t the motives and forces of the
Spirit of God. But in neither case is he independent and free from
obedience. He stands at a meeting-point of the spiritual and material
world, and must be governed by one or the other. In either case man's
life is played upon and dominated by motive-forces, infinitely vaster
and mightier than himself. Let him try (as he has tried) to forget his
necessary dependence--to detach himself from the higher obedience and
to 'be as God,' independent--and he falls necessarily under the
dominion of the lower forces, of his flesh or of the world. If he is
to cease {232} to live below himself, he must consent to surrender to
what is above himself. He must yield his spirit to the divine Spirit,
which is its natural master. So he ceases to be carnal, or governed by
the flesh, and becomes spiritual, or governed by the divine Spirit.
And that is liberty. 'That man,' said Leo the Great, 'has true peace
and liberty whose flesh is controlled by the judgement of his mind, as
his mind is directed by the government of God[3].' God's service, and
that only, is perfect freedom.

Man then is so constructed that he can only cease to fall below himself
by being raised above himself. His life cannot fail to be stamped with
the impress of sin unless it is stamped with the impress of God. The
state of the Christian, surrendered to the fashioning of God, is that
true dependence which is the true liberty. Independent of God, man
stands at last over against God to get what his independent action has
merited; and that is penal death, the inevitable outcome of misused
faculties, enslaved to sin. Surrendered to God in faith, on the other
hand, he receives into his nature, through all its open portals, the
inflooding tide of divine love; and enters, enriched and uplifted, into
the life that {233} is eternal, the life which he shares with Jesus,
the life that is truly human and really divine.

It is of great practical importance that we should get a just idea of
what our freedom consists in. There are men who, under the impulse of
a purely materialist science, declare the sense of moral freedom to be
an illusion. This is of course a gross error. But what has largely
played into the hands of this error is the exaggerated idea of human
freedom which is ordinarily current, an idea which can only be held by
ignoring our true and necessary dependence and limitation. It is this
that we need to have brought home to