Liberty is subjection to God

Dominique Barthélemy's book "God and His Image" is filled with striking passages, so much so I almost want to copy the entire chapter I'm reading now. Chapter 4, "A People Condemned to Liberty", is about the implications of the Hebrews being subjected to God alone. As usual, the story of the Jewish people is a type of the story of each individual soul. Our liberty as human beings depends on our subjection to God, and God alone. When we throw off God's yoke, another and much more onerous yoke must inevitably take its place. From page 73ff:

Only he who made man enables him to fulfill himself truly. It is in his hands that man passes from the germinal state of a dreamed-of destiny to birth, fulfillment and fruition. It is in these same hands that he proceeds on his way, and if he does not try to escape from them, man will achieve his liberty. If he abandons them, he finds himself in a state of privation and distress. For man must never imagine that what he needs is to be his own master. The only man to let himself be deceived by such a dream is the slave of false masters, even though the influence of the false master has been as discreet as that of the tempter himself. What man really wants is to be in the hands of a master who has real rights over his being, who does not usurp this almighty sovereignty. If a man finds he has no master once he has driven out the false masters he very soon discovers he is like a demagnetized compass and that any harvest he gathers is worthless. Not knowing the true fruit that it should be his to bear, man once again looks for other masters who, even if they fail to bring him real and total fruitfulness for his perfection, help him nonetheless to drive out a certain anxiety and fear of emptiness that assail him. At least these other masters will enable him to realize something, even if illusory and inauspicious, which will save him from being an isolated atom and will incorporate him into some organism that works and from which there comes a certain dignity that he likes to think of as influential. And that "something" which is preferable to solitude may be the grinding system of the totalitarian state. Even if it crushes him, it frees man from that obscure giddiness of his useless nothingness.

Impressive! A single paragraph that analyses the false appeal of existentialism and atheism and all the other ism's; and provides the real solution, the one real thing that we only find when we turn to our loving God and Father. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee" (St. Augustine).