Addresses by Phillips Brooks

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And then another thing. When a man comes forth into the fulness of that
life with God, when at last he has entered God's service and the
obedience to God's will, and the communion with God's life, then there
comes this wonderful thing, there comes the revelation of the man's
past. We dare to tell the man that if he enters into the divine life, if
he makes himself a servant of God and does God's will out of obedient
love, he shall then be strong and wise. One great element of his
strength is going to be this: A marvellous revelation that is to come to
him of how all his past has been filled with the power of that spirit
with which he has at last entered into communion, to which he has at
last submitted himself. Man becomes the child of God, becomes the
servant of Jesus Christ, and this marvellous revelation amazes him. He
sees that back through all the years of his most obstinate and careless
life, through all his wilfulness and resistance, through all his
profligacy and black sin, God has been with him all the time, beating
himself upon his life, showing him how He desired to call him to
Himself, and that the final submission does not win God. It simply
submits to the God who has been with the soul all the time. Can there be
anything more winning to the soul than that, anything that brings a
deeper shame to you, than to have it revealed to you, suddenly or
slowly, that from the first day that you came into this world, nay,
before your life was an uttered fact in this world, God has been loving
you, and seeking you, and planning for you, and making every effort that
He could make in consistency with the free will with which He endowed
you from the centre of His own life, that you might become His and
therefore might become truly yourself? Through all the years in which
you were obstinate and rebellious, through all the years in which you
defied Him, nay, through the years in which you denied Him and said that
He did not exist, He was with you all the time. What shall I say to my
friend who is an atheist? Shall I believe that until he comes to a
change of his opinions and recognizes that there is indeed a ruling
love, a great and fatherly God for all the world, that he has nothing to
do with that God? Shall I believe that God has nothing to do with him
until he acknowledges God? God would be no God to me if He were that, if
He left the man absolutely unhelped until the man beat at the doors of
His divine helpfulness and said, "I believe in Thee at last. Now help
me." And to the atheist there appears the light of the God whom he
denies. Into every soul, just so far and just so fast as it is possible
for that soul to receive it, God beats His life and gives His help. That
is what makes a man hopeful of all his fellow-men as he looks around
upon them and sees them in all the conditions of their life.

And this could only be if that were true, if that is true, which we are
dwelling upon constantly, the absolute naturalness of the Christian
life, that it is man's true life, that it is no foreign region into
which some man may be transported and where he lives an alien to all his
own essential nature and to all the natural habitudes in which he is
intending to exist. There are two ideas of religion which always have
abounded, and our great hope is, our great assurance for the future of
the world is, that the true and pure idea of religion some day shall
grow and take possession of the life of man. One idea, held by very
earnest people, embodied in very faithful and devoted lives, is the
strangeness of religion to the life of man, as if some morning something
dropped out of the sky that had had no place upon our earth before, as
if there came the summons to man to be something entirely different from
what the conditions of his nature prophesied and intended that he
should be. The other idea is that religion comet by the utterance of God
from the heavens, but comes up out of the human life of man; that man is
essentially and intrinsically religious; that he does not become
something else than man when he becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, but
then for the first time he becomes man; that religion is not something
that is fastened upon the outside of his life, but is the awakening of
the truth inside of his life; the Church is but the true fulfilment of
human life and society; heaven is but the New Jerusalem that completes
all the old Jerusalem and Londons and Bostons that have been here upon
our earth. Man, in the fulfilment of his nature by Jesus Christ, is
man--not to be something else, our whole humanity is too dear to us. I
will cling to this humanity of man, for I do love it, and I will know
nothing else. But when man is bidden to look back into his humanity and
see what it means to be a man, that humanity means purity, truthfulness,
earnestness, and faithfulness to that God of which humanity is a part,
that God which manifested that humanity was a part of it, when the
incarnation showed how close the divine and human belonged
together--when man hears that voice, I do not know how he can resist,
why he shall not lift himself up and say, "Now I can be a man, and I can
be man only as I share in and give my obedience to and enter into
communion with the life of God," and say to Christ, to Christ the
revealer of all this, "Here I am, fulfil my manhood."

