Liberty

Denotes a state of freedom, in contradistinction to slavery or restraint.

1. Natural liberty, or liberty of choice, is that in which our volitions are not determined by any foreign cause or consideration whatever offered to it, but by its own pleasure.

2. External liberty, or liberty of action, is opposed to a constraint laid on the executive powers; and consists in a power of rendering our volitions effectual.

3. Philosophical liberty consists in a prevailing disposition to act according to the dictates of reason, 1: e. in such a manner as shall, all things considered, most effectually promote our happiness.

4. Moral liberty is said to be that in which there is no interposition of the will of a superior being to prohibit or determine our actions in any particular under consideration.

See NECESSITY, WILL.

5. Liberty of conscience is freedom from restraint in our choice of, and judgment about matters of religion.

6. Spiritual liberty consists in freedom from the curse of the moral law; from the servitude of the ritual; from the love, power, and guilt of sin; from the dominion of Satan; from the corruptions of the world; from the fear of death, and the wrath to come; Rom 6:14. Rom 8:1. Gal 3:13. Joh 8:36. Rom 8:21. Gal 5:1-26 1Th 1:10.

See articles MATERIALISTS, PREDESTINATION, and Doddridge’s Lec. p. 50, vol. 1: oct. Watts’s Phil. Ess. sec. 5: p. 283; Jon. Edwards on the Will; Locke on Und. Grove’s Mor. Phil. sec. 18, 19. J. Palmer on Liberty of Man; Martin’s Queries and Rem. on Human Liberty; Charnock’s Works, p. 175, &c. vol. 2:; Saurin’s Sermons, vol. 3: ser. 4.

Besides the common application of this term, it is used in scripture symbolically, as

1. The liberty obtained by Christ for those that were captives of Satan. Isa 61:1; Luk 4:18; Joh 8:36.

2. The conscience set free from guilt, as when the Lord said to several, "Thy sins be forgiven thee: go in peace."

3. Freedom from the law, etc. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free." Rom 7:24-25; Gal 5:1. Jesus said, "I am the door: by me if any man enter in he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture." Joh 10:9.

4. The Christian’s deliverance from the power of sin by having died with Christ, as in Rom 6:8-22; and, having reckoned himself dead to sin, experimentally enjoying liberty, as in Rom 8:2-4, after experiencing that the flesh is too strong for him The deliverance is realised by the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, and the love of God is known and enjoyed. Christ is then the object before the soul, and not self.

LIBERTY.—Christ and His first disciples clearly regarded liberty as an essential of the highest religious life. He begins His mission at Nazareth with the words of Isaiah that His work was ‘to set at liberty them that are bruised’ (Luk 4:18). By His contrast of the Mosaic law with His own ‘I say unto you’ of Mat 5:22; Mat 5:28; Mat 5:39, He declares His disciples to be free of the ancient law; their worship no longer fettered by place (Joh 4:21); their very Sabbath, which had held them together in the Captivity, an institution to be sanely used for any kind of good work and any sinless pleasure (Mar 2:27, Mat 12:8, Luk 5:1-5). New wine-skins must be made for the new wine (Mar 2:22, Luk 6:38). The disciple must hold himself entirely at liberty from the things of the world for the world’s sake; he must stand ‘with loins girded about and lamp burning’ (Luk 12:35), unhindered by multitudinous possessions (Luk 12:15), not anxious as to the lesser matters of clothing, food, and shelter (Mat 6:25, Luk 12:22), taking ‘no bread, no wallet, no money,’ whereon he may come to depend too much (Luk 9:3; Luk 10:4, Mat 10:9, Mar 6:8). If the rich young man would be perfect, he must learn to be the free master of his riches, not their slave, even though he may have entirely to disperse them in order to assure himself of his spiritual liberty (Mat 19:21, Luk 18:22). In all things the disciple must be absolutely free for his mission, and ‘leave the dead to bury their own dead’ (Mat 8:22, Luk 9:60). His utterance itself must partake of the same liberty, not crippled by the slow movement of the intellectual faculties, but made vivid by immediate contact with the Holy Spirit: ‘Settle it therefore in your hearts not to meditate beforehand how to answer’ (Luk 21:14, Mar 13:11, Mat 10:19). Christ promises that the disciple who prizes His word shall come to know the greater fulness of truth, and that revelation shall liberate him; he shall no longer be a bond-servant of sin (it would be impossible, having once seen the light); he shall be free with all the liberties of sonship (Joh 8:32; Joh 8:34-36).

