reeks were the fathers of freedom;
and there have been other peoples in the world's history who have
made glorious and successful struggles to throw off their tyrants
and be free. And they have said, We are the fathers of freedom;
liberty was born with us. Not so, my friends! Liberty is of a far
older and far nobler house; Liberty was born, if you will receive
it, on the first Easter night, on the night to be much remembered
among the children of Israel--ay, among all mankind--when God
himself stooped from heaven to set the oppressed free. Then was
freedom born. Not in the counsels of men, however wise; or in the
battles of men, however brave: but in the counsels of God, and the
battle of God--amid human agony and terror, and the shaking of the
heaven and the earth; amid the great cry throughout Egypt when a
first-born son lay dead in every house; and the tempest which swept
aside the Red Sea waves; and the pillar of cloud by day, and the
pillar of fire by night; and the Red Sea shore covered with the
corpses of the Egyptians; and the thunderings and lightnings and
earthquakes of Sinai; and the sound as of a trumpet waxing loud and
long; and the voice, most human and most divine, which spake from
off the lonely mountain peak to that vast horde of coward and
degenerate slaves, and said, 'I am the Lord thy God who brought thee
out of the land of Egypt. Thou shalt obey my laws, and keep my
commandments to do them.' Oh! the man who would rob his suffering
fellow-creatures of that story--he knows not how deep and bitter are
the needs of man.

Then was freedom born: but not of man; not of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man, but of the will of God, from whom all
good things come; and of Christ, who is the life and the light of
men and of nations, and of the whole world, and of all worlds, past,
present, and to come.

From God came freedom. To be used as his gift, according to his
laws; for he gave, and he can take away; as it is written, 'He shall
take the kingdom of God from you, and give it to a people bringing
forth the fruits thereof.' 'For there be many first that shall be
last; and last that shall be first.' It is this which makes the
Jews indeed a peculiar people: the thought that the living God had
actually and really done for them what they could not do for
themselves; that he had made them a nation, and not they themselves.
It is this which makes the Old Testament an utterly different book,