It is in tones of winning promise and invitation that men are offered the wearing of Christ’s yoke. Let all who are weary and heavy laden come to Him: come, that they may take His yoke upon them. There is a seeming paradox in the invitation. Should not the weary be invited by promised freedom from all yoke-bearing? Should not the heavy-laden be attracted by a pledge of entire immunity from burdens grievous to be borne, whether heavy or light? Not so. Christ’s yoke is easy, but it is a yoke. The burden he imposes is light, but a burden of some sort He does impose. Being made free from sin, men become the servants—servitors, slaves even, δοῦλοι, of righteousness. But in so being made free from sin, and becoming servants, δοῦλοι, to God, they have their fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. And the yoke of privilege promised by Christ differs from the irksome bonds and rigid constraint of scribes and rabbis; a yoke which, says St. Peter, neither we nor our fathers were able to bear, inasmuch as it implies and involves a purely spiritual service—that we should serve (δουλεύειν) in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” Keble says of men, in the “Christian Year,” that, “Freely they own, or heedless prove, The curse of lawless hearts, the joy of self-control.” The joy of self-control. For what Wordsworth expressively calls “unchartered freedom,” as revelled in by those who ignore a holy and happy-making law of duty, is not in the long run, a boon, but a bane. True, that, as Cowper has it, “’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume, And we are weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil.” But the constraint that sweetens liberty is excepted; the control that enfranchises from servitude to self, and exalts to a liberty which monarchs cannot grant: “’Tis liberty of heart, derived from Heaven,” “and held by charter;” “a clean escape from tyrannizing lust.” “Grace makes the slave a freeman;” for “He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves beside.” Byron was drawing on his own bitter experience when he wrote the lines, “Lord of himself—that heritage of woe, That fearful empire which the human breast But holds to rob the heart within of rest.”