The Bible the Book of Freedom, Personal, National, Universal

“For He brought them out of darkness, and out of the shadow of death: and brake their bonds in sunder.”—Psalm cvii. 14 (Prayer-book Version).

The passage: God brought his people out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke their chains apart.

I believe it is a common notion, backed by divines and eagerly seized by infidels, that the Bible discourages men’s natural desire for Freedom as something secular and profane. Our evil nature, we’re told, cries out for Liberty; Subjection and Obedience are Christianity’s watchwords. There may be a regulated liberty compatible with religion, it is said — but one that religion imposes rather than one it awakens.

There is certainly a religion of which this is true — one much in vogue, one statesmen have wanted to keep the people orderly, one Churchmen have been willing to supply. But anyone reading the Old and New Testaments plainly and literally cannot say this is the religion they teach. Why else do the words “I am the Lord thy God, Which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” stand at the very threshold of the Ten Commandments, as their ground and sanction? Why is the sternest part of this record, the one that most insists on obedience, the history of a national deliverance? Why is the longing for Egypt’s fleshpots, the willingness to endure slavery, precisely the sin the Divine Lawgiver denounces and all his discipline is meant to cure? Why do the Prophets warn their people of captivity and slavery as the ultimate punishments, ones they can hardly bear to contemplate? Why is praise of God always tied to some rescue out of a strange land — since the Lord’s Songs, the Psalmist says, cannot be sung there? Why is “Redemption” the key-note of the New Dispensation as of the Old, the New fulfilling the Old because it completes that redemption? Are these not enough to show that the Bible does not aim to check the excesses of freedom, but to teach us its true nature, to stir up an appetite for it, to shame us out of contentment without it, and to show the conditions for gaining the fullest measure of it?

It’s easy to say: yes, the Bible speaks of a freedom, but not the one men ordinarily want. There is some ground for this. The Israelites craved freedom under Pharaoh’s taskmasters, yet were ready to stone Moses when he led them into the wilderness’s toils and perils — they wanted they knew not what, and shrank from it once given. So it was then, so it always has been, so it will be. In this sense — but no other — the freedom the Bible speaks of is not what men mean when they ask for it. It is not true that the Bible plays a double game, appealing to a feeling only to substitute something else for it. What men cry against when most fretful and impatient, it promises to free them from; what they thirst for most urgently, it promises to supply. If men are truly in earnest — if, as a great orator put it, they will not rest while a single link of the chain that galls them still clanks at their legs — God will bring them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and break their bonds asunder. And since experience shows this earnestness is not natural to men, that fitful effort, despondency, and subservience are, Scripture teaches that God kindles by bitter suffering and by marvellous encouragements what would not otherwise be, and keeps alive what left to itself would perish.

My brethren, if we would consider these things, and believe that the words of the honestest book in the world are not cheating words, I think our lives would grow clearer and more real. We have often thought: “If only we could get into a certain posture of mind, we might sympathise with what we hear in churches — an apprehension of sin we don’t have and wouldn’t willingly counterfeit, a sense of rebellion against a holy Law, a desire to please and know God and be like him. Well and good for those to whom it is given, whose temperament makes religion natural. But we are cast in a different mould; must we not, for now, follow our own bent as they follow theirs, rather than force ourselves into a shape not made for us?” Such words are spoken, sometimes openly, more often secretly. Better spoken than pent up in the heart — for once the conscience sees them plainly, it has its answer ready.