Jesus Himself exhibits the surprises which the ‘law of liberty’ (Jas 1:25) has within it. He tells of the master who, finding his servants alert and faithful, flings conventionality to the winds, ‘girds himself, makes them sit down to meat, and himself serves them’ (Luk 12:37). He tells His host that it were a higher thing to dare to invite, not his relatives and wealthy friends, but the poor, the lame, the blind, who could never recompense him (Luk 14:12). In dealing with the woman taken in sin,* [Note: Although no part of the correct text of John 8, the Pericope Adulterœ probably embodies a true reminiscence of an incident In our Lord’s ministry.] He takes the course of the moment, as novel as it is searching in its free way (Joh 8:1-11). The cruse of precious ointment is looked at as the symbol of an affectionate impulse, more to be valued than a calculated act of philanthropy—selling and giving to the poor (Mar 14:5, Mat 26:6-12, Joh 12:5). Pharisees are startled at His frank intercourse with publicans and sinners (Mar 2:16, Luk 5:30; Luk 15:2). In vain He likens the liberty of the Spirit to the wind ‘that bloweth where it listeth’ (Joh 3:8); few can understand the variety of the workings of the Divine Spirit in man, Wisdom only being justified by ‘all her children’ (Mar 11:19, Luk 7:35), to the confusion often of those who cannot comprehend a John the Baptist abstaining and the Son of man ‘eating and drinking.’ There are times when Christ seems deliberately to lead His hearers, and especially the formalists among them, into problems that find no solution in ‘the Law,’ but that compel an exercise of liberty of judgment, as in the ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ (Luk 20:25, Mat 22:21), ‘the baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men?’ (Luk 20:4), and the question, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day, or not?’ (Mar 3:4, Luk 6:9; Luk 14:3). The principle of true liberty, as our Lord taught and lived it, would go far in encouraging the believers in ‘the reunion of Christendom,’ especially such a command as ‘Forbid him not: for he that is not against you is for you’ (Luk 9:50).

That the Apostles so understood Christ can hardly be questioned. Throughout the NT liberty (ἐλευθερία, and its even more confident form ἐξουσία) runs as a golden thread, distinguishing the New Dispensation from the Old. There is the same joyous exercise of the power of a new life that Christ foretold. The writers have met one of the deepest problems of philosophy (man’s freedom of will), and have boldly pronounced upon it. St. Paul has no hesitation in asserting man’s natural liberty in the light of the spiritual liberty now made known through Jesus Christ. He claims the right (ἐξουσία) of free action in the common affairs of life, in food, in marriage, in the pastor not necessarily labouring manually, but sharing in material provision in return for his spiritual toiling (1Co 9:4-6; 1Co 9:12 bis), just as St. John will claim for the purified soul the same liberty (ἐξουσία) of approach to the tree of life and entry by the portals of the eternal city (Rev 22:14). Perhaps this particular word is most suggestively used in 1Co 8:9 ‘Take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumbling-block to the weak,’ i.e. lest the very strength and assurance of the new-found liberty may lead you to flourish it boastfully, thus courting temptation yourself, and perhaps ruining the weaker brethren, who, seeing you able to join in certain practices unharmed, will be tempted to copy you, to their own hurt. It is clear that in the first days liberty was fundamental with the Christian. Each man has to ‘work out his own salvation’ (Php 2:12), to be ‘fully assured in his own mind,’ to ‘give account of himself to God’ (Rom 14:5; Rom 14:12). Christians are the free citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem, children of liberty (Gal 4:26). For abiding freedom did Christ set them free (Gal 5:1), calling them into liberty (Gal 5:13). Henceforth no Mosaic veil of past traditions, laws, rites, can bind them. When Moses is read, it shall be with no hindering timidities (2Co 3:15 ff.) of the letter, but in the reverent freedom of the spirit (2Co 3:6-8). The disciple feels himself freed from that yoke ‘which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear’ (Act 15:10). The Law has but led into a larger world, in which is prized ‘the liberty which we have in Christ Jesus’ (Gal 3:24; Gal 2:4). The escape has been from the bondage of a religion of fear into the liberty of a faith that discerns in God the Eternal Fatherhood (Rom 8:15). So St. Paul prays that the word may have ‘free course,’ may run (Revised Version NT 1881, OT 1885 ) (τρεχῃ), spreading the gospel abroad with a free unhindered spirit (2Th 3:1), and leaving each worker to develop his own methods (1Co 9:1) and rules of conduct—‘Why is my liberty judged by another man’s conscience?’ (10:29). But this does not imply licence. That his liberty is Christian implies a limitation. He is to be ‘as free, yet not using his liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the bond-servant of God’ (1Pe 2:16), having no part with those worldly ones so ready in ‘promising liberty while they themselves are bond-servants of corruption’ (2Pe 2:19). He knows that he will be judged in his speech and conduct by the law of liberty which has taken the place of the ancient law (Jas 2:12). Being made free from sin he is still a servant, but of righteousness, a ‘servant to God’ (Rom 6:18; Rom 6:20; Rom 6:22), and from the ‘bondage of corruption’ has entered into the ‘liberty of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom 8:21). This liberty has been the exchange of a hateful for a precious bondage. If you were actually a slave, you are now ‘the Lord’s freedman,’ if you were free, you are now ‘Christ’s bond-servant’ (1Co 7:21-22), and that service is the ministry of the brethren, a bondage into which St. Paul boasts and glories that he had brought himself (1Co 9:19). He has found a new law in place of the ancient prohibitory ‘law of sin and of death,’ and this ‘law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ has made him free (Rom 8:2). The practical comment of the Apostles upon this doctrine of the Gospels indicates also the immeasurable indebtedness of Christianity to that principle of liberty with which Christ inspired His disciples.* [Note: The various terms used, and the many English equivalents, will be found fully treated in Hastings’ DB, artt. ‘Free,’ ‘Freedom,’ etc.]

