Obedience and Liberty [pp. 65-86]

OBEDIENCE AND LIBERTY.
activity, will there be found to be any interference with freedom.
If God gave us rare faculties, and then interdicted the use of
them; if he placed no commanding motives before us to stir energy and kindle enthusiasm; if he lifted up no lofty standards to
quicken our interest and excite our imagination, and pointed to
no sublime ideal of manly being; if the truths on which he would
have us meditate were in no way commensurate with the dignity
of our rationality; if the tasks to which he would have us apply
our power and skill were such as must inevitably deform and
belittle and narrow the soul; if the way of life which he prescribes
for us were one in which our highest nature must suffer because
there are no direct nor reflexive inspirations in it, no suggestive
over-broodings, no secret feedings as when roots touch the water
springs, no inner enrichings, no luminous outlooks, no vast and
solemn issues; if he forbid, instead of enjoining us, to think on
whatsoever things are true, and whatsoever things are honest,.
and whatsoever things are just, and whatsoever things are pure,
and whatsoever things are lovely, and whatsoever things are of
good report, and whatsoever things are virtuous, and whatsoever
things are praiseworthy; if he sought to dissuade us from such
an aim, instead of exhorting us, first to have faith, and then to
add to it virtue, and knowledge, and temperance, and patience,
and godliness, and brotherly-kindness, and charity; if any approximation to the divine likeness were an offence to him, and
all his resources of love and light, all his requirements, all his
directions, were not employed for the very purpose of making us
partakers of his own infinite fullness; then there mig,ht be some
propriety in the imputation that obedience is a "pinched and
hide-bound" theory of life, leading, by necessity, to " pinched
and hide-bound" types of character.
What, however, are the facts? Do God's commandments clip
the wings of highest aspirations? Do they tether ability to
confined and unsatisfying ranges? Are they shadows under
which the best vitalities in us can have only a puny growth?
Are they cruel frosts which nip and destroy the supremest
hopes? Does the touch of these commandments paralyze energy
and arrest the due unfolding of all noblest possibilities? Are
they a sort of disguised Delilah whose treacherous mission it is
to rob the stoutest of their mental and moral strength? In every
tendency of them just the opposite. They create and feed aspi
79
1874.]