Self-control, and liberty, and law… – Sunday, July 05, 1959
May we recall these two phrases from a moving and meaningful song: “Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law.”1 Always and earnestly urgent in all the issues and in all the aspects of life are “self-control” and “liberty” and “law.” And always to be taught, and never to be forgotten, is that liberty is preserved by law.
Self-control and liberty and law are basic to life, basic to the eternal plans and purposes of the Lord God pertaining to his children. But sometimes we may seem more to have remembered freedom than self-control, liberty more than the law.
As we come together, as we live together, as we serve and receive service in a world where physically we come ever, closer together, always we have to have self-control, always we have to live our lives with law as well as with liberty.
Always we have to consider the rights, the privileges, the comfort, the convenience of others, with an awareness that we have no right to do anything we want, to take anything we want, or irresponsibly to say anything we want, or to befoul the moral atmosphere, or the water others use, or the air where others are, or the peace that others have, or their rightful privacy, or to live uninhibited lives.
We have to be considerate of others always. Self-control, with law, is the only safeguard of liberty—and not the existence of law only, but respect for law, obeying the law—the laws of God, the commandments, the laws of the land. In a meaningful commencement address a great American said this of laws and liberty not many months before he left this life: “We are too inclined,” he said “to think of law as something merely restrictive—something hemming us in. We sometimes think of law as the opposite of liberty. But that is a false conception . . . God does not contradict Himself. He did not create man and then, as an afterthought, impose upon him a set of arbitrary, irritating, restrictive rules. He made man free—and then gave him the commandments to keep him free…. We cannot break the Ten Commandments. We can only break ourselves against them—or else, by keeping them, rise through them to the fullness of freedom under God. God means us to be free. With divine daring, He gave us the power of choice.”2
To this great utterance we would add: The greatest threat to liberty is lawlessness. And the greatest assurance of liberty is respect for law—the laws that lead to justice, to peace, and a quiet conscience, with consideration for others always. “Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law.”2
1 Katherine Lee Bates, America, The Beautiful
2 Cecil B. DeMille, Brigham Young University Commencement Address, 1957
July 05, 1959
Broadcast Number 1,559