explanations at these interviews were such as to satisfy him of the
harmlessness and orthodoxy of her intention. She appeared to him often
extravagant or questionable in expression, from her ignorance; but so
favoured of God, that the most learned divine might gather spiritual
wisdom from her lips. She told him of certain instantaneous
supernatural communications, which came and vanished, she knew not
how. Yet, like John of the Cross, she did not rest on these, but
passed on into the obscure path of pure faith. For this he praised
her, and believed that though these experiences were illusory, a
spirit so lowly and so obedient had been faithful to grace throughout,
such involuntary deception notwithstanding.—_Réponse à la Relation sur
le Quiétisme_, chap. i. 10-13.
Footnote 344:
She still speaks, however, of the ‘_sense_’ vouchsafed her of the
state of the souls given to her, even when they were at a distance;
and of communication in God with those to whom the Lord united her by
the tie of spiritual maternity. _Autobiography_, part III. ch. viii.
Nothing was more likely to open her eyes to the questionable character
of some of her experiences, and to the unguarded nature of many of her
expressions, than the kindly yet searching inquiries of a man like
Fénélon, qualified by temperament to enter into her feelings, and a
master in mystical theology. Mr. Upham seems to me greatly to overrate
the influence of Madame Guyon on Fénélon. To her fancy, her
imagination might at times depict him as a spiritual son: he was, in
fact, a friendly judge.
Footnote 345:
When called to separate the true mysticism from the false in the
writings of Madame Guyon, Bossuet was not only ignorant of Tauler,
Ruysbroek, Harphius, and others; he had not even read Francis de Sales
or John of the Cross. Fénélon, at his request, sent him a collection
of passages from Suso, Harphius, Ruysbroek, Tauler, Catharine of
Genoa, St. Theresa, John of the Cross, Alvarez, De Sales, and Madame
de Chantal. With just indignation does Fénélon expose the artifice by
which Bossuet afterwards attempted to turn this confidence against
him.—_Réponse à la Relation sur le Quiétisme_, chap. ii. 18-27.
Footnote 346:
_History of Madame de Maintenon_, bk. XI. chap. vii.
Footnote 347:
_History of Madame de Maintenon_, bk. XI. chap. vii. Bausset,
_Histoire de Fénélon_, liv. ii. p. 295. The high opinion entertained
of Fénélon by Madame de Maintenon was, as yet, unshaken. She knew that
though the friend of Madame Guyon, he was not her advocate. But she
was called to side with the man of charity or the man of zeal—the
liberal man or the bigot; and the issue could not long be doubtful.
Fénélon early saw the signs of danger. We find him striving to
moderate the enthusiasm of Madame de la Maisonfort—to reconcile her to
the regulations of Godet—to repress her indiscreet zeal in behalf of
her cousin, Madame Guyon.—_Correspondance de Fénélon_, Lettres 24, 26,
29, 30.
Footnote 348:
_Autobiography_, part III. chap. xiii. Phelipeaux gives in full the
correspondence on both sides, _Relation de l’Origine, du Progrès et de
la Condamnation du Quiétisme répandu en France_ (1732), liv. i. pp.
73, &c. His account abounds in misrepresentations, and does little
more, in the first part, than echo the _Relation sur le Quiétisme_ of
Bossuet, to whom the abbé was devoted. But his minuteness of detail,
and the copious insertion of important letters and documents on either
side, give to the heavy narrative considerable value. In a subsequent
interview between Bossuet and Madame Guyon, she declared herself
unable to pray for any particular thing—the forgiveness of her sins,
for instance. To do so was to fail in absolute abandonment and
disinterestedness. Bossuet was shocked. Madame Guyon promised and
meant, to be all submission; but conscience would be unmanageable at
times. Bossuet writes her long, sensible, hard-headed letters, in
which, without much difficulty, he exposes her error, and leaves her
no ground to stand on. She, however, must still humbly suggest that
the exercise of love embraces all petitions, and that as there is a
love without reflexion, so there may be a prayer without reflexion—a
substantial prayer, comprehending all others.—_Phelipeaux_, p. 111.
Footnote 349:
Her request was made to Madame de Maintenon for commissioners, half
clerical, half lay, to examine into the scandals which had been set
afloat against her character.—_Phelipeaux_, liv. i. p. 114.
_Autobiography_, part III. chap. xv.
Footnote 350:
_Autobiography_, chapp. xvi. xvii. See also her letter to the three
commissioners, in _Phelipeaux_, p. 117. Harlay heard with indignation
of this Conference at Issy, to decide upon a heresy which had been
unearthed in his diocese. He endeavoured to rouse the suspicions of
Louis, but in vain. He determined himself to condemn the writings of
Madame Guyon, before the Commissioners could come to a decision.
Madame de Maintenon informed Bossuet, who paid a visit without loss of
time to his metropolitan, complimented him on the censure he was about
to fulminate, gave every explanation, and took his departure with
polite assurances that the verdict of Issy would but reiterate the
condemnation pronounced by the vigilant Archbishop of Paris. So
completely was the cause of Madame Guyon prejudged.—_Phelipeaux_, p.
125.
Footnote 351:
_Autobiography_, part III. chapp. xviii. xix. _Réponse à la Relation_,
&c., I. ii. 3. _Upham_, vol. II. chapp. x. and xi.
Footnote 352:
The articles at first proposed to Fénélon for his signature were
thirty in number. The 12th and 13th, the 33rd and 34th, were wanting.
He said that he could only sign these thirty articles _as they were_,
‘_par déférence_,’ and against his persuasion. Two days afterwards,
when the four additional articles were laid before him, he declared
himself ready to sign them with his blood. The 34th article is the
most important of the four, as bearing directly on the most critical
question arising from the doctrine of disinterested love. It allows
that doctrine expressly, if words have meaning, and occupies all the
ground Fénélon himself was concerned to maintain in its defence.
