The Law of Liberty

The Law of Liberty is a sermon by Henry Churchill King, the American Congregational minister, philosophical theologian, and president of Oberlin College who lived from 1858 to 1934. The sermon was delivered as King’s baccalaureate address at Oberlin College on June 21, 1914 and was subsequently published in book form for distribution to the Oberlin community and to the broader audience that King’s writings had developed.

The baccalaureate sermon in early twentieth century American higher education was the formal sermon delivered to the graduating class of a college, typically by the college president or by a major visiting religious figure. The sermons were ceremonial occasions but also serious efforts to send the graduating students into their adult lives with a coherent statement of the moral and religious vision the institution had been trying to communicate to them across their college years. King’s baccalaureate sermons across his long Oberlin presidency were widely admired for their combination of intellectual substance and practical application.

The Law of Liberty takes its central theme from the New Testament epistle of James, where the phrase the law of liberty appears in connection with the practical application of Christian ethical teaching to daily life. King uses the phrase as the organizing concept for a meditation on the relationship between genuine freedom and the moral law that he believed should govern the conduct of educated Christian young people entering adult life. He argues that the deepest kind of freedom is not the absence of moral obligation but the willing acceptance of obligations that one understands to be genuinely good, and that genuine liberty in this sense is what the college years should have prepared the graduates to find.

The sermon is delivered in the polished and substantial manner that King had developed across his long career as a college president and public speaker. The language is elevated without being inaccessible, the argument is carefully constructed, and the practical application to the situation of the graduating students is direct without being condescending. The sermon belongs to the substantial American tradition of academic baccalaureate sermons and is a representative example of the genre at its more thoughtful best.

The book is short, perhaps forty pages in the typical printing, and reads as a single sitting. For readers interested in early twentieth century American Christian higher education, this is a useful primary document. It pairs naturally with King’s other addresses and writings.