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 charact