paradox. Great truths very often present themselves to us in the first
place as paradoxes, and it is only when we come to combine the two
different terms of which they are composed and see how it is only by
their meeting that the truth does reveal itself to us, that the truth
does become known. It is by this same truth that God frees our souls,
not from service, not from duty, but into service and into duty, and he
who makes mistakes the purpose of his freedom mistakes the character of
his freedom. He who thinks that he is being released from the work, and
not set free in order that he may accomplish that work, mistakes the
Christ from whom the freedom comes, mistakes the condition into which
his soul is invited to enter. For if I was right in saying what I said
the other day, that the freedom of a man simply consists in the larger
opportunity to be and to do all that God makes him in His creation
capable of being and doing, then certainly if man has been capable of
service it is only by the entrance into service, by the acceptance of
that life of service for which God has given man the capacity, that he
enters into the fulness of his freedom and becomes the liberated child
of God. You remember what I said with regard to the manifestations of
freedom and the figures and the illustrations, perhaps some of them
which we used, of the way in which the bit of iron, taken out of its
uselessness, its helplessness, and set in the midst of the great
machine, thereby recognizes the purpose of its existence, and does the
work for which it was appointed, for it immediately becomes the servant
of the machine into which it was placed. Every part of its impulse flows
through all of its substance, and it does the thing which it was made to
do. When the ice has melted upon the plain it is only when it finds its
way into the river and flows forth freely to do the work which the live
water has to do that it really attains to its freedom. Only then is it
really liberated from the bondage in which it was held while it was
fastened in the chains of winter. The same freed ice waits until it so