The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define.  It refers finally to the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save their lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice.  Ruskin rebuked Coleridge for praising freedom, and said that no man would wish the sun to be free.  It seems enough to answer that no man would wish to be the sun.  Speaking as a Liberal, I have much more sympathy with the idea of Joshua stopping the sun in heaven than with the idea of Ruskin trotting his daily round in imitation of its regularity.  Joshua was a Radical, and his astronomical act was distinctly revolutionary.  For all revolution is the mastering of matter by the spirit of man, the emergence of that human authority within us which, in the noble words of Sir Thomas Browne, “owes no homage unto the sun.”

Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this:  that man is not meant merely to receive good laws, good food or good conditions, like a tree in a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure in selecting and shaping like the gardener.  Perhaps that is the meaning of the trade of Adam.  And the best popular words for rendering the real idea of liberty are those which speak of man as a creator.  We use the word “make” about most of the things in which freedom is essential, as a country walk or a friendship or a love affair.  When a man “makes his way” through a wood he has really created, he has built a road, like the Romans.  When a man “makes a friend,” he makes a man.  And in the third case we talk of a man “making love,” as if he were (as, indeed, he is) creating new masses and colours of that flaming material an awful form of manufacture.  In its primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god in man, or, if you like the word, the artist.

In its secondary political sense liberty is the living influence of the citizen on the State in the direction of moulding or deflecting it.  Men are the only creatures that evidently possess it.  On the one hand, the eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness.  On the other hand, ants, bees, and beavers exhibit the highest miracle of the State influencing the citizen; but no perceptible trace of the citizen influencing the State.  You may, if you like, call the ants a democracy as you may call the bees a despotism.  But I fancy that the architectural ant who attempted to introduce an art nouveau style of ant-hill would have a career as curt and fruitless as the celebrated bee who wanted to swarm alone.  The isolation of this idea in humanity is akin to its religious character; but it is not even in humanity by any means equally distributed.  The idea that the State should not only be supported by its children, like the ant-hill, but should be constantly criticised and reconstructed by them, is an idea stronger in Christendom than any other part of the planet; stronger in Western than