A man has but to assimilate this life-conception and he will be set free, as a matter of course, from the fetters that now restrain him, and feel free as a bird who spreads his wings and flies over the wall that has kept him a prisoner.
They talk of setting the Christian Church free from the State, of granting freedom to or withholding it from Christians. Such thoughts and expressions are strangely misleading. Liberty can neither be granted to nor withheld from a Christian or Christians.
But if there is a question of granting or withholding liberty, then evidently it is not the true Christians who are meant, but only men who call themselves by that name. A Christian cannot help being free, because in the pursuit and attainment of his object no one can either hinder or retard him.
A man has but to understand his life as Christianity teaches him to understand it; that is, he must realize that it does not belong to himself, nor to his family, nor to the State, but to Him who sent him into the world; he must therefore know that it is his duty to live, not in accordance with the law of his own personality, nor of that of his family or State, but to fulfil the infinite law of Him who gave him life, in order to feel himself so entirely free from all human authority that he will cease to regard it as a possible obstacle.
A man needs but to realize that the object of his life is the fulfilment of God's law; then the preëminence of that law, claiming as it does his entire allegiance, will of necessity invalidate the authority and restrictions of all human laws.
The Christian who contemplates that law of love implanted in every human soul, and quickened by Christ, the only guide for all mankind, is set free from human authority.
A Christian may suffer from external violence, may be deprived of his personal freedom, may be a slave to his passions,—the man who commits sin is the slave of the sin,—but he cannot be controlled or coerced by threats into committing an act contrary to his consciousness. He cannot be forced to this, because the privations and sufferings that are so powerful an influence over men who hold the social life-conception have no influence whatever over him. The privations and sufferings that destroy the material welfare which is the object of the social life-conception produce no effect upon the welfare of the Christian's life, which rests on the consciousness that he is doing God's will—nay, they may even serve to promote that welfare when they are visited upon him for fulfilling that will.
A Christian, therefore, who submits to the inner, the divine law, is not only unable to execute the biddings of the outward law when they are at variance with his consciousness of God's law of love, as in the case of the demands made upon him by the government; but he cannot acknowledge the obligation of obeying any individual whomsoever, cannot acknowledge himself to be what is called a subject. For a Christian to promise to subject himself to any government whatsoever—a subjection which may be considered the foundation of State life—is a direct negation of Christianity; since an individual who promises beforehand to obey implicitly every law that men may enact, by that promise utters an emphatic denial of Christianity, whose very essence is obedience in all contingencies to the law which he feels to be within him—the law of love.
With the pagan life-conception it was possible to promise to obey the will of temporal authorities without violating the laws of God, which were supposed to consist in carrying out such customs as circumcision, the observance of the Sabbath, the utterance of prayer at certain periods, abstinence from certain kinds of food, etc. The one did not contradict the other. But Christianity differs from paganism inasmuch as its requirements are not of an external or negative character; on the contrary, they are such as reverse man's former relations toward his fellow-men, and may call for acts on his part which could not be anticipated, and consequently are not defined. Hence it is that a Christian can neither promise to obey nor to disobey the will of another, ignorant as he must be of the nature of its requirements; not only must he refuse to obey human laws, but he cannot promise to do or abstain from doing anything definite at any given time, because he can never tell at what hour or in what manner the Christian law of love, on which his life-conception is based, will demand his coöperation. A Christian, promising in advance to obey unconditionally the laws of men, admits by that promise that the inner law of God does not constitute for him the sole law of his life.