And do not you see how immediately this sweeps aside, as one gush of the
sunlight sweeps aside the darkness, do not you see how it sweeps aside
all the foolish and little things that people are saying? I say to my
friend, "Be a Christian." That means to be a full man. And he says to
me, "I have not time to be a Christian. I have not room. If my life was
not so full. You don't know how hard I work from morning to night. What
time is there for me to be a Christian? What time is there, what room is
there for Christianity in such a life as mine?" But does not it come to
seem to us so strange, so absurd, if it was not so melancholy, that man
should say such a thing as that? It is as if the engine had said it had
no room for the steam. It is as if the tree had said it had no room for
the sap. It is as if the ocean had said it had no room for the tide. It
is as if the man said that he had no room for his soul. It is as if life
said that it had no time to live, when it is life. It is not something
that is added to life. It is life. A man is not living without it. And
for a man to say that "I am so full in life that I have no room for
life," you see immediately to what absurdity it reduces itself. And how
a man knows what he is called upon by God's voice, speaking to him every
hour, speaking to him every moment, speaking to him out of everything,
that which the man is called upon to do because it is the man's only
life! Therefore time, room, that is what time, that is what room is
for--life. Life is the thing we seek, and man finds it in the fulfilment
of his life by Jesus Christ.

Now, until we understand this and take it in its richness, all religion
seems, becomes to us such a little thing that it is not religion at all.
You have got to know that religion, the service of Christ, is not
something to be taken in in addition to your life; it is your life. It
is not a ribbon that you shall tie in your hat, and go down the street
declaring yourself that you have accepted something in addition to the
life which your fellow-men are living. It is something which, taken into
your heart, shall glow in every action so that your fellow-men shall
say, "Lo, how he lives! What new life has come into him?" It is that
insistence upon the great essentialness of the religious life, it is the
insistence that religion is not a lot of things that a man does, but is
a new life that a man lives, uttering itself in new actions because it
is the new life. "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom
of God." So Jesus said to Nicodemus the ruler, Nicodemus the amateur in
religions, who came and said, "Perhaps this teacher has something else
that I can bind into my catalogue of truths and hold it." Jesus looked
him in the face and said: "It is not that, my friend, it is not that; it
is to be a new man, it is to be born again. It is to have the new life,
which is the old life, which is the eternal life. So alone does man
enter into the kingdom of God." I cannot help believing all the time
that if our young men knew this, religion would lift itself up and have
a dignity and greatness--not a thing for weak souls, but a thing for the
manliest soul. Just because of its manliness it is easy. "Is it easy or
is it hard, this religion of yours?" people say to us. I am sure I do
not know the easy and the hard things. I cannot tell the difference.
What is easier than for a man to breathe? And yet, have you never seen a
breathless man, a man in whom the breathing was almost stopped, a
drowning man, an exhausted man? have you never seen, when the breath was
put once more to his nostrils and brought down once more into his empty
lungs, the struggle with which he came back to it? It was the hardest
thing for him to do, so much harder for him to live than it was for him
to die. But by and by see him on his feet, going about his work, helping
his fellow-men, living his life, rejoicing in his days, guarding
against his dangers, full of life. Is life a hard thing for him? You
don't talk about its being hard or easy any more than you talk about
life itself. The man who lives in God knows no life except the life of
God. Let men know that it is not mere trifling, it is not a thing to be
dallied with for an instant, it is not a thing for a man to convince
himself by an argument, and then keep as it were locked in a shelf: it
is something that is so deep and serious, so deep and serious that when
a man has once tested it there is no more chance of his going out of it
than there is of his going out of the friendship and the love which
holds him with its perpetual expression, with the continued deeper and
deeper manifestation of the way in which the living being belongs to him
who has a right to his life.

Now in the few moments that remain I want to take it for granted most
seriously, most earnestly, that the men who are listening to me are in
earnest, and I want to try to tell them as a brother might tell a
brother, as I might tell to you or try to tell to you if sitting before
my fireside, I want to try to answer the question which I know is upon
your hearts. "What shall I do about this?" I know you say; "Is this all
in the clouds? Is there anything I can do in the right way?" If you are
in earnest, I shall try to tell you what I should do, if I were in your
place, that I might enter into that life and be the free man that we
have tried to describe, of whom we believe certain special and definite
things. What are they? In the first place I would put away my sin. There
is not a man listening to me now who has not some trick of life, some
habit that has possession of him, which he knows is a wrong thing. The
very first thing for a man to do is absolutely to set himself against
them. If you are foul, stop being licentious, at least stop doing
licentious things. If you, in any part of your business, are tricky, and
unsound, and unjust, cut that off, no matter what it costs you. There is
something clear and definite enough for every man. It is as clear for
every man as the sunlight that smites him in his eyes. Stop doing the
bad thing which you are doing. It is drawing the bolt away to let
whatever mercy may come in come in. Stop doing your sin. You can do that
if you will. Stop doing your sin, no matter how mechanical it seems, and
then take up your duty, whatever you can do to make the world more
bright and good. Do whatever you can to help every struggling soul, to
add new strength to any staggering cause, the poor sick man that is by
you, the poor wronged man whom you with your influence might vindicate,
the poor boy in your shop that you may set with new hope upon the road
of life that is beginning already to look dark to him. I cannot tell you
what it is. But you know your duty. No man ever looked for it and did
not find it.