What is that answer? The one already hinted at. Granted you feel none of that sense of personal evil you’re told you ought to have — is there no sense of bonds you’d wish to be rid of? It hardly matters what theologians call these bonds — whether the oppressors are sensual, intellectual, or spiritual; if we are oppressed within ourselves, that is enough. I speak of what is actual, not what we read in books. Do we not hear men constantly complaining they cannot do or be what they would? They blame tyrannical laws, or governors who ignore laws, custom, social rules, old habits, present fashions, superstitions about the future. Each fixes blame on a different place, yet each feels the burden, and each has good reasons for his choice — though none does justice to his neighbour’s indignation. “Misplaced,” he says; “if only people knew what he knows, they’d turn their energies against the real grievance and redress it together — but he can’t do it alone; he must bring the world round to his mind.” Here is a confession that, whatever the evil, the mind of man is somehow the ultimate cause that it isn’t removed — its home lies very near there, wherever else it may be. The Bible, I think, is not as unjust to our different views of its nature as we are to one another’s; it justifies us all. Evil laws, abused law, bad customs, social rules — all are admitted as links in the chain; the promised liberty concerns them all. And yet the tacit acknowledgment — made unawares even by those whose theories most avoid it — that in the end we are slaves or free in ourselves; that no outward yoke could crush us had we not put it on; that we could cast it off if we would — this is sanctioned and repeated on every page of Scripture, indeed is the expression of its deepest principle. For when we confess, in any terms, that the will is at the root of the tyranny we groan under, we stumble on the very doctrine we found offensive: that circumstances do not forge our fetters, Sin does; circumstances only serve Sin because we ourselves serve it. We do feel this sin, even without the language others use for it. But there is no greater cruelty than to bring a man to this discovery and lead him no further — it makes him desperate, strips away his dreams of emancipation, once he thought his tyrants lay outside him, and tells him freedom is meant for him yet can never be reached. To this condition a man comes at last who has learned only the deep, precious truth that

“It is the will
Alone which chains us to permitted ill,”

but has not learned that there is One seeking to set the will free — One above man, One who sympathizes with man, One working in man to will and to do of his good pleasure.

If, then, brethren, the cry for pardon has not yet risen in our hearts, it may still be working in another form — apparently, not really, another. We may cry for an Absolver, one to free us from the bonds of sins committed through our frailty. God’s voice, be sure, is not monotonous, not confined to one measured accent shaped by human art. Some spirits respond at once to the charge of violating a righteous law, others to the sense of grieving a loving Father; but there are others, sterner and colder, who nonetheless feel a weight often too heavy to bear, and dislike giving it a religious name. Whether pride or honesty causes that reluctance, I won’t disturb it — only let them be sure the choice of name doesn’t hide the fact or falsify it. Whatever perplexity makes a man’s actions irregular, his thoughts unquiet, his life contradictory — that is a band needing to be broken, one he will find, after endless struggle, he cannot break himself, not with all the machinery of nature and art to help his weakness. He must turn to the Lord of his will, who can meet him in a region the vulture’s eye has not seen. He must say: “In this darkness and shadow of death I cannot find my way. The outer world I know something of; but here, in the depths of my own being, I am lost. Here, where I most need peace, I find the source of my disturbance; here, where I flee for freedom from the world’s slavery, I find a dungeon-keep. Yet I am sure there is Light here, if I could see it — Light that might turn this prison into a kingly palace. Source of Light, enlighten me! Mighty Deliverer, absolve me!” Such voices have risen from men everywhere, in every age, and the answer has come. Their bands have been broken asunder. They have known that God’s words are true, purified sevenfold; certain that Christ came to free the imprisoned spirit of man, that he is near that spirit now, to be trusted, so that day by day it may prove the truth of his words, “If the Son shall make you free, then are ye free indeed.”

