The Law of Liberty

“So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty.” — JAMES ii. 12.

“THE law of liberty” is the striking expression of this verse, the one that provokes our curiosity.

Of all the qualities which great books and especially the Bible have, few are more remarkable than their power of bringing out the unity of disassociated and apparently contradictory ideas. One of the peculiarities of their use of common words is the way in which they take two which seem directly opposite and, carrying each out into its highest meaning, find for them a meeting-place in some larger truth. It gives us a glimpse of the final unity of all truth. We live down about the bases of the words we use; see them in their simply human relations; see them where they touch the ground. To us they seem to stand opposite, over against each other, ununited, ununitable. But we never must forget that every true thought outgoes its human relations, and for all true thoughts there must be some place of meeting. Inspiration is just the entrance of their complete meaning into human words; and then, filled with God, they are illuminated, and we can trace them all the way up and see that they are not isolated columns, but parts of a structure. They are not opposite and contradictory, but they meet together in an arch of one harmonious meaning. And then all language builds itself from being a wilderness of unconnected pillars, — about which we wander as an insect creeps from pillar to pillar across a vast cathedral floor, having no suspicion of its unity, — into one vast temple wherein intelligent men walk upright, looking upward to where the great roof collects and harmonizes all, and do intelligible worship.

Take these two words, “the law of liberty,” Liberty and Law. They stand over against each other. Our first conception of them is as contradictory. The history of human life, we say, is a history of their struggle. They are foes. Law is the restraint of liberty. Liberty is the abrogation, the getting rid of law. Each, so far as it is absolute, implies the absence of the other. It is a contradiction of terms to speak of them together.

But the expression of our text suggests another thought, that by the highest standards there is no contradiction but rather a harmony and unity between the two; that there is some high point in which they unite; that really the highest law is liberty, the highest liberty is law; that there is such a thing as a law of liberty. This is the thing which we are to study and try to comprehend.

In the first place then, what do we mean by Liberty, that oldest, dearest, vaguest of the words of man? I have defined it often to you. I hold it to mean simply the genuine ability of a living creature to manifest its whole nature, to do and be itself most unrestrainedly. Nothing more, nothing less than that. Against all ternporary and conventional ideas of freedom we assert that, that no man is a slave whose nature has power to ex press and use all of itself; that no man is free whose nature is restrained from such expression.

Now between this idea and our ordinary thought of law there must of course be an inherent contradiction. The ordinary laws of social and national life are special provisions made for the very purpose of restricting the natures and characters of their subjects. National law does not aim at the development of individual character, but at the preservation of great general interests by the repression of the characteristic tendencies of individuals. One man has a tendency to steal. The law sets itself against the freedom of his nature and says “You shall not.” Another’s character tempts him to murder. “No!” says the law, and cramps his liberty of action by the grasp of positive restriction. All national and social law, in the performance of its office, sets itself in struggle with the liberty of the individual, and binds his nature away from certain bad and harmful manifestations. And as law becomes despotic and supreme it goes on to restrict more and more the freedom of the personal nature. A tyrannical law, which has slaves for its subjects, restricts not only bad but good tendencies. A slave says, “I mean to learn to read.” “No,” says the master. “It is not good for the community you live in. Your individual freedom must yield to its requirements.” And so the law shuts his book and takes it away. Another slave says, “I am going to run away; I am my own master; “but at once the law puts its fatal arm out and draws him back and says,” No! It is for our good that you should stay.

Your freedom must yield again;” and so it relocks the fetters.

Thus far, then, you see Law is the opposite of Liberty. Law between man and man, in its legitimate and its illegitimate aspects alike, is the law of constraint. It is always seen holding man back, repressing some tendency which, if the man were perfectly free, would be putting itself out to somebody’s inconveniency. We say the word “law,” and it has this repressive sound. We hear the noise of grating prison-doors, of heavy keys groaning in their locks. We see the lines of chains or lines of soldiers that bind the individual’s freedom for some other individual’s or for society’s advantage. Law is constraint as yet, and is the foe of liberty.

