in the rebellion... for which I damned two of them, and the other two I
did excommunicate." This time the fomenter of discord was a busy
Scotchman. Muggleton calls him Walter Bohenan, which appears to be only
a _bhonetic_ representation of Walter _Buchanan_. That so sagacious a
seer as Muggleton should have been betrayed into associating himself
intimately with a canny Scot is truly wonderful, and illustrates the
eternal verity that "we are all of us weak at times," even the
prophets. _Bohenan's_ self-assertion led him on to dizzy heights of
towering presumption, until at last "he acted the highest act of
rebellion that ever was acted." It was all in vain; he was cut off for
ever--perished from the congregation; utterly damned, and thereupon
disappears, swallowed up of darkness and silence.
Muggleton lived twenty-six years after this last revolt, exercising
unquestioned authority; an autocratic prophet to whom something like
worship was offered even to the last. He was far advanced in his
eighty-ninth year when he died. He was far on towards seventy when he
was brought before Jeffreys, then Common Serjeant, and other justices,
on a charge of blasphemy. Jeffreys was as yet a novice in those arts of
which he became the acknowledged master a few years after, but already
he quite equalled his future self in his savage brutality to the poor
monomaniac. "He was a man," says Muggleton, "whose voice was very loud;
but he is one of the worst devils in nature." The jury hesitated to
bring in their verdict, knowing well enough what would follow, but
Jeffrey's look and manner cowed them. The prophet was condemned to pay
a fine of L 500, to stand in the pillory three times for two hours
_without the usual protection to his head_, which those condemned to
such a barbarous punishment were allowed. He was to have his books
burned by the common hangman, and to remain in Newgate till his fine
was paid. Only a man of an iron constitution could have come out of the
ordeal with his life. Muggleton bore it all; remained in Newgate for a
year, compounded for his fine in the sum of L 100, which his friends
advanced, and was a free man on the 19th of July, 1677, a day which the
Muggletonians observed as the prophet's Hegira.
As early as 1666 he had many followers on the Continent, and in that
year the _Transcendant Spiritual Treatise_ was translated into German
by a convert who came over to London to confer with the sage. Except on
very rare occasions he never left London, nor indeed the parish in
which he was born. He pursued the trade of a tailor till late in life,
but his books had sold largely, and he managed to get together a
competence, and was at one time worried by his neighbours and fined for
refusing to serve in some parish offices. There was a fund of sagacity
about the man which appears frequently in his later letters, but an
utter absence of all sentiment and all sympathy. He had no _nerves_.
Staid, stern, and curiously insensible to physical pain, he was
absolutely fearless, with a constitution that could defy any hardships
and bear any strain upon it.
When we come to the _teaching_ of Muggleton, we find ourselves in a
tangled maze of nonsense far too inconsequential to allow of any
intelligible account being given of it. Jacob Boehm's mistiest dreams
are clearness itself compared with the English prophet's utterances.
Others might talk of the divine cause or the divine power or the divine
person, "fumbling exceedingly" and falling back in an intellectual
swoon upon the stony bosom of the Unknowable. Muggleton grimly told you
that there was a personal Trinity in the universe--God, man, and
devil--and each had his body. If you pressed him for further
particulars he poured forth words that might mean anything, a metallic
jargon which you were ordered to receive and ponder. Such as it was,
however, you had to accept or reject it at your peril. Why should an
inspired prophet argue?
Something must be set down to the circumstances in which he found
himself, and to the dreadfully chaotic condition which the moral
sentiments and religious beliefs of the multitude had been reduced to
during the wild anarchy of the seventeenth century. There were two men
in England who were _quite certain_--George Fox was one, Muggleton was
the other. Everybody else was doubting, hesitating, groping for the
light, moaning at the darkness. These two men _knew_, other people were
seeking to know. George Fox went forth to win the world over from
darkness to light. Muggleton stayed at home, he _was_ the light. They
that wanted it must come to him to find it. All through England there
was clamour and hubbub of many voices, men going to and fro, always on
the move, trying experiments of all kinds. Here was one man, "a still
strong man in a blatant land," who was calm, steadfast, unmovable, and
always at home. He did not want you, whoever you were; he was perfectly
indifferent to you and your concerns. Preach? No! he never preached, he
never cared to speak till he was spoken to. If you went to him as an
oracle, then he spake as a god.
Moreover, when the Restoration came and the high pressure that had been
kept up in some states of society was suddenly taken off, there was a
frantic rage for pleasure, which included the wildest debauchery and
the most idiotic attempts at amusement. Then, too, the haste to be rich
agitated the minds of all classes; Westward ho! was the cry not only of
Pilgrim Fathers but of reckless adventurers of all kinds. From across
the sea came the ships of Tarshish bringing gold, and silver, and
ivory, and apes, and peacocks, and a thousand tales of El Dorado.
Muggleton the prophet, with that lank brown hair of his and the dreamy
eye and the resolute lips, waited unmoved. Pleasure? If he wondered at
anything it was to know what meaning there could be in the word.