(_Entretiens sur la Religion_, Fén. Œuvres, tom. i. p. 34.) The
article is in substance as follows:—On peut inspirer aux âmes peinées
et vraiment humbles un consentement à la volonté de Dieu, quand même,
par une supposition très-fausse, au lieu des biens éternels promis aux
justes, il les tiendrait dans les tourments éternels, sans néanmoins
les priver de sa grâce et de son amour.—_Réponse à la Relation_, &c.,
chap. iii. _Phelipeaux_, liv. i. pp. 131, 135-137.
Footnote 353:
See Note on p. 278.
Footnote 354:
See second Note on p. 278.
Footnote 355:
See Note on p. 279.
Footnote 356:
Witness the panegyrics of Bossuet on Theresa and John of the Cross.
Compare also their different verdicts on the former. Fénélon says,
writing to Madame de Maintenon, ‘Quelque respect et quelque admiration
que j’aie pour Sainte Thérèse, je n’aurais jamais voulu donner au
public tout ce qu’elle a écrit.’—_Correspondance_, 31. Bossuet,
writing to Madame Guyon, says, ‘Je n’ai jamais hésité un seul moment
sur les états de Sainte Thérèse, parceque je n’y ai rien trouvé, que
je ne trouvasse aussi dans l’Ecriture,’ &c.—_Phelipeaux_, liv. i. p.
104. In the _Instructions sur les Etats d’Oraison_, Bossuet, in
speaking of the passive state, had allowed of certain miraculous
suspensions (impuissances) from which Fénelon shrinks—which he would
have located in some section _Faux_ of his _Maxims_—and to which
Noailles refused his approval.—_Réponse à la Relation_, xxviii. and
lxii.
Footnote 357:
Her letter to Bossuet furnishes a fair justification of this retreat
to Paris.—_Phelipeaux_, liv. i. p. 152. It gratifies our curiosity to
learn from this authority what books were seized when Desgrès, the
detective, entered the little house in the Faubourg St. Antoine, in
the name of the king. There were some plays of Molière, some romances,
such as _John of Paris_ and _Richard Lion-heart_, but these, said
Madame Guyon, belonged to the lacqueys of her son, a lieutenant in the
guards. But she acknowledged a _Griseldis_ and _Don Quixote_ as her
books. It is pleasing to find our fair saint, so far of like passions
with ourselves, amused with Sancho, and pitying Griseldis,—herself a
patient sufferer at the hands of blinded, pitiless men.
Footnote 358:
See Note on p. 280.
Footnote 359:
See second Note on p. 280.
Footnote 360:
Bausset, _Histoire de Fénélon_, liv. iii. p. 45. See also Note on p.
281.
Footnote 361:
Bausset, _Hist. de Fénélon_, liv. iii. 47. A minute, though very
partial account of all the squabbles and intrigues at Rome, from first
to last, may be read in _Phelipeaux_.—See also _Memoirs of Madame de
Maintenon_, xi. 19. _Corr. de Fénélon_, lettre 108.
Footnote 362:
Bausset, iii. 48-50; Aimé-Martin, _Etudes sur la Vie de Fénélon_, p.
14.
Footnote 363:
Bausset, 53-4; _Mem. of Maintenon_, XI. 20; Aimé-Martin, 15.
Footnote 364:
Bausset, 59-61. The means to which Bossuet could stoop—the falsehoods
he could coolly repeat, after detection, as though nothing had
happened—the misquotation, and misrepresentation—the constant reply to
awkwardly pressing arguments by malicious personalities—all these
things are exposed in Fénélon’s _Lettres en Réponse_, and in the
_Réponse_ itself. They are bad enough; but the student of controversy
is accustomed to this imperturbable lying, to these arts of
insinuation. The most detestable feature of all in the part played by
Bossuet, lies in that sleek cant and tearful unction with which he
calumniates—as though it almost broke his heart to write what he
exults in writing. Well might Fénélon request that he would not weep
over him so profusely while he tore him in pieces, and desire fewer
tears and more fair play! See the Preface to the _Réponse_; _Réponse_,
59; and _Réponse aux Remarques_, § vi.
Footnote 365:
Bausset, iii. 68, 69; Upham, vol. ii. p. 289.
Footnote 366:
Bausset, 77, 78.
Footnote 367:
Upham, vol. ii. ch. 18.
CHAPTER III.
All opinions and notions, though never so true, about things
spiritual, may be the very matter of heresy, when they are adhered
to as the principle and end, with obstinacy and acquiescence; and,
on the contrary, opinions and speculations, however false, may be
the subject of orthodoxy, and very well consist with it, when they
are not stiffly adhered to, but only employed in the service of
disposing the soul to the faith of entire resignation, which is the
only true orthodoxy wherein there can be no heresy nor capital
errours.—POIRET.
WILLOUGBY. I think, Atherton, you have been somewhat too indulgent on
that question of disinterested love. To me it appears sheer presumption
for any man to pretend that he loves God without any regard to self,
when his very being, with its power to know and love, is a gift—when he
has nothing that he did not receive,—when his salvation is wholly of
favour, and not of merit,—and when, from the very first, he has been
laid under an ever-increasing weight of obligation beyond all estimate.
On this matter Oliver Cromwell appears to me a better divine than
Fénélon, when he writes, ‘I have received plentiful wages beforehand,
and I know that I shall never earn the least mite.’
GOWER. Yet Fénélon bases disinterested love on the doctrine which denies
to man all possibility of merit.
ATHERTON. I think Willoughby looks at Fénélon’s teaching concerning
disinterested love too much apart from his times and his Church. Grant
that this disinterestedness is a needless and unattainable refinement,
savouring of that high-flown, ultra-human devotion so much affected by
Romish saintship—still it has its serviceable truth, as opposed to the
servile and mercenary religionism which the Romanist system must
ordinarily produce.
WILLOUGHBY. It is the less of two evils, perhaps; but, let divines say
what they will, men cannot abjure self as such a doctrine requires. Man
may ask it of his fellow-men, but God does not require it of them, when
he tells them He would have all men to be saved. That inalienable desire
of individual well-being, to which God appeals, these theologians
disdain.
GOWER. But man comes into this world to live for something higher than
happiness.
