Bible Commentaries
John 8

Verse 12

The Light of the World

Again therefore Jesus spake unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.— John 8:12.

1. Jesus spoke these words in the Temple at Jerusalem. He was sitting in the treasury, within the court of the women; and it was the time of the Feast of Tabernacles, when this court was crowded with pilgrims.

The purpose of the Feast of Tabernacles was to commemorate a chapter in the life of the Hebrew nation away far back in its history. The observance of it was bound up with thoughts of the forty years’ wanderings in the wilderness. It was held at the close of the harvest and the vintage, after the farmers had finished the round of the year’s labours in the fields. When the set time arrived, the people quitted their homes to go up to Jerusalem; and they lived there during the week of the festival in small booths made of branches of olive, and palm, and myrtle, the purpose of this being to recall the tent-life of their fathers in the Arabian Desert. The little huts of greenery were set up in the open courts of the houses, upon the flat roofs, along the principal streets, in the open places of the city, and in some of the outer courts of the Temple.

Two characteristic ceremonies of this Festival gathered up in expressive symbols the lessons of a Divine sustenance and of a Divine Presence, which remained as the great results of the teaching of the desert, and both of these were treated by Christ as parables of Himself. Each morning water was brought in a golden vessel from the Pool of Siloam and poured upon the altar of sacrifice. That water recalled to the people the supply drawn from the rock at Meribah, and pointed forward to the spiritual water which hereafter men should draw “out of the wells of salvation.” For in Christ the living rock, the image and the prophecy found their accomplishment; and so “in the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” Then again, every evening there were lighted in one of the courts of the Temple two great lamps which are said to have cast their light over every quarter of the Holy City. These recalled the pillar of fire which had been in old times the sure token of Divine leadership and pointed forward to “the sun of righteousness” which should “arise with healing in his wings.” In Christ—the “light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of his people Israel”—the image and the prophecy found their accomplishment, “and therefore” He “spake again unto” the people, “saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.”

2. “I am the light of the world.” This is one of those short, pregnant statements of our Lord characteristic of this Gospel, which impress us at once by their brevity, their beauty, and their largeness of meaning. Statements of a similar kind, of equal terseness and force, occur to every one—“I am the good shepherd”; “I am the resurrection, and the life”; “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

Sometimes Jesus gathers His work and nature up in one descriptive word, and offers it, as it were out of a wide-open hand, complete to His disciples. In such a word all the details of His relation to the soul and to the world are comprehensively included. As the disciple listens and receives it, he feels all his fragmentary and scattered experiences drawing together and rounding into unity. As, having heard it, he carries it forth with him into his life, he finds all future experiences claiming their places within it, and getting their meaning from it. Such words of Jesus are like spheres of crystal into which the world is gathered, and where the past and future, the small and great, may all be read.

What Divine audacity there is in such sayings! and how little we can suppose them to be the sayings of a mere teacher or prophet! They have no parallel in the words of even the greatest teachers. One and all imply something which the most powerful and enlightened, conscious of their own capacities to communicate truth or to do good, would scruple to arrogate to themselves. They might claim respect for the truth they speak, and summon men to attend to it with a voice of authority. But no merely human teacher would dare to make himself the centre of all truth, and the centre of the world.

It was indeed a magnificent word, a stupendous word. It is one of those sayings of our Lord which prove that never man spake as this Man. It is utterly unaccountable and inexplicable save on one assumption. It either makes us tremble with a shock of surprise, with a feeling of doubt which we wish to crush down as blasphemy, or it brings us to our knees in worship, as before One who is lifted immeasurably above the ordinary limitations of humanity. There are only two possible conclusions to which we can come concerning such words as these. They are either the wildest words of audacity and self-deluded egotism that human lips ever uttered, or they are the language of one who was set far above all human criticism and judgment by His real and unmistakable Divinity. Had such a claim as this been made by the greatest teacher, prophet, or apostle of the ancient world, his words and memory would long since have perished in the scorn and disgust which it would have provoked; and were such a claim advanced by any person in the present day, there would be a universal feeling that mental derangement was at the base of it. No wonder that the men who listened to Him were either filled with indignation or inspired with reverential awe. No wonder that He seemed to them either a blasphemer or the Son of God. There could be no middle course. It was certain that the person who talked in this way would either be scorned and hated and crucified by the world or lifted by adoring hearts wholly above the world in love and honour and supremest adoration. And no middle course has ever been possible for long. Men have never continued to reverence Him as a man unless they have learned to worship Him as God. It is difficult to trust Him at all unless we trust Him all in all. These words are either so extravagant or so sublime, that the Man who spoke them was guilty of a self-conceit unparalleled in human history, or He was higher than the highest human thought can reach and not to be addressed save in the worshipful words of Thomas, “My Lord and my God.” We have ever to make our choice, and most of us have made it to our heart’s rest and joy. We are sure that He knew what He was saying and had Divine right to say it: “I am the light of the world.”

3. What does Jesus mean? How is He the light of the world? Let us understand what light is and does.

(1) “The light of the world,” “the light of life”—the words send us instantly abroad into the world of Nature. They set us on the hilltop watching the sunrise as it fills the east with glory. They show us the great plain flooded and beaten and quivering with the noonday sun. They hush and elevate us with the mystery and sweetness and suggestiveness of the evening’s glow.

Any one who has watched a sunrise among mountains will know how the light opens out depths of beauty and life where but lately the eye rested on a cold monotony of gloom or mist. At one moment only the sharp dark outline of the distant ranges stands out against the rosy sky, and at the next peak after peak catches the living fire, which then creeps slowly down their rocky slopes, and woods and streams and meadows and homesteads start out from the dull shadows, and the grass on which we stand sparkles with a thousand dewdrops.

Walk on the central glacier of the Oberland in the gloom of a summer night. The grey clouds have hung about the Grimsel, and inflicted on you the sense of chill October, instead of bringing the sweet clearness of an August afternoon. The night has gathered starless and cold; but you are bent on your journey, though it requires all the energy of your determination to carry you through the discomforts of the march. The path at first is sharp and stony, then it is steep—steep in descent, steep in ascent—and your already tired and aching feet make you feel that it is hard to know which is the worse of the two. However, you have passed the polluted moraine, and at last you are on the ice. How cold it is! The breeze comes sweeping down the glacier, and chills you to the bone. Onward you go. The clouds are clearing. Things are better. Star after star is plain above you, and the giant mountains tower grim and gaunt around you, but, at any rate, less wrapped in shrouds. Onward you go, taking more and more courage. What is that shaft of amber, clear and fine as polished steel? What is that flash of deeper glory which shoots across the heavens? What is that line of scintillating gold and crimson which marks the crenulated crests of the mountains, and makes their snow-peaks and ice-lines like transparencies drenched in living fire? How glorious it is, the breaking of the dawn—the breaking of a real splendid August morning over the region of eternal snow! Gradually it steals down the slope of the mountains, till the very glacier itself is aglow. Now a world is before you, startling in its wildness and beauty—your graceful Finster Aar and savage Schreckhorn, and Strahleck barrier, and then, beyond, the soaring Eiger and the grim and meditative Mönch. Wild and beautiful in form and strangeness,—it is all before you now. Ah! it was all there, in its strangeness and stateliness, even when you shivered in the mist and darkness. It was all before you; but to you it was useless, unperceived, unwondered at. You needed the magic of light to reveal it. You know what it is, though it was there before you knew it. You are a debtor to the tender mystery of the dawn. 1 [Note: Knox Little, The Light of Life, 4.]

Twice recently has it been my privilege to watch the sun rise in circumstances of unusual beauty. Long before his appearing we had tokens of his coming. The horizon, and the clouds that gathered in little flocks about the horizon, and banks of clouds further remote abiding motionless in the highest places, began to clothe themselves in appropriate raiment to welcome the sovereign of the morning. Dull greys, gleaming silver, deep reds, dark purple—all available hues were to be seen in that array. Then in the fulness of time the great flame rode out among the encircling glories, making them all appear dim and faint in the presence of his own effulgence. 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Silver Lining, 69.]

(2) Now the idea of light, long before the time of St. John, had become spiritual in its religious application; and when Christ speaks of Himself as the “light of the world,” it is no darkness of nature that He has in view, but the darkness that rests on men’s thoughts and life, the darkness that all true men feel more or less in themselves. Wherever men have arisen to the power of thought, and are capable of looking “before and after,” there comes home to them a deep sense of their ignorance. Their outlook is fast bound on all sides; and “more light” is their instinctive cry amid encircling darkness, or a twilight of uncertainty more perplexing sometimes than darkness itself. They look upwards, and long that the day may break on their mental struggle, and the shadows flee away from their hearts. The outward light is not enough. The eye is not satisfied with seeing. There is the conscious need of a higher light than ever. lit up sea or shore. The darkness of the world, in short, is a moral darkness, in which man is often unable to see his true way or choose his own good.

He that has light within his own clear breast

May sit i’ the centre, and enjoy bright day:

But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts

Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;

Himself is his own dungeon. 1 [Note: Milton, Comus.]

“I am the light of the world”; and before His coming, His appearance was foretold in tokens of purple and gold. Here and there, in Isaiah and Jeremiah, we have great peaks tipped with the light of the coming day, suggesting the glory in which the whole world would be bathed in after time. “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd”; is not that a foretoken of the tenth chapter of John? “Liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound”; is not this the herald of the wonderful happenings which thrill the gospel story through and through? And then, after all these golden hints of promise there came the Sun, the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His wings, and the whole world passed into a new day. 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Silver Lining, 69.]

(3) But Christ’s words must be interpreted by their reference to the light which was then being celebrated. Of that light we read that “the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.” This was a customary mode of directing the movements of large bodies of men, whether caravans or armies. In the case of an army a tall pole was erected in front of the chief’s tent, and from it a basket of fire was suspended, so that the glare of it was visible by night, and its smoke by day. The head of a marching column could thus be descried from a great distance, especially in wide level tracts with little or no vegetation and few inequalities of surface to interrupt the view. The distinctive peculiarity of the Israelitish march was that Jehovah was in the fire, and that He alone controlled its movements and thereby the movements of the camp. When the pillar of cloud left its place and advanced the tents were struck, lest the people should be separated from Jehovah and be found unfaithful to Him. During the whole course of their sojourn in the wilderness their movements were thus controlled and ordered. The beacon-fire that led them was unaffected by atmospheric influences. Dispelled by no gales, and evaporated by no fiercest heat of the Eastern sun, it hovered in the van of the host as the guiding angel of the Lord. The guidance it gave was uninterrupted and unerring; it was never mistaken for an ordinary cloud, it never so altered its shape as to become unrecognizable. And each night the flame shot up, and assured the people they might rest in peace.

There is no difficulty in understanding what was in our Lord’s mind at this time. Already He had made two distinct allusions to the incidents of the wilderness journey. In the sixth chapter He spoke of the manna which God had sent down from heaven, and He said: “I am the bread of life.” Then in the seventh chapter He spoke of the water which gushed out of the rock, and He said, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink”; as much as to say, “I am the rock from which the living water flowed.” And in the text it is said: “Then spake Jesus again unto them”—implying that He was taking up the same subject after a little interval—“saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life,” alluding, evidently, to the third great symbol of the exodus, the pillar of fire, by which Jehovah guided His people through the wilderness. So it seems clear that our Lord is referring here to Himself as the fulfilment of this great Old Testament type—“I am the light of the world.”

4. There are two things, then, that light does, and it seems as if Christ had them both before Him when He said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness.” The first is that it enables us to see. Enter a dark room and you do not see anything; but bring a light and you see what the room contains. The other is that it guides us. The lights at the harbour mouth are there to guide vessels safely into the harbour. And one has sometimes discovered the use of a light, even though it were but the glimmer of a candle in a cottage window, when one has been overtaken by the darkness on some hillside or unfrequented moor. So we have—

I. Christ is the Light of the world because He enables men to see what is in the world.

II. Christ is the Light of the world because He guides men through the world.

I

He Enables Men to See

The lights by the altar in the Temple were memorials of the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. When, then, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world,” He would declare Himself as being in reality, and to every soul of man to the end of time, what that cloud with its heart of fire was in outward seeming to one generation of desert wanderers. Now, the first thing which it was to these was the visible vehicle of the Divine presence. “The Lord went before them in a pillar of a cloud.” “The Lord looked through the pillar.” “The Lord came down in the cloud, and spake unto him.” “The cloud covered the tabernacle, and the glory of the Lord appeared.” Such is the way in which it is ever spoken of, as being the manifestation to Israel in sensible form of the presence among them of God their King.

1. He enabled men to see God.

(1) He made clear in His own life and words the Divine idea, as no one had done before, and no one has ever done since. Men had been struggling with this idea from the first efforts of religious speculation. It was still unformed and imperfect. Outside of revelation it fluctuated and took many shapes, now presenting itself as a multiplicity of Divine energies, with more or less coherence; and now retreating into a vague Absolute or Necessity, encompassing all being, but without thought or love for any. Polytheism more refined or more sensualistic, and Pantheism more or less abstract, divided the thought of the Gentile world. On the other hand, the idea of God had been to the Hebrews one of growing clearness. He was the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of Israel, who had given the covenant on Mount Sinai, who had led their fathers by the way of the wilderness into the promised land, a “jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation,” and yet also “the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, and transgression, and sin,” a holy God, “of purer eyes than to behold evil,” even a Father whose pitying mercy was able to measure all the depths of our weakness. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.”

This sublime conception of the Hebrew mind was perfected in Christ. Every attribute of spiritual excellence was brought out into clearer distinction, and every element less exalted was enlarged and purified. Hitherto the God of the Hebrews had remained too isolated and apart. With all their growth of religious intelligence—the voice of the Divine always speaking more clearly as we descend the course of their prophetic literature—there still clung certain restrictions to their highest conception. Jehovah was their God in some special manner—the Giver of their Law, the God of their Temple, who was to be worshipped in Jerusalem. They had difficulty in enlarging the Divine idea so as to embrace the human race, in rising above local privilege and national prerogative to the thought of God as the spiritual Source and Guide of all men alike. Christ fixed for ever this great thought. “God is a Spirit,” He said; “and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” “Neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem,” was there any special virtue, so far as the Divine presence was concerned. This presence was universal and universally spiritual, embracing all life, claiming the homage and devotion, the faith and love, of all moral intelligence—the presence of the Father as well as the Sovereign of men.

(2) How did He accomplish this? By the manifestation of His person even more than by His doctrine, since He said, not “I bring the light and the truth,” but “I am the light, and I am the truth.” He is the light of the world, because in Him is the glory of God. His words are madness, and something very like blasphemy, unless they are vindicated by the visible indwelling in Him of the present God. The cloud of the humanity, “the veil, that is to say, his flesh,” enfolds and tempers; and through its transparent folds it reveals, even while it swathes, the Godhead. Like some fleecy vapour flitting across the sun, and irradiated by its light, it enables our weak eyes to see light, and not darkness, in the else intolerable blaze. Yes! Thou art the light of the world, because in Thee dwelleth “the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” Thy servant hath taught us the meaning of Thy words, when he said: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us; and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

In that famous picture which Holman Hunt has painted of this wonderful scene and utterance in the Saviour’s life, there is one fatal blunder, as it appears at least to those who read Jesus with clearest eyes. The Saviour stands in the encircling gloom, lamp in hand, through which rays of light stream out upon the dusky archways of the Temple, upon the shadowy forms in the background, and upon His own sad, beautiful face. But it is from the lamp which He carries that the illumination comes. That is the mistake. It ought to have been shown as the irradiation from His own person, the glory of His own face, the sunlight of His own matchless purity, grace, and love. He Himself is the light of the world—not what He taught, but what He was and did. His very incarnation is the world’s light. The fact that God could and did dwell in a human form, could speak through human lips, and think through a human mind, and feel the beatings of a human heart, and suffer all human pangs, and render into perfect beauty a human life; the fact that God’s great, awful, mysterious, holy, and loving nature could have its abode in the flesh in a body like our own and glorify it,—that to begin with, and more than all things else, is the light of the world, for it lightens the face of every man that comes into the world. 1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough, The Cross in Modern Life, 90.]

2. Christ has made clear not only the idea of God, but the idea of man.

(1) The two ideas everywhere interchange, and react the one upon the other. The glory of Christ is that He seized so clearly the spiritual essence of both, and set the great realities of the spiritual life in man in front of the Supreme Spiritual Reality whom He revealed. There is nowhere for a moment any doubt in Christ as to what the true life of man is. He is here and now, a creature of nature, like all other creatures; but his true life is not natural, like that of the fowls of the air or the lilies of the field. He is essentially a moral being, with relations beyond nature, and wants and aspirations and duties which connect him with a Divine or Supernatural order. From first to last this spiritual conception underlies the Gospels, and makes itself felt in them. There is no argument, because there is no hesitation. “Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?” The possibility of a negative answer is not supposed. The claims of the natural order, some have even thought, are unduly depressed. The spiritual life seems to overshadow and displace them. But this is only by way of emphasis, and in order to rouse man from the dreams of a mere sensual existence. “After all these things do the Gentiles seek”—those who know no better, to whom the meaning of the spiritual and Divine order has not come. “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” The spiritual must be held in its true place as primary; after this the natural has also its place, and is to be recognized in addition.

(2) But the great thought is, that man is the dependant of a Divine kingdom, everywhere transcending the visible and present world. God has made him in His own image, and loves him, however far he may have degraded that image and wandered away from Divine good. He claims man as His own—as rightfully belonging to the higher world of spiritual intelligence, of which He is the Head. And so Christ came “to seek and to save that which was lost.”

Surely this is a higher conception of human life than that of either ancient or modern secularism—a conception truer to the radical instincts of human nature, ever looking beyond the present, and owning the power of more than earth-born thoughts. From the fact of sin itself and a sense of wrong there comes a voice which speaks of something better—of a life akin to angels and to God. The very misery of man attests his greatness, and that there is more in his life, which “appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away,” than the experience of a day. Towards this thought the yearnings of all larger hearts, and the searchings of all higher minds, had pointed for centuries. It was the dream alike of Plato and of Cicero, of Egypt and of Persia. Hebrew Prophecy and Psalmody had grasped it more firmly as the Divine shone upon them more clearly. Yet withal it remained a comparative uncertainty before Christ. He, as no one before Him had done, held forth before men the conception of a higher life, greater than all the prizes of earth, and more enduring than all the accidents of time. That which was but faintly apprehended by Gentile philosopher, or even Jewish seer, was made manifest by the appearing and resurrection of our Lord, “who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” As St. Peter says in his First Epistle, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.”

