Article October 8, 1910 Issue

"CALLED UNTO LIBERTY"

ROBERT NALL

True liberty is spiritual, not material. It is emancipation from the enslavement of the senses. It is deliverance from those entanglements which cause mortals to bear a heavy yoke, and which make life so burdensome to humanity. The popular idea of liberty is based upon a wrong concept; and while that is held, there can be no advance into the realm of truth and righteousness. Peer and peasant, rich and poor, the learned and the illiterate, alike are burdened with the thought that they have been deprived of something that would make life happier and more endurable. A feeling of dissatisfaction is the universal possession of mortals. They crave that which they have not; and even should they receive the material things they desire, the hunger remains.

What a hopeless bondage it is when the thought is earthly, the vision cramped, and the consciousness so darkened that spiritual light has as yet found no entrance. As Jesus looked upon the crowds that flocked to him because of his miracle of feeding them, he penetrated into their motives, and in a few words directed their thoughts from the unreal and temporal to the real and spiritual. "Labor not," he said, "for the meat that perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life." He saw them the slaves of sense; he sought to lift them up to a higher and purer conception of what life meant. Knowing that the truth alone makes free, all through his ministry he ever kept in the forefront of his teaching and his example the possibility of deliverance from the thraldom of the fleshly mind, and a present realization of the inheritance which is man's birthright.

Christian Science comes with a clarion call to true liberty. It promises freedom from the misery and suffering under which humanity seems everywhere crushed. It plants its standard on the basic statement, "God made man free" (Science and Health, p. 227), and it ensures to all who will seek, that by patient continuance in well-doing they may know what it is to enter into the "glorious liberty of the children of God." But this means work—steady, persistent, daily and hourly watchfulness. The thought of freedom is exhilarating; it refreshes and strengthens and encourages. The thought, however, must be translated into action. In this connection the writer remembers with profound thankfulness his first reading of the chapter on "Prayer" in Science and Health. He had long been searching for light and liberty, praying as best he knew how; but, having an entirely false conception of God and man, the darkened condition was unchanged. The illumination that came with the true understanding of what prayer is, has never ceased to be a guide to higher spiritual attainment. From that time began the awakening from the false sense of life, and the newer and clearer and purer apprehension of Truth.

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