See also artt. Free Will and Necessity.

Edgar Daplyn.

LIBERTY.—Moralists are accustomed to distinguish between formal freedom, or man’s natural power of choice, and real freedom, or power to act habitually in accordance with the true and good. Scripture has little to say on the mere power of choice, while everywhere recognizing this power as the condition of moral life, and sees real liberty only in the possession and exercise of wisdom, godliness, and virtue. Where there is ignorance and error, especially when this arises from moral causes (Rom 1:21, Eph 4:18, 1Jn 2:11 etc.)—subjection to sinful lusts (Rom 7:14-23, Eph 2:8, 1Pe 1:14; 1Pe 4:2-3; cf. 1Pe 2:16 etc.), fear and distrust of God (Rom 8:15, Heb 12:18-21 etc.), bondage to the letter of the law (Gal 4:24-25)—there cannot be liberty. Sin, in its nature, is a state of servitude (Joh 8:34). Spiritual liberty is the introduction into the condition which is the opposite of this—into the knowledge and friendship of God, the consciousness of cleansing from guilt, deliverance from sin’s tyranny, the possession of a new life in the Spirit, etc. Even under the Law, saints could boast of a measure of liberty; God’s commandment was found by them to be exceeding broad (Psa 119:46; Psa 119:96, cf. Psa 51:11-12). But the gospel gives liberty in a degree, and with a completeness, unknown under the Law and unthought of in any other religion. It does this because it is the religion of reconciliation, of the Spirit, of sonship, of love. Jesus already teaches that His yoke is easy and His burden light; this because He inculcates meekness and lowliness of heart—a spirit like His own (Mat 11:29-30). His religion is to St. James ‘the perfect law, the law of liberty’ (Jas 1:25). The instrument in freeing from bondage is ‘the truth’ (Joh 8:32); the agent is the Spirit of God. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there,’ of necessity, ‘is liberty’ (2Co 3:17). As the result of the reception of the truth of the gospel, the believer knows himself justified and saved (Rom 6:7), knows God as Father, and is assured of His love (1Jn 4:14-16); receives the spirit of adoption, in which is liberty (Rom 8:15-16); experiences deliverance from the dominion of sin (Rom 6:17-18; Rom 7:25; Rom 8:2); is set free from the yoke of outward observances (Gal 4:9; cf. Gal 5:1 ‘with freedom did Christ set us free; stand fast, therefore,’ etc.); has victory over the world (Gal 4:14, 1Jn 5:4); lives in the power of the Spirit (Gal 5:16-18; Gal 5:22-25); has release from fear of death (Heb 2:15), etc. On the freedom of man’s will, see Predestination, p. 749^a.