WILLOUGHBY. That depends on what you mean by the word. Of course, life
has a purpose far above that snug animalism which some men call
happiness. In opposition to _that_, the outcry revived of late against
happiness, as a motive, has its full right. But I mean by happiness,
man’s true well-being—that of his higher, not his lower nature—that of
his nature, not for a moment, but for ever. With such happiness, duty,
however stern, must always ultimately coincide. I say, man was formed to
desire such a realisation of the possibilities of his nature, that to
bid him cease or slacken in this desire is a cruelty and a folly, and
that the will of God ought never for an instant to be conceived as
hostile to such well-being. If He were, why hear we of Redemption? And I
may point with reverence to the Incarnate Perfectness, ‘who, _for the
joy that was set before him_, endured the cross;’ he would die to know
the blessedness of restoring to us our life. Only the most sublime
self-sacrifice could account such a result a recompense; and that
recompense he did not refuse to keep constantly in view.
ATHERTON. Your dispute is very much a question of words. True
self-annihilation certainly does not consist in being without a personal
aim, but in suppressing all that within us which would degrade that aim
below the highest.
GOWER. The Quietists are right in undervaluing, as they do, mere
pleasurable feeling in religion.
ATHERTON. Quite so: in as far as they mean to say by such depreciation
that God may be as truly near and gracious in spiritual sorrow as in
spiritual joy,—that inward delights and blissful states of mind are not
to be put virtually in the place of Christ, as a ground of trust—that
the witness of the Spirit does not evince itself in the emotional nature
merely, but is realised in the general consciousness of a divine life,
which is its own evidence. But I think the Quietists too much overlook
the fact that peace, rising at times to solemn joy, is after all, the
_normal_ state of the Christian life, and as such, always a legitimate
object of desire.
GOWER. As to disinterested love, once more, may we not take Bunyan as a
good example of the mean between our two extremes? When in prison, and
uncertain whether he might not soon be condemned to die, the thought
came into his mind:—Suppose God should withdraw Himself at the very last
moment—fail to support me at the gallows—abandon me. But he resisted the
temptation like a man. He tells how he said within himself, ‘If God doth
not come in (to comfort me), I will leap off the ladder even blindfold
into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. It was my duty,’ he
declared, ‘to stand to His word, whether He would ever look upon me, or
save me at the last, or not.’
WILLOUGHBY. I can understand Bunyan. He was _driven_ to that
self-abandonment, and his faith made its brave stand there; he did not
_seek_ it. But the Quietists would have us cultivate, as the habit of
Christian perfection, that self-oblivion which is, in fact, only our
resource in the hottest moment of temptation. Why shut ourselves up in
the castle-keep, if not an outwork has been carried?
ATHERTON. What a torrent of cant and affectation must have been set a
flowing when Quietism became the fashion for awhile! What
self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation; and how easily might
the detail of spiritual maladies and imaginary sins be made to minister
to display! Is it not thus Pope describes Affectation?—how she
Faints into airs, and languishes with pride,
On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe
Wrapt in a gown for sickness, and for show.
GOWER. That reminds me of Zoilus, pretending to be ill, that he might
exhibit to his friends the new purple counterpane just come from
Alexandria.
WILLOUGHBY. But I can imagine some, in earnest, seeking refuge in
Quietism—doing so rather in desperation than in aspiration—heart sick,
weary of the world. Such would find but cold comfort. In vain would they
be surrounded with offers of supersensible manifestations, divine
touches, tastes, illapses—ethereal, super-angelic—not to say superhuman,
fare. Craving some tangible consolation, some food adapted to their
nature, they would be mocked with these pictures of a feast,—with
promise of the sustenance proper only to some other race of creatures.
ATHERTON. As though one should feed a sick lion on gingerbread and
liqueurs.
GOWER. Or one might liken such poor disappointed creatures to the lamb
brought into the churches on St. Agnes’ day, reclined on its cushion
fringed with gold, its ears and tail decked with gay ribbon,—bleating to
church music—petted and adorned, in a manner to it most unintelligible
and unsatisfying—and seeming, to the ear of the satirist, to cry all the
while,—
Alack, and alas!
What’s all this white damask to daisies and grass!
KATE. Helen and I were much interested in that old book you lent us, Mr.
Atherton, _The Life of Mistress Antonia Bourignon_,[368] an excellent
woman, shamefully persecuted.
ATHERTON. I think so. She took upon herself, you see, to rebuke the
Church as well as the world.
MRS. ATHERTON. And had large property left her, which excited the
cupidity of those Fathers of the Oratory, who gave her such trouble.
GOWER. I never heard of her before.
ATHERTON. Her Quietism was very similar to that of Madame Guyon, but she
was not, like her, mixed up with a controversy famous in history. She
found, however, a faithful Fénélon in her accomplished disciple, Peter
Poiret,[369] a liberal and large-minded Quietist, whose mysticism may be
said to occupy a position between that of the German Theology and our
English Platonists.
WILLOUGHBY. I greatly enjoyed reading some parts of his _Divine
Œconomy_. Tennyson’s stanza expresses the spirit of his theology:—
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.
ATHERTON. Yet his six volumes add one more to our many systems. The
vitiating element, in a theology otherwise very fairly balanced, is the
extreme to which he carries the doctrine of passivity. In religion, he
will have the understanding utterly inert.[370]
WILLOUGHBY. Yet he uses, very effectively, in his writings, the faculty
he calls on us to resign.
ATHERTON. It is very common with mysticism to demand, in that way, a
sacrifice which it does not make itself. With Poiret, Philosophy,
Criticism, and Rhetoric, are the curse of the Church—the sources of all
false theology.
WILLOUGHBY. Still there is much truth in his assertion that all positive
religion accomplishes its purpose only as it leads to a filial
subjection of the soul to God—as it conducts men, beyond itself, to
immediate intercourse with Deity.
ATHERTON. William Law has the same idea: it constitutes, with him, the
_natural_ basis of all revealed religion.
WILLOUGHBY. It is mainly on this ground, I suppose, that Poiret adopts
an eschatology more mild than that of the Calvinism which he forsook. He
is not without his hopes concerning heathens hereafter. He believes in a
state of purification after death, for those who departed, in a state of
grace, but not yet ripe for the full enjoyment of heaven.
