Liberty Under Laws

Liberty Under Laws

Preached by the Abolitionist Pastor from Brooklyn, Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, during Christmas of 1862. Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, NY

Adapted and Intro by Matthew Hernandez

Matthew is a Mexican American who was born in LA, served 15 months in Iraq as a US Soldier, and is now an independent street-journalist living in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, NY.

Liberty is defined as, the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.

In this powerful message from Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, he describes the same power struggle of corrupt men who aim to dampen the liberty of our collective society.

Beecher warns of how those in power will always aim to subdue free thinking in hopes of leaving people helpless against tyranny. He however fills us with great hope, in the face of these ongoing threats. 

- Matt Hernandez

The only liberty that a man has, is the liberty to use himself, in all his powers, according to the laws which God has imposed on those powers. The only liberty in this world is the liberty to be unhindered in obeying natural laws. Our directions, our tendencies, and therefore our duties, are all expressed in the laws that God has made; and when we come to those laws we are bound to obey them; and if anybody hinders us, then our liberties begin. As toward God, liberty means obedience to laws; and it is only when we are disputed in the right of this obedience by men, that we begin to get an idea of liberty. We have a right to obey God, whether he speaks on Sinai, or in muscle or bone or faculty, or any other way. It is our liberty to unfold natural laws, and to follow them.

Sovereignty & Liberty

This is the sovereignty of man. It is the right of every man over his own mind, heart, and body; over his time, movements, and relations to the physical world. It is the sovereignty of every man over himself. It is his right to have and hold and use himself according to the laws that God made. That is his liberty; and if any one attempts to take it away from him, he attempts to deprive him of so much of his liberty. If he does not know how to use himself thus, he loses by his ignorance so much of his liberty.

This sovereignty has seldom been exercised by, or even revealed to, the mass of men in the world. Man has been rigidly hindered and hampered by civil and secular impositions as to his body. Men have not been allowed to exercise their natural physical capacities according to the law of their own development. It has been in this respect as it was in Egypt in respect to business. It was ordained what calling a man should follow. If he was born of a priest, he had a right only to be a priest. If he was born of a mechanic, he was bound to be a mechanic. He could not elect, according to the formal law of adaptation, what career he would engage in, where he would go, or what he would be. 

Laws have divided men, cut them up into classes, and set apart to some much, to others less, to others still less, and to others almost nothing except the crumbs that fall from the table of the more favored. And it is no small thing to say to every human being on the earth, “God gave you the right to develop your body, and all that pertains to it, according to the law that is in you, and not according to the law that happens to be in the civil society where you are.”

Though a man be born black as midnight, — though his face is as if all the stars of darkness had kissed him, still, if he is born with the tongue of an orator, he has God’s permission and God’s ordination to be an orator; and nobody has a right to say to him, “You shall not.” If a man has an artificer’s skill in his hand, he has a right to cut and carve, whether it be machinery or statue or what not; and nobody has a right to say to him, “ You shall not follow out the law that is infixed in your organization and your constitution.” And this is what I consider to be the most atrocious thing in that most atrocious, heaven-abhorred and hell-beloved system of slavery.

Natural Laws of God

Men defend slavery on the ground that the black men of the South are well fed and clothed, and are apparently happy in their condition; but the fact that they have enough to eat and to wear, and that they can sing, is no evidence that they have all the rights of their manhood.

They have a right to listen to the voice of God in their faculties and organization, and to follow out the laws that God has put in them. We have four million people before whom we stand in all the majesty of local and national law, and say: “You shall not come up into yourself; you shall not have the liberty to be what God made you able to be; you shall not be free to obey the laws of your being,” — this is to go at right angles to Divine decrees; it is to contravene God’s creative idea.

Education & Liberty

Man has been robbed, likewise, of his mind, that is, of his education. An uneducated mind is like undug ore. Iron on my farm is nothing. When I have dug it out, and smelted it, and purified it, and when it has been made into a sword, into knives, into utensils or machinery of any sort, then the mineral has been educated. Now a man is nothing but a mine of undug faculties. The first step in education consists in digging them out in the rough, preparatory to bringing them to their perfect form.