And then the third thing--pray. Yes, go to the God whom you but dimly
see and pray to Him in the darkness, where He seems to sit. Ask Him, as
if He were, that He will give you that which, if He is, must come from
Him, can come from Him alone. Pray anxiously. Pray passionately, in the
simplest of all words, with the simplest of all thoughts. Pray, the
manliest thing that a man can do, the fastening of his life to the
eternal, the drinking of his thirsty soul out of the great fountain of
life. And pray distinctly. Pray upon your knees. One grows tired
sometimes of the free thought, which is yet perfectly true, that a man
can pray anywhere and anyhow. But men have found it good to make the
whole system pray. Kneel down, and the very bending of these obstinate
and unused knees of yours will make the soul kneel down in the humility
in which it can be exalted in the sight of God.

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

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

Now those are the things for a man to do who really cares about all
this. Those are the things for an earnest man to do. They have no power
in themselves, but they are the opening of the windows. And if that
which I believe is true, God is everywhere giving himself to us, the
opening of the windows is a signal that we want Him and an invitation
that He will be glad enough to answer, to come. Into every window that
is open to Him and turned His way, Christ comes, God comes. That is the
only story. There is put aside everything else. Election,
predestination, they can go where they please. I am sure that God gives
Himself to every soul that wants Him and declares its want by the open
readiness of the signal which He knows. How did the sun rise on our city
this morning? Starting up in the east, the sun came in its majesty into
the sky. It smote on the eastward windows, and wherever the window was
all closed, even if it were turned eastward, on the sacred side of the
city's life, it could not come in; but wherever any eastward window had
its curtains drawn, wherever he who slept had left the blinds shut, so
that the sun when it came might find its way into his sleepiness, there
the sun came, and with a shout awoke its faithful servant who had
believed in him even before he had seen him, and said, "Arise, arise
from the dead, and I will give thee life." This is the simplicity of it
all, my friends. A multitude of other things you need not trouble
yourselves about. I amaze myself when I think how men go asking about
the questions of eternal punishment and the duration of man's torment in
another life, of what will happen to any man who does not obey Jesus
Christ. Oh, my friends, the soul is all wrong when it asks that. Not
until the soul says, "What will come if I do obey Jesus Christ?" and
opens its glorified vision to see all the great things that are given to
the soul that enters into the service of the perfect one, the perfect
love, not until then the perfect love, the perfect life, come in. A man
may be--I believe it with all my heart--so absolutely wrapped up in the
glory of obedience, and the higher life, and the service of Christ, that
he never once asks himself, "What will come to me if I do not obey?" any
more than your child asks you what you will do to him if he is not
obedient. Every impulse and desire of his life sets toward obedience.
And so the soul may have no theory of everlasting or of limited
punishment, or of the other life.

Simply now, here, he must have that without which he cannot live, that
without which there is no life. Jesus the soul must have, the one
yesterday, to-day, and forever; He that is and was and is to be. Men
dwell upon what He was, upon what He is; I rather think to-day of what
He is to be. And when I see these young men here before me looking to
the future and not to the past,--nay, looking to the future and not to
the present, valuing the present only as it is the seed ground of the
future, the foundation upon which the structure is to rise whose
pinnacle shall some day pierce the sky,--I want to tell them of the
Jesus that shall be. In fuller comprehension of Him, with deeper
understanding of His life, with a more entire impression of what He is
and of what He may be to the soul, so men shall understand Him in the
days to be, and yet He shall be the same Christ still. The future
belongs to Jesus Christ, yes, the same Christ that I believe in and that
I call upon you to believe in to-day, but a larger, fuller, more
completely comprehended Christ, the Christ that is to be, the same
Christ that was and suffered, the same Christ that is and helps, but
the same Christ also who, being forever deeper and deeper and more
deeply received into the souls of men, regenerates their institutions,
changes their life, opens their capacities, surprises them with
themselves, makes the world glorious and joyous every day, because it
has become the new incarnation, the new presence of the divine life in
the life of man.