Christ asserts for man his true dignity and his rightful place in the universe of matter and of spirit. There is no single point in respect to which Christ has wrought so complete a revolution as in respect to the dignity and worth of the individual man. He effected this change, not by teaching a new philosophy, but by living a new life, and consecrating that life by His pitying death. He came to save man, not because man was wise or worthy, but because he was ignorant and lost, and yet could be exalted to wisdom and holiness. Therein did He declare that the lowliest and the most simple have an intrinsic worth in the judgment of God, such as the world had never before accorded to man as man. It was the reproach of Christ, that He consorted with publicans and sinners. His eating with them, however, did not signify that He sympathized with them as they were; it signified that He knew what they might become. To accomplish His work for man, Christ not only was found in fashion as a man, but, being such, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death—even the death of the cross. In this He attested still more strikingly what manhood, as manhood, is worth in the judgment of God. It is not surprising that the light that streamed from Christ’s life and death slowly but surely effected changes so great in all the estimates that Christendom has learned to put upon man.

How great is little man!

Sun, moon, and stars respond to him,

Shine or grow dim

Harmonious with his span.

How little is great man!

More changeable than changeful moon,

Nor half in tune

With Heaven’s harmonious plan.

Ah rich man! ah poor man!

Make ready for the testing day

When wastes away

What bears not fire or fan.

Thou heir of all things, man

Pursue the saints by heavenward track:

They looked not back;

Run thou, as erst they ran.

Little and great is man:

Great if he will, or if he will

A pigmy still;

For what he will he Song of Solomon 1 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 121.]

(3) The new ideal of man was set forth by our Lord not only in His discourses but in Himself. Jesus never taught a systematic and scientific morality. He simply replaced the moral world on its true axis, which is the love of God and of man; but on no occasion did He attempt a classification of our duties, a complete explanation of the motives, aims, impulses, and restraining forces of our moral conduct. In the Sermon on the Mount, He showed the inner and spiritual nature of the law; He pointed out what is true purity and love. In His inimitable parables He has taught us, by many examples, what are the conditions of eternal life; but it is, above all, by the manifestation of His Person, and by the radiance of His life, that He has revealed to us the moral ideal of humanity. For the first time, a life absolutely fulfilling the moral law was seen in Him, a life wholly directed by the love of God and man, a life in which there is not an action, a word, a thought, or an impulse of the heart which does not conduce to the glory of God and the good of mankind, and which is not inspired, filled, penetrated by this love. In Him we see for the first time the admirable union of all those virtues which seem contrary to each other, and which usually exclude each other—authority and simplicity, majesty and humility, strength and gentleness, hatred of evil and tender mercy, purity without asceticism, condescension without servility; so that, to employ an image which the subject affords us, just as the various colours which are separated by the prism—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet—vivid and brilliant as they are, form, when united, a perfect white of spotless beauty, so all those different features which compose the form of Christ unite and blend in a harmony so extraordinary and so lifelike that it is imprinted for ever on the conscience of mankind. Through Him, light has for ever been thrown upon man. In Him, man has been seen as he ought to be. This great example stands before us; and wherever it is seen, the absolute return to darkness is impossible. Doubtless the powers of darkness may fall at times on portions of humanity; baseness, lying, hypocrisy, and violence may even shelter themselves under the name of Christ; but misconception and confusion will not last long; the light will at length be triumphant, the delusive shadows, the hideous nightmares, will disappear, and, in the fair and glorious daybreak of morning, justice, purity, and love will shine forth resplendent.

Science is teaching us lessons concerning the physical structure of the universe. The same stuff is ablaze in Sirius and the Sun and the flaming heart of the earth, and so Jesus Christ gives us the moral unity of all the worlds. The setting of the next life we can little imagine, but this we know, that God’s ideal of life is Jesus Christ. We are to be like Him. That is the real predestination. He who in both worlds delighted to do His Father’s will, suffered with brave hope, obeyed with changeless fidelity, served with supreme, unfailing love, is the universal type. God tells us that it is enough to be like Him. The words He uttered, “Good and faithful,” are negotiable in both worlds. Character and capacity are all of life that we can take with us when death swings open the door from this into the next room in our Father’s house. 1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 62.]

3. But now, since Jesus has perfectly revealed to us what God is and what man ought to be, He has lighted up the profound abyss which separates man from God. The more His holiness is made evident and clear, the more evident does our own imperfection become; all our virtues pale beside His perfection, as the false glitter of glass trinkets is outshone by the lustre of a pure diamond. His purity brings out the frightful and repulsive character, not only of our crimes, but of those thoughts, evil intentions, hatreds, and covetous desires, which, though unreached by human law, are revealed through Him. He shows us at once the evil that we have done, and the good which we have neglected to do; He casts a searching light on all hollow pretence, on all ostentation, pursuit of earthly glory, and selfishness more or less cleverly dissimulated. Never before Him had our nature been so profoundly, so accurately judged; never before had man been so clearly revealed to man. Thus were realized the prophetic words which the aged Simeon pronounced over the child Jesus—that by Him the thoughts of many hearts would be revealed ( Luke 2:35). Thus the light which shines forth from His person, and which at first attracts us by its sublimity, ends by becoming overwhelming and terrible when it penetrates to the depths of our being, and clearly shows our corruption.

(1) One phase of the mystery of man is that which meets us in the mass of sin, and seemingly base, lost life, which there is in the world. It is that same mystery of man’s moral nature; only not of its struggling, but of where it has ceased to struggle. That is the terrible thing which one is apt to feel wherever life is in dense masses, as in large cities—the multitudes who do not seem to struggle, who are complacent in the hollowest shams of vanity and folly; who are sunk in low, grovelling tastes, from which nothing seems to rouse them; who grow up hard, bold, defiant, and despise the very efforts that you make to help them upwards. And there are yet deeper abysses: all the lost, broken-down lives that fester in the byways of our cities; the masses of crime; the even more hopeless baseness of those who fatten by fostering crime,—whole classes, lost, lost, so lost that we cannot tell even how to try to save them, how to begin to try! And what is to be the end and outcome of it all?

(2) This light would be overpowering, and would leave us without hope, if, after having shown us our misery, it did not at the same time reveal the Divine mercy, if it did not show us in God a love greater than our rebellion, a pardon greater than our iniquity. This is what “Christ crucified” teaches us beyond all else, and it is for this reason that these grand words, “I am the light of the world,” never appear grander or more true than when they emanate from the Cross. At the foot of the Cross the sinner sees and receives a pardon truly worthy of God, because it completely satisfies His justice while at the same time revealing His mercy.

In the Howard Prize Essay for 1885, on “The Preservation of Health,” by Dr. Clement Dukes, the following passage occurs: “Light is not only the great preserver of health, but a great preventer of disease; for Tyndall found that sunlight arrested the growth of organisms, so that, as Dr. Murphy states, sunlight serves the double purpose of aiding the growth of those organisms which are necessary for man, as well as of man himself, while it retards the production of those which are antagonistic to his existence.” Many illustrations are given of this in the essay. The author, drawing upon his own experience, says that when house surgeon in a London hospital, he found that in one of its wards, which was very dark, simple fractures took seven to fourteen days longer in uniting than they would have done in a well-lighted ward, whilst they were afraid to put compound fractures in it at all; and when, from want of space, they were compelled to do so, they chose a bed where the light was greatest. Florence Nightingale, as the result of her wide observation, remarks: “One of the greatest observers of human things says: ‘Where there is sun there is thought.’ All physiology goes to confirm this. Where is the shady side of deep valleys, there is cretinism. Where are cellars and the unsunned sides of narrow streets, there is the degeneracy and weakness of the human race; mind and body equally degenerating. Put the pale, withering plant and human being into the sun, and, if not too far gone, each will recover heart and spirit.” In France there are hospitals where they trust almost entirely to light for the cure of disease. Surely there is here an earthly analogue to a spiritual fact, namely, that only by the beams of the Sun of Righteousness can the evil growths in humanity be stayed and the good ones be fostered.

I was talking some time ago to a City Missionary, an earnest-hearted woman working in the worst parts of one of our great cities; and she told me, how, at first, her work made her utterly despairing. There seemed to be nothing she could do; and she was among a whole population who seemed just sinking down, down to hell—nothing else for it, according to all her old creed. She told me how she used to go home and be haunted with the horror of it; and then she went out again, praying, and longing, and trying, but still reaching only one here and there. But one day it came to her—just the thought of the Heavenly Father’s love shadowed forth in Christ’s, and compared to which her love could be nothing; and like a great flood of light it all broke upon her, that she could trust Him. Why should she be racking her soul with anxiety almost to madness as if she alone in this great universe cared for them? And ever after that, she told me, she had laboured on, not less earnestly than before, but with an easier, freer heart, feeling the mystery losing itself not in darkness, but in light. That light was Christ’s. That anxiety of love for sinners, and that trustful thought of God, are both from Him. There were kind loving hearts before Christ, sad for human suffering; but nowhere, before, do you find that peculiar sadness for sin, and for the poor, lost sinners of the world. That is like a new light upon the great dark mystery, the light of a new love, which has ever since been working in the world; and, the light of a greater love still than ours, a love in the infinite Heart of things, a love to which our hearts go out in that strong trustful plea Whittier has shaped for us—

Father of all,—Thy erring child may be

Lost to himself, but never lost to Thee! 1 [Note: B. Herford, Courage and Cheer, 144.]

II

He Guides Men

The second thought is that Christ, like the pillar of cloud and fire to the Israelites, is a guiding light to us in our march through the wilderness of this world.

But if Christ is to lead we must follow. “ He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness.” The first demand is for obedience. How emphatically the Book of Numbers (chap. 9) dwells upon the absolute control of all the marches and halts by the movements of the cloud. When it was taken up, they journeyed; when it settled down, they encamped. As long as it lay spread above the Tabernacle, there they stayed. Impatient eyes might look, and impatient spirits chafe—no matter. The camp might be pitched in a desolate place, away from wells and palm trees, away from shade, among fiery serpents, and open to fierce foes—no matter. As long as the pillar was motionless, no man stirred. Weary, slow days might pass in this compulsory inactivity; but “whether it were two days, or a month, or a year, that the cloud tarried upon the tabernacle, abiding thereon, the children of Israel journeyed not.” And whenever it lighted itself up,—no matter how short had been the halt, how weary and footsore the people, how pleasant the resting-place—up with the tent-pegs immediately, and away. Whether the signal was given at midnight, when all but the watchers slept, or at mid-day, it was all the same.

All true following of Christ begins with faith, or we might almost say that following is faith, for we find our Lord substituting the latter expression for the former in another passage of this Gospel parallel with the present. “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness.” The two ideas are not equivalent, but faith is the condition of following; and following is the outcome and test, because it is the operation, of faith. None but they who trust Him will follow Him. He who does not follow does not trust. To follow Christ means to long and strive after His companionship; as the Psalmist says, “My soul followeth hard after thee.” It means, the submission of the will, the effort of the whole nature, the daily conflict to reproduce His example, the resolute adoption of His command as our law, His providence as our will, His fellowship as our joy.

Between teaching and leading there may be all the difference that there is between theory and practice. A teacher may content himself with the thought, the attention, the contemplation, of his pupils, but a leader calls for action. That is precisely the note which is struck in these words: “he that followeth me.” Like the host in the wilderness following the pillar of fire, like the pilgrims to Mecca following the fire-cages slung high upon the poles, so must men follow this Christ, that they may not walk in darkness, but may have the light of life.

1. We have the promise that if we follow faithfully we shall not walk in darkness. This is true in practice of life and its perplexities. Nobody who has not tried it would believe how many difficulties are cleared out of a man’s road by the simple act of trying to follow Christ. No doubt there will still remain obscurities enough as to what we ought to do, to call for the best exercise of patient wisdom; but an enormous proportion of them vanish like mist when the sun breaks through, when once we honestly set ourselves to find out whither the pillared Light is guiding. It is a reluctant will, and intrusive likings and dislikings, that obscure the way for us, much oftener than real obscurity in the way itself. It is seldom impossible to discern the Divine will, when we only wish to know it that we may do it. And if ever it is impossible for us, surely that impossibility is like the cloud resting on the Tabernacle—a sign that for the present His will is that we should be still, and wait, and watch.

I only speak my own experience; I am not talking theology or philosophy: I know what I am saying, and can point out the times and places when I should have fallen if I had been able to rely for guidance upon nothing better than a commandment. But the pure, calm, heroic image of Jesus confronted me, and I succeeded. I had no doubt as to what He would have done, and through Him I did not doubt what I ought to do. 1 [Note: Mark Rutherford.]

So the years went on, and the sense of unreality in my teaching grew steadily more intense and intolerable. I saw myself continually expending all the forces of my mind on theories which left me and my hearers alike unchanged in the essential characteristics of our lives. I felt myself, like St. Augustine, but a “seller of rhetoric.” I was inculcating a method of life which I myself did not obey, or obeyed only in those respects that caused me neither sacrifice nor inconvenience. In order to continue such labours at all various forms of excuse and self-deception were required. Thus I flattered myself that I was at least maintaining the authority of morals. I did not perceive that morals are of no value to the world until vitalized by emotion. At other times I preached with strenuous zeal the superiority of the Christian religion, and dilated on its early triumphs. This pleased my hearers, for it always flatters men to find themselves upon the winning side. What I wonder at now is that they did not perceive that my zeal to prove Christianity true was exactly proportioned to my fear that it was false. Men do not seek to prove that of which they are assured. Jesus never sought to prove the existence of a God, because He was assured of it; He simply asserted and commanded. In my heart of hearts I knew that I was not sure. But I did not easily discover the reason of my uncertainty. I supposed the source to be the destructive criticism of the Gospels which had reduced Jesus Himself to a probability. In my private thoughts I argued that it was no longer possible to feel the intense reality of Christ. Francis might feel it, Catherine might feel it, because they lived in an atmosphere of poetry, unchilled by criticism. I could never feel as they felt because I could not transport myself into their atmosphere. Yet as often as I turned to these great lives, something thrilled within me, some living responsive fibre, so that I knew that I was not after all quite alien to them. Could it be that there was that in me that made me, or could make me, of their company? But how could I attain to their faith? What could give back to a modern man, tortured by a thousand perplexities of knowledge of which they never dreamed, the reality of Christ which they possessed? And then the answer came—not suddenly, but as a still small voice growing louder, more positive, more intense— Live the Life. Try to do some at least of the things that Jesus did. Seek through experience what can never come through ratiocination. Be a Francis; then it may be thou shalt think like him, and know Jesus as he knew Him. Live the life—there is no other way. 1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Empire of Love, 112.]

2. But there is a higher meaning in the words than even this promise of practical direction. In the profound symbolism of Scripture, especially of this Gospel, “darkness” is the name for the whole condition of the soul averted from God. So our Lord here is declaring that to follow Him is the true deliverance from that midnight of the soul. There is a darkness of ignorance, a darkness of impurity, a darkness of sorrow; and in that threefold gloom, thickening to a darkness of death, are they enwrapt who follow not the Light. That is the grim, tragical side of this saying, too sad, too awful for our lips to speak much of, and best left in the solemn impressiveness of that one word. But the hopeful, blessed side of it is, that the feeblest beginnings of trust in Jesus Christ, and the first tottering steps that try to tread in His, bring us into the light. It is not necessary that we should have reached our goal, it is enough that our faces are turned to it, and our hearts desire to attain it; then we may be sure that the dominion of the darkness over us is broken. To follow, though it be afar off, and with unequal steps, fills our path with increasing brightness, and even though evil and ignorance and sorrow may thrust their blackness in upon our day, they are melting in the growing glory, and already we may give thanks “unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son.”

Only he can be a true follower whose life and love are in union with the life and love in Christ. He will not be “light in the Lord” until his will is intermarried with the will of his Lord. Every man who is thus joined to the Lord is one Spirit with Him, and walks in His marvellous Light. He is inly and immovably persuaded that nothing can separate his love from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus his Lord; and the comforting, assuring light of this love floods his understanding. The love of God in his will, and the light of God in his mind, make him a new man. The descent of God’s life and light to dwell in his soul makes him sure and certain of his final ascent to God.

3. But we have not merely the promise that we shall be led by the light and brought into the light. A yet deeper and grander gift is offered here: “He shall have the light of life.” That means, not, as it is often carelessly taken to mean, a light which illuminates the life, but, like the similar phrases of this Gospel—“bread of life,” “water of life,”—light which is life. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” These two are one in their source, which is Jesus, the Word of God. Of Him we have to say, “With thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.” They are one in their deepest nature; the life is the light, and the light the life. And this one gift is bestowed upon every soul that follows Christ. Not only will our outward lives be illumined or guided from without, but our inward being will be filled with the brightness. “Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord.”

This is the great distinction between the light which Christ is and the light by which the Israelites were led from day to day. They had an external means of ascertaining promptly which way they should go. Their whole life was circumscribed, and its place and mode determined for them. The guidance offered us by Christ of an inward Kind. A God without might seem perfect as a guide, but a God within is the real perfection. God does not now lead us by a sign which we could follow, though we had no real sympathy with Divine ways and no wisdom of our own; He leads us by communicating to us His own perceptions of right and wrong, by inwardly enlightening us, and by making us ourselves of such a disposition that we naturally choose what is good.

If I had fulness of life I would have perfectness of vision; I would know what God is, what man is, what heaven is. Is it not written, “This is life eternal that they should know thee”? And yet, marvellous to tell, this unspeakable glory may be mine—be mine now, here, in the midst of the present world: “He that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.” It is not by dying it shall come to me; it is by following—following the steps of the Master through life’s strait gate and life’s narrow way. It is by taking up the cross, by lifting the burden, by bearing the sacrifice, by doing the will, that the doctrine shall be known to me. 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 251.]

