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Show 282 LillEilTY AKD SLAVERY. and they a1·e welcome to its rewards. But they mistook the thing: it was not liberty transformed; it was ty1·anny un bouud, the very scourge of hell, and Satan's chief instrument of torture to a guilty world. It was neither ~ore nor Jess than Sin, despising Goo, and warring against his image on the earth. \Ve do not doubt--nay, we firmly believe-that in the veritable history of the universe, analogous changes have taken place. But then these awful changes were not mere fairy tales. 'l'hcy a1·e recorded in the word of God. When Lucifer, the great hearer of light, himself was frcr, he sought equality with God, and thence hecame a hateful, hissing serpent in the dust. But he was not fully cursed, until "by devilish art" he reached "the organs of man's faucy," and with them forged the grand illusiou that equality alone is freedom. For even sinless, happy Eve was made to feel herself oppressed, until, with keen desire of equality with gods, "forth reaching to the fruit, •he plucked, she ate:"- "Earth felt tho wound, nnd Natul'C f1·om her sent, Sighing though nil her works, gnvo signfll of wo, That all was lost." ARGUMENT FROM THE PUBLIC GOOD. 283 How much easi01·, then, to cftcct the ruin of poor, fallen man, by stirring up this fierce de sire of equality with disconteutcd thoughts and vain hopes of unattainable good! It is this dark desire, and not liberty, which, in its rage, becomes the "poisonous snake;" and, though decked in fine, allegoric, glowing garb, it is still the loathsome thing, the "false worm," that turned God's Paradise itself into a blighted world. If llfl'. Macaulay had only distinguished between liberty and license,. than which no two things in the univcl'se are more diametrically opposed to each other, his passwn for line rhetoric would not have betrayed him into so absurd a conceit respecting the diverse forms of freedom. Liberty is-as we have seen-the blight emanation of reason in the form of Jaw; license is the triumph of blind passion over all law and Ol'der. lienee, if we would have liberty, the great deep of human passion must be restrained. For this purpose, as Mr. Burke has said, there must be power somewhere; and if there be not moral power within, there must be physical power without. Otherwise, tl1c restraints will be too weak; tho safeguards of libe•-ty will give way, and the passions of men |