The International Congregational Council which recently convened in Edinburgh was a most interesting religious event, and one of the most impressive utterances on this occasion was a sermon by Dr. George A. Gordon of Boston, having for its text the Master's great prediction, "When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth." Dr. Gordon said in part,—
Two worlds confront the religious mind to-day with new distinctness and impressiveness—the world of authority and the world of freedom. Paul's great image of the two mothers, Hagar bearing children in bondage and Sarah bearing children in freedom, is a mirror of our time. There are now as then two Jerusalems, that of tradition, custom, authority, and that of the advancing spirit of the Christian freeman. Many are afraid of the signs of the times. They think that a world half free and half bond is better than a world absolutely committed to freedom. Their faith in freedom as the opportunity of all great human interests is inadequate; the vast possible peril fills them with dismay. They fear for the fate of religion itself, for the records of religion and the philosophy of religion under freedom. They cannot see that the essential lives by its own right, that it needs no sanction beyond its own character, that it depends upon nothing foreign to itself, that it is as lasting as the order of which it is a part. To these men freedom, when it is under limitation, seems to be good for religion: when under no limitation freedom seems to be the supreme peril of religion. In such distractions of the Christian intellect we return to the words of the text for guidance and hope. They are the great assurance of the religious man in the world of freedom: "Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth."
While the dominant thought of this sermon is freedom, there is no very definite statement as to what freedom means nor how it is to be attained. The distinguished preacher calls attention to the popular opinion that freedom has its dangers and that it may be abused, a view which is doubtless held largely by mankind, and which seems to be supported by experience, although it is not in accord with the teachings of the Master, as understood in Christian Science. A false sense of freedom must undoubtedly work ill, as history shows; but happily a false sense of anything can only destroy that which is evil, for all good is secure in the divine consciousness, protected by divine law.