Men are talking about the institutions in which you are engaged, my
friends, about the business from which you have come here to worship for
this little hour. Men are questioning about what they care to do, what
they can have to do with Christianity. They are asking everywhere this
question: "Is it possible for a man to be engaged in the activities of
our modern life and yet to be a Christian? Is it possible for a man to
be a broker, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a mechanic, is it possible for a
man to be engaged in a business of to-day, and yet love his God and his
fellow-man as himself?" I do not know. I do not know what
transformations these dear businesses of yours have got to undergo
before they shall be true and ideal homes for the child of God; but I do
know that upon Christian merchants and Christian brokers and Christian
lawyers and Christian men in business to-day there rests an awful and a
beautiful responsibility: to prove, if you can prove it, that these
things are capable of being made divine, to prove that a man can do the
work that you have been doing this morning and will do this afternoon,
and yet shall love his God and his fellow-man as himself. If he cannot,
if he cannot, what business have you to be doing them? If he can, what
business have you to be doing them so poorly, so carnally, so
unspiritually, that men look on them and shake their heads with doubt?
It belongs to Christ in men first to prove that man may be a Christian
and yet do business; and, in the second place, to show how a man, as he
becomes a greater Christian, shall purify and lift the business that he
does and make it the worthy occupation of the Son of God.

What shall be our universal law of life? Can we give it as we draw
toward our last moment? I think we can. I want to live, I want to live,
if God will give me help, such a life that, if all men in the world were
living it, this world would be regenerated and saved. I want to live
such a life that, if that life changed into new personal peculiarities
as it went to different men, but the same life still, if every man were
living it, the millennium would be here; nay, heaven would be here, the
universal presence of God. Are you living that life now? Do you want
your life multiplied by the thousand million so that all men shall be
like you, or don't you shudder at the thought, don't you give hope that
other men are better than you are? Keep that fear, but only that it may
be the food of a diviner hope, that all the world may see in you the
thing that man was meant to be, that is, the Christ. Ah, you say, that
great world, it is too big; how can I stretch my thought and imagination
and conscience to the poor creatures in Africa and everywhere? Then
bring it home. Ah, this dear city of ours, this city that we love, this
city in which many of us were born, in which all of us are finding the
rich and sweet associations of our life, this city, whose very streets
we love because they come so close to everything we do and are, cannot
we do something for it? Cannot we make its life diviner? Cannot we
contribute something that it has not to-day? Cannot you put in it, some
little corner of it, a life which others shall see and say, "Ah, that
our lives may be like that!" And then the good Boston in which we so
rejoice, which we so love, which we would so fain make a part of the
kingdom of God, a true city of Jesus Christ, we shall not die without
having done something for it.

I linger, and yet I must not linger. Oh, my friends, oh, my fellow-men,
it is not very long that we shall be here. It is not very long. This
life for which we are so careful--it is not very long; and yet it is so
long, because, long, long after we have passed away out of men's sight
and out of men's memory, the world, with something that we have left
upon it, that we have left within it, will be going on still. It is so
long because, long after the city and the world have passed away, we
shall go on somewhere, somehow, the same beings still, carrying into the
depths of eternity something that this world has done for us that no
other world could do, something of goodness to get now that will be of
value to us a million years hence, that we never could get unless we got
it in the short years of this earthly life. Will you know it? Will you
let Christ teach it to you? Will you let Christ tell you what is the
perfect man? Will you let Him set His simplicity and graciousness close
to your life, and will you feel their power? Oh! be brave, be true, be
pure, be men, be men in the power of Jesus Christ. May God bless you!
May God bless you! Let us pray.

