are the mere drudges of
this world,--doing its work, but without any great and far-reaching aim
that makes it worth doing; accepting the tasks allotted to us because we
must, not because we will; living on because we happen to be here, but
without any part in that great future towards which all things are
running on. But this is of the very essence of slavery. For our Lord
here lays His finger on the sorest part of this deepest of human sores
when He says, "The slave knows not what his master does." It is not that
his back is torn with the lash, it is not that he is underfed and
overworked, it is not that he is poor and despised; all this would be
cheerfully undergone to serve a cherished purpose and accomplish ends a
man had chosen for himself. But when all this must be endured to work
out the purposes of another, purposes never hinted to him, and with
which, were they hinted, he might have no sympathy, this is slavery,
this is to be treated as a tool for accomplishing aims chosen by
another, and to be robbed of all that constitutes manhood. Sailors and
soldiers have sometimes mutinied when subjected to similar treatment,
when no inkling has been given them of the port to which they are
shipped or the nature of the expedition on which they are led. Men do
not feel degraded by any amount of hardship, by going for months on
short rations or lying in frost without tents; but they do feel degraded
when they are used as weapons of offence, as if they had no intelligence
to appreciate a worthy aim, no power of sympathising with a great
design, no need of an interest in life and a worthy object on which to
spend it, no share in the common cause. Yet such is the life with which,
apart from Christ, we must perforce be content, doing the tasks
appointed us with no sustaining consciousness that our work is part of a
great whole working out the purposes of the Highest. Even such a spirit
as Carlyle is driven to say: "Here on earth we are soldiers, fighting in
a foreign land, that understand not the plan of campaign and have no
need to understand it, seeing what is at our hand to be
done,"--excellent counsel for slaves, but not descriptive of the life we
are meant for, nor of the life our Lord would be content to give us.

To give us true freedom, to make this life a thing we choose with the
clearest perception of its uses and with the utmost ardour, our Lord
makes known to us all that He heard of the Father. What He had heard of