James Orr.

lib´ẽr-ti (דּרור, d^erōr, רחב, rāḥābh; ἐλευθερία, eleutherı́a): The opposite of servitude or bondage, hence, applicable to captives or slaves set free from oppression (thus d^erōr, Lev 25:10; Isa 61:1, etc.). Morally, the power which enslaves is sin (Joh 8:34), and liberty consists, not simply in external freedom, or in possession of the formal power of choice, but in deliverance from the darkening of the mind, the tyranny of sinful lusts and the enthrallment of the will, induced by a morally corrupt state. In a positive respect, it consists in the possession of holiness, with the will and ability to do what is right and good. Such liberty is possible only in a renewed condition of soul, and cannot exist apart from godliness. Even under the Old Testament godly men could boast of a measure of such liberty (Psa 119:45, rāḥābh, “room,” “breadth”), but it is the gospel of Christ which bestows it in its fullness, in giving a full and clear knowledge of God, discovering the way of forgiveness, supplying the highest motives to holiness and giving the Holy Spirit to destroy the power of sin and to quicken to righteousness. In implanting a new life in the soul, the gospel lifts the believer out of the sphere of external law, and gives him a sense of freedom in his new filial relation to God. Hence, the New Testament expressions about “the glorious liberty” of God’s children (Rom 8:21 the King James Version; compare Gal 2:4; Gal 5:13, etc.), about liberty as resulting from the possession of the Spirit (2Co 3:17), about “the perfect law of liberty” (Jas 1:25). The instrument through which this liberty is imparted is “the truth” (Joh 8:32). Christians are earnestly warned not to presume upon, or abuse their liberty in Christ (Gal 5:13; 1Pe 2:16).

Liberty (ἐëåõèåñßá) occupies a prominent place in the thought of NT writers and appears in a variety of significations.-

1. In the political sense.-As denoting the status of a free citizen and in direct contrast with the state of slavery, the word figures in one of the great dichotomies used by the apostolic writers in classifying men from the standpoint of their age (Col_3:1 -‘bondman, freeman’). We have no means of knowing even approximately in what proportions the churches of the apostolic and sub-apostolic times were made up of freemen and of slaves. Everything certainly goes to show that many of the latter class became Christians; in all probability, too, they usually formed the majority. It is precarious, however, to find positive evidence of this, as A. Deissmann does with regard to the Colossian Church, in the mere fact that (Col_3:18-25; Col_4:1) counsels addressed to slaves are given in ampler terms, those to masters quite briefly (St. Paul, Eng. translation , 1912, p. 216). Similar reasoning might argue from 1Pe_3:1-8; 1Pe_3:7 that wives were in a majority and husbands in a minority!

The fact that St. Paul, a native of Tarsus, was a Roman citizen is treated as a matter of importance in Acts. It was the Roman Emperors who gave the people of the provinces power to enjoy the rights of citizenship. There is a dramatic turning of tables in Act_22:28 when St. Paul is able to say quite simply (yet with a touch of pride), ‘But I am a Roman born,’ and Claudius, the captain, turns out to be but a parvenu who had had to spend a lot of money, somehow or other, to acquire the citizenship. The same status is claimed for Silas as well as St. Paul in Act_16:37.

Not a few of those who are mentioned by name in St. Paul’s Epistles (e.g. Philemon, Gaius, Erastus, Aquila, Phaebe, etc.) must have been of the citizen class. The number of such increased as time went on. In the Ignatian Epistles (e.g. Smyrn. xii. and Polyc. viii.) we find similar references to devoted Christians (Tavias, Alce, Daphnus, ‘the wife of Epitropus’ [or ‘of the governor’], Attalus, etc.) of the same rank. But Christianity had gained access to the palaces of the aristocracy before the 1st cent. was out, and had won adherents there who suffered for their faith-witness the well-known cases of T. Flavius Clemens, the consul, and his wife, Domitilla. And for the same period we have the evidence of an outsider in Pliny’s famous Epistle to Trajan (x. 97), wherein he tells us that he found in his province large numbers of Christians ‘of all classes’ (omnis ordinis). What was true of Bithynia was most probably true of other parts of the Empire.