When a man is first born, he is like an acorn. But in an acorn — that is, in its possible future — there is timber. In a bushel of acorns there are ships, there are dwellings, there are curiously carved cornices and statues. And when men are born, they are born into philosophers, into statesmen, into orators, into patriots, into wise men, provided that, being born, they are planted, and developed, and given an opportunity to grow to that which God thought of when he created them. But the belief of the human race has been that the man who knew much was a very dangerous creature. The heresy of five thousand years out of six, and of five hundred more, and of a hundred more besides, has been that knowledge was dangerous for the common people.

And it has been, since time began, the heresy that education was to be feared. Priests have been afraid, and prime ministers and princes and kings have been afraid, of education. And yet to every man belongs the liberty of having the fullest development of all that God put into the making of the human mind. We are called to liberty. It is a part of the design of that system which lies under the foundations of society, that every man has a right to the full use of every faculty of his mind according to the law that God established in that faculty.
God’s Children

The poorest creature, the lowest creature, the meanest creature, is immortal, is an eternal heir of God, and bears a spark of divinity within them. This revelation of what a person is, in and of their own nature, without any regard to their circumstances, is the key-note of civilization, and the key-note of the liberties of states and of communities that shall be permanent and normal and philosophical.

It is no small thing for a person to know that. Why, a slave that knows it and sings it, a slave that dreams of heaven and chants of Christ, is richer than is the richest master that has no god but the Devil, and stands higher in the sight of angels than he. For as angels come with God’s blessings down to us, methinks they fly but a little way before they reach the spirits of some of those sainted old slaves, and that then they descend.

Christ restores and enforces the right of a woman and man to use all their nature according to the law which God has fixed in every part of that nature, without hindrance from without. They do this by their Gospel; and I am entitled to preach that Gospel. But suppose I undertake to preach the Gospel in Georgia, in full, — not the letter which kills, but the spirit which makes alive ? They want me to do it. I am frequently asked why I do not do it. They exhort me, with a fidelity and a pathos that do not fail to touch me, to preach the Gospel! And I have made up my mind that I will. And today I begin by declaring, in the words of this passage,

“Ye have been called unto liberty.” Hear it, every Calmuck, every Tartar, every Chinaman, every Japanese, every Italian, every Austrian, every Russian serf, every Frenchman; hear it, among the mountain fastnesses of Norway and Sweden, through England, and along the German coast; hear it in the islands of the sea; hear it, ye denizens of the forests of America; hear it, ye slaves on every plantation throughout the bounds of the land; everywhere, in all the earth, hear the Gospel, ”YE HAVE BEEN CALLED UNTO LIBERTY!”

Liberty Defined

What is liberty? I declare that it is the right of every man who is born unto this world to use every power, every faculty of his being, according to the law that God has fixed in that power and in that faculty, and not according to any external imposition of man. This is the liberty to which you are called. And do you want me to preach the Gospel any more? [Voices: Amen! Amen!] “And let all the people say, Amen.”

Christ has given to every one of us liberty of thought and liberty of belief. It is not irresponsible liberty of thought that we are called to. We have no liberty of thinking that disdains the laws of thinking. There is no liberty that does not involve the observance of law. Nevertheless, you have, every man has, as much right as I have to read God’s Word, to think what truths are in that word, and to use every part of the mind in reasoning upon those truths.

Liberty is meant for people, and people are meant for liberty; and the more you can make them understand the law of God that is in them, the more you can drive them up to a full obedience to, and to a complete use of, the law that is written in them, the more safe they will be. A man will be a better father, a better husband, a better brother, a better neighbor, a better citizen, and a better Christian, the more liberty he has. Liberty is the breath of the soul. It is that by which God meant that we should live. Men live just in proportion as they are free; and they come short of true living just in proportion as they are cramped and confined and imprisoned. And how few there are that live, in the large sense of the term! Nevertheless, we are called to the royal gift of liberty in Jesus Christ.

Responsibility of Liberty

It is a serious responsibility that goes with liberty; if you have it, you must use it in the fear of God for the good of others as well as for your own good.

May God give us liberty, all of us, in Jesus Christ, and may he teach us to use that liberty as Christ himself used it, “who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and, being found in fashion as a man, humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” And then may God highly exalt us as he exalted him, and give us, as he gave him, a name which is above every name, because our liberty has been used for others, and not for ourselves alone.

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