This is the kind of law which always comes first. It was the first law of the world. Just as soon as Adam and Eve stood there free in the garden a law came down and bound itself about their liberty. “Of the tree in the midst of the garden ye may not eat.” This is the first law of every family. The new life of the new child puts itself out into some one of its untried tendencies, and the mother’s love, full of a supreme authority, draws it back, restrains it, says her first “No I” and thereby inaugurates, with her first denial, the struggle between liberty and law in her child’s life. It is the law of all imperfect and immature life, the law of all the Old Testaments, this law of constraint, this law which contradicts the thought of liberty.

Now I make use of this last illustration of the parent and the child to show you how this law of immature life, the law of constraint, being preparatory, ceases; and another, the law of liberty, takes its place. We saw the child’s liberty and the mother’s law in conflict The child said “I will,” and the mother said “You shall not,” and the mother’s authority restrained the child’s free action. Now look at the relation of those same two persons to each other twenty years after. Suppose them to have grown into that higher and more beautiful ideal of parental and filial life, which follows after the age of bare authority and submission has passed away. The child is a man. The mother is gray-haired. The boy is free, his own master. The whole idea of com mand and mastery, the whole old notion of a law of constraint, has drifted away from between them. But is there nothing in its place? See the high dignity with which the son honors himself by bending to the mother’s wish. See with what quicker instinct he has learned to anticipate her will. You discern the whole history of his education in any one act of filial love you see him do her. His nature has become so full, so impregnated with the spirit of love and obedience, that just as soon as it is free, its tendencies set that way. Its free tendencies become to it a law. Its liberty, with a compulsion that is irresistible, makes him her servant. The law of constraint which resulted from their relations is over. The law of liberty which has its source in his free, moral character takes its place. He is obedience and so obeys. He is love, and so a thousand loving acts strew the calm pathway where her descending years must walk.

Now use the illustration. I do not know that I can state it better. The law of constraint is that which grows out of man’s outward relations with God. The law of liberty is that which issues from the tendencies of a man’s own nature inwardly filled with God. That is the difference. Just as soon as a man gets into such a condition that every freedom sets toward duty, then evidently he will need no law except that freedom, and all duty will be reached and done.

Here then, in a moral character which both desires and is able to attempt the right, have we not reached a meeting point of these two contradictions? Have we not gained already some conception of the meaning of a Law of Liberty? I have tried to describe it simply. Here is a law in liberty, a liberty in law. There is no compulsion, and yet the life, by a tendency of its own educated will, sets itself towards God. The man is perfectly free and yet he does God’s will better than if he were chained to do it. The two pillars have met and joined into the arch of a self-deciding original moral life.

You see then what a fundamental and thorough thing this law of liberty must be. It is a law which issues from the qualities of a nature going thence out into external shape and action. It is a law of constraint by which you take a crooked sapling and bend it straight and hold it violently into line. It is a law of liberty by which the inner nature of the oak itself decrees its outward form, draws out the pattern-shape of every leaf, and lays the hand of an inevitable necessity on bark and bough and branch. All laws of constraint, whether in trees or men, are useless and cruel unless they are preparatory to, and can pass into, laws of liberty. My dear friends, if we understood this it would certainly show us the hollowness of a great deal of the life we live. We yield day after day, month after month, on through a long series of tiresome years, to the restraints of morality and religion. Morality says “You must not steal,” and we do keep our fingers off our neighbor’s goods. Religion says “You must pray to God,” and we do say our prayers most toilsomely, morning and evening, summer and winter, as the years go by. It is of no use. It all comes to nothing unless these laws of constraint are passing into laws of liberty within us. Habits of honesty, habits of prayer, are mere bondages unless they are helping somehow the production of a free, honest, and prayerful character. The only object in bandaging and twisting a man’s crooked leg is that some day it may get a free straightness into it which will make it keep its true shape when it is set free from bandages; a law of liberty instead of a law of constraint. If that day is never coming, bandaging is mere wanton cruelty. Better take the bandages off and let it be crooked, if it is getting no inner straightness, and will be crooked as soon as they are removed. Now, just so, this discipline and education, all these commandments and prohibitions which God lays on us; they are mere cruelty, they merely torture and worry humanity, they come to nothing, unless within them some free law of inner rectitude is growing up. One looks across God’s great moral hospital, sees crooked souls tied up in constraints, and wonders, as one might who looked through a surgeon’s ward, behind how many of those bandages an inner life is gathering which some day will ask no binding up and need nothing but its own liberty to be its law. It is a strange question. Suppose to-morrow all the laws of constraint should be repealed together; nothing but laws of liberty left to rule the world; all social penalties, all public restrictions lifted off together; nothing left but the last legislation of character. What would become of us? How, just as soon as our bandages were off, our unshaped lives would fall into their shapelessness. We should see strange sights to morrow morning. The man whom social decencies had kept honest through many well-respected years, we should see how the long constraint with him had been just an outside thing, and his law of liberty, when it had leave to exercise itself, was only a thief’s law born out of a thievish heart. Strange hands would find their way into their neighbor’s treasure. Eyes all unused to glow with lust, would flame out into unholy fire when once the quality of the inner heart had leave to utter itself freely. I tell you, my dear friends, there are very few of us indeed who could stand being judged by the law of liberty. Could you? Would you dare, with the proper shame which a man feels before his fellow-men, would you dare to bid God lift the constraints away, and trust to the power of truth and love and holiness, to the amount of God’s Spirit in your own heart, to carry you along His way to Him?