Citizenship and wealth, of course, did not necessarily go together. In the class of freemen were included people of all ranks, from artisans and labourers up to the wealthiest aristocrats. Unfortunately many citizens were but idle loafers, depending on the Imperial largesse. The existence of the huge, overgrown system of slavery had a sinister effect on the great mass of citizens, inasmuch as ‘paid labour was thought unworthy of any freeborn man’ (C. Bigg, The Church’s Task under the Roman Empire, Oxford, 1905, p. 114). The poor, hired labourers, however, of Jam_5:4 were not technically äïῦëïé. The same Epistle shows us how soon the Apostolic Church experienced the evils too possibly attendant upon the appearance of the rich man within the circle of the Christian society (chs. 2 and 5).

Though civic freedom is quite evidently valued, we find little or nothing in the apostolic writings bearing on political questions. Lofty moral teaching and profound theology abound, but there is no feeling manifest that political freedom was a thing worth seeking for its own sake. It may indeed be said that in the 1st cent. ‘the prevailing notions of freedom were imperfect, and the endeavours to realise them were wide of the mark’ (Lord Acton, The History of Freedom, London, 1907, p. 16). See, further, article Slave, Slavery.

2. In the sense of freedom of conscience.-‘Liberty’ is used in the NT to denote a man’s freedom to decide what is right or wrong for himself, especially in relation to matters enjoined upon him by some form of external authority. The development of such a notion naturally followed upon the development of the notion of conscience itself, which in turn was bound up with the growing sense of human individuality and personal responsibility. In pre-Christian lines of philosophical and religious teaching (as e.g. in Stoicism) we mark in this respect a praeparatio evangelica. As the ancient conception of man as merely a component unit in tribe or nation faded and gave way to the sense of his value for himself as well as for the community, and of his responsibility for himself, such consequences were bound to follow. So far from morality consisting simply in compliance with commands embodying the will of the community of which the man is a part (which commands may also be conceived as Divinely originated), when man realizes his individual responsibility to God, conscience emerges, and, criticizing those very commands, may disapprove as well as approve, whilst it may also find a whole area of moral interests which the injunctions of external authority do not touch and in which it must decide for itself.

To the rise of Christianity we very specially owe an advanced conception of conscience and its corollary, the claim to freedom to act in accord with the behests of conscience. ‘Am I not free?’ cries St. Paul (1Co_9:1); whilst ‘Peter and the apostles’ (Act_5:29) are heard declaring ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ These sayings might serve as watchwords of the new era as viewed from this standpoint (Judaism itself, it should be noted in passing, exhibited in course of time a similar development in its ethical teaching). And the clash between the new order and the old necessarily brought with it abundant scope for the outcrop of cases of conscience such as St. Paul handles in 1 Corinthians 8 ff. and Romans 14 f.

Freedom of this kind can be properly claimed and used only by the conscientious man-the man who is above all else concerned for harmony between the laws and customs he is called to observe and the inward regulative principle, and who departs from such laws only when an enlightened conscience imperatively demands it. For another important pre-requisite is that the exercise of this freedom shall be based on intelligent judgment. ‘Let each man be fully assured in his own mind’ (Rom_14:5) is a Pauline dictum of the first importance. Cf. the deeply significant logion ascribed to our Lord in Cod. D (Luk_6:5) wherein He says to a man found working on the Sabbath, ‘If thou knowest what thou art doing, blessed art thou; but if thou knowest not, thou art accurst and a transgressor of the law.’ A man cannot justifiably set at nought a positive commandment or institution unless he has sight of some higher principle which determines his course of action. The freedom an enlightened man asks is freedom to do what he sees he ought to do, and to do what he may do without injury to others.

For St. Paul very emphatically insists on the necessity of qualifying the exercise of one’s own liberty by regard for the claims of others. It must not involve harm to others or an infringement of their liberty. Self-limitation for the sake of others is, indeed, an example of the truest exercise of freedom.

3. As a description of the Christian life and experience.-Social conditions being what they were in the 1st cent., it was most natural that the life resulting from faith in Christ, as that is presented in the NT, should be described in the apostolic writings by a cycle of metaphors centring in the word ‘redemption’ (Deissmann, op. cit., p. 149). This is specially characteristic of St. Paul.

