urrender of the
inward life is incomplete, if it be not hypocritical, without the
surrender of external possessions. All the slave's goods belonged to the
owner.

And the owner has another right. He can say, 'Take that man's child and
sell him in the market!' and he can break up the family ties and
separate husband and wife, and parent and child, and not a word can be
said. Our Master comes, not with rough authority, but with loving,
though absolute authority, and He sometimes untwines the hands that are
most closely clasped, and says to the one of the two that have grown
together in love and blessedness, 'Come!' and he cometh, and to the
other 'Go!' and she goeth. Blessed they who can say, 'It is the Lord!
Let Him do what seemeth Him good.'

Now, dear friends, this absolute authority cannot be exercised by any
man upon another man, and this unconditional submission, which Jesus
Christ asks from us all, ought not to be rendered by any man to a man.
It is a degradation when a human creature is put even in the external
relation of slavery and servitude to another human creature, but it is
an honour when Jesus Christ says to me, 'Thou art Mine,' and I say to
Him, 'I am Thine, O Lord, truly I am Thy servant; Thou hast loosed my
bonds.' In the old Saxon monarchies, some antiquarians tell us, the
foundation of our modern nobility or aristocracy is found in that the
king's servants became nobles. Jesus Christ's slave is everybody else's
master. And it is the highest honour that a man can have to bow himself
before that Lord, and to take His yoke upon him and learn of Him. So
much, then, for my first point; now a word with regard to the second.

II. The sale, and the price.

'The Lord that bought them.' You perhaps remember other words which say,
'Ye are bought with a price; be not the servants of men'; also other
words of this Apostle himself, in which he speaks, in his other letter,
of being 'bought with the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without
blemish and without spot.' Now notice, Christ's ownership of us does not
depend on Christ's Divinity, which I suppose most of us believe, but on
Christ's sacrifice for us. It is perfectly true that creation gives
rights to the Creator. It is perfectly true that if we believe, as I
think the New Testament teaches, that He, who before His name was Jesus
was the Eternal Word of God, was the Agent of all Creation, and
therefore has rights. But Christ's heart does not care for