Practical Religion: Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing ChristiansRyle, J. C. (John Charles)
Religion
Practical Religion: Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing Christians
Ryle, J. C. (John Charles)
Christian life -- Anglican authors
Those who want to have more liberty,
would soon find, if they crossed the seas, that there is no country on
earth where there is so much real liberty as our own.[6]
6: The following weighty passage, from the pen of the judicious Hooker,
is commended to the attention of all in the present day. It is the
opening passage of the first book of his "Ecclesiastical Polity."
"He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not
so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want
attentive and favourable hearers, because they know the
manifold defects whereunto every kind of regiment or government
is subject; but the secret lets and difficulties, which in
public proceedings are innumerable and inevitable, they have
not ordinarily the judgment to consider. And because such as
openly reprove disorders of States are taken for principal
friends to the common benefit of all, and for men that carry
singular freedom of mind, under this fair and plausible colour
whatsoever they utter passeth for good and current. That which
is wanting in the weight of their speech is supplied by the
aptness of men's minds to accept and believe it. Whereas, on
the other side, if we maintain things that are established, we
have not only to strive with a number of heavy prejudices,
deeply rooted in the breasts of men, who think that herein we
serve the times, and speak in favour of the present state,
because we either hold or seek preferment; but also to bear
such reception as minds so averted beforehand usually take
against that which they are loth should be poured into them."
But while I bid men not undervalue English liberty, so also on the other
hand I charge them not to _overvalue_ it. Never forget that temporal
slavery is not the only slavery, and temporal freedom not the only
freedom. What shall it profit you to be a citizen of a free country, so
long as your soul is not free? What is the use of living in a free land
like England, with free thought, free speech, free action, free
conscience, so long as you are a slave to sin, and a captive to the
devil? Yes: there are tyrants whom no eye can see, as real and
destructive as Pharaoh or Nero! There are chains which no hands can
touch, as true and heavy and soul-withering as ever crushed the limbs of
an African! It is these tyrants whom I want you this day to remember. It
is these chains from which I want you to be free. Value by all means
your English liberty, but do not overvalue it. Look higher, further than
any temporal freedom. In the highest sense let us take care that "we are
free."
II. The second thing I have to show is _the truest and best kind of
freedom_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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