to understand your life. Suppose that not what you accomplish, or bear, or suffer, is the key to your experience, but this, — that through what you accomplish, or bear, or suffer, some other life may have more effectiveness or patience or endurance or peace! Others may increase, you may decrease; and your life, which is so inexplicable by itself, may get its meaning through that for which it prepares the way. What justifies it may be, not that which it achieves, but that which it makes possible. It offers itself to that better future, as the little stream offers itself to the river beyond, as though it sang to itself : — "It is better to sit at the fountain's birth Than a sea of waves to win, To live in the love that floweth forth, Each patient service of to-day repeats the Master's prophecy: "Greater things than these shall ye do, because I go to my Father;" each best of to-day makes ready for the better best that is to follow; each self-effacing service of the present world prepares through the wilderness of to-day the way for the Lord of the future to come, and makes his path straighter into the hearts of men. X THE LAW OF LIBERTY The perfect law, the law of liberty. — James i. 25. HE law of liberty, that sounds at first like a contradiction. law but a limiting of liberty? What is liberty but an escape from law? Law shuts you in; liberty lets you out. The law of the State restricts the liberty of the citizen; the laws of nature hamper the freedom of the will. How, then, can the Apostle say that the perfect law brings liberty? He means, I suppose, that the only real liberty in life is to be found, not outside of law, but through it. A country without law the country of the anarchist — is not necessarily a free country. It may be, on the contrary, a place of the most savage despotism. A world without law would not necessarily give greater play to the freedom of man. On the contrary, it would be simply a chaos of disorder, where there would be no scope for liberty. What, then, is the relation of liberty - to law? It is this, that while some laws shut in and enslave life, other laws broaden and enlarge life. One is set free as he passes from one kind of law to the other. Liberty is allegiance to the higher law. We speak, for instance, of a free country. What is a free country? Not a country where people may do just as they please. A country may put people in prison and yet be a free country. It may restrict or prohibit certain forms of business and yet be a free country. Its liberty is not a liberty without law. It is a free country because its laws give every citizen a chance to do his best. Life is open at the top. There is, not equality of condition, but equality of opportunity. The transfer from the lower to the higher rules of life is easy. In so far as a State does this it is a free State. Its law is a law of liberty. Or we speak, again, of a liberal education. What is a liberal, or liberating, education? It is not an education without law. On the contrary, the liberally educated man has submitted himself to discipline and learned the scope and authority of law. Intellectual liberty means freedom from sordid, commercial, or disingenuous views of life, and the trans fer of interest and loyalty to permanent ideals of truth or goodness or beauty. In so far as one has thus transferred his allegiance from narrowing and shifting interests to broadening and ideal interests, he is liberally educated. He has found the law of liberty. But the Apostle in this passage is not writing of politics or of education. He is writing of religion; and he is describing just what religion undertakes to do. Here you are, he means to say, all shut in by the small laws of life, and its petty, engrossing, enslaving interests, so that your life seems to have no scope or vision or quality about it, and you need to get up into the region of some higher law, where you can look out more broadly over life. I heard a while ago of a club in one of our great cities called the A. B. C. This rather elementary title had been taken from one of Henry Drummond's suggestions, that people ought to live, as he said, in their "upper stories; and these young people, who were wanting to live for something higher than their merely social round of pleasure and companionship, called themselves "The Anti-Basement Club." It was their pledge of transfer to higher levels of life; as if they had heard the great word of the parable: "Friend, go up higher!" But when one thus accepts the principle of the A. B. C. and goes into the "upper stories" of life, what is the law that meets him there? It is the law of liberty. Sometimes we wonder precisely what our religion does for us. It does not answer all our questions; it does not feed us or support us or free us from trouble and care. Well, then, what does it do? It gives us a law of liberty. It sets us free from the lower interests which threaten to master our lives. God comes to a human soul and says: "My child, give me thy heart;" and in that allegiance to the higher law the petty interests and cares which were dominating life let go their hold, and the soul enters into the law of liberty. What is the problem of life, but just this transfer of the heart's desire, from the shutin sense of routine, from the basement of life, to the refreshment and strength of the clearer, higher air; and what is liberty except the exhilarating emancipation of that new ideal? "The freer step, the fuller breath, |