ATHERTON. It is significant that the first step taken by Protestant
Mysticism, after departing from Calvinistic, Lutheran, or Anglican
orthodoxy, should always be an endeavour to mitigate the gloom which
hangs over the doctrine of the future state.
MRS. ATHERTON. I have also been reading M. Eynard’s _Life of Madame de
Krüdener_. She appears to me an inferior Madame Guyon—falling very short
of her predecessor in real elevation of soul and power of mind, and
decidedly more credulous.
ATHERTON. She was never chastened by trials so severe as those which
befel Madame Guyon or Antoinette Bourignon. I do not think her insincere
altogether,—she meant well, and often deceived herself; but she never
thoroughly conquered her inordinate vanity and love of display. When her
novel of _Valerie_ had outlived its day of puffery—when she had ceased
to shine in the world of fashion, she achieved distinction as a seeress
and guide of souls at the Hotel Montchenu.
WILLOUGHBY. A tuft-hunting sort of Quietism, hers. What a picture
Talleyrand gives of the evening religious service in her drawing-room,
when the allies were in Paris. The Emperor Alexander was a frequent
visitor, prominent among notabilities from every court in Europe. M.
Empeytaz, in his gown, prayed and preached; Madame de Krüdener, with her
blue eyes and long dark locks, would converse on the interior life, with
guest after guest, in the inner apartment, or haply come forward and
deliver a prophecy.[371]
ATHERTON. She had all the tact of a woman of the world, an impressive
manner, and a fascinating gift of utterance. Her mysticism received its
prophetic impulse chiefly from the predictions of a pretended
clairvoyante, managed by a knave.[372]
MRS. ATHERTON. Jung Stilling and Swedenborg had also their share in
giving that bent to her enthusiasm. I think she may have done good in
some quarters.
ATHERTON. Very likely. The world is seldom the worse for the shock it
receives when some one speaks out a strong belief in unseen realities,
even though not always in the wisest way.
Note to page 286.
An anonymous work, entitled _An Apology for Me. Antonia Bourignon_
(Lond. 1699), contains an account of her life. It was not her design to
found a sect, for she taught that of sects there were too many:
exclusive formulas and hostile systems had corrupted Christendom, and
made it a very Babel. She wished to forsake the world, with a few
associates, bound by no vows, distinguished by no habit, working with
their hands, and giving themselves to prayer and meditation. She was
much resorted to by religious persons of every communion, as a guide to
the higher degrees of the Christian life. She believed that special
light was granted her for the interpretation of Scripture, and that it
was her mission to recall the Church from formalism and human notions to
spirituality and Quietist devotion. She appears to have been truly
successful in awakening and stimulating religious aspiration in very
many minds, till the storm of persecution, raised by her sweeping
censure of the ecclesiastical world, drove her from one hiding-place to
another, throughout Schleswig and Holstein. She died, at last,
impoverished and deserted, concealed in a wretched lodging at Amsterdam.
Her letters are those of a pious and sensible woman, clear-headed,
precise, and decided in vexatious business details, and singularly free
from all obscureness or rhapsody. Swammerdam, the naturalist, was one of
her disciples. Her Quietism was a welcome doctrine to many among
Romanists, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Her bitterest persecutors were
found among the clergy of every denomination. The Jesuits of
Frederickstadt wished for fuel to burn her. The priests of the Oratory
at Mechlin defrauded her of her property. Lutheran and Calvinist pastors
alike, wrote, spoke, and preached against her with such virulence that
the zealous populace of Flensburg were ready to tear her in pieces for
the glory of God. (_Life_, pp. 310-313. Comp. _Letters_, xxii. xxiii.
xxiv.: _A Collection of Letters written by Mrs. A. Bourignon_, Lond.
1708.)
Note to page 287.
Poiret was a Calvinistic clergyman, who, after his acquaintance with
Antoinette Bourignon, and much reading of mystical writers, relinquished
his office. In his retirement he wrote a number of theological works, of
which the best known is his system of divinity, entitled The _Divine
Œconomy_. He possessed a goodly measure of that scholarship and
philosophic culture which, as a mystic, he at once uses and depreciates.
Our higher faculty—the understanding, or intellect, he calls it—is not
(like what he terms ‘reason’) a limited capability; but ‘being made for
God is in a manner infinite, so as to be able to exert infinite acts,
that is, to raise itself up to the contemplation of God as
incomprehensible, infinite, and above all particular forms of conceiving
him.’ If, therefore, we make an absolute surrender of this faculty to
God, and so, by a passive ‘implicit faith,’ yield ourselves up to
whatsoever He may be pleased to communicate to us, we receive Him ‘in a
manner worthy of Him, above all particular and bounded conception,
light, and sentiment.’ Then, he says, we practically own this
fundamental truth, ‘that God is infinite and incomprehensible; that he
is a Light, a Good, a Wisdom, a Power, a Justice,—in a word, a Being
above all comprehension and thought.’ He bids us remember that our
apprehensions of God, however true, as derived from his own word and
from particular communications of his own, are necessarily partial and
imperfect, so that ‘a true and pure faith, while embracing the
particular divine lights, will not regard chiefly the particular forms,
but the infinite God that is annexed to them, and comprehends in himself
infinitely more than the particulars he has disclosed to us.’ (_Div.
Œcon_. vol. v. chap. iv. §§ 37-41.)
What is true in this doctrine has seldom been denied—viz. that beyond
our highest apprehension of God, his nature extends infinitely. We know
but parts of his ways. We know _that_ infinity lies behind all our
‘bounded conceptions;’ but _what_ that infinity is, no surrender of the
Intellect can disclose to us.
Note to page 287.
Here Poiret shall speak for himself:—
‘The Understanding, to pass into the order of faith, must have these two
conditions; the first, that it be empty, and shut to all ideas of
worldly things, both heavenly and earthly; the second, that it keep
itself open before God after an indeterminate and general manner, not
particularly fixing upon anything. This being supposed, with the faith
of desire afore-mentioned, God causes to rise in the soul his divine
light, which is his eternal substantial word, which does himself modify
(if I may so say), or rather fills and quickens the understanding of the
soul, and enlightens it as he pleases.’—_Div. Œcon._ p. 93.
