is the revelation that
comes to them when they stand upon the borders
of the other side and are in the full life and
eternity of God. The thing men say is, " I have
done the very best I can." It is an awful thing
for a man to say. The man never lived, save he
who perfected our humanity, who ever did the
?ery best he could. You dishonor your life, you
not simply shut your eyes to certain facts, you
not simply say an infinitely absurd and foolish
thing, but you dishonor your human life if you
say that you have done in any day of your life
or in all the days of your life put together, the
very best that you could, or been the very best
man that you could be. You ! what are you ?

TRUE LIBERTY. 117

Again I say, The child of God, and this which you
have been, what is it? Look over it, see how
selfish it has been, see how material it has been,
how it has lived in the depths when it might
have lived on the heights, see how it has lived in
the little narrow range of selfishness when it
might have been as broad as all humanity, nay,
when it might have been as the God of humanity.
Don't dare to say that in any day of your life, or
in all your life together, you have done the best
that you could. The Pharisee said it when he
went up into the temple, and all the world has
looked on with mingled pity and scorn at the
blindness of the man who stood there and paraded
his faithfulness ; while all the world has bent
with a pity that was near to love, a pity that was
full of sympathy because man recognized his con-
dition and experience, for the poor creature grov-
elling upon the pavement, unwilling and unable
even to look upon the altar, but who, standing
afar off, said, " God be merciful to me a sinner ! "
Whatever else you say, don't say, "I have been
the very best I could." That means that you
have not merely lived in the rooms of your
imprisonment, but that you have been satisfied
to count them the only possible rooms of your
life, and that the great halls of your liberty have
nerer opened themselves before you. Shall not

118 PERFECT FREEDOM.

they open themselves somehow to us to-day, my
friends? Shall we not turn away from this hour
and go back into our business, into our offices,
into the shops, into the crowded streets, bearing
new thoughts of the lives that we might live,
feeling the fetters on our hands and feet, feeling
many things as fetters which we have thought
of as the ornament and glory of our life, deter-
mined to be unsatisfied forever until these fetters
skall be stricken off and we have entered into
the full liberty which comes to those alone who
are dedicated to the service of God, to the com-
pletion of their own nature, to the acceptance of
the grace of Christ, and to the attainment of the
eternal glory of the spiritual life, first here and
then hereafter, never hereafter, it may be, except
here and now, certainly here and now, as the
immediate, pressing privilege and duty of our
lives? So let us stand up on our feet and know
ourselves in all the richness and in all the awful-
ness of our human life. Let us know ourselves
children of God, and claim the liberty which God
has given to every one of his children who will
take it. God bless you and give some of you,
help some of us, to claim, as we have never
claimed before, that freedom with which the Son
makes free!