Editorial August 1, 1908 Issue

THE "LIBERTY OF THE CHILDREN OF GOD."

John B. Willis

No term is more richly suggestive of the meaning of the ideal life than the word freedom. In his teaching Christ Jesus was ever calling men to a larger liberty. His every healing work was a direct assault upon some human limitation or enslavement, and he epitomized the entire achievement of divine grace for men when he said that it would make them free.

Apart from their subjection to the belief of inherited disease or predisposition thereto, mortals are in bondage to habit, appetite, and all the falsities of material sense. In their ignorance they are lashed by asserted laws from which their ancestors suffered unspeakably, but which those same ancestors reenacted, codified, and imposed as a perpetual disability upon their children. Says the prophet of Israel, "Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge."

Yet more debasing and cruel, however, than the subjection to inherited ills, to ignorance, and to fleshly desired, is that enslavement to fear which is so largely the product of so-called civilization and enlightenment, and which in some form or other pursues and afflicts every son of Adam from his cradle to his grave. Take, for instance, the fear of want. However dreadful poverty may be, anxiety respecting future circumstance and supply, or fear lest a given station or style of living cannot be maintained, is not only well-nigh universal, but incomparably more degrading than poverty itself in its influence upon human character and life. While poverty may prompt to trespass, and beget suffering and desperation for many, the fear of poverty constantly impels an infinitely greater number of every station and rank in life to consent to all that selfishness, trickery, and meanness which defrauds and tends to debase the entire human race.

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