IV. TRUE LIBERTY.

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

Let us not think, my friends, that there is anything strange about the
spectacle which we witnessed this morning. The only strange thing that
there could be about it is that anybody should think that it is strange
that men should turn aside for half an hour from their ordinary business
pursuits, that they should come from the details of life to inquire in
regard to the principles, the everlasting principles and purposes of
life; that they should turn aside from those things which are occupying
them from day to day and make one single hour in the week consecrated to
the service of those great things which underlie all life--surely there
is nothing very strange. There is nothing more absolutely natural. Every
man does it in his own sort of way, in his own choice of time. We have
chosen to do it together, on one day of the week during these few weeks
which the Christian Church has so largely set apart for special thought
and prayer and earnest attempt to approach the God to whom we belong. It
is simply as if the stream turned back again to its fountain, that it
might refresh itself and make itself strong for the great work that it
had to do in watering the fields and turning the wheels of industry. It
is simply as if men plodding along over the flat routine of their life
chose once in a while to go up into the mountain top, whence they might
once in a while look abroad over their life, and understand more fully
the way in which they ought to work. These are the principles, these are
the pictures which represent that which we have in mind as we come
together for a little while each Monday in these few weeks, in order
that we may think about things of God and try to realize the depth of
our own human life. The first thing that we ought to understand about it
is that when we turn aside from life it is only that we go deeper into
life. This hour does not stand apart from the rest of the hours of the
week, in that we are dealing with things in which the rest of the week
has no concern. He who understands life deeply and fully, understands
life truly; he has forever renewed his life; and if there comes into our
hearts, in the life which we are living, a perpetual sense that life
needs renewal, a richening and refreshing, then it is in order that we
may go down into the depths and see what lies at the root of
things--things that we are perpetually doing and thinking. It is this
that brought us together here: it is that we may open to ourselves some
newer, higher life. It is that we may understand the life that we may
live, along side of and as a richer development of that life which we
are living from day to day, which we have been living during the years
of our life. How that idea has haunted men in every period of their
existence, how it is haunting you, that there is some higher life which
it is possible to live! There has never been a religion that has not
started there, lifted up its eyes and seen, afar off, what it was
possible for man to do from day to day, in contrast with the things
which men immediately and presently are. There is not any moment of the
human soul which has not rested upon some great conception that man was
a nobler being than he was ordinarily conceiving himself to be; that he
was not destined to the things which were ordinarily occupying his life;
that he might be living a greater and nobler life. It is because the
Christian Scriptures have laid most earnestly hold of this idea, it is
because it was represented not simply in the words which Christ said,
but in the very being which Christ was, that we go to them to get the
inspiration and the indication, the revelation and the enlightenment
which we need. I have read to you these few words in which Christ
declares the whole subject, the whole character of which His life is and
what His work is about to do, because it seems to me that they strike at
once the key-note of that which we want to understand. They let us enter
into the full conception of that which the new life which is offered to
man really is. There are two conceptions which come to every man when he
is entering upon a new life, changing his present life to something that
is different from the present life, and being a different sort of
creature and living in a different sort of a way. The first way in which
it presents itself to him--almost always at the beginning of every
religion, perhaps--is in the way of restraint and imprisonment. Man
thinks of every change that is to come to him as in the nature of denial
of something that he is at the present doing and being, as the laying
hold upon himself of some sort of restraint, bringing to him something
which says: "I must not do the thing which I am doing. I must lay upon
myself restraints, restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions. I must
not let myself be the man that I am." You see how the Old Testament
comes before the New Testament, the law ringing from the mountain top
with the great denials, the great prohibitions, that come from the mouth
of God. "Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other--Thou shalt not
murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt
not covet thy neighbor's goods." That is the first conception which
comes to a man of the way in 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 it is 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 restricted, restrained, and
imprisoned condition. So it is with every fulfilment of life. It is
possible for a man always to represent it to himself as if it were the
restriction, restraint, and prohibition of his life. The man passes
onward into the fuller life which belongs to a man. He merges his
selfishness into that richer life which is offered to human kind. He
makes himself, instead of a single, selfish man, a man of family; and it
is easy enough to consider that marriage and the family life bring
immediately restraints and 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 in
such an idea. We never lose sight of it. No other richer and fuller idea
which we come to by and by ever does away with the thought that man's
advance means 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. But yet there is immediately a greater and fuller.
When we hear those words of Jesus, we see immediately that not the idea
of imprisonment but the idea of liberty, not the idea of restraint but
that of setting free, is the idea which is really in His mind when he
offers the fullest life to human kind. Have you often thought of how the
whole Bible is a Book of Liberty, of how It rings with liberty from
beginning to end, of how the great men are the men of liberty, of how
the Old Testament, the great picture which forever shines, is the
