Excerpt from The Disciplines of Liberty: The Faith and Conduct of the Christian Freeman The idea of Liberty, in one form or another, dominates the religious life of the present day. No matter how troubled the waters, the Freeman's spirit points true to this magnetic pole. Given this initial loyalty a man may box the compass of all other religious interests with an approximate fidelity to contemporary fact. These chapters suggest some of the outstanding points of the religious compass at the present time, but the thought of freedom is both their point of departure and their goal. The reader will make due allowance for the deviation due to personal factors and will correct these deviations by his own experience. I am conscious of the fact that these pages may suggest the cheap and easy device of "scissors and paste." I have yielded, in some measure, to the inevitable seduction of the other man's effective statement of the case half from choice and half from necessity: from deliberate choice, because as a reader of religious literature I find that much of the value of any contemporary book is drawn from the constant intimation of other significant and rewarding books lying to one side or the other of the immediate highway; from necessity, because no man who is thinking and writing to-day can deny the whole premise of his effort - the noble communism of the modern religious mind. In particular I wish to acknowledge my debt to those who have directly contributed to the making of this book. I fully realize that any freshness and conviction in these pages is very largely due to the two parishes to which I have ministered. The preacher of to-day is made or unmade, spiritually, by his people. They either force him into innocuous conventionality or urge him on to the exercise of his Christian freedom. 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.