FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Romans vi. 20.
In being, and so long as they continued, slaves of sin (δοῦλοι τής ἁμαρτίας), the recipients of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans are forcibly described by him as having been, ipso facto, free from righteousness (ἐλεύθεροι τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ). But what fruit had they in the freedom of which they were now ashamed?
“He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside.”
They knew that to whom men yield themselves servants to obey, his servants they are to whom they are obedient, whether of sin unto death, or of loyal service unto righteousness. There is a freedom from righteousness, which is servitude to sin; and there is that service of God which, though a service, or rather because a service, is perfect freedom.
Gray, in the best known of his odes (best known by heart) devises this expressive phrase,
“Constraint, that sweetens liberty.”
It refers to schoolboys, enjoying all the more their playground freedom for the previous and succeeding restraints and constraints of the schoolroom. All work and no play makes a dull boy; but so does all play and no work. In this sense, as in so many others, does the paradox hold good that half is more than the whole (πλέον ἥμισυ παντός), and even a schoolboy can find by experience that a half holiday may be more than a whole one.