There is no more pathetic and suggestive picture of limitation than that of a fettered bird. All the impulses and equipment of its nature call for a life that is bounded by nought save the air, the sunlight, and the circle of the world, and when we see one of these gentle creatures deprived of its freedom and its native joy, our hearts speak out with the instinct, if not the authority, of the Master when he said, "Loose him and let him go." And this is the word of Love and Truth to all bondage whether of the body or of the mind. It is the word of right in the presence of every wrong, for whenever there is wrong, there some one is manacled, and fetters of every type are an unseemly denial of man's divinity.
The restraints and limitations which attach to sickness,poverty, fear, the enfeeblement of age and every other entailment of materiality, are never seen to be so incongruous, and intolerable as when we are possessed by a vivid sense of man's true nature and inheritance as a "winged thought" of God. Our fluttering sense of incapacity, our clogged faculties, our weakened condition, and, most painful of all, our dormant heaviness and dull indifference,—these are but the varying manifestations or degrees of that enslavement, in human experience, which, as Jesus taught, is not only unbecoming and unnatural, but unnecessary and heaven-condemned.
There lies before us a monograph which tells the story of the brief earthly life of a beautiful girl, the lovableness of whose character and the richness of whose mental and spiritual endowment constituted her a child of light and of beauty. She is said to have been so delicately organized as to be sensitive to the slightest disharmony, and yet so strong and true and good that she brought encouragement and inspiration, as well as joy and gladness, to all who entered the sunlight of her presence. "The key-note of her nature was love," which ever dispensed a sweet unselfishness, and yet her life was peculiarly trying and painful. Through sickness, poverty, and other causes, her childhood was robbed of its wonted pleasures, her girlhood of its dearest hopes, and when the fragrant petals of womanhood were but just opened, she was smitten by what men have been taught to regard an "inexplicable providence," and passed away.
