04- Civil Fredoom
IV. CIVIL FREEDOM.
Gal 5:13. “Ye have been called unto liberty: only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.”
IT is a very common observation, that the word freedom has various senses, and that there is need of discrimination in using it; that a man may be perfectly free, for example, in the sense of being perfectly protected from injury by a just and equal law, and yet be a slave to an appetite like the love of drink, or be oppressed and fettered by ignorance. Every one who has to say anything about freedom will find a similar reflection occur to him. No sooner do we begin to speak about it, than a multitude of distinctions and qualifications have to be made. Whether freedom ought to be desired or not, whether it ought to be allowed or not, is entirely uncertain till we understand the kind of freedom which is meant and the circumstances in the midst of which it is to be exercised.
Nevertheless the idea of freedom must be a high and noble one, or it could not have excited so much enthusiasm as it has done in men’s minds.
There is a spell in the name of liberty, which we may be hardly able to account for. The true and only way, as I believe, of accounting for the inspiration which has moved men to suffer and die in the cause of liberty, is to understand that liberty in its highest form is essentially spiritual, and to regard all inferior forms of it as deriving their life and worth from the highest. My purpose to-night is to shew the vital connexion between the common forms of freedom as between man and man, and that freedom which we enjoy towards God through receiving the Spirit of Sonship.
How would you describe liberty? If you say that a man is free when he is able to do what he pleases, the definition is a natural and obvious one, and certainly has some truth in it; but you will never persuade yourselves that it is a great and glorious thing for a man to be able to do as he pleases. On the contrary, there could be nothing worse than to tell a number of foolish persons that there is no restraint upon their doing just what they like. That would end in license and anarchy; and these are names of confessedly evil meaning. The state of things when each man “does what is right in his own eyes,” is one which we do not desire to bring about. It is felt to be a blessing when license and anarchy are suppressed by the force of a superior authority. It is plain therefore that the freedom whose cause is a holy one cannot consist in the simple absence of restraint upon men’s acts. But add a qualification, such as every one is ready to suggest. Personal freedom, it will be said, must of course have its limits. It is a good thing to be able to do as one likes, so long as one does not interfere with the corresponding liberty of others. When men live in society, the freedom of each must be limited by what the rest may similarly demand. Social freedom will be perfected, when the individual spheres within which each may do as he likes without interfering with his neighbour are as large as possible. This view is a very intelligible and convenient one, but it surely does not account for our reverence for freedom. Again I repeat, there is nothing sacred in the idea of a man doing as he pleases. The restraints are better than the freedom. If it were a supremely good thing that the sphere within which a man may do what he likes should be as large as possible, then it would seem to follow that the less we enter into those relations which have the effect of restraining us, the better. An unmarried man has more liberty, in this sense, than a husband and a father. He is much more at liberty, as we say, to do as he pleases, to go where he would like to go, to adjust his habits to his private tastes. According to this view, the lover of liberty will regard with disfavour domestic ties, social ties, and the general complexity which belongs to advancing civilization. The boast of freedom will be that expressed in Dryden’s lines, “I am as free as Nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.” But that is to reduce the idea of freedom to an absurdity. We do not need to argue in these days with any one who thinks that freedom is to be sought by reversing progress and by dissolving society into units.
According to the principle which I have undertaken to expound, our essential freedom comes of God’s calling. We are free, when we are God’s true spiritual children, as he would have us be; when we are in filial sympathy, of knowledge, affection, and will, with the gracious and righteous Father. Of this freedom I spoke this morning. The freedom of politics and social life may appear to be something quite different in kind from this, but I do not believe that it is. It is nothing less than this that stirs the enthusiasm with which liberty is honoured by the wise and good. Liberty, thus regarded, is voluntary self-conquest, not self-indulgence, a noble instead of a base thing: and the common recognized conditions of political and social freedom are felt to be good, because they minister to the essential liberty of God’s children. Freedom is realized, when men are awakened to a consciousness of their high destiny and responsibility. There cannot be anything that deserves the name of freedom, except where there is the dignity, the elevation of character, arising from this consciousness.
Whatever has a tendency to promote such a character in a natiort is worth contending for.
We are all of one mind in holding slavery, I mean the possession of a man as a piece of property by a fellow-man, to be a hateful evil. We are proud of the old glory of this English soil, upon which a bondsman could not put his foot without becoming free. If we have to confess that our history is stained by the complicity of Englishmen in the slave-traffic and in slave-owning, it is some comfort to us to think of the solemn and costly act by which the nation abolished slavery throughout the British dominions. Now this our feeling about slavery is due perhaps mainly to our knowledge of the barbarities which have been so naturally associated with it. Moreover the thought of a man being bought and sold by another man is so contrary to our ingrained belief as to the relation between man and man, that it excites in us an instinctive repugnance. But take slavery at its best; suppose the slave to be never bought and sold, and always kindly treated; slavery of this kind may be made by its apologists to appear a very tolerable condition. Still, in the absolute subjection to the will of another, which is implied in all slavery, there is an essential mischief. It excludes the slave from the dignity of responsibility. It keeps the man a child.