emancipator, leading forth out of imprisonment the people of God, who
were to do the great work of God in the very much larger and freer life
in which they were to live? The prophet, the psalmist, are ever
preaching and singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of the life of
man, that man was not imprisoned in order to fulfil himself, but shall
open his life, and every new progress shall be into a new region of
existence which lie has not touched as yet. When we turn from the Old
Testament to the New Testament, how absolutely clear that idea is!
Christ is the very embodiment of human liberty. In His own personal life
and in everything that He did and said, He was forever uttering the
great gospel that man, in order to become his completest, must become
his freest, that what a man did when he entered into a new life was to
open a new region in which new powers were to find their exercise, in
which he was to be able to be and do things which he could not be and do
in more restricted life. It is the acceptance of that idea, it seems to
me, that makes us true disciples of Christ and of that great gospel, and
that transfigures everything. When my friend turns over some new leaf,
as we say, and begins to live a new life, what shall we think of him? I
learn that he has become a Christian man, that he is doing something,
that he is working in a way and living a life which I have not known
before. What is my impression in regard to him? Is not your impression,
as you look upon that man, that somehow or other he has entered into a
slavery or bondage, that he has taken upon his life restrictions and
imprisonments which he did not have before? And you think of him,
perhaps, as a man who has done a wise and prudent thing, who has done
something that is going to be for his benefit some day in some distant
and half-realized world, but as a man who, for the present, has laid a
burden and bondage upon his life. That is never the tone of Christ; it
is never the tone of the Christian gospel. When a man turns away from
his sins and enters into energetic holiness, when a man sacrifices his
own self-indulgence and goes forth a pure 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 he 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. But think of
it for yourselves, for a moment, and ask what freer life really is. Try
to give a definition of liberty, and I know not what it can be said to
be except something of this kind: Liberty is the fullest opportunity for
man to be and do the very best that is possible for him. I know of no
definition of liberty, that oldest and dearest phrase of men, and
sometimes the vaguest also, except that. It has been perverted, it has
been distorted and mystified, but that is what it really means: the
fullest opportunity for a man to do and be the very best that is in his
personal nature to do and to be. It immediately follows that everything
which is necessary for the full realization of a man's life, even though
it seems to have the character of restraint for a moment, is really a
part of the process of his enfranchisement, is the bringing forth of him
to a fuller liberty. You see a man coming forward and offering himself
as one of the defenders of his country in his country's need. You see
him standing at the door where men are being received as recruits into
the army of the country. He wants liberty. He wants to be able to do
that which he cannot do in his poor, personal isolation here at home. He
wants the badge which will give him the right to go forth and meet the
enemies of his country, and he enrolls himself among these men. He makes
himself subject to obligations, duties, and drill. They are a part of
his enfranchisement. They are really the breaking of the fetters upon
his slavery, the sending him forth into freedom. He is like a bit of
iron or steel that lies upon the ground. It lies neglected and perfectly
free. You see it is made by the adjustment of the end of it so that it
can be set into a great machine and become part of a great working
system. But there it lies. Will you call it free? It is bound to be
nothing there. It is absolutely separate, and with its own personality
distinct and individual and all alone. What is to make that bit of iron
a free bit of iron, to let it go forth and do the thing which it was
meant to do, but the taking of it and the binding of it at both ends
into the structure of which it was made to be a part? It seems to me the
binding of a man,--it seems to me that the binding of the iron is not
the yielding of its freedom. It is not merely after finding its place
within the system that it first achieves its freedom and so joins in the
music and partakes of the courses with which the whole enginery is
filled. Is not it, then, for the first time a free bit of iron, having
accomplished all that it was made to do when it came forth from the
forge of the master, who had this purpose in his mind? This, then, is
freedom; everything is part of the enfranchisement of a man which helps
to put him in the place where he can live his best. Therefore every
duty, every will of God, every commandment of Christ, every
self-surrender that a man is called upon to obey or to make--do not
think of it as if it were simply a restraint to liberty, but think of it
as the very means of freedom, by which we realize the very purpose of
God and the fulfilment of our life. It is interesting to see how all
that is true in regard to the matter of belief, doctrine, and opinions
which we are apt to accept. How strange it very often seems that men go
to the Church, or to one another, and say: "Must I believe this doctrine
in order that I can enter into the Church?" "Must I believe this
doctrine in order that I may be saved?" men say, with a strange sort of
notion about what salvation is. How strange it seems, when we really
have got our intelligence about us and know what it is to believe! To
believe a new truth, if it be really truth and we really believe it, is
to have entered into a new region, in which our life shall find a new
expansion and a new youth. Therefore, not "Must we believe?" but "May I
believe?" is the true cry of the human creature who is seeking for the
richest fulfilment of his life, who is working that his whole nature may
find its complete expansion and so its completest exercise. We talk a
great deal in these days and in this place about a liberal faith. What
is a liberal faith, my friends? It seems to me that by every true
meaning of the word, by every true thought of the idea, a liberal faith
is a faith that believes much, and not a faith that believes little. The
more a man believes, the more liberally he exercise his capacity of
faith, the more he sends forth his intelligence into the mysteries of
