“Take thy lute, wench; my soul grows sad with troubles; Sing, and disperse them if thou canst.” And the singer’s theme is how “in sweet music is such art, killing care and grief at heart.” At another time it is dying Harry IV., who prays his attendants, as they bear him to an inner room— “Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends! Unless some dull[8] and favourable hand Will whisper music to my weary spirit.” And once more, we have Lear’s physician prescribing music for the safer awakening of the distraught old man from that long sleep which was only not his last. _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. Wordsworth sounds the depths of this philosophy in his magnificent Ode to Duty. He is fatigued by freedom; he would be no longer the sport of every random gust; he would no longer stray in smooth walks, but would serve Duty more strictly if he might:— “Through no disturbance of my soul, Or strong compunction in me wrought, _I supplicate for thy control_; But in the quietness of thought: _Me this uncharted freedom tires_; I feel the weight of chance desires; My hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose that ever is the same.”