CHAPTER IX.

MENTAL AND MORAL FREEDOM.

THE inevitable consequence of the enlargement of the circle of our knowledge, and the progress of our mind in the great lessons of sound education, must be the increase of mental independence and freedom; and this is certainly the most valuable of all freedoms man can enjoy. He may be a freedman from the chain of the oppressor, and the whip and Scourge of the overseer; he may be free of his country, and may lift up his voice in the framing of her institutions, or he may roam at will through all her gay and beautiful forests and fields; he may be free of the city, and be entitled to sit in old Chartered Guilds and Corporations, and all these freedoms have, or are supposed to have their value; and the freedom to move to and fro amidst the glorious scenery of Nature, beneath her skies and stars, and over her heaths and moors, is indeed a noble and exhilarating freedom. Free of the mountain, the moor, the forest, and the heath; free to

enter the ancient corporation of birds, and fluttering insects, and leaping squirrels, and bounding hares; it is a freedom, to our thinking, as far in value beyond the musty old parchment corporations of fat aldermen and drunken common-council men, as a mountain is beyond the cell of a moldewart. But, excellent as this freedom is, there is a nobler; the freedom of opinion, the freedom of conscience, freedom to investigate and to enquire, freedom to set antique error at defiance, freedom to hold what consciousness has determined to be right. This is the freedom, and those are the noblest natures where such freedom exists in its largest and fullest degree; and, therefore, tyrants have desired especially to obtain possession of the minds of their subjects; the power over the body was disregarded so long as there was a recess in the soul where the utmost freedom might reign; and, therefore, the dread which has been felt of religious liberty, for it is the parent, and herald, and in the battle for freedom, the warmest comrade of civil liberty. A part of the education of a young man, in these days, is to ascend to a lofty idea of freedom, a wellbalanced and consistent freedom; a freedom having its foundations in the holiest feelings of humanity; a freedom jealous of the rights of others, because most duly weighing and understanding its own. How shall such a conception of freedom and slavery exist in the mind that the independence of the in

dividual shall be secured? for, let my reader remember, that this freedom it is at once utterly out of the power of King or Kaiser, law or lawyers, to give or take away; it grows from the profoundest depths of the moral being, the roots strike there, and thence they shoot forth their branches over the whole private and public life.

Of mental and moral freedom, the world has produced no finer illustration than our own John Milton; he, alike in the days of light and darkness, lived for freedom, but a freedom far beyond the conception of most of those by whom he was surrounded. How like a Sampson he broke the withes, the superstitions and prejudices of his time? how, independently of any party, he spoke out what seemed to him to be truth? there was in his life no thought of pleasing man, or party of men; in his intellect he reverenced truth, the truth had made him free. Kingcraft and Priestcraft were alike his abhorrence, and the words, the immortal words he wrote in behalf of liberty, although burnt by the common hangman, possess vitality, not only to enable them to echo to our own times, but to times far beyond ours, the truths of emancipated man. If any character might be especially cited to set before youth, surely that character is John Milton, who refused to subscribe the college articles, and was thence expelled because he would not subscribe "slave;" Although belonging to the Puritan

party, by whom poetry was denounced, he did not forsake it in obedience to the requisitions of his

sect. And when, after opposing King and Council, his own parliamentary rulers betook themselves to the prohibition and mutilation of books, he stepped forth and lifted up his voice like a trumpet, in one loud, shrill, glorious, chivalric peal, for the freedom of the press. How magnificent was that life! Reading the records of it, we say with Pompey of old, "This it is to be a King!" He could say, if any man could ever say, "My mind to me a kingdom is." Exercising a strong controlling severity over all passions, and all prejudices, subjecting all to his will, so passed his life along. His life and his prose writings are glorious monuments of moral and mental liberty, which all should read and sedulously study, who are in any way prosecuting the work of self-education. Thus he says to us, in his apology for his early life and writings, "My morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not sleeping, or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring; in winter often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour, or to devotion; in summer, as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier; to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its full fraught: then, with useful and generous labours preserving the body's health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear,

and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion, and my country's liberty, when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies, to stand and cover their stations, rather than to see the ruin of our protestation, and the inforcement of a slavish life."

Here we have the full-length portrait of a Free Life, of Mental and Moral Freedom in its highest developement. Now let us look for an instance of Mental and Moral Slavery; and although there are few names in the circle of English literature more commanding our affection, and, for many qualities, our veneration, than that of Dr. Johnson, yet, simply because his is so eminent a name, it may be cited as an illustration of mental slavery. All his life long he was the creature of strong passions and prejudices; and although he had principles of action, and high principles too, yet, in many of the gravest sayings and circumstances of his life, Principle was altogether out of sight. He made it his boast, that in reporting the debates of the House of Commons, "he always gave those Whig dogs the worst on't." With him " a Whig," and "a rascal," were synonymous terms. Greek and Latin were to him of

principal advantage, because "they gave an advantage over others." The line of passing poetry, which really contained a great truth,

"Who rules o'er freemen should himself be free,"