Riches? What purpose could they serve? To him it seemed that the
Decalogue contained one wholly superfluous enactment; why should men
covet? There would have been some reason in limiting the number of the
commandments to nine; nine is the product of three times three. Think
of that! This man in that wicked age must have appeared to many a
standing miracle, if only for this reason, that he was the one man in
London who was content, passing his days in a stubborn rapture, as
little inclined for play or laughter as the sphinx in the desert, which
the sand storms can beat against but never stir.
So far from Muggleton's influence and authority growing less as he grew
older, it went on steadily increasing; there was a mystery and an awe
that gathered round him, and latterly he was regarded rather as an
inspired oracle than as a seer. The voice of prophecy ceased; he had
left his words on record for all future ages, but from day to day his
advice was asked, and people soon found it was worth listening to. In
the latter years of his life his letters dealt with the ordinary
affairs of men. People wrote to inquire about their matrimonial
affairs, their quarrels, their business difficulties, whether they must
conform to this or that enactment of the State, how they might outwit
the persecutors and skulk behind the law. Muggleton replies with
surprising shrewdness and good sense, and now and then exhibits a
familiarity with the quips and quirks of the law that he can only have
acquired by the necessity which suffering had laid upon him. His
language is always rugged, for he had received little or no education;
he is very unsafe in his grammar, but he has a plain, homely
vocabulary, forcible and copious, which, like most mystics, he was
compelled to enrich on occasion, and which he does not scruple to
enrich in his own way. His style certainly improves as he gets older,
and in these letters one meets now and then with passages that are
almost melodious, the sentences following one another in a kind of
plaintive rhythm, and sounding as you read them aloud, like a Gregorian
chant. He died of natural decay, the machine worn out. His last words
were, "Now hath God sent death unto me." They laid him on his bed, and
he slept and woke not. Nearly 250 of the faithful followed him to his
grave. It is clear that the sect had not lost ground as time moved on.
Not the least feature in this curious chapter of religious history is
that the Muggletonians should have survived as a sect to our own days.
As late as 1846 an elaborate index to the Muggletonian writings was
issued, and the _Divine Songs of the Muggletonians_, written
exclusively by believers, show that there has been a strange continuity
of composition among them, and that, too, such composition as ordinary
mortals have never known the like of. Yet Muggleton never broke forth
into verse. Joanna Southcott could not keep down her impulse to pour
forth her soul in metre; Muggleton is never excited, the emotional had
no charm for him. So, too, he never cared for music, he makes no
allusion to it. Nay, he speaks slightingly of worship, of prayer and
praise, especially of congregational worship. It was allowable to the
little men, a concession to the weak which the strong in the faith
might be expected to dispense with sooner or later. For himself,
isolated and self-contained, he could do without the aids to faith
which the multitude ask for and find support in. He held himself aloof;
he had no sympathy to offer, he asked for none; nay, he did not even
need his followers, he could do without them. The question for them
was, Could they do without him? For more than two centuries they have
kept on vehemently answering No!
Of late years a class of specialists has risen up among us who have
treated us to quite a new philosophy--to wit, the philosophy of
religion. To these thinkers I leave the construction of theories on
Muggleton's place in the history of religion or philosophy; to them,
too, I leave the question of what was the secret of his success and
power. Much more interesting to me is the problem how the sect has gone
on retaining its vitality. Perhaps the great secret of that permanence
has been that Muggleton did not give his followers too much to believe
or too much to do. He disdained details, he was never precise and
meddlesome. If the Muggletonians wished to pray, let them; to sing,
there was no objection; to meet together in their conventicles, it was
a harmless diversion. But they must manage these things themselves, and
provide for difficulties as they arose. It was no part of the prophet's
office to make bye-laws which might require to be altered any day. Thus
it came about that the sect was left at Muggleton's death absolutely
unfettered by any petty restraints upon its freedom of development. The
believers must manage their own affairs. There is one God and Muggleton
is His prophet--that was really the sum and substance of their creed.
That followed on a small scale which is observable on a large scale
among the Moslems, the prophet's followers found themselves more and
more thrown back upon their prophet till he became almost an object of
adoration. The creed of Islam without Mahomet would be to millions
almost inconceivable; the Muggletonian God without Muggleton would not
be known.
* * * * * * *
Says her Royal Highness, looking over my shoulder, "You have written
quite enough about those crazy, vulgar people. It's all old world talk.
There are no prophets now; there never will be any more."
No more prophets! The _prophetical succession_ never stops, never will
stop. When Muggleton died Emanuel Swedenborg was a boy of ten; twenty
years afterwards the new prophet was walking about London just as the
old one had done, living the same lonely life, conversing with the
angels and writing of heaven and hell and conjugal love, and--well, a
great deal else besides; and, odd coincidence, it was in that same
Eastcheap where Muggleton had damned the Quakers in 1653 that the
Swedenborgians held their first assembly in 1788, just about the same
time that Joanna Southcott came to London, and before Joseph Smith and
Brigham Young were born or thought of. No, no. The prophets are not
improved off the face of the earth. They never will be. They will turn
up again and again. You can no more hope to exterminate them by culture
than you can hope to produce them by machinery. _Propheta nascitur non
fit_. For once her Royal Highness was wrong.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Coming of the Friars, by Augustus Jessopp