Just saw this quote on another site, excellent: "There is a technical difference between the terms freedom and liberty. Freedom is spiritual and is rooted in the soul. Liberty is external and implies a removal of hindrances or restraints so that a person may act freely. No modern writer has more clearly expresses this difference than Ross Hoffman. “Between the words liberty and freedom, as used in the essay, there is an important difference. Liberty denotes that set of conditions or circumstances wherein a person may act from choice, as it pleases that person – the sphere of unconstrained action, in which one meets with no external compulsions or prohibitions. Freedom, on the other hand, is a subjective conception. It designates a consciousness in us of what we are, an inner illumination of our nature whereby we know ourselves as moral agents, able to discern right and wrong and to exercise the power of moral choice. In this sense no man is free who does not know himself as being possessed of free will. Our Lord, it will be remembered, did not say the truth would set us at liberty, but that it would make us free. For liberty may be conferred from without, as a slave is emancipated or a prisoner discharged, but freedom can be had only by men who know what kind of creatures God fashioned them to be.” -- Fulton J. Sheen, Freedom under God, 1940, p. 252
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 20:51:50 +0000