Liberty

Over the next several days I'm going to post a series of excerpts from J. Gresham Machen's baccalaureate address at Hampden-Sydney College on June 9, 1929 as published in The Gospel In The Modern World: And Other Short Writings edited by Stephen J. Nichols.

The following quote comes after a fairly lengthy introduction where Machen condemns what he saw as the modernist attempt to abolish liberty for the sake of utilitarianism—which has resulted in "a mechanistic world...in which all zest, all glory, and all that makes life worth living, has been destroyed." Here the staunch Presbyterian Machen sounds positively Chestertonian.

From such a slavery, which is already stalking through the earth today, in the particular form of the materialistic paternalism of the modern state, from such a world of unrelieved drabness, we seek escape in the high adventure of the Christian religion. There and there only, we think, is liberty to be found. There is to be found a liberty which is far deeper than the civil and political liberty of which we have spoken, a liberty that is indestructible in the depths of the soul.

In the Christian religion we find, in the first place, God. Back of the stupendous mechanism of the world, there stands, as the Master of it and not as its slave, no machine but a living Person. He is enveloped, indeed, in awful mystery; a dreadful curtain veils his being from the gaze of men. But unlike the world, he is free; and he has chosen in his freedom to lift the veil and grant us just a look beyond. In that look we have freedom from the mechanism of the world. God is free, and where he is there is liberty and life. (J. Gresham Machen, The Gospel and the Modern World)