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CHAPTER XVIII.

HUMAN FREEDOM.

In descanting on the claims of human brotherhood, we bave not wandered so far as it might seem from the divine idea of man as we suppose him when first introduced to this wondrous world. A perfect man, dignified with personal beauty and endowed with all the faculties and affections that might render him worthy of admiration and of love, is a being which genius cannot fully bring before the eye of the mind. The poetry of language, of chiselled marble, or of pictured light fails, unless the words, the sculpture, or the picture, over all that else is noble, gives us in that Presence a face radiant with the conscious love of freedom. The especial personality of the first man must have been imbued with the sentiments of free will most perfectly, for that is the most essential of all human prerogatives. The self-formative faculty of the soul, by which each man becomes improvable in knowledge and virtue, in a manner peculiarly his own, requires a consciousness of freedom in will and action, so far as that freedom interferes not with the law of his own well-being and that of his fellow-man. Each man is an original, so

far as he is free to choose for himself how he will exercise his instinct for instruction; he cannot call any man the master of his faculties. In accommodation to this implanted feeling, every thinking man finds an experience and an advancement in a path along which he is conducted by God alone. Feeling this, no man with enlightened reason and conscience can be at heart a slave. He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves besides.' Therefore the first man was free to learn any truth he could, in obedience to necessary law, for necessary law is necessary only because it is good, and cannot be broken without evil. Even now the sun shines equally on the evil and the good, to make the evil good and the good better. That was the meaning of all fostering influences, when man knew nothing of religious and civil despotism; and they who would rule man without enlightening him have the Spirit of Darkness as their ruler. Unnatural restraints are lawless forces that may produce deformities and monstrous developments. There is no authority but in love-free and freedom-giving love. Any attempts to compel men to think alike till equally intimate experimentally with the same truths, would be like making a Dutch garden, where trees and shrubs are trimmed into quaint shapes, pleasant only to minds so distorted as to find no loveliness in the flowers that grow, bloom, and blossom under the Spirit that first formed them. Created uniformity is that of life and freedom, where every kind of being is developed into a form of beauty belonging to the nature of its kind.

And so oaks resemble oaks, though no two oaks spread out their arms in exact imitation of each other. So souls, under influences fit to promote the growth of souls, expand not into the precise likeness of each other. Nothing but hard trimming and stiff training will reduce souls into quidnuncs and quincunxes. It is stupid to carve a yew tree into the portentous shape of a peacock, a tree only figuratively speaking. It is stupider to cultivate minds to a uniform pattern, like melons grown in bottles. Charles V. of Scotland tried his hand at this kind of carving and curbing. He determined to make all his subjects conform to his own creed. What was the consequence? He committed an outrage, and learnt a lesson which taught him to reason better on the nature of souls. Afterwards, having two clocks that he desired in vain to keep the same time, he exclaimed, 'What a fool I was to fancy I could make men think alike when I cannot even get two clocks to go together!' The greatest fools are those who would cast all souls into their own mould. Souls are more perverse than clockwork, because they are powers, not machines. Every mind has its own master motive power, a distinct spring of action, necessarily producing a difference in working. As, indeed, under the same electric influence, many clocks may now be made to keep the same time, so a community of minds may and do co-operate to the same ends under the same Spirit. But fellow-feeling under a common interest no more makes men work like similar machines than it causes their hearts to pulsate at the same rate. As

souls are often dwarfed at school, like plants growing too thickly to be duly supplied with individual nurture, so they often, when transplanted into larger fields, betray their scantiness of root by their little unsuccessful attempts to become larger. A flock may be fattened. for the market on the same pasture; but minds have such various powers of appropriating what is needed for their individual development, and demand such variety of management, that, without some indulgence to their instincts for different kinds of knowledge and employment, the life of the heart gets feeble, the brain fails, and the man becomes a distorted, stunted creature in mind and morals. A man obliged to conform can only be either a slave or a hypocrite. Why is this? For want of freedom. Unless the will, under instruction, have liberty to work in its own way, the very basis of moral relations is disturbed. A mind that grows under force, especially the force of fear, is tormented, and must grow awry in its morals, because the true source of enjoyment and health is wanting-love and liberty, without which man is indeed a slave. But where love is wanting, the man becomes a brute, to be restrained only by force.

If, then, the only way of improving man's heart and intellect be to promote delight by exciting the will, through love, to seek intelligence, the first man must have felt nothing but freedom. Every law, natural or supernatural, under which his will was brought into action coincided with the working of that will, and he needed only to act to be happy. The will and power

were one, and all without and all within were in accordance with his well-being, because the Maker of man made him not a slave but a co-operator-that is, capacitated to carry out the Divine purpose under natural law, with work ready to his hand and a soul to do it, as the joy of his life. With every increment of knowledge, he knew more of his own value, because he knew more of God. True knowledge is always so much revelation of the Divinity, and man's true dignity is the conscious reception of that knowledge, which, while exalting the soul's felt worth, as it must for ever do, excludes pride by exciting higher adoration of the absolutely Good.

The necessity of working out the purposes of the mind according to laws fixed in the nature of things does not interfere with the true freedom of the rational will, because the mind sees the necessity, and therefore the wisdom, of the laws themselves, and of course chooses to obey them, because wishing to succeed. The will, so to say, moves in the line of natural forces, and so makes them subservient to the end desired. Thus, delight and duty become one. A man, for instance, labours at some handicraft to support his family, and he is happy in his labour because he loves his family— he voluntarily adopts the toil while obeying the law of Providence which requires it. He is free, while still constrained by his love and sense of duty. The consent to such a force is, in fact, a mode of walking with God which a man of sound heart and mind would not forego, since it is the very way indicated as the only safe and happy one.