The still commandress of the silent night

Borrows her beams from her bright brother’s eye;

His fair aspect fills her sharp horns with light;

If he withdraw, her flames are quench’d and die;

E’en as the beams of thy enlight’ning Sp’rit,

Infus’d and shot into my dark desire,

Inflame my thoughts, and fill my soul with fire,

That I am ravish’d with a new delight;

But if thou shroud thy face, my glory fades,

And I remain a nothing, all composed of shades.

Eternal God! O Thou that only art

The sacred fountain of eternal light,

And blessed loadstone of my better part,

O Thou, my heart’s desire, my soul’s delight,

Reflect upon my soul, and touch my heart,

And then my heart shall prize no good above Thee;

And then my soul shall know Thee; knowing, love Thee;

And then my trembling thoughts shall never start

From Thy commands, or swerve the least degree,

Or once presume to move, but as they move in Thee. 2 [Note: Francis Quarles.]

4. Christ is our guiding light even unto death. The night cometh. I shall have to lie down and die. Is there any light? “I am the light.” He claims that to those who are in Him the night shineth even as the day. What does my Lord do in the hour of death to break up the reign of darkness? He gives us the cheer of sovereignty. “All things are yours … death!” Then I do not belong to death? No, death belongs to me. Death is not my master, he is my servant. He is made to minister to me in the hour of translation, and I shall not be enslaved by his approach.

That was a true and beautiful word uttered by Mrs. Booth when she was passing home: “The waters are rising, but I am not sinking!” Death was her minister, floating her forward to glory. “All things are yours … death.” And my Lord further softens the night by the gracious light of fellowship. “I will be with thee.” When we are in fine and congenial company how the time passes! The hours slip away and we marvel when the moment for separation comes. And so it will be in death! Our company will be so rich and welcome that the season will pass before we know it. I think the Christian’s first wondering question on the other side will be: “Am I really through? Really?” “Even the night shall be light about thee.” It matters not how stormy the night may be, the Light of Life shall never be blown out. “At eventide it shall be light.” 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Silver Lining, 73.]

Whence are we—and whither? Especially, whither? How that question has pressed upon the heart of man. Do you remember the first living glimpse that we get of our old Saxon forefathers, as they stood facing Christianity, not yet converted to it, but wondering if perhaps it might be true? They are facing it with this mystery of the unknown beyond pressing on their hearts. I know few more beautiful episodes in old-world thought. It was a few years after Augustine had come as a missionary to England, and in the rude North, King Edwin of Northumbria had gathered his chiefs and thanes together in “Witenagemot,” or “Wise men’s meeting,” that they might consider this new faith. One by one they told their faith about it, but the best word spoken was this. Said one of the thanes: “Truly the life of man in this world is on this wise. It is as when thou, O King, art feasting with thy thanes in winter-time, when the hearth is lighted and the hall is warm; but without, the rains and the snows are falling, and the winds howl. Then cometh a sparrow and flieth through the hall; it cometh in by one door and goeth out at the other. When a little moment brief and pleasant is passed, it disappears, and from winter returns to winter again. So is it with the life of man, O King. It is but for a moment; what goeth before it, and what cometh after it, wot we not at all. Wherefore, if these strangers can tell us aught, let us hearken to them and follow their law.” 2 [Note: B. Herford, Courage and Cheer, 145.]

5. And, finally, Christ guides His followers to another and a better life. Through the opened doors of that immortality which He has brought to light by means of His gospel, there has streamed ever since a steady radiance, towards which the hearts of all men have turned with thankfulness and hope. Christ has done for immortality what He had done for theism. He has not demonstrated it to the reason, but He has verified it as a fact. He has not superseded the necessity of searching and scrutinizing its possibility or probability on grounds of reason, but He has enforced these demonstrations by the best attested events of human history; and He stands before the rational faith of men declaring afresh to all the generations, “I am he that liveth and was dead,” and “Behold, I am alive for evermore,” and “Because I live, ye shall live also.”

What about the morrow? When the river is crossed, is there any light upon the regions beyond? Am I to gaze into blackness, impenetrable, inscrutable? “I am the light.” What kind of light does He give me here? “In my Father’s house!” Is there not a softening gleam in the very phrase? Look here for a sheaf of rays of welcome light. “In my Father’s house,” there is our habitation! “I go to prepare a place for you,” there is the preparation for us! “I will receive you unto myself,” there is a welcome for us! Does not this throw the soft light of the morning on the Beyond? The same light which has been given to me along the way of time will shine upon me in the realms of the new day. “The Lord God is the light thereof.” So you see it is Jesus all the way; my light to-day, to-night, to-morrow! 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Silver Lininig, 74.]

There is an ancient prayer for the departed which runs: Grant them, O Lord, eternal rest, and let light perpetual shine upon them.

The Light of the World

Literature

Aglionby (F. K.), The Better Choice, 51.

Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 254.

Banks (L. A.), Sermons which have won Souls, 75.

Brooks (P.), The Light of the World, 1.

Church (R. W.), Cathedral and University Sermons, 80.

Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, iii. 46.

Greenhough (J. G.), The Cross in Modern Life, 88.

Herford (B.), Courage and Cheer, 138.

Hopkins (E. H.), in The Keswick Week, 1908, 10.

Horne (C. S.), The Light of the World, 1.

Ingram (A. F. W.), The Gospel in Action, 23.

Jerdan (C.), For the Lambs of the Flock, 54.

Jowett (J. H.), The Silver Lining, 69.

Lewis (J.), The Mystic Secret, 143.

Little (W. J. Knox), The Light of Life, 1.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii., 319.

Marten (C. H.), Plain Bible Addresses, 100.

Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 250.

Maurice (F. D.), Lincoln’s Inn Sermons, iv. 174.

Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, ii. 218.

Newman (J. H.), Oxford University Sermons, 1.

Porter (N.), Yale College Sermons, 204.

Pulsford (J.), Loyalty to Christ, ii. 7.

Ragg (L.), Christ and our Ideals, 51.

Ross (J. M. E.), The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 80.

Tulloch (J.), Some Facts of Religion and of Life, 209.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), Nos. 375, 687.

Walters (C. E.), The Deserted Christ, 21.

Westcott (B. F.), The Revelation of the Father, 47.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxi. 380 (Horder); xxxvi. 138 (Whiton), 362 (Perowne); xlvi. 310 (Lang); lvi. 161 (Hughes); lxvii. 177 (Ingram); lxxvii. 70 (Marshall).

Clergyman’s Magazine, iii. 193 (Bersier).

Verse 32

Truth and Freedom

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.… If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.— John 8:32; John 8:36.

1. In the text we find united two of the greatest words in our language. There are perhaps no words in the language which have been so variously interpreted, or around which the conflict of opinion has raged more fiercely; no words which have had greater power to call forth the energy and devotion of human hearts, or which, on the other hand, have more often been employed to give an ideal colouring to base and selfish ends. How many rebels against just law, or wholesome moral restraint, have masked their caprice under the name of liberty; how many fires of persecution have been kindled in the pretended cause of truth! And, on the other hand, what noble battles have been fought for the most sacred interests of humanity, which were identified with these two names! We should blot out half of the heroic pages of history if we were to erase the deeds done, and the sufferings endured, for Truth and Freedom. In the text the two words are used to throw light upon each other, and, as it were, to exclude the false interpretations which might be given to each taken by itself. That is Truth which makes me really free; that is the genuine and only valuable Freedom which is based upon the Truth.

2. Let us recall the occasion on which the words were spoken. To some who had attached themselves (slightly, as it would seem) to Him, the Lord had said, “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.” Instead of joyfully accepting, they resented this gracious encouraging word of His, this promise, “Ye shall be made free,” and rejoined in displeasure—“We were never in bondage to any man.” How strangely men are often blinded by pride and presumption! Listen to these proud Jews, “We were never in bondage to any man”; while yet the whole past history of their nation was the record of one bondage following hard on another, they for their sins having come at one time or another under the yoke of almost every people round about them. They had been, by turns, in bondage to the Canaanites, in bondage to the Philistines, in bondage to the Syrians, in bondage to the Chaldeans; then again to the Græco-Syrian kings; and even at the very moment when this indignant disclaimer was uttered, the signs of a foreign rule, of the domination of a stranger, everywhere met their eye. They bought and sold with Roman money; they paid tribute to a Roman emperor; a Roman governor sat in their judgment hall; a Roman garrison occupied the fortress of their city. And yet, with all this plain before their eyes, brought home to their daily, hourly, experience, they angrily put back the promise of Christ, “The truth shall make you free,” as though it conveyed an insult: How sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free? We were never in bondage to any man.

3. These words of the Jews grew out of a total misunderstanding of the freedom of which Christ was speaking. It was not, in the first place, freedom from the yoke of the stranger, it was not deliverance from the tyranny of Rome, that Christ was promising here to as many as continued in His word, but freedom from the yoke of sin, deliverance from the bondage of corruption, from the tyranny of their own passions and desires. It was this that Christ promised, for it was this that He came from heaven to impart. That other freedom might and would follow in course of time; for men who are free inwardly are sure, sooner or later, to achieve an outer freedom as well. It was not, however, of this that Christ was speaking here, but of quite another freedom; and therefore, not caring to note that angry rejoinder of theirs, or to entangle Himself in controversy on so unprofitable a theme, but lifting up the whole question between Himself and them into a higher sphere, He replied, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” Every sinner, He would say, is the servant, or slave, of the sin which he commits—is in bondage to it, and needs liberty, even the liberty which I, the Truth, alone am capable of giving him; which he can receive from no other hands save only from Mine. If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed; otherwise, you are slaves and servants, and such must continue to the end. The text, therefore, deals with—

I. The Need of Liberation.

II. The Truth that Liberates.

III. The Liberty that the Truth gives.

I

The Need of Liberation

Christ’s aim was to make all men free. He saw around Him servitude in every form—man in slavery to man, and race to race; His own countrymen in bondage to the Romans—slaves of both Jewish and Roman masters, frightfully oppressed; men trembling before priestcraft; and those who were politically and ecclesiastically free, in worse bondage still—the rich and rulers slaves to their own passions. Conscious of His inward Deity and of His Father’s intentions, He, without hurry, without the excitement which would mark the mere earthly Liberator, calmly said, “Ye shall be free.”

1. First, then, we have to face this fact, that we are in bondage.—The Jews felt their political position acutely; they writhed under foreign dominion, and again and again broke out into rebellion, seeking an external freedom by casting off the hated Roman yoke. It was intolerable to them to be considered the slaves of Cæsar, and the most horrible scenes attended their several patriotic uprisings. The purpose of our Lord was to convince them of an underlying slavery, which accounted for their political servitude, and to confer upon them the spiritual liberty which contains the potency and promise of all freedoms. The essential slavery is interior; political coercion may imprison the body or intellectual error degrade the mind, but by far the most abject and fatal bondage is that of the soul under the dominion of ignorance, passion, and wilfulness.

(1) The bondage of the mind is one source and method of the essential slavery, the bondage of the mind being the tyranny of materialism. Our Lord often speaks of sin as unbelief, unbelief in the spiritual universe—blindness to God, to the spirituality of the law, to the rewards and retributions of the life beyond; and this unbelief, blocking out the spiritual universe, leaves us slaves of the senses. We are caged in by the body, limited by the bars of circumstance, victims of the material, the worldly, and the temporal. The carnally-minded may fancy themselves possessed of a large liberty, but earth and time at their widest are narrow to the spirit. To be governed from below is the essential slavery. To obey only animal impulses, to seek sensuous pleasure, to hope for nothing beyond social promotion, to find our motive and end in earthly things, and, in a word, to surrender ourselves to the fatalism of circumstance, is an infinitely worse slavery than to be bound hand and foot. In this cruel bondage thousands live and die without one great thought, principle, or hope in their maimed and fettered life.

A recent writer upon the London Zoological Gardens refers to “the spacious aviary” provided for the eagles. Spacious aviary! One would like to know what the eagles think of that. Surely the amplest artificial horizon is narrow and the loftiest dome mean to creatures born to range the skies and seek the sun. The noble birds must feel in dull, strange ways the loss of their native heaven; the most spacious aviary can only grievously and mysteriously fret them. So the world, and the things of the world, painfully cramp the creature in whose heart God has set eternity; his cage is narrow even when the stars are its gilded wires. It is said that a bird of the north, confined in a yard, and longing for his arctic haunts, has been known in spring to migrate from the southern to the northern side of his narrow confines. And, however men doom themselves to the straitened life of sense, the instinct of eternity pathetically asserts itself within absurd limits, and distracts the soul with morbid repinings. 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Bane and the Antidote, 228.]

(2) The bondage of the will is another part of the essential slavery. All see what an awful tyranny sin is when it has once become the habit of life. Some kinds of sin are coarser, others less offensive, but thousands who have committed sin find themselves miserably incapable of shaking off its tyranny; they are victims of vanity, envy, covetousness, ambition, temper, impatience, or sensual indulgence, and they struggle unavailingly with the despotism which holds them down. He who unwittingly grasps the handles of an electrifying-machine soon writhes in pain and shrieks for deliverance. Why does he not let go the torturing thing? He cannot; he is at the mercy of the operator, and is the butt of the crowd. It is thus with multitudes who have committed sin: they are its slaves; they are astonished at themselves, ashamed of themselves, filled with grief and remorse, yet utterly unable to break the infernal spell. There is often more hope for the poor wretch agonizing in the tentacles of the devil-fish than there is for some of these victims of vice.

In the Bay of Naples are several islands famous for their beauty. The sky of infinite depth and purity; the sea pure as the sky, and rivalling its manifold tints of ever-changing glory; the landscapes rich with the silver of the olive and the purple of the vine; the atmosphere full of the balm of flowers; and the horizon studded with picturesque spots, as a royal girdle with jewels, conspire to create a vision of delight. The Greek and Roman in their quest of loveliness and pleasure built their palaces here, and to this focus of colour and joy the modern lovers of beauty hasten as butterflies to roses. Now one of these fairy islands is the property of the Italian Government, and its only inhabitants are convicts. How little to them all this matchless scenery! Fettered, watched, driven, scourged, they can only be sickened by the splendour and irritated by the lavish treasures of earth and heaven. Is it not much like this with unregenerate man in regard to the blessings of life and the glory of the world? 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Bane and the Antidote, 235.]

(3) The bondage of the conscience is part of the slavery of sin. Men are built in three storeys, so to speak. Down at the bottom, and to be kept there, are inclinations, passions, lust, desires, all which are but blind aimings after their appropriate satisfaction, without any question as to whether the satisfaction is right or wrong; and above that a dominant will which is meant to control, and above that a conscience. That is the pyramid; and as the sunshine illumines the gilded top of some spire, so the shining apex, the conscience, is illumined when the light of God falls upon it. The commission of sin defiles the conscience, and conscience degrades us into convicts and cowards. The sense of dignity, freedom, and confidence is lost in the act of transgression, and with the consciousness of guilt comes fear and bondage. And is not life to the unregenerate man a harsh and gloomy servitude? We look upon God as “a hard Master.” Is not that the natural conception of God? The heathen look upon Him in this light and represent Him by terrible images in their temples; and although we do not set up ghastly idols, our pessimistic conceptions of the world’s Creator and Ruler are equally terrible. We think of Him, and are troubled. We look upon human duty as inequitable and exhausting, and fulfil our task with the discontent and bitterness of a slave. Finally, we look forward to the issues of life with deep misgiving. Through fear of death we are all our lifetime subject to bondage. At the bottom of all our pessimism, abjectness, and hopelessness is the consciousness of sin and guilt. Never did Shakespeare write a greater, deeper line than the one he puts into the mouth of Hamlet—“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” The unintelligible wretchedness of human life and the vague terrors which haunt us are not in any wise mental in their origin and strength and to be abolished by fuller intellectual light; they arise in the accusing conscience, and here primarily must our bondage and cowardice be dealt with.

The evils that we do, and that we cherish undone in our hearts, are like the wreckers on some stormy coast, who begin operations by taking the tongue out of the bell that hangs on the buoy, and putting out the light that beams from the beacon. Sin chokes conscience; and so the worse a man is, the less he feels himself to be bad; and while a saint will be tortured with agonies of remorse for some slight peccadillo, a brigand will add a murder or two to his list, and wipe his mouth and say, “I have done no harm.” We are ignorant of our sins because we bribe our consciences, because we drug our consciences, and will not attend to the facts of our own spiritual being. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

2. The second thing that claims attention is that we may be unconscious of our bondage. This unconsciousness may be due to our never having consciously enjoyed freedom, or it may be due to the long time that has elapsed since we lost it, so that slavery has become a second nature.

(1) We may never have opened our hearts to the joy of being free. There is nothing about us that is more remarkable and more awful than the power that we have, by not attending to something, of making that something practically non-existent. The great searchlights that they now have on battleships will fling a beam of terrible revealing power on one small segment of the vast circle of the sea; and all the rest, though it may be filled with the enemy’s fleet, will be lying in darkness. So just because we will not think of the facts of our slavery to sin, the facts are non-existent as far as we are concerned. Surely it is not a thing worthy of a man never to go down into the deep places of his own heart and see the ugly things that coil and wrestle and swarm and multiply there.

Ezekiel was once led to a place where, through a hole broken in the wall, there was shown him an inner chamber, on the walls of which were painted the hideous idols of the heathen. And there, in the presence of the foul shapes, stood venerable priests and official dignitaries of Israel, with their censers in their hands, and their backs to the oracle of God. There is a chamber like that in all our hearts; and it would be a great deal better that we should go down, through the hole in the wall, and see it than that we should live, as so many of us do, in this fool’s paradise of ignorance of our own sin. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

(2) The unconsciousness may be due to the force of habit. A slave may be only all the more a slave that he is insensible to his bondage. There is no sense of bondage when the instincts of freedom are unrepressed; but neither is there any when despotism has lasted long enough to kill them out. A man’s nature may have become so thoroughly habituated to slavery that he has ceased to know or think of anything better. On the other hand, the very consciousness of bondage is a kind of emancipation. He who has begun to know and feel the irksomeness of his limits, is already, in a sense, beyond them. There must be in him at least some measure of, and sympathy with, what transcends the bounds that hem him in, before he can feel them as bounds. Pain is the proof that vitality is not extinct. Shame is the witness that the soul is not utterly lost to goodness. And the blush on the slave’s cheek and the sense of degradation in his heart are at least the sign that he is not all a slave.