‘It will be objected, it may be, to what has been said, that this second
condition required here of the intellect that means to be enlightened by
Faith, is a state of idleness—time lost; and that it is an absurd thing
not to make use of the understanding and faculties God has given us, nor
so much as endeavour to excite in our minds good and bright thoughts.
Here are several things tacked together, and most of them beside the
purpose. For at present I am not treating of the means by which one may
be introduced, or rather brought, as it were, to the threshold of faith,
as I may say; nor of that imperfect and beginning faith, by me styled
active. Nor yet do I say, that when one has been enlightened by the
light of God, one is not to fix one’s mind to the consideration of the
lights held out by God: but what I say is this: I suppose a man has
already had some glimpse of the divine light by the call of preventing
grace, and that he has actively co-operated with it, by turning his
understanding towards it, with particular desires of such and such
lights; and, moreover, that, to confirm himself therein, he has deduced
in his reason and his other inferior faculties, notions, ratiocinations,
images, and words, and other particular exercises wherein he has been
exercised long enough to be capable of ascending to the state of pure
and altogether divine faith. Upon this supposition, the question is,
whether one whose faith has as yet been but weak, and the small light he
has had clouded and mixed with great darkness, prejudices, and errors,
designing to clear the principles of the fight he has from the aforesaid
mixture, and desiring to see this divine light in its purity and more
fully,—whether, I say, to this end he ought to apply thereto the
activity of his understanding, of his meditations, reflections, and
reasonings; or else, whether, all this apart, he ought to offer his
understanding in vacuity and silence to the Son of God, the Sun of
Righteousness, and the true Light of Souls? And this last is what we
affirm, and against which the objections alleged are of no force.’—P.
100.
‘Thus have I shown what God requires of the intellect in matters of
faith—viz. a fund of mind wherein neither reason nor imagination do at
all act, but where God only may be, and act brightly as He pleases, the
soul meanwhile not adhering to the particular manners of God’s acting,
but merely because it is God acting, and God infinite and
incomprehensible, who can dispose of His infinite ways above our
understanding.’—P. 104.
Antoinette Bourignon found in Poiret a learned and philosophical
disciple. He was to her, in some respects, what Robert Barclay was to
George Fox. But her writings appear also to have awakened a response, of
a more practical kind, in many devout minds of whom the world knew
nothing. Throughout Germany and Holland, France and Switzerland, and in
England also, were scattered little groups of friends who nourished a
hidden devotion by the study of pietist or mystical writers. Arndt and
Spener, Bourignon and Guyon, Labadie and Yvon, Thomas à Kempis, De
Sales, or translations from the Spanish mystics, furnished the oil for
their inward flame. Some withdrew altogether from the more active duties
of life; others were separatists from the religion established around
them. In some cases they held meetings for worship among themselves; in
others, the struggles of a soul towards the higher life were only
revealed to one or two chosen intimates. Whenever we can penetrate
behind the public events which figure in history at the close of the
seventeenth and the opening of the eighteenth century, indications are
discernible which make it certain that a religious vitality of this
description was far more widely diffused than is commonly supposed. A
single example will be sufficiently suggestive. One M. de Marsay, who
threw up his ensign’s commission in the French army, and retired, with
two friends, into seclusion, after the manner recommended by Antoinette
Bourignon, left behind him an unpublished Autobiography. A copy from a
translation of this curious narrative, in the possession of Mr. Tindall
Harris, has been kindly placed at my disposal by that gentleman. The
copy was executed in 1773, by some one who had known De Marsay
personally.
M. de Marsay was born at Paris, in 1688, of Protestant parents. A taste
for devotional reading was fostered, in early youth, by the piety of his
mother. Jurieu’s well-known work on _Divine Love_ found its place among
such studies; but none of the mystical writers. When he had entered the
army, sometimes half the day, and often half the night also, was devoted
to reading, meditation, and prayer. At one time he maintained an inward
prayer for three or four days without intermission, though the regiment
was on the march, and the troops under arms day and night. He fondly
imagined that such a state would continue all his life. When the
reaction came, his efforts to overcome the natural exhaustion and regain
his spiritual joy were so strenuous and painful that his delicate frame
gave way, and symptoms of consumption appeared. His distress at this
time was similar to that of Madame Guyon, and of many others, at the
earlier period of their entrance on the ‘inward way.’ Thomas à Kempis
was in his hand; but he could not yet understand the lesson which the
more experienced mystics so earnestly inculcate,—that spiritual
pleasures may be sought too greedily,—that we should persevere and
trust, whether in sensible delight or obscuration, whether in fulness or
‘aridity.’ He lay sick at Lisle for three months, calmly looking for
death, and then, to the surprise of all, recovered.
Meanwhile his friend, Lieutenant Cordier, has been reading Bourignon’s
_Lux in Tenebris_, in the camp before Bethune. He writes to De Marsay,
saying that he was now convinced the devotion they had hitherto
practised together was as nothing; that he had resolved to quit the army
and retire to some desert, there to live a life of poverty and devotion.
M. Barratier, the chaplain of their regiment, was of like mind; if De
Marsay would read Madame Bourignon, he would probably arrive at the
conclusion, and join them. So indeed it proved. De Marsay bought her
nineteen volumes, and determined to live her ‘poor and evangelical
life.’
After many delays, he succeeded in obtaining his discharge (diligently
reading, meanwhile, Theresa’s Life, and John of the Cross); and at last,
behold the three friends, in the spring of 1711, settled in a solitude
such as they desired, at Schwartzenau, on the estate of the Countess
Witgenstein. They rise at four, and begin the day by reading a chapter
in the Bible. Cordier and De Marsay work in the field, and Barratier has
breakfast ready for them at seven o’clock,—dry bread, of their own
baking, and cold water. Till noon they spin, card, or knit wool; Cordier
goes out on some errand; or De Marsay collects leaves, instead of straw,
for their beds. At noon they dine, and Barratier (the cook and
housekeeper) boils them the same food all the week through. One week it
is pease, with bread; another week, barley; next, wheat, groats, or
oatmeal pap; and for drink sometimes, ‘as a special treat,’ boiled
groats, in milk. After dinner one of them reads aloud from Bourignon’s
writings. Work again till four, and in the field till seven, when they
sit down to supper, before a dish of pulse or salad, groats or turnips.
