FREEDOM.
He that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ’s servant.—I. Corinthians, vii. 22.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.—John, viii. 32.
If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.—John, viii. 36.
As free, and not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants of God.—I. Peter, ii. 16.
Freely we serve,
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall.
Milton.
Yet gave me in this dark estate
To see the good from ill,
And, binding Nature fast in fate,
Left free the human will.
Pope.
Placed for his trial on this bustling stage,
From thoughtless youth to ruminating age,
Free in his will to choose or to refuse,
Man may improve the crisis, or abuse;
Else, on the fatalist’s unrighteous plan,
Say to what bar amenable were man?
With nought in charge he could betray no trust;
And if he fell, would fall because he must;
If Love reward him, or if Vengeance strike,
His recompense in both unjust alike.
Cowper.
Grace leads the right way: if you choose the wrong,
Take it and perish, but restrain your tongue;
Charge not, with light sufficient, and left free,
Your wilful suicide on God’s decree.
Cowper.
True freedom is where no restraint is known
That scripture, justice, and good sense disown,
Where only vice and injury are tied,
And all from shore to shore is free beside.
Cowper.
Where had been
The test of faith if the expanded arm
Of Heaven, in glory and in power displayed,
Had curbed the freedom of the human will,
Nor left the scope of choice!
Samuel Hayes.
If, with streamy radiance, God
Had dazzling beamed upon His creatures’ eyelids,
And shown Himself to their unbandaged view,
And with a voice divine to us had spoken,
Destroying in our hearts the wondrous balance,
(Man ceasing to be man had lost his freedom,)
Our soul would not have struggled with our senses,
And void of freedom what would virtue be?
Pulling, from Lamartine.
For what is freedom, but the unfettered use
Of all the powers which God for use had given?
But chiefly this, Him first, Him last to view
Through meaner powers and secondary things
Effulgent, as through clouds that veil His blaze.
Coleridge.
Man (ingenious to contrive his woe,
And rob himself of all that makes this vale
Of tears bloom comfort) cries, If God foresees
Our future actings, then the objects known
Must be determined, or the knowledge fail:
Thus liberty’s destroyed, and all we do
Or suffer, by a fatal thread is spun.
Say, fool, with too much subtilty misled,
Who reasonest but to err, does Prescience change
The property of things? Is aught thou seest
Caused by thy vision, not thy vision caused
By forms that previously exist? To God
This mode of seeing future deeds extends,
And freedom with foreknowledge may exist.
George Bally.
In a service which Thy will appoints
There are no bonds for me;
For my inmost heart is taught “the truth”
That makes thy children “free;”
And a life of self-renouncing love
Is a life of liberty.
A. L. Waring.