In the closing stanzas of that most graphic yet touching poem, “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Byron well expresses the deadness of soul, the hopelessness, and even carelessness concerning life and freedom, begotten in those who have too long worn the chains of slavery. For the canker of such fetters eats more deeply into the soul than into the enchained limbs.

It might be months, or years, or days,

I kept no count, I took no note,

I had no hope my eyes to raise

And clear them of their dreary mote;

At last men came to set me free,

I asked not why, and reck’d not where,

It was at length the same to me,

Fetter’d or fetterless to be

I learn’d to love despair.

And thus when they appear’d at last,

And all my bonds aside were cast,

These heavy walls to me had grown

A hermitage—and all my own!

And half I felt as they were come

To tear me from a second home.

II

The Truth that Liberates

All truth gives freedom. We hardly need to prove this in the present day. We know that in every sphere ignorance is bondage, and knowledge is power. So sure are we of it that we fearlessly argue from effect to cause. That which fetters is not true, that which frees us and gives us power cannot be false.

1. The craving for liberty lies deep in human nature, and many means have been tried to satisfy it.

(1) Force has been tried. Wherever force has been used on the side of freedom we honour it; the names which we pronounce in boyhood with enthusiasm are those of the liberators of nations and the vindicators of liberty. Israel had had such—Joshua, the Judges, Judas Maccabæus. Had the Son of God willed so to come, even on human data the success was certain. Let us waive the truth of His inward Deity, of His miraculous power, of His power to summon to His will more than twelve legions of angels. Let us only notice now that men’s hearts were full of Him, ripe for revolt; and that at a single word of His, thrice three hundred thousand swords would have started from their scabbards. But had He so come, one nation might have gained liberty; not the race of man. Moreover, the liberty would only have been independence of a foreign conqueror. Therefore as a conquering king He did not come.

Cromwell was strong that things obtained by force, though never so good in themselves, are both less to the ruler’s honour and less likely to last. “What we gain in a free way is better than twice as much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and our posterity’s”; and the safest test of any constitution is its acceptance by the people. And again, “It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it.” The root of all external freedom is here. 1 [Note: John Morley, Oliver Cromwell, 513.]

(2) Legislation has been tried. Perhaps only once has this been done successfully, and by a single effort. When the names of conquerors shall have been forgotten, and modern civilization shall have become obsolete, when England’s shall be ancient history, one Act of hers will be remembered as a record of her greatness, that Act by which in costly sacrifice she emancipated her slaves. But one thing England could not do. She could give freedom, but she could not make fit for freedom, she could not make it lasting. The stroke of a monarch’s pen will do the one, the discipline of ages is needed for the other. Give to-morrow a constitution to some feeble Eastern nation or a horde of savages, and in half a century they will be subjected again. Therefore the Son of Man did not come to free the world by legislation.

(3) Civilization has been tried. Civilization does free; intellect equalizes. Every step of civilization is a victory over some lower instinct. But civilization contains within itself the elements of a fresh servitude. Man conquers the powers of nature and becomes in turn their slave. The workman is in bondage to the machine which does his will; his hours, his wages, his personal habits are determined by it. The rich man fills his house with luxuries, and cannot do without them. A highly civilized community is a very spectacle of servitude. Man is there, a slave to dress, to hours, to manners, to conventions, to etiquette. Things contrived to make his life more easy become his masters. Therefore Jesus did not talk of the progress of the species or the growth of civilization. He did not trust the world’s hope of liberty to a right division of property. He freed the inner man, that so the outer might become free too. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

If there were any doubt as to Christianity being truth, that complete freedom, which cannot be oppressed by anything, and which a man experiences the moment he makes the Christian life-conception his own, would be an undoubted proof of its truth. 1 [Note: Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (Complete Works, xx. 220).]

2. Only the Truth can make us free. We must be true in our attitude to ourselves and to our fellow-men.

(1) Of course the Truth meant is not mere information. In that sense, the wisest of men can know only a little; he has to content himself with being ignorant of all but a fraction of what is knowable. And, what is more important, true wisdom does not depend upon the extent of a man’s information. There cannot indeed be wisdom without information, gathered from books and from communication with others; but such information is but the raw material out of which wisdom has to be extracted; and often a mind that is not possessed of any great store of knowledge, and whose experience is very limited, shows itself able to draw more light out of it than others who have had a wide intercourse with men and things.

(2) Nor, again, is the Truth referred to the holding of correct doctrines in theology, or in any other subject. It has been one of the most fatal mistakes to regard such correctness according to some standard of orthodoxy as the root of the matter, and to suppose that the one thing needful was, by whatever measures might be necessary—by violence or constraint, by hindering men from speaking and thinking freely, by narrowing their lives, and so preventing the natural action of their minds—to confine them to one set of opinions. Opinions, however right, are mere prejudices, unless they spring from a living root in our own experience and thought. We have many opinions which have come to us, we might almost say, in our sleep—by imitation of those around us, by the fact that we have heard things said and never heard them controverted, or at best, by a superficial exercise of our understanding upon first appearances. Such opinions therefore sit upon us very lightly, and we could part with them without much loss or change. We should not feel diminished, nor would our lives be essentially altered, if they were turned into their opposites.

(3) There is, however, a deeper kind of conviction than this, which is continually forming itself within every man, and constitutes for him the genuine result of his experience; a conviction as to the real meaning of his life in this world, what is most to be sought for, and what is most to be avoided, what he himself would wish to be, and what attitude he should take up in relation to his fellow-men; a conviction which may be said to constitute his real religion or to determine what he really worships. This conviction may not come readily to our lips, and indeed it often needs a kind of self-analysis, to which most men are very averse, to recognize it at all; yet it is continually shaping itself more and more definitely within us, and every act we do, and every serious thought we think, is a contribution to its growth. Every one is continually, by every action and thought, building up within him a true or a false view of his own nature and of the world, a view which puts him into a right or a wrong attitude to himself and to his fellow-men. Now, if we ask the secret of success or failure in this process, looking at conspicuous instances of either, what do we find? It is that success seems to depend upon a certain inward sincerity of soul, a willingness to apprehend the real facts of the case and to accept their lesson, upon a hatred of falsehood and illusion and a desire to stand in the clear light of day, and to understand the real meaning of the experience which life brings to us; while failure seems to be the result of a certain unwillingness to admit anything we do not like, a readiness to accept anything as true that flatters our desires, and an obstinate shutting of our ears to anything that opposes them.

“O ye hypocrites,” said Christ to the Pharisees, “ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” At first it seems hard that men should be condemned for not having insight enough to discern the signs of the times, that is, to see what were the really important circumstances in their surroundings and what was the line of conduct, of thought and action, which would make them useful to their day and generation. But the justice of the condemnation becomes evident when we realize that such want of discernment is due, not to merely intellectual limitations, but to that lack of truthfulness of soul which alone makes a man open to the inner meaning of the facts before him. In truth, men often go through life only half-awake, or seeing as in dreams only the pictures evoked by their own desires and feelings; and thus that which is most important in the experiences of their own lives is all but entirely lost to them. 1 [Note: E. Caird, Lay Sermons Delivered at Balliol College, 30.]

3. What, then, is the Truth which Christ says shall make us free? Truth is the vital law or principle of life. “If ye continue in my word … ye shall know the truth.” Clearly, this sequence of ideas regards truth as the vital principle of life. It is not a theory, a calculation, an abstraction, a logical deduction, but a practical continuing in the word of life. When a man has discovered the word which fulfils his life he has found the very soul and essence of truth. In no other way can truth be found, in no other way can it be satisfactorily tested.

(1) The essential truth for the seed that is sown in the ground consists in the vital principle in virtue of which it germinates and unfolds its own proper life. By this principle it is distinguished from all the other products of the world, and receives its own charter of individual existence. The truth of the barley seed lies in that principle by which it unfolds its particular and distinctive qualities, and produces wholesome barley, and not something else. The truth of the rose tree is held in the principle which distinguishes it from all other flowering plants, and causes it to produce the beauty of the rose. Plainly enough, the truth of any and every plant does not consist in what botany discourses about them, but in the vital principle which gives them distinctive existence and perfection of life. The principle is, of course, as wide as creation. The essential truth for all created things lies in the potent principle in which they “live and move and have their being.” In the last issue, universal truth is the eternal pulse of the life of God.

(2) The truth of intellect lies, therefore, not in any discoveries or theories of the human mind, but in the deeper laws by which the mind itself is constituted and developed. The things that are essential to mind, not the theories that are incidental to it, are its truth. The things that cannot be denied without contradicting the being of thought are indisputable truth. Among these are the ideas of order, arrangement, cause and effect, and universal relation.

(3) When we carry this principle into the province of the human spirit, we reach the deepest home of truth, the last word upon which all others depend, to which all others are subjugated, and in which all others are completed. The truth for the human spirit is that which is experienced and realized by it as the energy and satisfaction of its own life; that which, in flowing through its being, imparts inspiration, expansion, and potency. For example, the consciousness of an indwelling God, the pulse of a universal moral law, and the potencies of immortality, are vital elements of our spiritual nature, being essential to spiritual self-realization. The spirit of man cannot deny these without committing spiritual suicide. These are as fundamental a part of spiritual being as order and relation are of intellectual being. It is in spiritual life, and there alone, that the truth of the spirit can be tested and approved. The word of Jesus Christ answers this test; for it has been proved by man’s spiritual nature to give life, and to give it abundantly. No arguments in the world can countervail a fact like this. As the principle of life for a tree constitutes the truth of that tree, so the proved principle of life for the spirit of man constitutes the truth for his spirit. In the word of Christ the vital principle of spiritual life is given in its perfect form; the indwelling God is invested with supreme glory, the consciousness of moral law is uplifted into its perfected grandeur, and the pulse of immortal life is flushed with the final energy of demonstration and revelation. In Jesus Christ the spiritual life of man has experienced a power and development unknown to it before. “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” For the spirit (which is the only rightful judge), this proof is irrefragable, for it lies in undeniable potencies of life. The question, “What is truth?” is satisfactorily answered. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

4. Christ is “the Truth,” and His teaching, accepted by the will and expressed in the life, is the Truth that makes us free. The truth which He taught was chiefly on three points—

(1) God.—Blot out the thought of God, a Living Person, and life becomes mean, existence unmeaning, the universe dark, and resolve is left without a stay, aspiration and duty without a support. The Son exhibited God as Love: and so that fearful bondage of the mind to the necessity of Fate was broken. A living Lord had made the world; and its dark and unintelligible mystery meant good, not evil. He manifested Him as a Spirit; and if so, the only worship that could please Him must be a spirit’s worship. Not by sacrifices is God pleased; nor by droned litanies and liturgies; nor by fawning and flattery: nor is His wrath bought off by blood. Thus was the chain of superstition sent asunder; for superstition is wrong views of God; exaggerated or inadequate, and wrong conceptions of the way to please Him.

(2) Man.—We are a mystery to ourselves. Go to any place where nations have brought together their wealth and their inventions, and before the victories of mind you stand in reverence. Then stop to look at the passing crowds who have attained that civilization. Think of their low aims, their mean lives, their conformation only a little higher than that of brute creatures, and a painful sense of degradation steals upon you. So great and yet so mean! And so of individuals. There is not one whose feelings have not been deeper than we can fathom, not one who would venture to tell out to his brother man the mean, base thoughts that have crossed his heart during a single hour. Now this riddle He solved. He looked on man as fallen, but magnificent in his ruin. We, catching that thought from Him, speak as He spoke. But none that were born of woman ever felt this or lived this like Him. Beneath the vilest outside He saw this—a human soul, capable of endless growth; and thence He treated with what for want of a better term we may call respect all who approached Him; not because they were titled Rabbis, or rich Pharisees, but because they were men. Here was a germ for freedom. It is not the shackle on the wrist that constitutes the slave, but the loss of self-respect, to be treated as degraded till he feels degraded, to be subjected to the lash till he believes that he deserves the lash. And liberty is to suspect and yet reverence self, to suspect the tendency which leaves us ever on the brink of fall, to reverence that within us which is allied to God, redeemed by God the Son, and made a temple of the Holy Ghost.

(3) Immortality.—Christ taught that this life is not all; that it is only a miserable state of human infancy. He taught that in words, by His life, and by His Resurrection. This, again, was freedom. If there is a faith that cramps and enslaves the soul, it is the idea that this life is all. If there is one that expands, and elevates, it is the thought of immortality; and this is something quite distinct from the selfish desire of happiness. It is not to enjoy, but to be that we long for; to enter into more and higher life—a craving which we can part with only when we sink below Humanity, and forfeit it. This was the martyrs’ strength. They were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might attain a better resurrection. In that hope, and the knowledge of that truth, they were free from the fear of pain and death.

5. We must know the Truth. A servant may obey his master’s will without any intelligent apprehension of its meaning, or sympathy with his intentions and aims. If he is sent on an errand, he may carry correctly the words of a message which he does not understand. He may go on a mission the nature of which is quite above his apprehension, simply following out certain precise directions without any discretionary power of action. He may construct, if he has mechanical skill, an elaborate piece of mechanism, simply working, bit by bit, according to the detailed plan or drawing placed before him. But suppose that by diligent study the workman’s mind has become developed and his knowledge increased, so as to enable him to understand the principle and enter with intelligent appreciation into the idea of the thing; or even more than that, suppose advancing knowledge and culture have raised him generally into a capacity of sympathy and fellowship with the master’s mind—then, in that case, though he might continue to obey the master’s behests, there would be a complete change in the character of the work.

Only then have I reached the deepest conviction, only then does faith stand on the impregnable rock of certitude, when I can say, “I know this to be the truth of God; its teaching has touched the deepest springs of thought and feeling within my breast, it has awakened my conscience, moved my heart, kindled my aspirations after a, purer, better life, brought peace and rest to my spirit, and though a thousand authorities should contradict it, though Paul or an angel from heaven should teach another doctrine, I will not, cannot receive it.” 1 [Note: John Caird, University Sermons, 206.]

(1) To desire the truth is the beginning. We might almost call it the end as well. The desire, if it is genuine, will inevitably teach a man the true road to follow. For the genuine desire to see and hold the truth is bound up with the longing for excellence which our Lord calls the hunger and thirst after righteousness. “If any man willeth to do God’s will,” our Lord says, “he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.” To desire to see the truth is one condition of seeing it; to will to do God’s will is the other. The truth is revealed to those who are straining towards their Father in heaven. Heavenly aspirations, earnest desire for goodness, the face turned towards Christ, the desire ever to live by whatever within us is highest and best, the willing obedience to our own best thoughts, the cheerful, the glad resolution to do whatever shall seem to us kindest, truest, justest, purest, noblest—that is the life which opens the eyes, and, whenever God reveals any part of the excellence of His holiness, as He will assuredly reveal it to each man in fitting time, that is the life which catches the light, and that is the man whom the truth conducts to perfect freedom.

(2) The light of truth is, in some degree, like the light of heaven. It comes by God’s ordinance for the most part, and not wholly by man’s seeking. The pearl of great price was found by the man who was seeking goodly pearls. He sought for truth, and he found in the course of his search the one truth of all. But the treasure hid in a field was found by one who was not seeking at all. The truth was given in the course of God’s Providence, and looked as if it came by chance.

He accepted with his whole heart and soul the Christian representation of man as originally a child in the house of the Infinite Father, who speaks truth to him in a voice he can recognize as His. This representation he was well aware rests upon two vast assumptions, 1st, that man actually knows God, and, 2nd, that he is able to recognize His voice. He always frankly admitted that he could not prove these positions, but he held them fast as the main support of his intellectual and moral life. He strongly held that man reaches highest truth only when God utters it to his soul by His Word and Spirit. Through learning and science we get subordinate truths; but through Divine teaching alone the highest truth. This conviction, which took full possession of him, produced a beautiful intellectual humility. No one ever imbibed more of the levelling spirit of the Gospel that calls the sage to sit beside the little child in the school of Christ. 1 [Note: David Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 381.]

III

The Liberty that Truth Gives

The whole Bible is a book of liberty. It rings with liberty from beginning to end. Its great men are the men of liberty; and the Old Testament 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 and the psalmist are ever preaching and singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of the life of man. 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.

1. What is Liberty? Try to give a definition of liberty, and it will be something of this kind: Liberty is the fullest opportunity for man to be and do the very best that is possible for him. There is 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 enfranchisement, is the bringing forth of him to a fuller liberty.

(1) 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 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.” 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 neighbour’s goods. That is the first conception which comes to a man of the way in which 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 imprisonment, restraint.

So is it with all civilization. It is perfectly possible for us to represent civilization 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 a restricted, restrained, and imprisoned condition. So is it 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 in 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 prohibitions. The man may not have the freedom 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 prohibition and imprisonment and restraint. There is no doubt truth is 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 prohibition 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.

You capture a fish in the stream, and place it in a confining globe or bowl of water. You have taken away its liberty by restriction. But suppose that, instead of placing it in the globe, you fling it far away upon a far-stretching lea. You have not confined it. You have given it more free space than it had before. It was previously confined within the waters of the stream, but now all the wide world is an open space around it. Have you given it freedom? No; you have enslaved it by depriving it of its vital constraint. Within the constraint of the waters it flashed along joyously like a beam of light. On the open meadow, it gasps and writhes in pitiful helplessness and distress. It has lost its liberty in the lawlessness of licence. You have taken it out of those vital relations that controlled and perfected its activities. 1 [Note: J. Thomas.]

In a lecture given at Woolwich, Ruskin recalled an incident of his early childhood which his mother was fond of telling him. “One evening when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the tea-urn, which was boiling merrily. It was an early taste for bronzes, I suppose; but I was resolute about it. My mother bade me keep my fingers back; I insisted on putting them forward. My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said—“Let him touch it, Nurse.” So I touched it,—and that was my first lesson in the meaning of the word Liberty. It was the first piece of Liberty I got, and the last which for some time I asked for. 2 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 10.]

