Excerpt from Sermon Preached at the National Scotch Church, Saint Matthew's, Halifax, on the Morning of the First Sunday of 1866 Man's birthright is liberty. His deepest instincts revolt from every form of slavery. We sing with flushed cheeks the songs of freedom, and the name of Wallace or Sydney stirs our blood like the blast of a trumpet. We bring garlands to the tombs of those who died rather than submit to chains on their freeborn limbs or their free Fatherland. And more heroic far are those who have fought against the serfdom of the human mind, who have not feared the strength of stupidity and ignorance, who through faith in truth have broken the bars clamped around thought to its foul dishonor, who from love of truth have faced the most sweeping social ban. And, rising into the realm of the moral and spiritual, greater is he that ruleth his own spirit than he that taketh a city. Yet the world is full of slavery. Timidity and ambition and interest all seek to impose it, and in one way or another it has seized upon and attempted to hold every part of man's nature, and the history of the race is a history of the resulting conflicts and of the mutual successes and failures, slavery alas counting most of the successes. A cause equally radical and universal alone can have produced so comprehensive an effect. To know this cause, and to know what and how much freedom is possible to us, we must clearly understand wherein liberty essentially consists. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.