Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader

by John Ludwig Hülshof

I condemn the government of Russia when it oppresses the Jews.

I affirm that to persecute ideas is like persecuting light, air, electricity, or the magnetic fluid.

Ideas escape all persecution. When repressed they explode like powder.

LESSON XXXVIII

FALSE NOTIONS OF LIBERTY

People talk of liberty as if it meant the liberty of doing what a man likes. The only liberty that a man should ask for is the privilege of removing all restrictions that prevent his doing what he ought to do.

I call that man free who is able to rule himself. I call him free who has his flesh in subjection to his spirit; who fears doing wrong, but who fears nothing else.

I call that man free who has learned that liberty consists in obedience to the power and to the will and to the law that his higher soul approves. He is not free because he does what he likes, but he is free because he does what he ought.

Some people think there is no liberty in obedience. I tell you there is no liberty except in loyal obedience. Did you ever see a mother kept at home, a kind of prisoner, by her sick child, obeying its every wish and caprice? Will you call that mother a slave? Or is this obedience the obedience of slavery? I call it the obedience of the highest liberty—the liberty of love.

We hear in these days a great deal respecting rights: the rights of private judgment, the rights of labor, the rights, of property, and the rights of man.