Work again, in-doors, till nine, and then to bed. It was a rule that
they should only speak to each other when it was absolutely necessary.
They had no regular hours for prayer, but endeavoured (as Bourignon
counsels) to do everything in a spirit of prayer, by living consciously
in the presence of God, and referring all ceaselessly to Him.
Yet in this Paradise of asceticism De Marsay is not happy. The endeavour
to retain constantly a general sense of the divine presence was far less
unnatural and arduous than those protracted prayers and meditations at
which he used to labour. But he has little enjoyment, and the clamorous
demands of a large appetite sorely disturb his pious thoughts. See him,
one day, sitting on the stump of a tree—the picture of despair. His soul
is in the abyss. God seems to have abandoned him to himself. What has he
done? He has eaten a potato between meals! Only by the most ample
confession, the most contrite self-abasement, can he recover peace.
Terrible tyranny of the misguided conscience over the feeble judgment!
Here was a moral power that might have made a hero; and it only drives a
slave.
But the revulsion must come; and simultaneously the three anchorites
remit their silence and their introversion, and (the spell once broken)
chatter incessantly; now one, and now another, bursting into fits of
unmeaning, involuntary laughter. Yet, through all such mortifying
discouragement, all terror and temptation, De Marsay makes his way. He
does but yield himself, in his helplessness, the more absolutely to God,
to be delivered from his spiritual adversaries, if He wills, or to be
abandoned to the countless possibilities of evil, within him and about
him. Bourignon brought him to this point. So far she essays to guide
souls in the ‘interior way;’ after that, the Divine Conductor leads them
each as He will.
With poor Cordier it fared not so well. They had relaxed their rule, he
said: he would leave them, and live entirely alone. So he was carried
from extreme to extreme, till he reached a spurious resignation—a
passivity which did not resist evil—a self-forgetfulness which ceased to
recognise in himself his most dangerous enemy. From the height of
spiritual pride he was precipitated into licence. A woman living near,
with great affectation of sanctity, beguiled him into marriage. This
female Tartuffe stood afterwards revealed in her real iniquity; and
Cordier eventually returned to the world and a godless libertinism.
The Countess Witgenstein gave shelter, about this time, to a Lady Clara
de Callenberg, who had suffered much domestic unhappiness on account of
her pietism. This lady, considerably his senior, De Marsay saw, wooed,
and won. Our pair of ascetics resolved to live a life of absolute
continence, and De Marsay renders hearty thanks that (in spite of many
temptations) they received grace to adhere to their determination. The
good man’s manner of reasoning is curious. The first thought of a change
of life occurred to him one day, when sitting, ‘in great calmness of
mind,’ under a tree, with his knitting-tackle. ‘It was shown to me,—if
it was true that I was willing to be the property of God without
exception, it was his will that I should give Him the first proof
thereof, in marrying the Lady Clara de Callenberg.’ Barratier married
them, and so the original association was finally dissolved.[373] The
marriage was a very happy one, their principal outward trial arising
from the frequent indisposition of his wife, who ruined her constitution
by the miserable austerity of her diet. They were all but penniless; yet
in this they rejoiced, as so much exercise of faith; and, indeed, such
moderate means as they required were generally found forthcoming from
one quarter or another.
De Marsay did not always remain in their hut at Schwartzenau; he
journeyed to Switzerland to visit his mother, and again to Paris to see
his brother, passing through Blois with letters to Madame Guyon, who
died shortly before he reached that city. He travelled also repeatedly,
in company with his wife, everywhere finding little circles of devout
persons who received them with open arms. His narrative is full of the
difficulties he found in ascertaining the divine will. Again and again
does he discover, after an interval of years, that steps taken in the
full persuasion that they were divinely directed, were, in reality,
self-moved and erroneous. He fears to relax a severity, lest it should
be self-indulgence; he fears to prolong it, lest it should be
self-righteousness. After making one sacrifice, an additional one
suggests itself as possible, and the longer the thought is entertained,
the more hopeless is peace of mind, till conscience has compelled that
also; and all this, sometimes from first to last, in fear and darkness.
After dividing most of their little store among the poor, and selling
their cottage as too large, Madame de Marsay can know no rest from her
fears till the greater part of the money received has been also given
away,—that the command may be obeyed, ‘Sell all that thou hast.’ Yet,
through all self-made troubles, the genuineness of their religion shines
out. He is ever humble, thankful, trustful. The reading of Madame Guyon
weans him still farther from ‘sensible religious delights;’ he enters
calmly into the state of ‘dark faith;’ begins to attach less importance
to austerities; loses much of his stiffness; will attend public worship,
and commune.
It is instructive to mark how few of those concerning whom he writes as
having entered on the higher religious life, are found holding on in
that course. After an interval of absence, he returns to a neighbourhood
where he had known several such. He finds most of them in darkness and
disappointment. They know not where their souls are, or what has come to
them. Some are sunk in apathy. There are those who retain the form,
though their fire has gone out long ago. Others have plunged from high
profession into vices the most shameless. Yet a remnant are preserved
through all the dangers of the way. Those perplexities and doubts which
so frequently clouded the pathway of De Marsay, were probably his
safeguard. In a life of such excessive introspection, a proper
self-distrust must almost necessarily take the form of morbid
scrupulosity. Even he had some narrow escapes, for which he does well to
sing his lowly _Non nobis Domine!_ He came afterwards to see how
injurious was that withdrawment from all public worship (habitual with
himself and his wife), in the case of those who had children. The
offspring of such parents either grew up with a contempt for the
ordinances of religion, or, finding their position as separatists
hurtful to their advancement in the world, conformed, from interested
motives.