Do not think that in speaking of this mysterious region, where the roots of all our thoughts and acts lie, I am withdrawing you from ordinary practical life. No — it is in the common hard warfare of daily life that one learns these secrets, all the metaphysics worth knowing. In trying to do right as husbands, brothers, fathers, citizens, we find the bands that hold us; in the disappointments of meeting ordinary temptations, doing the nearest duty, being honest and truthful, still more trustful and loving. This teaches us we need an ever-present helper and deliverer, a daily absolution, a renewal of strength hour by hour — and shows what kind of absolution we need. It is the Son who makes us free, because he brings us the adoption of sons. It is the faith that in him our spirits may claim God as Father, because he has claimed us as sons and given us his Spirit to cry “Abba, Father” — this faith raises us above the flesh, meant to be our slave but claiming to be our master; above the world, meant to offer its fruits to God but demanding our worship instead; above the Spirit of Evil, who would persuade us there can be no freedom in serving a loving God, and would make us slaves of self-will and hatred. So we are driven back to our Baptism, to learn our child’s Catechism afresh every day — its wonderful lessons of what God made us to be, what we make ourselves when we forget him, what his Name is and what strength and deliverance it holds for us and all our brethren; how by its power we can keep his commandments, loving him with heart, soul, and strength, loving our neighbour as ourselves; how we may pray to him together as members of one body, “Our Father”; how he answers — adopting us as children, feeding us with the flesh and blood of his Son; how, in faith of the reconciliation that flesh and blood express, we can offer ourselves as living sacrifices to God. This child-lore holds the whole secret of the deliverance we need in manhood as in infancy — may we all claim it! All we have ever dreamed of humanity’s possible liberty, all that sages and saints glimpsed, sometimes far off, sometimes almost within reach, all that tempted longing hearts only to vanish like a phantom — all this is expressed in this teaching, together with the resolution of life’s actual problems: escape from outer and inner woe, absolution from past guilt, present helplessness, and future terrors. Let us wait for no change of circumstance, no new experience, no fresh revelation. Our circumstances will only be a growing bondage unless we seek Divine freedom; our experience has told us enough that we cannot live without it; the revelation of God’s love we already have warrants the conviction that it is near all who desire it, and that he himself is awakening that desire.

These reflections on Freedom are not unneeded now. When wild and wicked acts are done in its name, the word loses power over timid minds, tempting them to think it is not one religious men should meddle with. The obvious answer — that religion too has been used to justify plots and assassinations, so that if you cast away one on that ground you must cast away both — carries little weight with those who live only in the moment and treat history as a mere almanac of events that cannot recur. It would be an idle taunt to note that crimes now imputed to the enemies of Popes were smiled on and sanctioned by Popes themselves in other days, were it not needed as a warning: those who would make the Gospel of Christ something other than a Gospel of Freedom are making both Freedom and Religion criminal and ungodly, and so encouraging atrocities done under either name. Let this be weighed by those who, out of wantonness, love of paradox, or dislike of certain people and professions, speak lightly of a word no Englishman can despise in his heart without betraying all his country’s memories and traditions — and its Faith too. For faith in a God who breaks men’s bonds asunder has been our forefathers’ faith, the faith to which we owe everything pure and great among us. It has given us our manliness, and equally given us noble women capable of divine strength and heroism even under the most depressing circumstances. We must remember that the Sovereigns who brought back to our soil, from lands where they had wandered, an impatience of Freedom, a taste for Absolutism, a belief that Absolutism and Religion are natural allies, brought with them also irreverence for women, heartlessness, and licentiousness. That this infection in the English Court has in our own day been thoroughly removed, and domestic purity established — this has been the great impulse to loyalty among the English people, and is the best pledge that the Queen’s children, wherever they go, will show by word and life how blessed a thing it is to be born on free soil. We may confidently believe that she who is leaving us now — since simplicity is stronger than guile, old affections stronger than plausible theories — will never be tempted, by any sophistry however dressed in religious language, nor by any dread of revolution however reasonable, to think a Government earns the titles of patriarchal and divine by enslaving its subjects rather than raising them to freedom. May the happy omen of her marriage, on the day we commemorate St. Paul’s conversion, forever remind her that the noblest champion for Christ bade men stand fast in the liberty with which Christ had made them free! May all that day’s blessings be hers! May they be ours too, that we may be God’s ministers, as St. Paul was, in bringing the nations we rule, and by degrees all nations, out of darkness and the shadow of death, and in breaking their bonds asunder.