sus seems to answer: "That depends upon what it is to be free.
It is a question of your definition of liberty. You seem to believe
that to be free one must have no authority or leadership or master.
But I say unto you that there is no such liberty. You must be the
servant of something. You must be under the authority of your law, or
your superstition, or your God, or yourself. Freedom on any other
terms is not freedom, it is lawlessness. {196} Indeed it may be more
like slavery than freedom."

What is a free country? Not a country without law,--a country of the
anarchist,--but a country where the law encourages each citizen to be
and to do his best. A free country gives every man a chance. It opens
life at the top. It invites one's allegiance from the things which
enslave to the things which enlarge. And that is the only liberty,--a
transfer of allegiance, a higher attachment, which sets free from the
lower enslavements of life. Suppose a man is the slave of a sin, how
does he get free? He frees himself from his sin by attaching himself
to some better interest. Sin is not driven out of one's life; it is
crowded out. Suppose a man is the slave of himself, sunk in the
self-absorbed and ungenerous life, how does he get free? He gets free
by finding an end in life which is larger than himself. He becomes the
servant of the truth, and the truth makes him free. Suppose a man asks
himself, "What can religion do for me? It does not solve all my
problems, or satisfy all my needs. What then does religion do?" Well,
first of all, it gives one liberty. It detaches one's life from {197}
the things which shut it in, and attaches it to those ideal ends which
give enlargement, emancipation, range to life. God speaks to you of
duty, of self-control, of power in your prayers, and then you go out
into the world again, not as if all were plain before you, but at least
with a free heart, and a mind not in bondage to the world of
circumstance or of trivial cares. The truth of God, so far as it has
been revealed to you, has made you free. You have found the perfect
law, the law of liberty.

{198}

LXXIX

THE SOIL AND THE SEED

_Matthew_ xiii. 1-9.

It takes two things to make a seed grow. One is a good seed, and the
other is a good soil. One is what the sower provides, and the other is
what the ploughman prepares. God's best seed falls in vain on a rock.
Man's best soil is unfruitful till the sower vis