He continued to this effect: “Christ said that it was a part of his mission to heal the broken-hearted. What is meant by the phrase ‘a broken heart?’” He illustrated it by the story of Eli, and by the wife of Phineas, both of whom died broken in heart; “and our Saviour himself died on the cross heart-broken by sorrow rather than by physical torture.”—
(I lost something here because I was questioning and doubting within myself, for I have always had the thought that Christ must have been _glad_ to die.)
He went on:—“To heal the broken-hearted is to say to those who are beset by the remembrance and the misery of sin, ‘My brother, the past is past—think not of it to thy perdition; arise and sin no more.’” (All this, and more to the same purpose, wonderfully beautiful! and I became all soul—subdued to listen.) “There are two ways of meeting the pressure of misery and heart-break: first, by trusting to time” (then followed a quotation from Schiller’s “Wallenstein,” in reference to grief, which sounded strange, and yet beautiful, from the pulpit, “Was verschmerzte nicht der Mensch?”—what cannot man grieve down?); “secondly, by defiance and resistance, setting oneself resolutely to endure. But Christ taught a different way from either—by _submission_—by the complete surrender of our whole being to the will of God.
“The next part of Christ’s mission was to preach deliverance to the captives.” (Then followed a most eloquent and beautiful exposition of Christian freedom—of who were free; and who were not free, but properly spiritual captives.) “To be content within limitations is freedom; to desire beyond those limitations is bondage. The bird which is content within her cage is free; the bird which can fly from tree to tree, yet desires to soar like the eagle,—the eagle which can ascend to the mountain peak yet desires to reach the height of that sun on which his eye is fixed,—these are in bondage. The man who is not content within his sphere of duties and powers, but feels his faculties, his position, his profession; a perpetual trammel,—_he_ is spiritually in bondage. The only freedom is the freedom of the soul, content within its external limitations, and yet elevated spiritually far above them by the inward powers and impulses which lift it up to God.”