God, the more he understands those things which God chooses to reveal to
his creatures, the more liberally he believes. Let yourselves never
think that you grow liberal in faith by believing less; always be sure
that the true liberality of faith can only come by believing more. It is
true, indeed, that as soon as a man becomes eager for belief, for the
truth of God and for the mysteries with which God's universe is filled,
he becomes all the more critical and careful. He will hot any longer, if
he were before, be simply greedy of things to believe, so that if any
superstition comes offering itself to him he will not gather it in
indiscriminately and believe it without evidence, without examination.
He becomes all the more critical and careful, the more he becomes
assured that belief, and not unbelief, is the true condition of his
life. The truth that God has entered into this world in wondrous ways
and filled its life with Jesus Christ, the truth that man has a soul and
not simply a body, that he has a spiritual need, that God cares for him
and he is to care for himself, that there is an immortal life, and that
that which we call faith is but the opening of a gate, the pushing back
of a veil,--shall a man believe those things as imprisonments of his
nature, and shall it not make him larger? Shall it not be the indulgence
of his life when he enters into the great certainties which so are
offered to his belief, believing them in his own way? Let us always feel
that to accept a new belief is no to build a wall beyond which we cannot
pass, but is to open the door to a great fresh, free region, in which
our souls are to live. And just so it is when we come to the moral
things of life. The man puts aside some sinfulness. He breaks down the
wall that has been shutting his soul out of its highest life. He has
been a drunkard, and he becomes a sober man. He has been a cheat, and
becomes a faithful man. He has been a liar, and becomes a truthful man.
He has been a profligate, and he becomes a pure man. What has happened
to that man? Shall he simply think of himself as one who has crushed
this passion, shut down this part of his life? Shall he simply think of
himself as one who has taken a course of self-denial? Nay. It is
self-indulgence that a man has really entered upon. It is an indulgence
of the deepest part of his own nature, not of his unreal nature. He has
risen and shaken himself like a lion, so that the dust has fallen from
his mane, and all the great range of that life which God gave him to
live lies before him. This is the everlasting inspiration. This is the
illumination. I don't wonder that men refuse to give up evil if it
simply seems to them to be giving up the evil way, and no vision opens
before them of the thing that they may be and do. I don't wonder that,
if the negative, restricting, imprisoning conception of the new life is
all that a man gets hold of, he lingers again and again in the old life.
But just as soon as the great world opens before him then it is like a
prisoner going out of the prison door. Is there no lingering? Does not
the baser part of him cling to the old prison, to the ease and the
provision for him, to the absence of anxiety and of energy? I think
there can hardly be a prisoner who, with any leap of heart, goes out of
the prison door, when his term is finished, and does not even look into
that black horror where he has been living, cast some lingering, longing
look behind. He comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life, to the
necessity of making himself once more a true man among his fellow-men.
But does he stop? He comes forth, and if there be the soul of a man in
him still, he enters into the new life with enthusiasm, and finds the
new powers springing in him to their work. And if it be so with every
special duty, then with that great thing which you and I are called upon
to do--the total acceptance by our nature of the will of God, the total
acceptance by our nature of the mastery of Jesus Christ. Oh! how this
world has perverted words and meanings, that the mastery of Jesus Christ
should seem to be the imprisonment and not the enfranchisement of the
soul! When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun,
and let the 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 color that
was in the bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, the flower
and stone rejoice. I can almost hear them sing in the field and in the
stream. What then? Shall not man bring his nature out into the fullest
illumination, and surprise himself by the things that he might do? Oh!
the littleness of the lives that we are living! Oh! the way in which we
fail to comprehend, or when we do comprehend, deny to ourselves the
bigness of that thing which it is to be a man, to be a child of God!
Sometimes it dawns upon us that we can see it opening into the vision of
these men and women in the New Testament. Sometimes there opens to us
the picture of this thing that we might be, and then there are truly the
trial moments of our life. Then we lift up ourselves and claim our
liberty or, dastardly or cowardly, slink back into the sluggish
imprisonment in which we have been living. How does all this affect that
which we are continually conscious of, urging upon ourselves and upon
one another? How does it affect the whole question of a man's sins? Oh!
these sins, the things we know so well! As we sit here and stand here
one entire hour, as we talk in this sort of way, everybody knows the
weaknesses of his own nature, the sins of his own soul. Don't you know
it? What shall we think about those sins? It seems to me, my friends,
that all this great picture of the liberty into which Christ sets man,
in the first place does one thing which we are longing to see done in
the world. It takes away the glamour and the splendor from sin. It
breaks that spell by which men think that the evil thing is the glorious
thing. If the evil thing be that which Christ has told us that the evil
thing is--which I have no time to tell you now--if every sin that you do
is not simply a stain upon your soul, but is keeping you out from some
great and splendid thing which you might do, then is there any sort of
splendor and glory about sin? How about the sins that you did when you
were young men? How can you look back upon those sins and think what
your life might have been if it had been pure from the beginning, think
what you might have been if from the very beginning you had caught sight
of what it was to be a man? And then your boy comes along. What are the
men in this town doing largely in many and many a house, but letting
their boys believe that the sins of their early life are glorious
things, except that those things which they did, the base and wretched