It stunts and dwarfs his humanity. The cares of the husband and the father are not fully laid upon him, so as to train him in the higher qualities of the man. And this, let me remark by the way, is one of the worst evils of dependent pauperism. It encourages people to throw off their domestic responsibilities, to be careless and servile in their habits; and so it wages a steady and insidious war against elevation of character. If it is represented, then, that the condition of the slave may be a very comfortable one, and that he has the advantage of having no cares, we should reply “No, not the advantage, but the degradation. Our point of view ought to be that of the spirit, not of the flesh. To be free is, for a spiritual being, to be tried, to be called upon to act, to be constrained to care for others and to provide for oneself. The flesh may look back with longing to the fleshpots of Egypt; but it is better for the spirit, for the man, to wander and to hunger in the temptation of the wilderness.” The freedom bestowed on the Israelites by the deliverance out of Egypt was national, even more than personal. The children of Israel were treated as a people, to whom the blessing of orderly legislation was given, and who were to take possession of a promised land. And the freedom which has inspired the trumpet-notes of song and nerved the patriot to effort and endurance and sent its bracing breath through human history has generally been the deliverance of a people from a foreign yoke. Why then is it glorious to fight and suffer and die for national independence? Because to be conquered and made tributary involves moral humiliation. The land that serves strangers is spiritually disinherited. The prosperity of the inhabitants may be reasonably cared for; they may not be subjected to constant galling insults, though these can hardly be absent: but the higher spirit in the nobler part of the population feels that it has not its just rights. The citizens of an independent country acquire elevation from the consciousness of a national calling. It may be a small country, a Switzerland or a Belgium; but, so longas it is independent, it is able to reflect that it, too, like its neighbours, has its appointed place in the world. It has the duties, the responsibilities, of one of the family of nations. This is food for high thought, exercise for high faculties. When it has lost its self-respect, the heart of a people is smitten as if with a blight. The child is no longer born to an inheritance of noble traditions and solemnizing responsibilities. Ah, my brethren, think what it ought to be to us to be born to such an inheritance as ours 1 God grant to us not to be unworthy of it.
Once more, there is a kind of freedom which we English know well, opposed to the condition of being governed, Hot by a foreign race, but by despotic authority at home. We hardly call it a free country, in which the citizens do not personally possess a sliarc, in some form or other, of the powers of government. In this sense of the word, that country is the freest in which the greatest number of people are practically interested in the life and work of the nation. Our historical mode of enjoying this freedom is through representation.
We vote for representatives; and our representatives, when assembled together, have a predominant voice in the supreme government of the country. In thinking about these things, we are compelled to admit that no form of government is ideally perfect. Voting for those who are to govern us is evidently not everything; for most of us very decidedly disapprove of what is a perfectly genuine form of it, that of electing by a plebiscitum a Ruler who is to exercise despotic power. It is not a vote, given now and then, that nourishes the freeman’s responsibility and dignity; it is the fact of having, in one way or another, or in various ways, some living interest and influence in the national life. One nation cannot in this matter lay down laws for another. But we may say generally, that there are two points to be aimed at by those who would promote domestic political freedom. One is, that each citizen should have some link of contact with the sovereign power, so that he may feel that he has something to do, though it may be extremely little, with the greatest affairs of the nation. The other is, that he should have a more visible and realizable interest in the small affairs of his own neighbourhood and society. For that which freedom, in any genuine shape, has to do, is to call out the sense of responsibility and to mix a man up with larger than selfish interests. Despotism is adverse to true spiritual freedom, because it encourages a man to feel that public affairs are provided for without him, and that he may therefore give himself up without distraction to the promotion of his own interest.
Questions concerning political freedom and the way in which it may be most healthily diffused are sifted in the discussions and struggles of the day.
I have only two or three observations to offer from the point of view of this sermon.
I. First, as to religion and the Church. I am quite ready to admit that religion may be and often has been adverse to freedom. Here indeed we have one test of the better and the worse religion. But the method we have been following leads us to the conclusion that a national Church, apart from its direct work of bearing witness to the Gospel of grace, ought to serve the cause of freedom in an important degree by giving elevation and sacredness to the idea of the country. The.national Church is the witness qf the Divine Calling of the nation. It should keep us in mind that it is God who gives us this beautiful land of ours with its golden harvests, and that we are placed and nourished here in order that this nation may be a servant of God in the world. I ask you, my brethren, whether you are not consciously lifted in the scale of spiritual freedom by thinking of our England as a Christian country, which accepts the election of God and confesses Christ as Lord. But it is greatly to be desired, in this same interest of spiritual freedom, that the people generally should claim an active share in Church matters. Through Parliament and the Crown the nation generally has as much power in Church matters as it chooses to exercise. In these days in which we live, representatives should be made aware that it will not do to neglect matters so vitally affecting the welfare of the country as those of religion. And I cannot but believe that it would be a great gain to extend, through some such machinery as that of parochial Church Councils, the local and educating influence of responsibility.
