The Law of Liberty.
Take these two words, "the law of liberty" liberty and law. They stand over against one another. Our first conception of them is as contradictory. The history of human life, we say, is a history of their struggle. They are foes. Law is the restraint of liberty. Liberty is the abrogation, the getting rid, of law. Each, so far as it is absolute, implies the absence of the other. But the expression of the text suggests another thought, that by the highest standards there is no contradiction, but rather a harmony and unity between the two; that there is some high point in which they unite; that really the highest law is liberty, the highest liberty is law; that there is such a thing as a law of liberty.
I. First, what do we mean by liberty, the oldest, dearest, vaguest, of the words of man? I hold it to mean simply the genuine ability of a living creature to manifest its whole nature, to do and be itself most unrestrainedly. Now between this idea and our ordinary thought of law there must, of course, be an inherent contradiction. The ordinary laws of social and national life are special provisions made for the very purpose of restricting the very natures and characters of their subjects. National law does not aim at the development of individual character, but at the preservation of great general interests by the repression of the characteristic tendencies of individuals. We hear the word "law," and it has this repressive sound. We hear the noise of grating prison doors, of heavy keys groaning in their locks. We see the lines of chains or the lines of soldiers that bind the individual's freedom for some other individual's or for society's advantage. Law is constraint as yet, and is the foe of liberty.
II. The law of constraint is that which grows out of man's outward relations with God; the law of liberty is that which issues from the tendencies of a man's own nature inwardly filled with God. That is the difference. Just so soon as a man gets into such a condition that every freedom sets towards duty, then evidently he will need no law except that freedom, and all duty will be reached and done. You see then what a fundamental and thorough thing the law of liberty must be. All laws of constraint are useless unless they are preparatory to, and can pass into, laws of liberty. This doctrine of the law of liberty makes clear the whole order and process of Christian conversion. Laws of constraint begin conversion at the outside, and work in; laws of liberty begin their conversion at the inside, and work out.
III. The whole truth of the law of liberty starts with the truth that goodness is just as controlling and supreme a power as badness. Virtue is as despotic over the life she really sways as vice can be over her miserable subjects. Here is where we make our mistake. We see the great dark form of viciousness holding her slaves down at their work, wearing their life away with the unceasing labour of iniquity; but I should not know how to believe in anything if I did not think that there was a force in liberty to make men work as they can never work in slavery. There is one large presentation of the fact of sin which always speaks of it as a bondage, a constraint, and consequently of holiness as freedom or liberation; but I believe there is no more splendidly despotic power anywhere than that with which the new life in a man sets him inevitably to do righteous and godly things. If there is one thing on earth which is certain, which is past all doubt, past all the power of mortal hindrance or perversion, it is the assurance with which the good man goes into goodness and does good things, ruled by the liberty of his higher life. Oh for such a liberty in us! Look at Christ, and see it in perfection. His was the freest life man ever lived. Nothing could ever bind Him. He walked across old Jewish traditions, and they snapped like cobwebs; He acted out the Divinity that was in Him up to the noblest ideal of liberty. But was there no compulsion in His working? Hear Him: "I must be about My Father's business." Was it no compulsion that drove Him those endless journeys, foot-sore and heart-sore, through His ungrateful land? "I must work today." What slave of sin was ever driven to his wickedness as Christ was to His holiness? What force ever drove a selfish man into his indulgence with half the irresistibility that drove the Saviour to the cross? Who does not dream for himself of a freedom as complete and as inspiring as the Lord's? Who does not pray that he too may be ruled by such a sweet despotic law of liberty?
Phillips Brooks, The Candle of the Lord,p. 183.
References: James 2:12. R. Gregory, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxii., p. 305; Preacher's Monthly,vol. v., p. 343; J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity,Part II., p. 331.James 2:14-17. T. Hammond, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xii., p. 378. James 2:15. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xviii., No. 1061,