In 1731, Count Zinzendorf came to Schwartzenau, and fascinated the De
Marsays for a time. But De Marsay—so melancholy, and so given to
solitude—was not one long ‘to find good for his soul’ in connexion with
any religious community whatever. The Moravian converts met at first at
his house, and he preached to them two or three times, with remarkable
acceptance. But he detected pleasure to sense and self in such exercise
of his gifts, and left them, resolving to yield himself up to the way of
dark faith—to ‘die off from all the creatures’—to be as one
excommunicate, and perishing in the wilderness of spiritual desertion
for his unfaithfulness.
His difficulties were not diminished by mystical metaphysics. There is
the Ground of his soul, and its inward attraction, to be followed,
whatever reason, prudence, reflection, and even that which seems
conscience, may urge or thunder against it. Whether the attraction be
false or true, is exceedingly hard to determine;—the issue frequently
proves it the former, and that the common-sense folk about him were
right after all. He arrives at a state—the wished-for state, in
fact—free from all form, image, object of hope, &c.—a total blank of the
senses and powers, and yet complains bitterly of the misery of that
condition. Reason, internal sense, hope,—all have been abandoned, and
yet, out of the internal ground there arises nothing in the shape of
light or encouragement. The most harassing secular life, in which he
would have been driven to look out of himself to Christ, had been truer
and happier than this morbid introversion.
A single passage in his history (and there are several like it) is
better than a treatise in illustration of the dangers which beset the
notion of _perceptible_ spiritual guidance. He is at Berleberg (1726),
and hears of emigration thence to Pennsylvania. As he lies awake one
night, it is strongly impressed upon his mind that he ought to go: he
and his wife might realize a complete solitude in that land of cheapness
and freedom. For there was too much of the creature for him, even at
Schwartzenau. They resolve, despite the earnest dissuasion of their
friends, to join the next band of emigrants. News arrives that the
greater part of those who last went out, died on the voyage, of disease
or want. De Marsay finds nothing here to stagger him—for should he
shrink from any such hazard? Again, it is shown him clearly that his
wife will die if they sail—he seems to see her dead. They resolve,
nevertheless, to yield themselves up to death; and spend wretched
tearful days, nerved to that determination. At last, when again alone
and in stillness, he receives an impression that it is _not_ the will of
God that he should go. He communicates the joyful tidings to his wife.
She replies that she will go without him, unless she also receives a
similar inward monition for herself. Such impression she happily
obtains, and they remain. The sacrifice had been made, however, said De
Marsay, the Isaac offered—but the victim was not to be actually slain.
Finally, he discovers that his original impulse to go to America was
‘muddy and impure,’ arising from his excessive attachment to seclusion.
So is it continually where men’s whims and fancies are identified with
the oracles of an imagined perceptible guidance.
After many alternations—now rising to a love that casts out fear, and
anon receding into gloom—his mind is mellowed and liberalized with
advancing years. He no longer conceives it necessary to die to the
creature by forsaking his religious friends. He lives at Wolfenbüttel,
with Major Botticher, the husband of his niece, and has abandoned every
ascetic singularity. He believes in the mystical states (for he has
lived them), but he is no longer in any one of them. He looks away from
himself only to Christ. He no longer identifies the mysteries of the
interior way with spirituality. He has friendly intercourse with
ministers—attends church—rejoices in the good work doing among Reformed
and Lutherans everywhere.
Madame de Marsay died in 1742, in great mental distress; throughout
several weeks previously having imagined herself abandoned and
condemned. But her husband rejoiced in his assurance of her glorious
rest. His end was a contrast to his distressful life. ‘I swim and bathe
in joy,’ said he, ‘that I shall now soon obtain what, through the grace
of our Saviour, I have so long and ardently wished and hoped for.’
Footnote 368:
See Note on p. 289.
Footnote 369:
See Note on p. 290.
Footnote 370:
See Second Note on p. 290.
Footnote 371:
See _Revelations from the Life of Prince Talleyrand_; and compare
Eynard, _Vie de Madame de Krüdener_, chap. xvii. Madame de Genlis
writes of her, ‘M^e. de Krüdener disait les choses les plus
singulières avec un calme qui les rendait persuasives; elle était
certainement de très bonne foi; elle me parut être aimable,
spirituelle et d’une originalité très piquante.’—P. 30.
Footnote 372:
See the whole story of the pastor Fontaine and Maria Kummerin, in
Eynard.
Footnote 373:
Barratier subsequently became minister to the French church in Halle.
BOOK THE ELEVENTH
MYSTICISM IN ENGLAND
CHAPTER I.
Is virtue then, unless of Christian growth,
Mere fallacy, or foolishness, or both?
Ten thousand sages lost in endless woe,
For ignorance of what they could not know?
That speech betrays at once a bigot’s tongue;
Charge not a God with such outrageous wrong.
Truly not I—the partial light men have,
My creed persuades me, well employed, may save;
While he that scorns the noonday beam, perverse,
Shall find the blessing, unimproved, a curse.
COWPER.
One morning, Willoughby, calling on Atherton, found him and Gower
looking over an old-fashioned little volume.
WILLOUGHBY. What have you there, Atherton?
ATHERTON. A curious old book—_The History of Hai Ebn Yokhdan_, by Abu
Jaafer Ebn Tophail—an Arabian philosopher of Spain, writing in the
twelfth or thirteenth century: ‘done into English’ by Simon Ockley.
GOWER (_to Willoughby_). I happened to be looking through Barclay’s
_Apology_—found him referring to this _History of Yokhdan_; and, behold,
Atherton fetches me down, from one of his topmost dust-of-erudition
strata there, the very book. It appears that good Barclay was so hard
put to it, to find examples for the support of his doctrine concerning
the Universal and Saving Light, that he has pressed this shadowy
philosophical romance into the service, as an able-bodied
unexceptionable fact:—sets up a fanciful ornament from the Moorish
arabesques of Toledo as a bulwark for his theory.
WILLOUGHBY. Who, then, may this Hai Ebn Yokhdan be?