Thank God there are a few, rare lives that could abide the test. They come just often enough to re assure our faith in human possibilities. Here and there a noble man, a true woman, from whom we feel sure that every last restraint of positive external law might be lifted off; and, just as it needs no hand to guide a sunbeam down the air, just as no heavy pressure has to hold down the round world into a sphere, so it would need nothing but the changed and perfected nature which is in them already to find the way and carry them along it, through every good, to the great final central good, in God.

It is of the first importance to our understanding of the gospel that we should understand the difference between the law of constraint and the law of liberty. It is by the law of liberty, not by the law of constraint, that the gospel establishes its standards. Hence comes that look of it which is the strangest to an outside spectator, the way in which it sometimes seems to depreciate morality and deal with spiritual and sentimental character. Christ took His stand in the midst of a sinning world and, leaving many a special sin unrebuked about Him, He just uncovered hearts with His question, “Dost thou believe in and love Me?” He went, that is, back to character. He knew that acts could be good for nothing except as they grew out of character. He knew that there could be no morality with any reliability or permanence about it, but what carried in it the enactment of a free live life. On this broad basis He founded Christian morality, not as a new code of laws; that would make Him only another Solon or another Numa; but as a new life in the world, as the manifestation of a new regenerated character. That made Him the world’s Savior, that showed Him the world’s God.

And again this doctrine of the law of liberty makes clear the whole order and process of Christian conversion. Laws of constraint begin conversion at the outside and work in. Laws of liberty begin their conversion at the inside and work out. Which is the true way? If you are a drunkard and I want to change you by God’s help, how shall I go to work? I may restrain you if I have the power, heap penalties upon you, shut up all the drinking shops in town, tie you up in your room day after day; I may try that way, and I try in vain. All temperance history has proved it. Restrictive legislation may do something to keep sober men from becoming drunkards, but it can never make sober men out of those who are the slaves of drink already. No; I must take another way. I must feel about the drunkard just exactly as I must about the thief, about the libertine, about the liar, that there is no chance of his special sin being reformed unless the law for its reformation comes out of his own soul, the law of a free character there enacting the great “Thou shalt not!” before which his wickedness must give way. I must feel sure of that; and so I must strike right at the centre and, no matter what sort of a sinner he is, — drunkard or libertine or thief, — I must try somehow to get his heart open to the power of Christ, the changer of hearts. I must begin his reformation by trying after his con version. Many men would call it, no doubt, a very roundabout and unpractical sort of way; to go to preaching the gospel and talking about a change of heart to some poor blear-eyed inebriate who came staggering to you to get cured of his drunkenness. But still the fact remains that if that poor creature’s heart can be changed; and if there is anything at all in the promise of a supernatural regeneration nobody can doubt its possibility; if his heart can be changed, not merely this sin but all sins must go down before the self-enacting law of the new life which will be in him. Other methods of reform may be easier of application than this, but where is any one which, once applied, sweeps the whole field with such a perfect certainty of success?

