Editorial March 21, 1914 Issue

True Freedom

John B. Willis

As generally understood, freedom means the possession of the unobstructed privilege and power to do as one pleases. It is thought of as exemption from restraint, the ability to gratify the dictum of desire. But wherever and whenever the light "which lighteth every man" has dawned in the world, it has meant an advance in the human thought of freedom; it has made men see that the happiness they have identified with it is not to be found in the gratification of appetite and impulse, but in the escape from their rule. Christ Jesus pressed this upon the thought of mankind as it had never been before. His great theme was that men must become responsive to a higher law, be supreme where they once were subject.

Devotion to this spiritual ideal was splendidly manifest in the early Christians; nevertheless, it is just here that the church has come short in all the later centuries. It has been said that Schiller "distrusted religious organizations of all kinds, fearing their tendency to fetter the human spirit," and that he "found the life of the Spirit to consist in the liberty to discover and assimilate the will of God," that is, divine law. In this the poet surely glimpsed the emancipating light of truth which is so apparent in Christian Science.

The Master came declaring and demonstrating the power of divine Truth, the knowledge of God, to free men from every form of limitation, and his immediate disciples proved this possible; but the cry of heresy awakened by Mrs. Eddy's reassertion of the gospel speaks volumes for the totality of the loss of his inspiring ideal. This is the more surprising as we remember that normally the sense of possible freedom should advance with every increment of its realization. Each successive elevation of consciousness can but enlarge in geometrical ratio the boundary of vision, and in entire keeping with this law of spiritual growth the Master said, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works ... shall he do." The facts of history attest, however, that in the so-called Christian centuries human susceptibility to one of the greatest foes of freedom, namely, disease, and the consequent temptation to fear, have not been lessened but increased.

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