(2) But 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 servant of his God and his fellow-men, there is only one cry in the whole gospel of that man, and that is the cry of freedom. As soon as I can catch that, as soon as I can 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. 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 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? No. 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 illumination. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 82.]

(3) It is no wonder that, if the negative, restricting, imprisoning conception of the new life is all that a man gets hold of, he should still linger on in the old life. For just as soon as the great world opens before him he is like a prisoner going out of the prison door—is there then no lingering? Does not the baser part of him cling to the old prison, to the ease and the provision for him, to the absence of anxiety and of energy? 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, or 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 powers springing in him to their work.

When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun, and let the sunlight 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 bringing forth the hidden colour that was in the bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, the flower and the 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? 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 88.]

2. What is that Liberty which the Truth gives?

(1) Is it political freedom?—Christ’s gospel did not promise political freedom, yet it gave it; more surely than conqueror, reformer, or patriot, that gospel will bring about a true liberty at last. And this, not by theories or by schemes of constitutions, but by the revelation of truths. God is a Spirit: man is His child—redeemed and sanctified. Before that spiritual equality, all distinctions between peer and peasant, monarch and labourer, privileged and unprivileged, vanish. A better man, or a wiser man than I, is in my presence, and I feel it a mockery to be reminded that I am his superior in rank. Let us hold that truth; let us never weary of proclaiming it: and the truth shall make us free at last.

(2) Is it intellectual freedom?—Slavery is that which cramps powers. The worst slavery is that which cramps the noblest powers. Worse therefore than he who manacles the hands and feet is he who puts fetters on the mind, and pretends to demand that men shall think, and believe, and feel thus and thus, because others so believed, and thought, and felt before. There is a tendency in the masses always to think—not what is true, but—what is respectable, correct, orthodox: we ask, Is that authorized? It comes partly from cowardice, partly from indolence, from habit, from imitation, from the uncertainty and darkness of all moral truths, and the dread of timid minds to plunge into the investigation of them. Now, truth known and believed respecting God and man, frees from this, by warning of individual responsibility. But responsibility is personal. It cannot be delegated to another, and thrown off upon a church. Before God, face to face, each soul must stand, to give account.

We hear much about “free-thought”; but free-thought is realized only in Him who delivers from the illusions of time and matter, and persuades us of the real and abiding universe. He fres the understanding from the most fatal of errors. He opens our eyes that we may see; strikes from the soul the fetters of sense; cleanses our wings from the clogging bird-lime of earthliness; and for the first time we are free, gloriously free like the eagle “ringed round with the azure sky.” 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

(3) Is it freedom of the will?—It is not enough to define the liberty which Christ promises as freedom from sin. Many circumstances will exempt from sin which do not yet confer that liberty “where the Spirit of the Lord is.” Childhood, paralysis, ill-health, the impotence of old age, may remove the capacity and even the desire for transgression: but the child, the paralytic, the old man, are not free through the Truth. Therefore, to this definition we must add, that one whom Christ liberates is free by his own will. It is not that he would, and cannot; it is that he can, and will not. Christian liberty is right will, sustained by love, and made firm by faith in Christ. Wherever a man would and cannot, there is servitude. He may be unable to control his expenditure, to rouse his indolence, to check his imagination. Well—he is not free. He may boast, as the Jews did, that he is Abraham’s son, or any other great man’s son; that he belongs to a free country; that he never was in bondage to any man; but free in the freedom of the Son he is not.

An act is free when it is the expression of our own thought and will, when our own nature and our whole nature goes with it. If in what we do we are merely doing blindly another’s bidding, following mechanically the directions laid down for us, we may be a useful tool, a convenient instrument of a master’s purposes, but our work is not our own, but his; we are not free. To make us free, the work itself must constitute or contain the motive of our activity. The satisfaction or delight of doing it, and not any ulterior end or object, must be all in all to us. In the measure in which any other motive,—hope or fear, desire of honour or reward, dread of punishment or disgrace, nay, even a sense of duty or obligation,—interferes or intermingles with our activity, in that measure we are not free. 2 [Note: John Caird, University Sermons, 208.]

“A man,” said Epictetus, is free only when “whatever is the will of God is his will too, and whatever is not God’s will is not his will.” This was a true definition of the highest freedom, provided that acceptance of the will of God is not a matter of necessity and submission merely, as it was with many of the Stoics. This would be the self-contradictory thing, freedom under compulsion. A man is truly free only when the will of God is not merely accepted, but loved and desired as that which is wholly good; when the love of God, of His Will, and of all that He is, becomes the active principle of the life. Then God’s will is for the man not merely law but love and life. He has the will of God, as far as may be, as his will; in the highest sense possible to man he is one with God. 1 [Note: W. L. Walker, The True Christ, 27.]

(4) Is it freedom of the conscience?—Is it freedom of the inner self, carrying with it the fulness of moral freedom, and the superiority to all fears? Fear enslaves, courage liberates—and that always. Whatever a man intensely dreads, that brings him into bondage, if it be above the fear of God, and the reverence of duty. The apprehension of pain, the fear of death, the dread of the world’s laugh, of poverty, and the loss of reputation enslave alike. From such fear Christ frees, and through the power of the truth. He who lives in the habitual contemplation of immortality cannot be in bondage to time or enslaved by transitory temptations. Do not say he will not; “he cannot sin,” saith the Scripture, while that faith is living. He who feels his soul’s dignity, knowing what he is and who, redeemed by God the Son, and freed by God the Spirit, cannot cringe, or pollute himself, or be mean. He who aspires to gaze undazzled on the intolerable brightness of that One before whom Israel veiled their faces, will scarcely quail before any earthly fear.

Of truth, as well as of love, it may be said that there is no fear in truth, but perfect truth casteth out fear. The eye which is strong enough to pierce through the shadow of death is not troubled because the golden mist is dispelled and it looks on the open heaven. 2 [Note: Benjamin Jowett.]

A lady with whom he was slightly acquainted assailed him for “heterodox opinions,” and menaced him with the consequence which in this world and the next would follow on the course of action he was pursuing. His only answer was, “I don’t care.” “Do you know what don’t care came to, sir?” “Yes, madam,” was the grave reply, “He was crucified on Calvary.” 3 [Note: S. A. Brooke, Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 353.]

Then he stood up, and trod to dust

Fear and desire, mistrust and trust,

And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet,

And bound for sandals on his feet

Knowledge and patience of what must

And what things may be, in the heat

And cold of years that rot and rust

And alter; and his spirit’s meat

Was freedom, and his staff was wrought

Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought.

For what has he, whose will sees clear,

To do with doubt and faith and fear,

Swift hopes, and slow despondencies?

His heart is equal with the sea’s

And with the sea-wind’s, and his ear

Is level with the speech of these,

And his soul communes and takes cheer

With the actual earth’s equalities,—

Air, light, and night, hills, winds, and streams,

And seeks not strength from strengthless dreams. 1 [Note: Swinburne.]

(5) It is the freedom of fellowship with God.—Freedom is perfect harmony between our souls and God’s law. Jesus is the truth that shows us God and gives us hearts to love Him; teaches us our relations to Him and enables us to live in harmony with those relations. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” The choice is before us—the bondage of Satan or the liberty of the sons of God; slaves of sin or freemen in Christ Jesus. No other choice is open to us. We cannot say, “I will be free, but not in Christ.” We cannot free ourselves, else the Son would never have come to free us. We can be made free only by the truth as it is in Jesus.

“If the Son shall make you free.” We can all admit that what the Son of the King does, He does with an authority and delegated power second only, if second, to the King Himself. But this is not all. This parallel will go only a very little way to meet the case. To the Christ, the crucified and risen Christ, and because He was crucified, the Father has committed the whole government of our world. This Son, the Son of God, became the Son of man, that He might do this very thing; so that the word is doubly true and doubly emphatic, the Son, the Son of God, being the Son of man. “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” It is all to be attributed to the promise of God’s incarnate Son; there is no other way in which it can be accomplished.

“Ye shall be free indeed.” It is a grand word, “indeed.” It is very comforting in its simplicity; and it is a word for wonder—“indeed.” There are many kinds of liberty, but not “indeed.” There is the liberty of forgetfulness; there is the liberty of licentiousness; but “indeed” means so much behind it, “Ye shall be free indeed.” 1 [Note: J. Vaughan.]

“I was one of a party who visited Chatsworth the other day. We were allowed the privilege of going through the noble house. But our liberties were severely restricted. We were allowed to pass rapidly through what is called “the showrooms,” but we were rigidly excluded from the “living-rooms.” In many places there were red cords stretched across inviting passages, and our progress was barred. If I had been a son of the house, I could have passed into the living-rooms, the place of sweet and sacred fellowships, the home of genial intercourse, where secrets pass from lip to lip, and unspoken sentiments radiate from heart to heart.” 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, British Weekly, Dec. 29, 1910.]

Truth and Freedom

Literature

Arnot (W.), The Lesser Parables, 62.

Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 265.

Brooks (P.), Addresses, 1.

Burrell (D. J.), Christ and Men, 258.

Burell (D. J.), The Spirit of the Age, 362.

Caird (E.), Lay Sermons and Addresses, 21.

Caird (J.), University Sermons, 196.

Carter (W.), The Church of the People, 200.

Chadwick (W. E.), Christ and Everyday Life, 154.

Dresser (H. W.), The Greatest Truth, 221.

Eaton (T. T.), The Southern Baptist Pulpit, 67.

Farquhar (J. W.), The Gospel of Divine Humanity, 60.

Fothergill (H.), The Hiding of His Power, 151.

Hopkins (E. H.), The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, 77.

Horne (C. S.), The Doctrine of the Trinity, iii.

Hutton (W. H.), A Disciple’s Religion, 186.

Mayor (J. E. B.), Twelve Cambridge Sermons, 53.

Mills (B. R. V.), The Marks of the Church, 189.

Moore (A. L.), in Keble College Sermons, 211.

Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, i. 265.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, x. (1864) No. 565.

Temple (F.), Sermons in Rugby School Chapel, iii. 149.

Thomas (J.), Concerning the King, 84.

Trench (R. C.), Sermons for the Most Part in Ireland, 54.

Trench (R. C.), Westminster and Other Sermons, 269.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xxiii. (1883) No. 1246.

Walker (W. L.), The True Christ, 21.

Watkinson (W. L.), The Bane and the Antidote, 225.

Whiton (J. M.), Gloria Patri, 205.

Cambridge Review, iv. Supplement No. 91; vii. Supplement No. 163.

Christian World Pulpit, x. 376 (Caird); xxxvii. 209 (Brooks); xlix. 145 (Gore); lxiv. 423 (Lang); lxvii. 97 (Henson).

Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser., v. 104 (Cowie); x. 193 (Barry).

Verse 36

Truth and Freedom

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.… If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.— John 8:32; John 8:36.

1. In the text we find united two of the greatest words in our language. There are perhaps no words in the language which have been so variously interpreted, or around which the conflict of opinion has raged more fiercely; no words which have had greater power to call forth the energy and devotion of human hearts, or which, on the other hand, have more often been employed to give an ideal colouring to base and selfish ends. How many rebels against just law, or wholesome moral restraint, have masked their caprice under the name of liberty; how many fires of persecution have been kindled in the pretended cause of truth! And, on the other hand, what noble battles have been fought for the most sacred interests of humanity, which were identified with these two names! We should blot out half of the heroic pages of history if we were to erase the deeds done, and the sufferings endured, for Truth and Freedom. In the text the two words are used to throw light upon each other, and, as it were, to exclude the false interpretations which might be given to each taken by itself. That is Truth which makes me really free; that is the genuine and only valuable Freedom which is based upon the Truth.

2. Let us recall the occasion on which the words were spoken. To some who had attached themselves (slightly, as it would seem) to Him, the Lord had said, “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.” Instead of joyfully accepting, they resented this gracious encouraging word of His, this promise, “Ye shall be made free,” and rejoined in displeasure—“We were never in bondage to any man.” How strangely men are often blinded by pride and presumption! Listen to these proud Jews, “We were never in bondage to any man”; while yet the whole past history of their nation was the record of one bondage following hard on another, they for their sins having come at one time or another under the yoke of almost every people round about them. They had been, by turns, in bondage to the Canaanites, in bondage to the Philistines, in bondage to the Syrians, in bondage to the Chaldeans; then again to the Græco-Syrian kings; and even at the very moment when this indignant disclaimer was uttered, the signs of a foreign rule, of the domination of a stranger, everywhere met their eye. They bought and sold with Roman money; they paid tribute to a Roman emperor; a Roman governor sat in their judgment hall; a Roman garrison occupied the fortress of their city. And yet, with all this plain before their eyes, brought home to their daily, hourly, experience, they angrily put back the promise of Christ, “The truth shall make you free,” as though it conveyed an insult: How sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free? We were never in bondage to any man.

3. These words of the Jews grew out of a total misunderstanding of the freedom of which Christ was speaking. It was not, in the first place, freedom from the yoke of the stranger, it was not deliverance from the tyranny of Rome, that Christ was promising here to as many as continued in His word, but freedom from the yoke of sin, deliverance from the bondage of corruption, from the tyranny of their own passions and desires. It was this that Christ promised, for it was this that He came from heaven to impart. That other freedom might and would follow in course of time; for men who are free inwardly are sure, sooner or later, to achieve an outer freedom as well. It was not, however, of this that Christ was speaking here, but of quite another freedom; and therefore, not caring to note that angry rejoinder of theirs, or to entangle Himself in controversy on so unprofitable a theme, but lifting up the whole question between Himself and them into a higher sphere, He replied, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” Every sinner, He would say, is the servant, or slave, of the sin which he commits—is in bondage to it, and needs liberty, even the liberty which I, the Truth, alone am capable of giving him; which he can receive from no other hands save only from Mine. If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed; otherwise, you are slaves and servants, and such must continue to the end. The text, therefore, deals with—

I. The Need of Liberation.

II. The Truth that Liberates.

III. The Liberty that the Truth gives.

I

The Need of Liberation

Christ’s aim was to make all men free. He saw around Him servitude in every form—man in slavery to man, and race to race; His own countrymen in bondage to the Romans—slaves of both Jewish and Roman masters, frightfully oppressed; men trembling before priestcraft; and those who were politically and ecclesiastically free, in worse bondage still—the rich and rulers slaves to their own passions. Conscious of His inward Deity and of His Father’s intentions, He, without hurry, without the excitement which would mark the mere earthly Liberator, calmly said, “Ye shall be free.”

1. First, then, we have to face this fact, that we are in bondage.—The Jews felt their political position acutely; they writhed under foreign dominion, and again and again broke out into rebellion, seeking an external freedom by casting off the hated Roman yoke. It was intolerable to them to be considered the slaves of Cæsar, and the most horrible scenes attended their several patriotic uprisings. The purpose of our Lord was to convince them of an underlying slavery, which accounted for their political servitude, and to confer upon them the spiritual liberty which contains the potency and promise of all freedoms. The essential slavery is interior; political coercion may imprison the body or intellectual error degrade the mind, but by far the most abject and fatal bondage is that of the soul under the dominion of ignorance, passion, and wilfulness.

(1) The bondage of the mind is one source and method of the essential slavery, the bondage of the mind being the tyranny of materialism. Our Lord often speaks of sin as unbelief, unbelief in the spiritual universe—blindness to God, to the spirituality of the law, to the rewards and retributions of the life beyond; and this unbelief, blocking out the spiritual universe, leaves us slaves of the senses. We are caged in by the body, limited by the bars of circumstance, victims of the material, the worldly, and the temporal. The carnally-minded may fancy themselves possessed of a large liberty, but earth and time at their widest are narrow to the spirit. To be governed from below is the essential slavery. To obey only animal impulses, to seek sensuous pleasure, to hope for nothing beyond social promotion, to find our motive and end in earthly things, and, in a word, to surrender ourselves to the fatalism of circumstance, is an infinitely worse slavery than to be bound hand and foot. In this cruel bondage thousands live and die without one great thought, principle, or hope in their maimed and fettered life.

A recent writer upon the London Zoological Gardens refers to “the spacious aviary” provided for the eagles. Spacious aviary! One would like to know what the eagles think of that. Surely the amplest artificial horizon is narrow and the loftiest dome mean to creatures born to range the skies and seek the sun. The noble birds must feel in dull, strange ways the loss of their native heaven; the most spacious aviary can only grievously and mysteriously fret them. So the world, and the things of the world, painfully cramp the creature in whose heart God has set eternity; his cage is narrow even when the stars are its gilded wires. It is said that a bird of the north, confined in a yard, and longing for his arctic haunts, has been known in spring to migrate from the southern to the northern side of his narrow confines. And, however men doom themselves to the straitened life of sense, the instinct of eternity pathetically asserts itself within absurd limits, and distracts the soul with morbid repinings. 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Bane and the Antidote, 228.]

(2) The bondage of the will is another part of the essential slavery. All see what an awful tyranny sin is when it has once become the habit of life. Some kinds of sin are coarser, others less offensive, but thousands who have committed sin find themselves miserably incapable of shaking off its tyranny; they are victims of vanity, envy, covetousness, ambition, temper, impatience, or sensual indulgence, and they struggle unavailingly with the despotism which holds them down. He who unwittingly grasps the handles of an electrifying-machine soon writhes in pain and shrieks for deliverance. Why does he not let go the torturing thing? He cannot; he is at the mercy of the operator, and is the butt of the crowd. It is thus with multitudes who have committed sin: they are its slaves; they are astonished at themselves, ashamed of themselves, filled with grief and remorse, yet utterly unable to break the infernal spell. There is often more hope for the poor wretch agonizing in the tentacles of the devil-fish than there is for some of these victims of vice.

In the Bay of Naples are several islands famous for their beauty. The sky of infinite depth and purity; the sea pure as the sky, and rivalling its manifold tints of ever-changing glory; the landscapes rich with the silver of the olive and the purple of the vine; the atmosphere full of the balm of flowers; and the horizon studded with picturesque spots, as a royal girdle with jewels, conspire to create a vision of delight. The Greek and Roman in their quest of loveliness and pleasure built their palaces here, and to this focus of colour and joy the modern lovers of beauty hasten as butterflies to roses. Now one of these fairy islands is the property of the Italian Government, and its only inhabitants are convicts. How little to them all this matchless scenery! Fettered, watched, driven, scourged, they can only be sickened by the splendour and irritated by the lavish treasures of earth and heaven. Is it not much like this with unregenerate man in regard to the blessings of life and the glory of the world? 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Bane and the Antidote, 235.]

