WHATEVER their station or circumstance, mortals are ever seeking a larger freedom, and practically all the efforts and activities of the human race are in the line of endeavor to find escape from some sense of limitation or incapacity. This innate and universal longing for liberty upon the part of all noble souls, argues for its legitimacy. It has recently been well said that "the democratic spirit finds the authority of religion ... in the soul's own recognition of its ... divinely bestowed privilege," and with equal fitness it may be said that humanity's desire and persistent struggle for a fuller freedom gives ground and justification for the assumption that this is its legitimate goal, its true belonging.
Happily, some of the grosser forms of enslavement known to the past have disappeared from most civilized countries; nevertheless, the intellectual and commercial advance of the race has never brought genuine emancipation. The form and type of subjection may change, but the enslavement remains the same. This may be illustrated in the economic world. The vassalage, the absolute subjection of the many to the few which characterized the feudalism of the middle ages, has passed away, but in many countries there remains a legalized monopoly of natural resources which still continues the practical enslavement of very many of the people. The condition of great numbers of the involuntary poor in every Christian country today is well-nigh as pitiful as any presented in the so-called "dark ages," and when one thinks further of the fetters of sin and sickness, ignorance and fear, self-depreciation and squalor, in the wretchedness of which the old and the young, the innocent and the guilty are alike submerged, especially in all our great centers of population,—when these obtrusive aspects of human life are disclosed, the compass and extent of present mortal serfdom begins to be seen, and in one's heart of hearts he cries out with the prophet of old, "O Lord, how long!"
Over against the gigantic belief of error's enslavement, Christian Science proclaims the fact of God's will that all men should be free. The divinely beneficent purpose expressed in the declaration, "I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage," is restated in varying form upon well-nigh every page of the Scripture, and Christ Jesus' Oft-repeated explanation of the end for which he had come was that men might have more abundant life, that they might come into their inheritance of the liberty of the children of God. He taught, moreover, that this universal emancipation is to be brought about by learning to know the truth, that the attainment of true freedom is to be a matter of growth in wisdom, the unfoldment of spiritual verities in human consciousness.