things that they were doing when they were fifteen and twenty and
twenty-five and thirty years old, are the true career of a human nature,
are the true entrance into human life? The miserable talk about sowing
wild oats, about getting through the necessary conditions of life before
a man comes to solemnity! Shame upon any man who, having passed through
the sinful conditions and habits and dispositions of his earlier life,
has not carried out of them an absolute shame for them, that shall let
him say to his boy, by word and by every utterance of his life within
the house where he and the boy live together, "Refrain, for they are
abominable things!" To get rid of the glamour of sin, to get rid of the
idea that it is a glorious thing to be dissipated instead of being
concentrated to duty, to get rid of the idea that to be drunken and to
be lustful are true and noble expressions of our abounding human life,
to get rid of any idea that sin is aught but imprisonment, is to make
those who come after us, and to make ourselves in what of life is left
for us, gloriously ambitious for the freedom of purity, for a full
entrance into that life over which sin has no dominion. And yet, at the
same time, don't you see that while sin thus becomes contemptible when
we think about the great illustration of the will of God and Jesus
Christ, don't you see how also it puts on a new horror? That which I
thought I was doing in the halls of my imprisonment I have really been
doing within the possible world of God in which I might have been free.
The moment I see what life might have been to me, then any sin becomes
dreadful to me. Have you ever thought of how the world has stood in
glory and honor before the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ? If any life
could prove, if any argument could show on investigation to-day that
Jesus did one sin in all his life, that the perfect liberty which was
his perfect purity was not absolutely perfect, do you realize what a
horror would seem to fall down from the heavens, what a constraint and
burden would be laid upon the lives of men, how the gates of men's
possibilities would seem to close in upon them? It is because there has
been that one life which, because absolutely pure from sin, was
absolutely free; it is because man may look up and see in that life the
revelation and possibility of his own; it is because that life, echoing
the great cry throughout the world that man everywhere is the son of
God, offers the same purity--and so the same freedom--to all mankind; it
is for that reason that a man rejoices to cling to, to believe in,
however impure his life is, the perfect purity, the sinlessness of the
life of Jesus. When you sin, my friends, it is a man that sins, and a
man is a child of God; and for a child of God to sin is an awful thing,
not simply for the stain that he brings into the divine nature that is
in him, but for the life from which it shuts him out, for the liberty
which he abandons, for the inthrallment which it lays upon the soul.
There is one thing that people say very carelessly that always seems to
me to be a dreadful thing for a man to say. They say it when they talk
about their lives to one another, and think about their lives to
themselves, and by and by very often say it upon their death-bed with
the last gasp, as though their entrance into the eternal world had
brought them no deeper enlightenment. One wonders what is the revelation
that comes to them when they stand upon the borders of the other side
and are in the full life and eternity of God. The thing men say is, "I
have done the very best I can." It is an awful thing for a man to say.
The man never lived, save he who perfected our humanity, who ever did
the very best he could. You dishonor your life, you not simply shut your
eyes to certain facts, you not simply say an infinitely absurd and
foolish thing, but you dishonor your human life if you say that you have
done in any day of your life or in all the days of your life put
together, the very best that you could, or been the very best man that
you could be. You! what are you? Again I say, The child of God, and this
which you have been, what is it? Look over it, see how selfish it has
been, see how material it has been, how it has lived in the depths when
it might have lived on the heights, see how it has lived in the little
narrow range of selfishness when it might have been as broad as all
humanity, nay, when it might have been as the God of humanity. Don't
dare to say that in any day of your life, or in all your life together,
you have done the best that you could. The Pharisee said it when he went
up into the temple, and all the world has looked on with mingled pity
and scorn at the blindness of the man who stood there and paraded his
faithfulness; while all the world has bent with a pity that was near to
love, a pity that was full of sympathy because man recognized his
condition and experience, for the poor creature grovelling upon the
pavement, unwilling and unable even to look upon the altar, but who,
standing afar off, said, "God be merciful to me a sinner!" Whatever else
you say, don't say, "I have been the very best I could." That means that
you have not merely lived in the rooms of your imprisonment, but that
you have been satisfied to count them the only possible rooms of your
life, and that the great halls of your liberty have never opened
themselves before you. Shall not they open themselves somehow to us
to-day, my friends? Shall we not turn away from this hour and go back
into our business, into our offices, into the shops, into the crowded
streets, bearing new thoughts of the lives that we might live, feeling
the fetters on our hands and feet, feeling many things as fetters which
we have thought of as the ornament and glory of our life, determined to
be unsatisfied forever until these fetters shall be stricken off and we
have entered into the full liberty which comes to those alone who are
dedicated to the service of God, to the completion of their own nature,
to the acceptance of the grace of Christ, and to the attainment of the
eternal glory of the spiritual life, first here and then hereafter,
never hereafter, it may be, except here and now, certainly here and now,
as the immediate, pressing privilege and duty of our lives? So let us
stand up on our feet and know ourselves in all the richness and in all
the awfulness of our human life. Let us know ourselves children of God,
and claim the liberty which God has given to every one of his children
who will take it. God bless you and give some of you, help some of us,
to claim, as we have never claimed before, that freedom with which the
Son makes free!

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