(3) The bondage of the conscience is part of the slavery of sin. Men are built in three storeys, so to speak. Down at the bottom, and to be kept there, are inclinations, passions, lust, desires, all which are but blind aimings after their appropriate satisfaction, without any question as to whether the satisfaction is right or wrong; and above that a dominant will which is meant to control, and above that a conscience. That is the pyramid; and as the sunshine illumines the gilded top of some spire, so the shining apex, the conscience, is illumined when the light of God falls upon it. The commission of sin defiles the conscience, and conscience degrades us into convicts and cowards. The sense of dignity, freedom, and confidence is lost in the act of transgression, and with the consciousness of guilt comes fear and bondage. And is not life to the unregenerate man a harsh and gloomy servitude? We look upon God as “a hard Master.” Is not that the natural conception of God? The heathen look upon Him in this light and represent Him by terrible images in their temples; and although we do not set up ghastly idols, our pessimistic conceptions of the world’s Creator and Ruler are equally terrible. We think of Him, and are troubled. We look upon human duty as inequitable and exhausting, and fulfil our task with the discontent and bitterness of a slave. Finally, we look forward to the issues of life with deep misgiving. Through fear of death we are all our lifetime subject to bondage. At the bottom of all our pessimism, abjectness, and hopelessness is the consciousness of sin and guilt. Never did Shakespeare write a greater, deeper line than the one he puts into the mouth of Hamlet—“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” The unintelligible wretchedness of human life and the vague terrors which haunt us are not in any wise mental in their origin and strength and to be abolished by fuller intellectual light; they arise in the accusing conscience, and here primarily must our bondage and cowardice be dealt with.

The evils that we do, and that we cherish undone in our hearts, are like the wreckers on some stormy coast, who begin operations by taking the tongue out of the bell that hangs on the buoy, and putting out the light that beams from the beacon. Sin chokes conscience; and so the worse a man is, the less he feels himself to be bad; and while a saint will be tortured with agonies of remorse for some slight peccadillo, a brigand will add a murder or two to his list, and wipe his mouth and say, “I have done no harm.” We are ignorant of our sins because we bribe our consciences, because we drug our consciences, and will not attend to the facts of our own spiritual being. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

2. The second thing that claims attention is that we may be unconscious of our bondage. This unconsciousness may be due to our never having consciously enjoyed freedom, or it may be due to the long time that has elapsed since we lost it, so that slavery has become a second nature.

(1) We may never have opened our hearts to the joy of being free. There is nothing about us that is more remarkable and more awful than the power that we have, by not attending to something, of making that something practically non-existent. The great searchlights that they now have on battleships will fling a beam of terrible revealing power on one small segment of the vast circle of the sea; and all the rest, though it may be filled with the enemy’s fleet, will be lying in darkness. So just because we will not think of the facts of our slavery to sin, the facts are non-existent as far as we are concerned. Surely it is not a thing worthy of a man never to go down into the deep places of his own heart and see the ugly things that coil and wrestle and swarm and multiply there.

Ezekiel was once led to a place where, through a hole broken in the wall, there was shown him an inner chamber, on the walls of which were painted the hideous idols of the heathen. And there, in the presence of the foul shapes, stood venerable priests and official dignitaries of Israel, with their censers in their hands, and their backs to the oracle of God. There is a chamber like that in all our hearts; and it would be a great deal better that we should go down, through the hole in the wall, and see it than that we should live, as so many of us do, in this fool’s paradise of ignorance of our own sin. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

(2) The unconsciousness may be due to the force of habit. A slave may be only all the more a slave that he is insensible to his bondage. There is no sense of bondage when the instincts of freedom are unrepressed; but neither is there any when despotism has lasted long enough to kill them out. A man’s nature may have become so thoroughly habituated to slavery that he has ceased to know or think of anything better. On the other hand, the very consciousness of bondage is a kind of emancipation. He who has begun to know and feel the irksomeness of his limits, is already, in a sense, beyond them. There must be in him at least some measure of, and sympathy with, what transcends the bounds that hem him in, before he can feel them as bounds. Pain is the proof that vitality is not extinct. Shame is the witness that the soul is not utterly lost to goodness. And the blush on the slave’s cheek and the sense of degradation in his heart are at least the sign that he is not all a slave.

In the closing stanzas of that most graphic yet touching poem, “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Byron well expresses the deadness of soul, the hopelessness, and even carelessness concerning life and freedom, begotten in those who have too long worn the chains of slavery. For the canker of such fetters eats more deeply into the soul than into the enchained limbs.

It might be months, or years, or days,

I kept no count, I took no note,

I had no hope my eyes to raise

And clear them of their dreary mote;

At last men came to set me free,

I asked not why, and reck’d not where,

It was at length the same to me,

Fetter’d or fetterless to be

I learn’d to love despair.

And thus when they appear’d at last,

And all my bonds aside were cast,

These heavy walls to me had grown

A hermitage—and all my own!

And half I felt as they were come

To tear me from a second home.

II

The Truth that Liberates

All truth gives freedom. We hardly need to prove this in the present day. We know that in every sphere ignorance is bondage, and knowledge is power. So sure are we of it that we fearlessly argue from effect to cause. That which fetters is not true, that which frees us and gives us power cannot be false.

1. The craving for liberty lies deep in human nature, and many means have been tried to satisfy it.

(1) Force has been tried. Wherever force has been used on the side of freedom we honour it; the names which we pronounce in boyhood with enthusiasm are those of the liberators of nations and the vindicators of liberty. Israel had had such—Joshua, the Judges, Judas Maccabæus. Had the Son of God willed so to come, even on human data the success was certain. Let us waive the truth of His inward Deity, of His miraculous power, of His power to summon to His will more than twelve legions of angels. Let us only notice now that men’s hearts were full of Him, ripe for revolt; and that at a single word of His, thrice three hundred thousand swords would have started from their scabbards. But had He so come, one nation might have gained liberty; not the race of man. Moreover, the liberty would only have been independence of a foreign conqueror. Therefore as a conquering king He did not come.

Cromwell was strong that things obtained by force, though never so good in themselves, are both less to the ruler’s honour and less likely to last. “What we gain in a free way is better than twice as much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and our posterity’s”; and the safest test of any constitution is its acceptance by the people. And again, “It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it.” The root of all external freedom is here. 1 [Note: John Morley, Oliver Cromwell, 513.]

(2) Legislation has been tried. Perhaps only once has this been done successfully, and by a single effort. When the names of conquerors shall have been forgotten, and modern civilization shall have become obsolete, when England’s shall be ancient history, one Act of hers will be remembered as a record of her greatness, that Act by which in costly sacrifice she emancipated her slaves. But one thing England could not do. She could give freedom, but she could not make fit for freedom, she could not make it lasting. The stroke of a monarch’s pen will do the one, the discipline of ages is needed for the other. Give to-morrow a constitution to some feeble Eastern nation or a horde of savages, and in half a century they will be subjected again. Therefore the Son of Man did not come to free the world by legislation.

(3) Civilization has been tried. Civilization does free; intellect equalizes. Every step of civilization is a victory over some lower instinct. But civilization contains within itself the elements of a fresh servitude. Man conquers the powers of nature and becomes in turn their slave. The workman is in bondage to the machine which does his will; his hours, his wages, his personal habits are determined by it. The rich man fills his house with luxuries, and cannot do without them. A highly civilized community is a very spectacle of servitude. Man is there, a slave to dress, to hours, to manners, to conventions, to etiquette. Things contrived to make his life more easy become his masters. Therefore Jesus did not talk of the progress of the species or the growth of civilization. He did not trust the world’s hope of liberty to a right division of property. He freed the inner man, that so the outer might become free too. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

If there were any doubt as to Christianity being truth, that complete freedom, which cannot be oppressed by anything, and which a man experiences the moment he makes the Christian life-conception his own, would be an undoubted proof of its truth. 1 [Note: Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (Complete Works, xx. 220).]

2. Only the Truth can make us free. We must be true in our attitude to ourselves and to our fellow-men.

(1) Of course the Truth meant is not mere information. In that sense, the wisest of men can know only a little; he has to content himself with being ignorant of all but a fraction of what is knowable. And, what is more important, true wisdom does not depend upon the extent of a man’s information. There cannot indeed be wisdom without information, gathered from books and from communication with others; but such information is but the raw material out of which wisdom has to be extracted; and often a mind that is not possessed of any great store of knowledge, and whose experience is very limited, shows itself able to draw more light out of it than others who have had a wide intercourse with men and things.

(2) Nor, again, is the Truth referred to the holding of correct doctrines in theology, or in any other subject. It has been one of the most fatal mistakes to regard such correctness according to some standard of orthodoxy as the root of the matter, and to suppose that the one thing needful was, by whatever measures might be necessary—by violence or constraint, by hindering men from speaking and thinking freely, by narrowing their lives, and so preventing the natural action of their minds—to confine them to one set of opinions. Opinions, however right, are mere prejudices, unless they spring from a living root in our own experience and thought. We have many opinions which have come to us, we might almost say, in our sleep—by imitation of those around us, by the fact that we have heard things said and never heard them controverted, or at best, by a superficial exercise of our understanding upon first appearances. Such opinions therefore sit upon us very lightly, and we could part with them without much loss or change. We should not feel diminished, nor would our lives be essentially altered, if they were turned into their opposites.

(3) There is, however, a deeper kind of conviction than this, which is continually forming itself within every man, and constitutes for him the genuine result of his experience; a conviction as to the real meaning of his life in this world, what is most to be sought for, and what is most to be avoided, what he himself would wish to be, and what attitude he should take up in relation to his fellow-men; a conviction which may be said to constitute his real religion or to determine what he really worships. This conviction may not come readily to our lips, and indeed it often needs a kind of self-analysis, to which most men are very averse, to recognize it at all; yet it is continually shaping itself more and more definitely within us, and every act we do, and every serious thought we think, is a contribution to its growth. Every one is continually, by every action and thought, building up within him a true or a false view of his own nature and of the world, a view which puts him into a right or a wrong attitude to himself and to his fellow-men. Now, if we ask the secret of success or failure in this process, looking at conspicuous instances of either, what do we find? It is that success seems to depend upon a certain inward sincerity of soul, a willingness to apprehend the real facts of the case and to accept their lesson, upon a hatred of falsehood and illusion and a desire to stand in the clear light of day, and to understand the real meaning of the experience which life brings to us; while failure seems to be the result of a certain unwillingness to admit anything we do not like, a readiness to accept anything as true that flatters our desires, and an obstinate shutting of our ears to anything that opposes them.

“O ye hypocrites,” said Christ to the Pharisees, “ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” At first it seems hard that men should be condemned for not having insight enough to discern the signs of the times, that is, to see what were the really important circumstances in their surroundings and what was the line of conduct, of thought and action, which would make them useful to their day and generation. But the justice of the condemnation becomes evident when we realize that such want of discernment is due, not to merely intellectual limitations, but to that lack of truthfulness of soul which alone makes a man open to the inner meaning of the facts before him. In truth, men often go through life only half-awake, or seeing as in dreams only the pictures evoked by their own desires and feelings; and thus that which is most important in the experiences of their own lives is all but entirely lost to them. 1 [Note: E. Caird, Lay Sermons Delivered at Balliol College, 30.]

3. What, then, is the Truth which Christ says shall make us free? Truth is the vital law or principle of life. “If ye continue in my word … ye shall know the truth.” Clearly, this sequence of ideas regards truth as the vital principle of life. It is not a theory, a calculation, an abstraction, a logical deduction, but a practical continuing in the word of life. When a man has discovered the word which fulfils his life he has found the very soul and essence of truth. In no other way can truth be found, in no other way can it be satisfactorily tested.

(1) The essential truth for the seed that is sown in the ground consists in the vital principle in virtue of which it germinates and unfolds its own proper life. By this principle it is distinguished from all the other products of the world, and receives its own charter of individual existence. The truth of the barley seed lies in that principle by which it unfolds its particular and distinctive qualities, and produces wholesome barley, and not something else. The truth of the rose tree is held in the principle which distinguishes it from all other flowering plants, and causes it to produce the beauty of the rose. Plainly enough, the truth of any and every plant does not consist in what botany discourses about them, but in the vital principle which gives them distinctive existence and perfection of life. The principle is, of course, as wide as creation. The essential truth for all created things lies in the potent principle in which they “live and move and have their being.” In the last issue, universal truth is the eternal pulse of the life of God.

(2) The truth of intellect lies, therefore, not in any discoveries or theories of the human mind, but in the deeper laws by which the mind itself is constituted and developed. The things that are essential to mind, not the theories that are incidental to it, are its truth. The things that cannot be denied without contradicting the being of thought are indisputable truth. Among these are the ideas of order, arrangement, cause and effect, and universal relation.

(3) When we carry this principle into the province of the human spirit, we reach the deepest home of truth, the last word upon which all others depend, to which all others are subjugated, and in which all others are completed. The truth for the human spirit is that which is experienced and realized by it as the energy and satisfaction of its own life; that which, in flowing through its being, imparts inspiration, expansion, and potency. For example, the consciousness of an indwelling God, the pulse of a universal moral law, and the potencies of immortality, are vital elements of our spiritual nature, being essential to spiritual self-realization. The spirit of man cannot deny these without committing spiritual suicide. These are as fundamental a part of spiritual being as order and relation are of intellectual being. It is in spiritual life, and there alone, that the truth of the spirit can be tested and approved. The word of Jesus Christ answers this test; for it has been proved by man’s spiritual nature to give life, and to give it abundantly. No arguments in the world can countervail a fact like this. As the principle of life for a tree constitutes the truth of that tree, so the proved principle of life for the spirit of man constitutes the truth for his spirit. In the word of Christ the vital principle of spiritual life is given in its perfect form; the indwelling God is invested with supreme glory, the consciousness of moral law is uplifted into its perfected grandeur, and the pulse of immortal life is flushed with the final energy of demonstration and revelation. In Jesus Christ the spiritual life of man has experienced a power and development unknown to it before. “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” For the spirit (which is the only rightful judge), this proof is irrefragable, for it lies in undeniable potencies of life. The question, “What is truth?” is satisfactorily answered. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

4. Christ is “the Truth,” and His teaching, accepted by the will and expressed in the life, is the Truth that makes us free. The truth which He taught was chiefly on three points—

(1) God.—Blot out the thought of God, a Living Person, and life becomes mean, existence unmeaning, the universe dark, and resolve is left without a stay, aspiration and duty without a support. The Son exhibited God as Love: and so that fearful bondage of the mind to the necessity of Fate was broken. A living Lord had made the world; and its dark and unintelligible mystery meant good, not evil. He manifested Him as a Spirit; and if so, the only worship that could please Him must be a spirit’s worship. Not by sacrifices is God pleased; nor by droned litanies and liturgies; nor by fawning and flattery: nor is His wrath bought off by blood. Thus was the chain of superstition sent asunder; for superstition is wrong views of God; exaggerated or inadequate, and wrong conceptions of the way to please Him.

(2) Man.—We are a mystery to ourselves. Go to any place where nations have brought together their wealth and their inventions, and before the victories of mind you stand in reverence. Then stop to look at the passing crowds who have attained that civilization. Think of their low aims, their mean lives, their conformation only a little higher than that of brute creatures, and a painful sense of degradation steals upon you. So great and yet so mean! And so of individuals. There is not one whose feelings have not been deeper than we can fathom, not one who would venture to tell out to his brother man the mean, base thoughts that have crossed his heart during a single hour. Now this riddle He solved. He looked on man as fallen, but magnificent in his ruin. We, catching that thought from Him, speak as He spoke. But none that were born of woman ever felt this or lived this like Him. Beneath the vilest outside He saw this—a human soul, capable of endless growth; and thence He treated with what for want of a better term we may call respect all who approached Him; not because they were titled Rabbis, or rich Pharisees, but because they were men. Here was a germ for freedom. It is not the shackle on the wrist that constitutes the slave, but the loss of self-respect, to be treated as degraded till he feels degraded, to be subjected to the lash till he believes that he deserves the lash. And liberty is to suspect and yet reverence self, to suspect the tendency which leaves us ever on the brink of fall, to reverence that within us which is allied to God, redeemed by God the Son, and made a temple of the Holy Ghost.

(3) Immortality.—Christ taught that this life is not all; that it is only a miserable state of human infancy. He taught that in words, by His life, and by His Resurrection. This, again, was freedom. If there is a faith that cramps and enslaves the soul, it is the idea that this life is all. If there is one that expands, and elevates, it is the thought of immortality; and this is something quite distinct from the selfish desire of happiness. It is not to enjoy, but to be that we long for; to enter into more and higher life—a craving which we can part with only when we sink below Humanity, and forfeit it. This was the martyrs’ strength. They were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might attain a better resurrection. In that hope, and the knowledge of that truth, they were free from the fear of pain and death.

5. We must know the Truth. A servant may obey his master’s will without any intelligent apprehension of its meaning, or sympathy with his intentions and aims. If he is sent on an errand, he may carry correctly the words of a message which he does not understand. He may go on a mission the nature of which is quite above his apprehension, simply following out certain precise directions without any discretionary power of action. He may construct, if he has mechanical skill, an elaborate piece of mechanism, simply working, bit by bit, according to the detailed plan or drawing placed before him. But suppose that by diligent study the workman’s mind has become developed and his knowledge increased, so as to enable him to understand the principle and enter with intelligent appreciation into the idea of the thing; or even more than that, suppose advancing knowledge and culture have raised him generally into a capacity of sympathy and fellowship with the master’s mind—then, in that case, though he might continue to obey the master’s behests, there would be a complete change in the character of the work.

Only then have I reached the deepest conviction, only then does faith stand on the impregnable rock of certitude, when I can say, “I know this to be the truth of God; its teaching has touched the deepest springs of thought and feeling within my breast, it has awakened my conscience, moved my heart, kindled my aspirations after a, purer, better life, brought peace and rest to my spirit, and though a thousand authorities should contradict it, though Paul or an angel from heaven should teach another doctrine, I will not, cannot receive it.” 1 [Note: John Caird, University Sermons, 206.]

