What is freedom?
Cover page of Larcom’s Beckonings
Today's Devotional
Happy are you, O Israel! Who is like you? — Deuteronomy 33:29 (ESV).
Let us convince the world by our Christian character that order, piety, charity, mental cultivation, religious liberty, and religious sentiments can co-exist with a state of permanent peace and unexampled prosperity. —Charles Brooks
He is the free man whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside.
His are the mountains, and the valleys his,
And the resplendent rivers; his to enjoy,
Who, with a filial confidence inspired,
Can lift to heaven an unpresumptuous eye,
And smiling say,— My Father made them all.
—William Cowper.
None can love freedom heartily but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. —John Milton.
About the author and the source
Today being Independence Day in the United States, we sought for selections that emphasized freedom and independence. Charles Brooks (1795–1872) was a minister in Hingham, Massachusetts. Englishman William Cowper (1731–1800) was an early Romantic poet and hymnwriter. John Milton (1608–1674), one of the great masters of English literature, is famed for his epic poem Paradise Lost and for polemics against censorship and in favor of divorce.
Charles Brooks. Daily Monitor, or Reflections for Each Day of the Year… Boston: N.S. Simpkins and Co., 1828.
“July 4” in Beckonings for Every Day, a Calendar of Thought, arranged by Lucy Larcom. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1887.