e for a man always to represent it to himself as if it were the
restriction, restraint, and prohibition of his life. The man passes
onward into the fuller life which belongs to a man. He merges his
selfishness into that richer life which is offered to human kind. He
makes himself, instead of a single, selfish man, a man of family; and it
is easy enough to consider that marriage and the family life bring
immediately restraints and prohibitions. The man may not have the
freedom which he used to have. So all development of education, in the
first place, offers itself to man, or seems to offer itself to man, as
prohibition and imprisonment and restraint. There is no doubt truth in
such an idea. We never lose sight of it. No other richer and fuller idea
which we come to by and by ever does away with the thought that man's
advance means prohibition and self-denial, that in order that man shall
become the greater thing he must cease to be the poorer and smaller
thing he has been. But yet there is immediately a greater and fuller.
When we hear those words of Jesus, we see immediately that not the idea
of imprisonment but the idea of liberty, not the idea of restraint but
that of setting free, is the idea which is really in His mind when he
offers the fullest life to human kind. Have you often thought of how the
whole Bible is a Book of Liberty, of how It rings with liberty from
beginning to end, of how the great men are the men of liberty, of how
the Old Testament, the great picture which forever shines, is the
emancipator, leading forth out of imprisonment the people of God, who
were to do the great work of God in the very much larger and freer life
in which they were to live? The prophet, the psalmist, are ever
preaching and singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of the life of
man, that man was not imprisoned in order to fulfil himself, but shall
open his life, and every new progress shall be into a new region of
existence which lie has not touched as yet. When we turn from the Old
Testament to the New Testament, how absolutely clear that idea is!
Christ is the very embodiment of human liberty. In His own personal life
and in everything that He did and said, He was forever uttering the
great gospel that man, in order to become his completest, must become
his freest, that what a man did when he entered into a new life was to
open a new region in which new powers were to find their exercise, in
which he was to be able to be