(1) To desire the truth is the beginning. We might almost call it the end as well. The desire, if it is genuine, will inevitably teach a man the true road to follow. For the genuine desire to see and hold the truth is bound up with the longing for excellence which our Lord calls the hunger and thirst after righteousness. “If any man willeth to do God’s will,” our Lord says, “he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.” To desire to see the truth is one condition of seeing it; to will to do God’s will is the other. The truth is revealed to those who are straining towards their Father in heaven. Heavenly aspirations, earnest desire for goodness, the face turned towards Christ, the desire ever to live by whatever within us is highest and best, the willing obedience to our own best thoughts, the cheerful, the glad resolution to do whatever shall seem to us kindest, truest, justest, purest, noblest—that is the life which opens the eyes, and, whenever God reveals any part of the excellence of His holiness, as He will assuredly reveal it to each man in fitting time, that is the life which catches the light, and that is the man whom the truth conducts to perfect freedom.

(2) The light of truth is, in some degree, like the light of heaven. It comes by God’s ordinance for the most part, and not wholly by man’s seeking. The pearl of great price was found by the man who was seeking goodly pearls. He sought for truth, and he found in the course of his search the one truth of all. But the treasure hid in a field was found by one who was not seeking at all. The truth was given in the course of God’s Providence, and looked as if it came by chance.

He accepted with his whole heart and soul the Christian representation of man as originally a child in the house of the Infinite Father, who speaks truth to him in a voice he can recognize as His. This representation he was well aware rests upon two vast assumptions, 1st, that man actually knows God, and, 2nd, that he is able to recognize His voice. He always frankly admitted that he could not prove these positions, but he held them fast as the main support of his intellectual and moral life. He strongly held that man reaches highest truth only when God utters it to his soul by His Word and Spirit. Through learning and science we get subordinate truths; but through Divine teaching alone the highest truth. This conviction, which took full possession of him, produced a beautiful intellectual humility. No one ever imbibed more of the levelling spirit of the Gospel that calls the sage to sit beside the little child in the school of Christ. 1 [Note: David Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 381.]

III

The Liberty that Truth Gives

The whole Bible is a book of liberty. It rings with liberty from beginning to end. Its great men are the men of liberty; and the Old Testament 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 and the psalmist are ever preaching and singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of the life of man. 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.

1. What is Liberty? Try to give a definition of liberty, and it will be something of this kind: Liberty is the fullest opportunity for man to be and do the very best that is possible for him. There is 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 enfranchisement, is the bringing forth of him to a fuller liberty.

(1) 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 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.” 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 neighbour’s goods. That is the first conception which comes to a man of the way in which 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 imprisonment, restraint.

So is it with all civilization. It is perfectly possible for us to represent civilization 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 a restricted, restrained, and imprisoned condition. So is it 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 in 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 prohibitions. The man may not have the freedom 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 prohibition and imprisonment and restraint. There is no doubt truth is 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 prohibition 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.

You capture a fish in the stream, and place it in a confining globe or bowl of water. You have taken away its liberty by restriction. But suppose that, instead of placing it in the globe, you fling it far away upon a far-stretching lea. You have not confined it. You have given it more free space than it had before. It was previously confined within the waters of the stream, but now all the wide world is an open space around it. Have you given it freedom? No; you have enslaved it by depriving it of its vital constraint. Within the constraint of the waters it flashed along joyously like a beam of light. On the open meadow, it gasps and writhes in pitiful helplessness and distress. It has lost its liberty in the lawlessness of licence. You have taken it out of those vital relations that controlled and perfected its activities. 1 [Note: J. Thomas.]

In a lecture given at Woolwich, Ruskin recalled an incident of his early childhood which his mother was fond of telling him. “One evening when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the tea-urn, which was boiling merrily. It was an early taste for bronzes, I suppose; but I was resolute about it. My mother bade me keep my fingers back; I insisted on putting them forward. My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said—“Let him touch it, Nurse.” So I touched it,—and that was my first lesson in the meaning of the word Liberty. It was the first piece of Liberty I got, and the last which for some time I asked for. 2 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 10.]

(2) But 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 servant of his God and his fellow-men, there is only one cry in the whole gospel of that man, and that is the cry of freedom. As soon as I can catch that, as soon as I can 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. 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 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? No. 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 illumination. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 82.]

(3) It is no wonder that, if the negative, restricting, imprisoning conception of the new life is all that a man gets hold of, he should still linger on in the old life. For just as soon as the great world opens before him he is like a prisoner going out of the prison door—is there then no lingering? Does not the baser part of him cling to the old prison, to the ease and the provision for him, to the absence of anxiety and of energy? 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, or 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 powers springing in him to their work.

When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun, and let the sunlight 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 bringing forth the hidden colour that was in the bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, the flower and the 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? 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 88.]

2. What is that Liberty which the Truth gives?

(1) Is it political freedom?—Christ’s gospel did not promise political freedom, yet it gave it; more surely than conqueror, reformer, or patriot, that gospel will bring about a true liberty at last. And this, not by theories or by schemes of constitutions, but by the revelation of truths. God is a Spirit: man is His child—redeemed and sanctified. Before that spiritual equality, all distinctions between peer and peasant, monarch and labourer, privileged and unprivileged, vanish. A better man, or a wiser man than I, is in my presence, and I feel it a mockery to be reminded that I am his superior in rank. Let us hold that truth; let us never weary of proclaiming it: and the truth shall make us free at last.

(2) Is it intellectual freedom?—Slavery is that which cramps powers. The worst slavery is that which cramps the noblest powers. Worse therefore than he who manacles the hands and feet is he who puts fetters on the mind, and pretends to demand that men shall think, and believe, and feel thus and thus, because others so believed, and thought, and felt before. There is a tendency in the masses always to think—not what is true, but—what is respectable, correct, orthodox: we ask, Is that authorized? It comes partly from cowardice, partly from indolence, from habit, from imitation, from the uncertainty and darkness of all moral truths, and the dread of timid minds to plunge into the investigation of them. Now, truth known and believed respecting God and man, frees from this, by warning of individual responsibility. But responsibility is personal. It cannot be delegated to another, and thrown off upon a church. Before God, face to face, each soul must stand, to give account.

We hear much about “free-thought”; but free-thought is realized only in Him who delivers from the illusions of time and matter, and persuades us of the real and abiding universe. He fres the understanding from the most fatal of errors. He opens our eyes that we may see; strikes from the soul the fetters of sense; cleanses our wings from the clogging bird-lime of earthliness; and for the first time we are free, gloriously free like the eagle “ringed round with the azure sky.” 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

(3) Is it freedom of the will?—It is not enough to define the liberty which Christ promises as freedom from sin. Many circumstances will exempt from sin which do not yet confer that liberty “where the Spirit of the Lord is.” Childhood, paralysis, ill-health, the impotence of old age, may remove the capacity and even the desire for transgression: but the child, the paralytic, the old man, are not free through the Truth. Therefore, to this definition we must add, that one whom Christ liberates is free by his own will. It is not that he would, and cannot; it is that he can, and will not. Christian liberty is right will, sustained by love, and made firm by faith in Christ. Wherever a man would and cannot, there is servitude. He may be unable to control his expenditure, to rouse his indolence, to check his imagination. Well—he is not free. He may boast, as the Jews did, that he is Abraham’s son, or any other great man’s son; that he belongs to a free country; that he never was in bondage to any man; but free in the freedom of the Son he is not.

An act is free when it is the expression of our own thought and will, when our own nature and our whole nature goes with it. If in what we do we are merely doing blindly another’s bidding, following mechanically the directions laid down for us, we may be a useful tool, a convenient instrument of a master’s purposes, but our work is not our own, but his; we are not free. To make us free, the work itself must constitute or contain the motive of our activity. The satisfaction or delight of doing it, and not any ulterior end or object, must be all in all to us. In the measure in which any other motive,—hope or fear, desire of honour or reward, dread of punishment or disgrace, nay, even a sense of duty or obligation,—interferes or intermingles with our activity, in that measure we are not free. 2 [Note: John Caird, University Sermons, 208.]

“A man,” said Epictetus, is free only when “whatever is the will of God is his will too, and whatever is not God’s will is not his will.” This was a true definition of the highest freedom, provided that acceptance of the will of God is not a matter of necessity and submission merely, as it was with many of the Stoics. This would be the self-contradictory thing, freedom under compulsion. A man is truly free only when the will of God is not merely accepted, but loved and desired as that which is wholly good; when the love of God, of His Will, and of all that He is, becomes the active principle of the life. Then God’s will is for the man not merely law but love and life. He has the will of God, as far as may be, as his will; in the highest sense possible to man he is one with God. 1 [Note: W. L. Walker, The True Christ, 27.]

(4) Is it freedom of the conscience?—Is it freedom of the inner self, carrying with it the fulness of moral freedom, and the superiority to all fears? Fear enslaves, courage liberates—and that always. Whatever a man intensely dreads, that brings him into bondage, if it be above the fear of God, and the reverence of duty. The apprehension of pain, the fear of death, the dread of the world’s laugh, of poverty, and the loss of reputation enslave alike. From such fear Christ frees, and through the power of the truth. He who lives in the habitual contemplation of immortality cannot be in bondage to time or enslaved by transitory temptations. Do not say he will not; “he cannot sin,” saith the Scripture, while that faith is living. He who feels his soul’s dignity, knowing what he is and who, redeemed by God the Son, and freed by God the Spirit, cannot cringe, or pollute himself, or be mean. He who aspires to gaze undazzled on the intolerable brightness of that One before whom Israel veiled their faces, will scarcely quail before any earthly fear.

Of truth, as well as of love, it may be said that there is no fear in truth, but perfect truth casteth out fear. The eye which is strong enough to pierce through the shadow of death is not troubled because the golden mist is dispelled and it looks on the open heaven. 2 [Note: Benjamin Jowett.]

A lady with whom he was slightly acquainted assailed him for “heterodox opinions,” and menaced him with the consequence which in this world and the next would follow on the course of action he was pursuing. His only answer was, “I don’t care.” “Do you know what don’t care came to, sir?” “Yes, madam,” was the grave reply, “He was crucified on Calvary.” 3 [Note: S. A. Brooke, Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 353.]

Then he stood up, and trod to dust

Fear and desire, mistrust and trust,

And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet,

And bound for sandals on his feet

Knowledge and patience of what must

And what things may be, in the heat

And cold of years that rot and rust

And alter; and his spirit’s meat

Was freedom, and his staff was wrought

Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought.

For what has he, whose will sees clear,

To do with doubt and faith and fear,

Swift hopes, and slow despondencies?

His heart is equal with the sea’s

And with the sea-wind’s, and his ear

Is level with the speech of these,

And his soul communes and takes cheer

With the actual earth’s equalities,—

Air, light, and night, hills, winds, and streams,

And seeks not strength from strengthless dreams. 1 [Note: Swinburne.]

(5) It is the freedom of fellowship with God.—Freedom is perfect harmony between our souls and God’s law. Jesus is the truth that shows us God and gives us hearts to love Him; teaches us our relations to Him and enables us to live in harmony with those relations. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” The choice is before us—the bondage of Satan or the liberty of the sons of God; slaves of sin or freemen in Christ Jesus. No other choice is open to us. We cannot say, “I will be free, but not in Christ.” We cannot free ourselves, else the Son would never have come to free us. We can be made free only by the truth as it is in Jesus.

“If the Son shall make you free.” We can all admit that what the Son of the King does, He does with an authority and delegated power second only, if second, to the King Himself. But this is not all. This parallel will go only a very little way to meet the case. To the Christ, the crucified and risen Christ, and because He was crucified, the Father has committed the whole government of our world. This Son, the Son of God, became the Son of man, that He might do this very thing; so that the word is doubly true and doubly emphatic, the Son, the Son of God, being the Son of man. “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” It is all to be attributed to the promise of God’s incarnate Son; there is no other way in which it can be accomplished.

“Ye shall be free indeed.” It is a grand word, “indeed.” It is very comforting in its simplicity; and it is a word for wonder—“indeed.” There are many kinds of liberty, but not “indeed.” There is the liberty of forgetfulness; there is the liberty of licentiousness; but “indeed” means so much behind it, “Ye shall be free indeed.” 1 [Note: J. Vaughan.]

“I was one of a party who visited Chatsworth the other day. We were allowed the privilege of going through the noble house. But our liberties were severely restricted. We were allowed to pass rapidly through what is called “the showrooms,” but we were rigidly excluded from the “living-rooms.” In many places there were red cords stretched across inviting passages, and our progress was barred. If I had been a son of the house, I could have passed into the living-rooms, the place of sweet and sacred fellowships, the home of genial intercourse, where secrets pass from lip to lip, and unspoken sentiments radiate from heart to heart.” 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, British Weekly, Dec. 29, 1910.]

Truth and Freedom

Literature

Arnot (W.), The Lesser Parables, 62.

Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 265.

Brooks (P.), Addresses, 1.

Burrell (D. J.), Christ and Men, 258.

Burell (D. J.), The Spirit of the Age, 362.

Caird (E.), Lay Sermons and Addresses, 21.

Caird (J.), University Sermons, 196.

Carter (W.), The Church of the People, 200.

Chadwick (W. E.), Christ and Everyday Life, 154.

Dresser (H. W.), The Greatest Truth, 221.

Eaton (T. T.), The Southern Baptist Pulpit, 67.

Farquhar (J. W.), The Gospel of Divine Humanity, 60.

Fothergill (H.), The Hiding of His Power, 151.

Hopkins (E. H.), The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, 77.

Horne (C. S.), The Doctrine of the Trinity, iii.

Hutton (W. H.), A Disciple’s Religion, 186.

Mayor (J. E. B.), Twelve Cambridge Sermons, 53.

Mills (B. R. V.), The Marks of the Church, 189.

Moore (A. L.), in Keble College Sermons, 211.

Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, i. 265.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, x. (1864) No. 565.

Temple (F.), Sermons in Rugby School Chapel, iii. 149.

Thomas (J.), Concerning the King, 84.

Trench (R. C.), Sermons for the Most Part in Ireland, 54.

Trench (R. C.), Westminster and Other Sermons, 269.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xxiii. (1883) No. 1246.

Walker (W. L.), The True Christ, 21.

Watkinson (W. L.), The Bane and the Antidote, 225.

Whiton (J. M.), Gloria Patri, 205.

Cambridge Review, iv. Supplement No. 91; vii. Supplement No. 163.

Christian World Pulpit, x. 376 (Caird); xxxvii. 209 (Brooks); xlix. 145 (Gore); lxiv. 423 (Lang); lxvii. 97 (Henson).

Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser., v. 104 (Cowie); x. 193 (Barry).

Verse 46

The Sinlessness of Christ

Which of you convicteth me of sin?— John 8:46.

It has some times been inferred from the context of these words that the word “sin” really means here intellectual rather than moral failure: “Which of you convicteth me of error? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?” The second question is thus made to repeat its meaning into the translation of the first. But the word translated “sin” means moral failure throughout the New Testament; and our Lord is arguing from the genus to the species, from the absence of moral evil in Him generally to the absence of a specific form of moral evil, namely, falsehood. He is maintaining that as they cannot detect in Him any kind of sin, they ought not by their disbelief to credit Him practically with falsehood, or, at least, indifference to truth, and His own means of attaining and proclaiming it. It has also been thought that our Lord here only challenges the detective power of His Jewish opponents, and that He does not literally imply His sinlessness. But the challenge would hardly have been offered unless the Speaker had been conscious of something more than guiltlessness of public acts which might be pointed to as in some sense sinful. Sin, like holiness, is not merely a series of facts which may be measured and dated: it is a particular condition of the will, it is a moral atmosphere. It is more than the act and word; it is the attitude of the soul towards God and man. Sin dishonours God and lives for self rather than for others. Christ alone could say, “I honour my Father,” “I seek not my own glory.” The perfect life was based on a perfect motive.

Our Lord claims, then, to be sinless in a very different sense from that in which a man might defy an opponent to prove against him a specific form of wrongdoing in a court of law. We are here in the atmosphere not of law but of morality; and morality is a question not of external facts merely, but of internal motives.

The question, “Could the Jews convict Christ of sin?” is but a part of the greater question, “Was Christ sinless?” We shall consider—

I. The Proof of Christ’s Sinlessness.

II. The Value of Christ’s Sinlessness for us.

I

The Proof of Christ’s Sinlessness

1. External evidence.—All that we know about our Lord goes to show that He was sinless. This impression was produced most strongly on those who were brought into the closest contact with Him.

(1) The Apostolic writings clearly emphasize this remarkable feature of Christ’s career—that it was without sin. “Who did no sin,” is St. Peter’s phrase about Christ. “Him who knew no sin,” is the kindred expression of St. Paul. “In him is no sin,” writes St. John in his First Epistle. “Without sin,” is the similar description of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

The important fact is that the New Testament writers were not unconscious of the extraordinary character of this “sinlessness” with which they credited Christ, or of the marked exception which it formed to the generally normal aspect of His life. It would not be true to say that the Synoptic portraiture of Christ is in the main supernatural. The “Son of man,” as described by His biographers, is genuinely human, and moves easily among His contemporaries. There are supernatural elements in the records, no doubt, but they do not obliterate the historical figure of the Saviour, or destroy the generally normal aspect of His earthly course. Mystery there is in abundance, but the true manhood stands out always to view. It would be difficult to construct a juster summary of the Synoptic account of our Lord than that which is contained in the text: “We have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” Whatever else might be said of Him, this at least must be said, that He was truly man. Only one invariable human trait is absent from the portrait they draw—there is no sin in Christ.

The marks of passion, of weakness, of pride, of the love of popularity, and the consequent lack of moral courage, of a thousand infirmities of the flesh, some of which we notice in all other men, are certainly not obvious, or anywhere forced upon our recognition, in the life and conversation which is mirrored in the four Gospels. On the contrary, Jesus was not only followed and loved, but, by those who knew Him best, He was worshipped before He died. 1 [Note: N. Smyth, Old Faiths in New Light, 94.]