There are, I doubt not, some among you who need just this radical and thorough truth. You have some one besetting sin. You have tried to get rid of it; you have struggled with it; you have set every law at work upon it; but there it is. It is not dead. It will not die. You have brought it up here to-night, and while I speak you are feeling how live it is all the time, that untruthfulness, that impurity, that selfishness, which no law of constraint has yet sufficed to kill. What you need is just the law of liberty; the law that comes freely out of a changed heart. You must be converted by God’s Spirit before you can conquer down to the root that sin of yours. I do not offer you to-night another specific for its cure. I only spread before you the great offer of Christ, wherein he promises to save our souls and make them healthy, so that out of them nothing but healthy fruits can grow. “Whosoever will, let him come and drink of the water of life freely.”

Again, this truth throws very striking light into one of the verses which precede our text, one of the hardest verses in the Bible to a great many people. “Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, is guilty of all,” it is said. Why? Because the consistent, habitual breakage of one point proves that the others were kept under the law of constraint, not under the’ law of liberty. It proves that the tendency of the nature’s liberty, which breaks forth in this one place, is a bad tendency and not a good one; that if the nature had its way, if all constraint was removed and it simply acted itself out, the nine points of obedience would be less powerful than the one point of disobedience. It takes only one volcano anywhere in the earth to show that the heart of the earth is fire, and that some day it may burst through the thickest crust. It takes only one little quiver of flame, just leaking out between the shingles of a house, to prove that the heart of the house is afire, and that no part of all its safe-looking walls is genuinely secure. You see the flame along the shingles, and you speak of it as a whole; “The house is afire! There is fire in the house!” Just so you see the bad fiery nature which the law constrains breaking through, and again you speak of it as a whole. What particular shingle is burning is of no consequence. “The law is broken. The one whole law is broken by the one whole bad heart! The man has sinned; he is sin; his law of liberty is a law of wickedness.” This is the tragedy of our single sins, dear friends; the tragedy of a fire that runs along the outline of the structure and, little as it is, proves that the whole is in danger; the tragedy of one break in the earth’s crust down which we read the fearful possibility of the last great catastrophe. Down the crack which some one transgression makes in the fair face of a smooth and blooming life, we can see waiting for God’s judgment-word, the fire before which that life shall be at last consumed with fervent heat.

The whole truth of the law of liberty starts with the truth that goodness is just as controlling and supreme a power as badness. Virtue is as despotic over the life she really sways as vice can be over her miserable subjects. Here is where we make our mistake. We see the great dark form of viciousness holding her slaves down at their work, wearing their life away with the unceasing labor of iniquity; but I should not know how to believe in anything if I did not think that there was a force in liberty to make men work as they can never work in slavery. You take a state that has been dependent and make it suddenly independent, free it from all the old obligations and tributes, and just let it be at liberty to develop its own self-reliant life. Does it stop working and settle back into barbarism? Does not the new liberty prove to it a new law? Does not inspiration come splendidly out of its independence, and the whole state lift itself up and answer the demands of its freedom with a before untried capacity of work?

So of the man as well as of the state. You take any slave to whom his liberty has been given. What is the result? Does he just sit down counting his liberty a mere liberty to do nothing, and, with hands folded before him, fall even far back beyond the listless labor of his slavehood’s days? Ask the men who have been among the emancipated slaves. Sometimes, at first, they tell us such is the case; but almost always, when the truth of liberty gets in and settles on the poor dark brain, when the poor chattel really gets to know and believe that he is his own man, there comes forth from the new liberty a new law. There is a compulsion about the needs of his novel life which drives him harder and gets more work out of him than his master’s frown or whip had ever used to do. He studies or digs or fights under the inner impulse of a new-found manhood, which is his law of liberty.

