thinks of every change that is to come to him as in the nature of denial of something that he is at the present doing and being, as the laying hold upon himself of some sort of restraint, bringing to him something which says:  “I must not do the thing which I am doing.  I must lay upon myself restraints, restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions.  I must not let myself be the man that I am.”  You see how the Old Testament comes before the New Testament, the law ringing from the mountain top with the great denials, the great prohibitions, that come from the mouth of God.  “Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other—­Thou shalt not murder.  Thou shalt not steal.  Thou shalt not commit adultery.  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.”  That is the first conception which comes to a man of the way in which he is to enter upon a new life, of the way in which the denial in his experience is to take effect.  It is as if the hands were stretched out in order that fetters might be placed upon them.  The man says, “Let some power come that is to hinder me from being this thing that I am.”  And the whole notion is the notion of imprisonment, restraint So it is with all civilization.  It is perfectly possible for us to represent civilization as compared with barbarism, as accepted by mankind, as a great mass of restrictions and prohibitions that have been laid upon human life, so that the freedom of life has been cast aside, and man has entered into restricted, restrained, and imprisoned condition.  So it is with every fulfilment of life.  It is possible for a man always to represent it to himself as if it were the restriction, restraint, and prohibition of his life.  The man passes onward into the fuller life which belongs to a man.  He merges his selfishness into that richer life which is offered to human kind.  He makes himself, instead of a single, selfish man, a man of family; and it is easy enough to consider that marriage and the family life bring immediately restraints and prohibitions.  The man may not have the freedom which he used to have.  So all development of education, in the first place, offers itself to man, or seems to offer itself to man, as prohibition and imprisonment and restraint.  There is no doubt truth in such an idea.  We never lose sight of it.  No other richer and fuller idea which we come to by and by ever does away with the thought that man’s advance means prohibition and self-denial, that in order that man shall become the greater thing he must cease to be the poorer and smaller thing he has been.  But yet there is immediately a greater and fuller.  When we hear those words of Jesus, we see immediately that not the idea of imprisonment but the idea of liberty, not the idea of restraint but that of setting free, is the idea which is really in His mind when he offers the fullest life to human kind.  Have you often thought of how the whole Bible is a Book of Liberty, of how It rings with liberty from beginning to end, of how the great men are the