The Christian life is represented as (a) freedom from the bondage of law.-St. Paul’s treatment of this topic (found mainly in the Epistles to Romans and Galatians) is not easy to follow and is doubtless coloured by his own vivid personal experience. We do not find quite the same line taken in other early apostolic writings that have been preserved to us. By general consent, it is true, it came to be held that Jewish and Gentile Christians alike were free from obligation to observe the Jewish Law in its peculiar institutions and ceremonial rules. The old sacrificial system was abolished ‘that the new law of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is without the yoke of necessity, might have a human oblation’ (i.e. the dedication of the man himself) (Epistle of Barnabas, ii.; so also Epistle to the Hebrews, and Epistle to Diognetus, iv. [regarding Sabbath, circumcision, ‘kosher’ foods, and the like]). But St. Paul has far more than this in view. He is thinking of all law as the expression of God’s will for man’s life and the severe revealer of man’s sin as he departs from it: law that has only condemnation for the sinner (see the autobiographical Romans 7).

That the Apostle countenances an antinomian freedom he himself indignantly denies. Nor did he lack the true Jew’s veneration for the Torah. With him law assumes the form of ‘an imperious principle opposed to grace and liberty only when it is viewed as the condition of justification, the means of attaining to righteousness before God through the merit of good works.’ As the expression of God’s will and the guide of human obedience it is ‘holy, just, and good’ (Rom_7:12; see E. H. Gifford, Romans [in Speaker’s Commentary, 1881, p. 48]). Torah comes to its own in the new life which springs from Christian faith and the unio mystica between the Christian and his Lord. And if other early Christian writers present this life as lived under law (see Epistle of James, especially the happy expression, ‘law of liberty,’ ch Rom_1:25; also 1Jn_3:22 ff.), St. Paul likewise lays stress on ‘the law of Christ’ (Gal_6:2) and gives us the far-reaching aphorism: ‘Love is the fulfilment of law’ (Rom_13:10).

(b) Freedom from the bondage of sin.-Sin is here personified as a tyrannical master (see especially the line of treatment in Romans 6; cf. Joh_8:34). An interesting parallel is furnished in the Discourses of Epictetus (iv. i.), where it is laid down that ‘no wicked man is free.’

(c) Freedom from the bondage of idolatry.-See Gal_4:8 f.-a point of material importance to the Gentile world in apostolic days.

(d) Freedom from the bondage of corruption (Rom_8:21).-This rather belongs to the hope for the world at large which contemplates the social state wherein the new life is perfectly realized. ‘The glory of the children of God’ is a liberty which all creation sighs to share.

It remains briefly to point out that not only does the term ‘redemption’ (applied to the work of Christ in opening to men this new experience of life) derive from the social state in the midst of which Christianity was burn, but ‘adoption’ as used by St. Paul (Rom_8:15; Rom_8:23, Gal_4:5) similarly gains special significance as denoting entrance upon the life of liberty. Adoption, in a general way, was no uncommon phenomenon in the old world (see õἱïèåóßá in Deissmann, Bible Studies, Eng. translation , 1901, p. 239), but it was also one recognized way of giving freedom to a slave.

There is no inconsistency but only striking paradox when this experience which is described as freedom is also described as a servitude to God (cf. 1Pe_2:16, èåïῦ äïῦëïé, and Rom_6:22, äïõëùèÝíôåò ôῷ èåῷ). Here, too, it is of interest to recall that it was a Stoic doctrine of liberty that true freedom consists in obeying God, or, as Philo of Alexandria (see Tract, Quod sit liber quisquis virtuti studet) puts it, the following of God. Again, as the Christian is commonly described in the NT as a äïῦëïò ×ñéóôïῦ, the singular use of ἀðåëåýèåñïò (= libertus, freedman) in 1Co_7:22 noticeably introduces the notion of enfranchisement to describe the gaining of freedom in Christ. There may be here the underlying thought that the ‘freedmen’ of Christ stand related to Him somewhat as the liberti stood to their patron, to whom they were bound to render, in the language of Roman Law, obsequium et officium.

4. In the philosophical sense.-See article Freedom of the Will.

Literature.-See works referred to in article Slavery, and in addition to works quoted in foregoing article , T. G. Tucker, Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul, London, 1910; H. Wallon, Histoire de l’esclavage dans l’antiquite2, Paris, 1879.

J. S. Clemens.