Now that is an illustration. It represents the incentive power of all freedom. There is one large presentation of the fact of sin which always speaks of it as a bondage, a constraint, and consequently of holiness as freedom or liberation. “The bondage of sin and death.” “The perfect liberty of the children of God.” Those are the two terms. Now if our illustration includes a truth, it must be with every bondman just as with the black slave of the South, that his liberty will be a larger and more imperative compulsion to him than his slavery can be. This is what I want to believe. When I see a man toiling in some one of the slaveries of sin, I want to think: “Yes, he is working hard, but not half as hard as he would if he were free, and set on by an inner love to labor for the cause of holiness.” I want to hold that in the nature of things right has a supreme control over its servants which the wrong can never win over its slaves. And I do hold it. I believe I see it. I be lieve there is no more splendidly despotic power any where than, that with which the new life in a man sets him inevitably to do righteous and godly things. If there is one thing on earth which is certain, which is past all doubt, past all the power of mortal hinderance or perversion, it is the assurance with which the good man goes into goodness and does good things, ruled by the liberty of his higher life.

The law of liberty! This is its manifestation. This is the picture of its meaning, this character of the regenerated man. Free, yet a servant! Free from external compulsions, free from sin; yet a servant to the higher law that issues forever from the God within him. In him is realized that high conception of the Collect in our morning service, which you and I utter Sunday after Sunday, and which he lives on from day to day. “O God, whose service is perfect freedom.” He never says to himself “I must.” God never speaks to him “Thou shalt;” but straight across every temptation and expediency, across the prejudices of his own education and the perplexing standards of the world, across every social or national intimidation, he goes to do the thing he knows is right. He thinks right, and speaks right, and acts right, simply because he is right and is compelled to it by the liberty of his new nature. Liberty is a positive thing, not merely negative: it works and lives and struggles and is driven by a queenly compulsion to everything that is good.

O for such a liberty in us! Look at Christ and see it in perfection. His was the freest life man ever lived. Nothing could bind Him. He walked across old Jewish traditions and they snapped like cobwebs. He acted out the divinity that was in Him up to the noblest ideal of liberty. But was there no compulsion in His working? Hear Him: “I must be about my Father’s business.” Was it no compulsion that drove Him those endless journeys, footsore and heartsore, through His ungrateful land? “I must work to-day.” What slave of sin was ever driven to his wickedness as Christ was to holiness? What force ever drove a selfish man into his voluptuous indulgence with half the irresistibility that forced the Savior to the cross? 0 my dear friends, who does not dream for himself of a freedom as complete and as inspiring as the Lord’s? Who does not pray that he too may be ruled by such a sweet despotic law of liberty?

By this law we shall be judged. How simple and sublime it makes the judgment day! We stand before the great white throne and wait our verdict. We watch the closed lips of the Eternal Judge, and our hearts stand still until those lips shall open and pronounce our fate; heaven or hell. The lips do not open. The Judge just lifts His hand and raises from each soul be fore Him every law of constraint whose pressure has been its education. He lifts the laws of constraint and their results are manifest. The real intrinsic nature of each soul leaps to the surface. Each soul’s law of liberty becomes supreme. And each soul, without one word of condemnation or approval, by its own inner tendency, seeks its own place. They turn and separate, father from child, brother from brother, wife from husband, each with the old habitual restrictions lifted off, turns to its own; one by an inner power to the right hand, another by a like power to the left; these up to heaven, and these down to hell. Do we need more? It needs no word, no smile, no frown. The freeing of souls is the judging of souls. A liberated nature dictates its own destiny. Could there be a more solemn judgment seat? Is it not a fearful thing to be “judged by the law of liberty “?

“So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty.” Is this James, then, what foolish readers of the Bible call him, a shallow moralist and formalist? Is Paul or John more profound? How must they speak and do who live in sight of such a judgment? With what continual searching of their hearts! How solemnly they must speak! How solemnly they must do! What a deep reverence and awe and independence must be in them! How real the things of the soul, the things of right and wrong, the things of spiritual life, must be! Above all, how they must wrestle and pray to win from God that gift of the regenerating Spirit which can change their hearts down to the core; make them, like Christ’s heart, the spontaneous source of every holiness; make their law of liberty a law of everlasting me!