2. Again: it’ is an important problem, what amount of legal regulation is desirable in the common life of a people, with a view to the promotion of genuine freedom. It is absurd to assume that law is the opposite of freedom; but it is quite true that there may be an excess of government, that the machinery of law may interfere more than is desirable in private and social life. I believe that this problem is not to be settled by theory, but by ’experience. Political tact ought to feel its way towards the best limit of regulative interference.
Such maxims as that you cannot make people virtuous by Act of Parliament, and such sayings as that of an eloquent orator, that he would rather see England free than sober, appear to me to confuse rather than to help the inquiry. We already, with universal assent and approval, do a great deal in the way of regulation. The question is whether we cannot do more, without defeating our highest object. That object is to train and help all English persons to.r^-government, and so to lift them to a higher exercise of genuine freedom. Whether a particular step will help or hinder this object is -to be determined by practical wisdom rather than by theoretical maxims.
3. My own belief is, if I may venture to express it, that we do rightly in cautiously pressing interference in several directions. In some departments, as for example, in the relations of capital and labour, the legislation required may be that of withdrawing special interference, rather than that of extending it. It is not to be denied that a great deal of the best legislation of this century has consisted in thus withdrawing regulation from interests and arranging that they shall be let alone. But on the other hand experience seems to have abundantly proved that much good may be done by putting a check upon occasions of temptation. The regulation of labour in factories is almost universally admitted to have been a great blessing. The regulation of the sale of intoxicating liquors is allowed as good by all up to some point or other; it is an important question whether further steps in the same direction may not be successfully made in the future. It is a good thing that gambling should be hindered as much as possible. In all such matters, it is a gain to do something when we cannot do everything. In one most important matter, I am confident that we may hopefully go forward, I mean in compelling parents to send their children to school. To press this compulsion firmly, and to apply it universally, would be, I am persuaded, a great and almost unmixed benefit to the country.
These are lines in which a lover of freedom and of his country may still find practical work to do. So much has been done in the way of removing injustices and abolishing privileges, that it is not easy now to discover a grievance. But we have always the higher aim before us, of promoting universal elevation of mind and character throughout the land. To labour in this cause is now the truest service of freedom.
I hope it does not appear to you an arbitrary connexion which I have endeavoured to bring out, between the liberty of the children of God and every inferior form of liberty which can claim our reverence and service. I do not see how the loyal Christian could really care for anything secular except through seeing its relation to the kingdom of God and the work of redemption. But if the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the Ruler of the world, this relation can nowhere fail. Let me not be supposed, however, to forget that the grace of God is able to bestow the transcendent freedom in the absence of every other. For the spiritual freedman of Jesus Christ, “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage.”
Slaves, in the first Christian century and in all subsequent times, have been made truly free by the grace of God, and have been content to bear their lot without rebelling against it. You may trace in thought how the sense of responsibility, the consciousness of a calling, the feeling of selfrespect and dignity, might be awakened in the breast of a slave, and be made to work in him far more powerfully, by the direct voice of the Gospel, than if he were trained from infancy and through manhood to the blessed cares of the family and of citizenship. So now, whilst we acknowledge with thankfulness what we have gained from the happy conditions of our English Christian lives, and whilst we long and strive that such advantages may be imparted to all our brethren as widely as possible, let us not think it enough to be free citizens, responsible parents.
No; these relations point to a higher. We can only realize the most perfect freedom in these lower though still Divinely ordained conditions by being free in that condition to which God calls us all, in the filial Spirit of his Son. We are not free till the chains of sin by which we are tied and bound are loosed from us by God’s accepted forgiveness. When we can come to God as our Father, remembering his righteousness, his holiness, his goodness, not afraid of him, but throwing ourselves upon his grace and help, then we can stand upright amongst our fellow-men, then we can lead an inward life over which neither circumstance nor desire shall have dominion.
Seek then, dear brethren, the freedom which is to be found in the fellowship of the believer with his Lord. If the Son shall make you free, said Jesus himself, ye shall be free indeed. Aim always at the highest blessings, knowing that our God loves best to give us these; and there is nothing higher than a life of faith in the Son of God, a life fed by his Spirit, a life whose secret power is hid with Christ in God.