Renan’s Jesus is a charming Galilean with a certain sympathy for beautiful scenery and an affectionate tenderness for the peasants who follow him; but he is provoked to violence, impatience, base trickery, as soon as he finds his mission as a reformer unsuccessful. The Frenchman, bred amidst pious frauds, calls him the most delightful and wonderful of men, who practises innocent artifices, resorts to thaumaturgy unwillingly, but when he does resort to it is guilty of wilful imposture beside the grave of his friend. We in England should say he was a horrible liar and audacious blasphemer. We should pronounce the Jews right in the judgment which they passed upon him. To me the book is detestable, morally as well as theologically. It has brought to my mind, as I have said in my paper on it, that wonderful dream of Richter’s in which Jesus tells the universe, “Children, you have no Father.” 2 [Note: F. D. Maurice, Life, ii. 464.]

(2) Christ’s sinlessness is apparent in the attitude of His enemies towards Him. When Pilate repeatedly asked the priests, who were clamouring for His blood, “Why, what evil hath he done?” all the answer they could give (sufficient, no doubt, for their purpose) was, “We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.” The impression of Christ’s sinlessness is observable too in Pilate himself, who yielded to the wishes of Christ’s enemies, while he admitted the innocence of their Victim; in the restless anxiety of the wife of Pilate, haunted in her dreams by the thought that the blood of “that just person” might be visited on her husband; in the lower sense of the pregnant declaration made by the centurion at the cross—“Truly this was the Son of God”; above all, in the remorse of Judas. Judas, who had known Christ as Peter had known Him for three years of intimate companionship; Judas, who would gladly, had it been possible, have justified his treachery to himself by any flaw that he could dwell on in his Master’s character, was forced to confess that the blood which he had betrayed was innocent. In the hatred of the Sanhedrists, as described particularly in St. John’s Gospel, the purity and force of Christ’s character is not less discernible. It is the high prerogative of goodness, as of truth, in their loftier forms, that they can never be approached in a spirit of neutrality or indifference; they must perforce create a decided repulsion when they do not decidedly attract. The Pharisees would have treated an opposing teacher, in whom any moral flaw was really discernible, with contemptuous indifference: the sinless Jesus of Nazareth provoked their irreconcilable, implacable hostility.

Even the Pharisees betray the impression of a quite original and wonderful elevation. For though they regarded Him as a sinner and despiser of the law, from the viewpoint of their inherited moral and religious axioms, yet they could not stop short at this and view Him as an ordinary sinful man, or teacher of error. Rather He appeared to them, in the very estrangement in which they had placed themselves towards Him, so much one possessed of power ( Matthew 7:29; John 7:46), so wonderfully firm, strong, and great of His kind, that they were obliged to attribute to Him a superhuman power of evil, after they had resolved not to concede to Him a superhuman power of good. 1 [Note: Dorner, in British and Foreign Evangelical Review, xi. 586.]

(3) How does the matter stand to-day, as from our modern standpoint we examine the facts? The most exacting criticism of the documents has not disallowed the Apostolic belief. The New Testament, read in the light of honest criticism, justifies, so far as documents can justify, the Apostolic doctrine of the sinlessness of Christ. In bringing a human career lived out in the first century to be judged by the moral standard accepted in the twentieth we are applying a test the most severe imaginable. If we were judging a man in order to appraise his merits, this test were the unjustest in the world; but in the case of the Son of Man, it is not so much unjust as inevitable. He, whom we Christians worship as the Incarnate Creator, must be able to command the homage not of one age only, but of all ages. Let the moral standard of mankind be raised as high as you will, it must never rise above the standard of Christ; His standard must always be the goal towards which the moral effort of the race is moving, and never a single advance in goodness must be unable to find its interpretation and justification in the complete goodness of the Son of Man. Applying, therefore, necessarily our educated twentieth-century consciences to the historic Jesus, is He stripped of His attribute of sinlessness? Rationalists of the baser sort accumulate what they describe as immoral, or contradictory, or unreasonable teachings from the Gospels, but if we have the patience to examine their procedure we shall find that it violates every accepted canon of sound criticism and cautious interpretation. Fairly examined, honestly interpreted, the teaching of Christ commands the deliberate approval of the general conscience of our age. Not even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than “to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life.” 1 [Note: J. S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion, 255.]

What impression does He make on us? His portrait is before us in the Gospels and other New Testament writings; we can still follow His steps, hear Him speak, look into His eye, watch the development of His character, observe His behaviour under the most diverse and trying conditions, and test Him by all the standards we apply to our fellow-men. What is the result? He stands faultless and unique among men, severed from them by the whole diameter of perfection. We see Him grow through a beautiful infancy and childhood into maturity, and then live a life and display a character in which we can find no flaw. He is pure truth and trust, honesty and honour, righteousness and reverence, goodness and mercy and love, sympathy and service and sacrifice. No excess or defect, fault of omission or commission, evil disposition or temper, selfishness or sinister motive ever mars the splendid beauty of His perfection. He fulfils all human relations, passes through all experiences, is seen in joy and in sorrow, under the whips and stings of malice and in the agony of crucifixion, and yet He never loses His poise and balance or gives way to any ill-temper, but is always pure sweetness and light. It is true that He shows indignation, but only such as is the expression of righteous wrath. As we watch this Man, there is nothing we would add to Him or subtract from Him, no criticism we would pass upon Him, no finishing touch we could give to Him, but we are lost in admiration of Him as the one perfect and most beautiful personality in all the world. 1 [Note: J. H. Snowden, The Basal Beliefs of Christianity, 80.]

2. Christ Himself claims to he sinless.—By what standard was He judging Himself? What was His conception of sin? How was it with His spiritual organs? Were they quick and sensitive, or were they sluggish and benumbed? What was the state of His moral consciousness? Before we can determine His claim to sinlessness these questions must be answered.

(1) Until this Man of Nazareth arose, sin had never been tracked to its roots. The analysis had often been attempted, but it had never proved conclusive and ultimate. Christ’s analysis was an unveiling of its genesis. He probed behind ritual; He probed behind posture; He probed behind feeling; He probed behind thought, and His lance touched the innermost quick at the will. He pushed everything else aside as effects; He discovered the cause in the will. This was His uniqueness as a teacher. “Make the tree good, and the fruits will be good,” and He addresses Himself to the regeneration of the roots. This Man, with the claim to sinlessness, unveiled the nature of sin and revealed its contents to the light as they had never been seen before.

(2) Christ’s spiritual senses were far more finely perceptive than even the delicate organ of sight. Let us recognize how unspeakably refined His soul must have been to be capable of registering such exquisite distinctions. If a poor woman came near to Him in a spirit of faith, His soul thrilled with the presence, and He said, “Who touched me?” If doubt and suspicion drew near unto Him, His soul was chilled with the presence, and “he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” So refined and delicate was His spirit that He perceived evil thoughts that lay unexpressed in the hearts of those about Him. “He perceived the thought of their heart”; “He knew what was in man.” His soul instinctively registered the presence of good and evil, just as a fine barometer registers the passing of a genial breeze or a chilling draught.

In one constituted like Jesus, to be without the sense of sin was to be sinless, to be conscious of no disobedience was to have always obeyed. 1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn, Studies in the Life of Christ, 61.]

An artist goes into a building and is troubled by it exceedingly; a thousand laymen are there, and are quite comfortable. The artist’s eye instantly detects the false proportion, the line that is out of course, and his eye will turn to it; he may put very severe repressive restraints upon himself; he may make many a vow to be blind to the defect; but the trouble will come again and again upon him, because on that side of his life he is highly cultured, so much so as to be almost perfect. And by so much as any man is himself perfect, does he instantly detect what is defective and imperfect in other people. 2 [Note: J. Parker.]

II

The Value of Christ’s Sinlessness for Us

1. Christ is our Ideal.—The sinless Christ satisfies a deep want of the soul of man—the want of an ideal.

No artist can attempt a painting, a statue, a building, without some ideal in view; and an ideal is not more necessary in art than in conduct. Each nation has its ideals; so has each city, each family, each profession, each school of thought; and how powerfully these energetic phantoms of the past control and modify the present is obvious to all who observe and think. There is no truer test of a man’s character than the ideals which excite his genuine enthusiasm; there is no surer measure of what he will become than a real knowledge of what he heartily admires. 3 [Note: H. P. Liddon.]

Just as there are two ways for indicating the road to a traveller, even thus there are two ways for moral guidance in the case of a man who is seeking the truth. One way consists in indicating to the man the objects which he will come across, and then he is guided by these objects. The other way consists in giving the man the direction by the compass, which he is carrying with him, and on which he observes the one immutable direction, and, consequently, every deflection from it. The first way of moral guidance is the way of external definitions, of rules: man is given definite tokens of acts which he must perform and which not. “Observe the Sabbath, be circumcised, do not steal, drink no intoxicating drink, kill no living being, give the tithe to the poor, make your ablutions, and pray five times a day,” and so forth,—such are the injunctions of external religious teachings,—of the Brahmanical, Buddhistic, Mohammedan, Hebrew, and the ecclesiastic, falsely called Christian. The other way is to indicate to man unattainable perfection, the striving after which man is cognizant of; man has pointed out to him the ideal, in relation to which he is at any time able to see the degree of his divergence from it. “Love God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.—Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Such is the teaching of Christ. 1 [Note: Tolstoy, Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata (Complete Works, xviii. 426).]

Whate’er thou’st won, remaineth still much more;

Heaven hath abundance yet for thee in store;

Still glows the grand Ideal on before!—

Which all thy best achievements doth degrade,

Thy boasted virtues dwarfs, and makes to fade,

Yea pass into complete eclipse and shade.

Ev’n he who such high eminence had gained

Yet counted not that aught was yet attained,

But onward to the goal with ardour strained,—

Reckoning his reach but as the starting-place,

Whence to pursue the spirit’s boundless race;

Of life’s grand edifice but laid the base.

E’en saints on high with heavenly honours crowned

Their crowns of glory cast upon the ground,

Not otherwise loyal and faultless found.

Great is the goal, the guerdon ’fore thee set,

No self-complacence must thy progress let,

Press boldly on, the things behind forget;

Part with thy past, let go! 2 [Note: William Hall.]

(1) Humble penitence grows in the life of a saint. How is it, then, that with our Lord the very reverse is the case? How is it that He is absolutely unconscious of any shortcoming or sin? Why is there not a vestige of personal penitence in any word of Christ’s? Why is He absolutely satisfied as He contemplates Himself? How is it that the possibility of sinning, or failing to do God’s will, never enters His mind? A good person is full of regrets, always discontented because be knows he is still far off from his ideal. Why does our Lord never express any such regret? How is He so sublimely conscious that His ideal is reached, or rather that He has never been for one moment separated from its realization? There is practically no answer to these questions but this—He is Himself the ideal that man is reaching after.

Scripture is a succession of saintly biographies all upon one type, the penitential. By a sudden transition there springs up one solitary instance of a completely opposite type, which vanishes, and never reappears. But the solitary and insulated unpenitential type makes also a solitary assumption of worth, and the assumption is part of the portrait. 1 [Note: J. B. Mozley, in Contemporary Review, vii. 495.]

If you want to find those who have the keenest sense of sin, you will not find them among the reprobates or among the newly repentant, but among the experienced and maturing saints. It is at the beginning of the Christian life, when the great heights of holiness are still to climb, that the sense of sin and of unworthiness is most imperfectly developed. It is growth in grace that deepens the consciousness of the blackness of personal sin and that makes confession of sin the painful wail of the soul. And so it is among the holy ones that you hear the most heart-sick expressions of sin. Here is John, the mystic of the twelve, fitted by his refinement of spirit to lean on the Master’s breast, and catch the soft whispers of the deeper things; and yet, from this man, there come the words, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Here is Paul, of masculine mind and of childlike heart, abounding in labours, persistent in sacrifice; and yet in old age, when the veil was almost transparent, he writes to his beloved Timothy, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” Here is John Bunyan, whose intimacy with the ways of the Almighty passed far beyond the human ken; brave, lowly, saintly, and yet his writings abound in agonizing confession of personal unworthiness and sin. And here is one of the saints of our own time, the holy Andrew Bonar, whose long life was like an unbroken beam of the Eternal light; and yet to the very week of his death his diary abounds in expressions of unworthiness and the pained confession of personal sin. These are the common characteristics of the lowly saints. 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The Examiner, March 26, 1903, p. 300.]

(2) The sinlessness of Jesus deepens the conviction of our own sinfulness. We no longer judge ourselves by law, or convict ourselves at the bar of conscience; His life is our law, and He is our conscience, and from Him comes our fullest and most convincing condemnation. But we feel sin as men could not feel it before Christ came. Fear has deepened into pathos, and penitence into the tenderest contrition, because although He was the sinless One, yet He was the suffering One—“For our sins and for our salvation.” Sinless, Christ has filled men’s hearts with a profounder sense of sin than even the saintliest men of old ever knew or felt. To the best of men life has become one long season of Lent—a season of penitence because the vision of His life and the vision of His Cross are ever with us. “Which of you convicteth me of sin?” has become not only His defence but our condemnation.

For myself, it is only since His Divine image rose before my soul that I have properly learned what is the true state of man. Previously, I always measured myself with the little, and so appeared in my own eyes to be great. Now I measure myself with Him, and have become very little indeed. 1 [Note: A. Tholuck, Hours of Christian Devotion, 31.]

Sin began in man with the dawn of the ideal. It was with the infancy of the race as with the individual infant; which, born a mere bundle of sensations and appetites, arrives gradually at moralhood, where it can sin, and does. A perception of sin, we say, is an element of moral progress. There are no shadows where there is no light. 2 [Note: J. Brierley, Life and the Ideal, 40.]

Drop, drop, slow tears,

And bathe those beauteous feet,

Which brought from heaven

The news and Prince of peace:

Cease not, wet eyes,

His mercies to entreat;

To cry for vengeance

Sin doth never cease:

In your deep floods

Drown all my faults and fears;

Nor let his eye

See sin, but through my tears. 3 [Note: P. Fletcher.]

2. Christ is our Example.—A difficulty arises here in connection with the sinlessness of our Lord which has troubled some people. “How,” they say, “can He be our example if He could not sin? We are sinners. He is sinless. Is it of any avail to say to us, Be like Jesus Christ? We cannot be like Him, just because He is without sin and we are not.” Now, it is quite true that on the face of it to imitate Christ as we are is an impossibility. And, in fact, He never did preach Himself simply as an example apart from other claims that He made. He did not merely live a human life of perfect goodness and then say, “Be like me.” We must take what He said about following Him in connection with all the rest of His claim and His work. He did realize the ideal human life, but He also offered a propitiatory sacrifice for sin, and promised to give us of His Spirit whereby we can be made partakers of His holy human Nature. His first appeal to us is to believe on Him, that is, to entrust our lives to Him as God and Man. It is “Come unto me” first, and then “Learn of me.” It is only the man who has first handed over his life into the keeping of Christ, who has accepted His atoning work, who seeks His Spirit, who can really, with any likelihood of success, imitate the example of Jesus. It is only to the believer, pardoned by the sacrifice of Christ, filled with the transforming power of the life of Christ, that Christ is an example of conduct.

It is a false supposition that the ideal of infinite perfection cannot be a guidance for life, and that, looking at it, it is necessary to dismiss it with a motion of the hand, saying that it is useless to me because I can never attain it, or to degrade the ideal to the level on which my weakness wants to stand. To reflect in this manner is the same as though a navigator should say: “Since I cannot go in the direction indicated by the compass, I shall throw away the compass or cease looking at it, that is, I will abandon the ideal or will fasten the needle of the compass to the place which at a given moment will correspond to the direction of my vessel, that is, I will degrade the ideal in accordance with my weakness.”

The ideal of perfection which Christ has given us is not a dream or a subject for rhetorical sermons, but a most necessary, most accessible guide of moral life for man, just as the compass is a necessary and accessible implement guiding the navigator; all that is necessary is to believe in the one as in the other. In whatever situation a man may be, the teaching about the ideal, given by Christ, is sufficient in order to obtain the safest indication of those acts which one may and which one may not perform. But it is necessary completely to believe in this teaching, this one teaching, and to stop believing in any other, just as it is necessary for the navigator to believe in the compass, and to stop looking at and being guided by what he sees on both sides. One must know how to be guided by the Christian teaching, how to be guided by the compass, and for this it is most important to understand one’s position, and to be able not to be afraid precisely to indicate one’s own deflection from the one, ideal direction. No matter on what round man may stand, there is always a possibility of his approaching this ideal, and no position of his can be such that he should be able to say that he has attained it and no longer can strive after a greater approximation. 1 [Note: Tolstoy, Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata (Works, xviii. 431).]

3. Christ is the Reconciler between God and man.—Christ’s sinlessness affects the value of His sacrifice. The sinbearer, as all the types of the Mosaic law prefigured, must be himself sinless—“a lamb without blemish and without spot.” The eternal, immutable, inevitable law of God claims an entire fulfilment. Who is to fulfil it? One has said, “Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.” Did He do it, or did He not? He twice says of Himself that He did do it; and at the supreme moments of His life. Once in His High Priest’s prayer, after the Paschal supper—“I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.” Once, just before He died—“It is finished.”

Let us conceive (if we may without irreverence) that some one single sin, untruthfulness, or vanity, or cruelty, could be really charged on Him, and what becomes of the atoning character of His Death? How is it conceivable that He should even have willed to die for a guilty world? For while, if we look at it on one side, His death appears to have been determined by circumstances, on the other, it was as certainly the result of His own liberty of action. “No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of myself: I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” At once Priest and Sacrifice, Christ is represented in the Epistle to the Hebrews as “offering himself without spot to God.” It was the crowning act of a life which was throughout sacrificial; but had He been conscious of any inward stain, how could He have desired to offer Himself in sacrifice to free a world from sin? Had there been in Him any personal evil to purge away, His Death might have been endured on account of His own guilt: it is His absolute Sinlessness that makes it certain that He died for others. 2 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Passiontide Sermons, 14.]

The Sinlessness of Christ

Literature

Adderley (J. G.), in Sermons far the People, New Ser., iii. 126.

Barry (A.), Sermons at Westminster Abbey, 165.

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