ATHERTON. Simply a mystical Robinson Crusoe. The book relates how a
child was exposed in an ark upon the sea, drifted to a Fortunate Island
in the Indian Ocean, was there suckled by a roe, dresses himself with
skins and feathers, builds a hut, tames a horse, rises to the discovery
of ‘One supreme and necessarily self-existent Being,’ and does, at last,
by due abstinence and exclusion of all external objects, attain to a
mystical intuition of Him—a contemplation of the divine essence, and a
consciousness that his own essence, thus lost in God, is itself
divine:—all this, by the unaided inner Light. A Mussulman hermit who is
landed on the island, there to retire from mankind, finds him; teaches
him to speak; and discovers, to his devout amazement, that this Ebn
Yokhdan has attained, first by deduction from the external world, and
then, abandoning that, by immediate intuition, to the very truth
concerning God which he has learnt through the medium of the Koran—the
tee-totum mysticism of spinning dervishes included.[374]
GOWER. Barclay, citing his Arab, points the moral as teaching ‘that the
best and most certain knowledge of God, is not that which is attained by
premises premised, and conclusions deduced; but that which is enjoyed by
conjunction of the Mind of Man with the Supreme Intellect, after the
mind is purified from its corruption and is separated from all bodily
images, and is gathered into a profound stillness.’[375]
WILLOUGHBY. And the simple-hearted apologist of the Friends never
suspected that this story was a philosopher’s conjecture—Abu Tophail’s
ideal of what the inner light might be supposed to teach a man, in total
seclusion?
ATHERTON. Not he. At any rate, Yokhdan figures in the first half-dozen
editions of the _Apology_. I believe, in none later.
GOWER. A curious sight, to see the Arabian Sufi and the English Quaker
keeping company so lovingly.
WILLOUGHBY. And yet how utterly repugnant to our English natures, that
contemplative Oriental mysticism.
GOWER. In practice, of course. But in the theory lies a common ground.
ATHERTON. Our island would be but a spare contributor to a general
exhibition of mystics. The British cloister has not one great mystical
saint to show. Mysticism did not, with us, prepare the way for the
Reformation. John Wycliffe and John Tauler are a striking contrast in
this respect. In the time of the Black Death, the Flagellants could make
no way with us. Whether coming as gloomy superstition, as hysterical
fervour, or as pantheistic speculation, mysticism has found our soil a
thankless one.
GOWER. I should like to catch a Hegelian, in good condition, well
nourished with the finest of thrice-bolted philosophic grain, duly
ignorant of England, and shut him up to determine, from the depths of
his consciousness, what would be the form which mysticism must
necessarily assume among us.
ATHERTON. He would probably be prepared to prove to us _à priori_ that
we could not possibly evolve such a product at all.
GOWER. Most likely. The torches of the Bacchantes, flung into the Tiber,
were said still to burn; but what whirling enthusiast’s fire could
survive a plunge into the Thames? There could be nothing for it but
sputtering extinction, and then to float—a sodden lump of pine and
pitch, bobbing against the stolid sides of barges.
WILLOUGHBY. The sage might be pardoned for prophesying that our
mysticism would appear in some time of religious stagnation—a meteoric
flash spasmodically flinging itself this way and that, startling with
its radiance deep slimy pools, black rich oozing reaches of plurality
and sinecure. Remembering the very practical mysticism of the Munster
Anabaptists, he might invest our mystical day-star with such ‘trains of
fire and dews of death;’ or depict it as a shape of terror, like his who
‘drew Priam’s curtain at the dead of night;’ heralding horrors; and
waking every still cathedral close to dread the burning fate that
befell, ‘the topless towers of Ilium.’
ATHERTON. It certainly would have been hard to foresee that mysticism in
England would arise just when it did—would go so far, and no
farther:—that in the time of the Commonwealth, when there was fuller
religious freedom by far, and, throughout the whole middle class, a more
earnest religious life than at any former period of our history,—when
along the ranks of triumphant Puritanism the electric light of
enthusiasm played every here and there upon the steel which won them
victory, and was beheld with no ominous misgiving, but hailed rather as
Pentecostal effluence,—that, at such a juncture, Quakerism should have
appeared to declare this liberty insufficiently free, this spirituality
too carnal, this enthusiasm too cold,—to profess to eject more
thoroughly yet the world, the flesh, and the devil,—to take its place in
the confused throng contending about the ‘bare-picked bone’ of
Hierarchy, and show itself not to be tempted for a moment by wealth, by
place, by power,—to commit many follies, but never a single crime,—to
endure enumerable wrongs, but never to furnish one example of resistance
or revenge.
WILLOUGHBY. Well done, old England! It is gratifying to think that, on
our shores, mysticism itself is less fantastic than its wont,—labours
benignly, if not always soberly; and is represented, not by nightmared
visionaries, or fury-driven persecutors, but by the holy,
tender-hearted, much-enduring George Fox. The Muggletonians,
Fifth-Monarchy men, and Ranters of those days were the exceptional mire
and dirt cast up by the vexed times, but assuredly not the
representatives of English mysticism.
ATHERTON. The elements of Quakerism lie all complete in the personal
history of Fox; and the religious sect is, in many respects, the
perpetuation of his individual character;—the same intellectual
narrowness, incident to an isolated, half-disciplined mind, and the
same large, loving heart of charity for all men. Remember how he
describes himself as ‘knowing pureness and righteousness at eleven
years of age;’ carefully brought up, so that from his childhood all
vice and profaneness were an abomination to him. Then there were his
solitary musings and sore inward battles, as he walked about his
native Drayton many nights by himself: his fastings oft; his much
walking abroad in solitary spots many days; his sitting, with his
Bible, in hollow trees and lonesome places, till night came on.
Because the religious teachers to whom he applied in his temptations
to despair were unhappily incompetent to administer relief, he
concludes too hastily that the system of ministerial instruction is
more often a hindrance than a help to ‘vital godliness.’ Because
‘priest Stevens’ worked up some of his remarks in conversation into
his next Sunday’s sermon,—because the ‘ancient priest’ at Mansetter,
to whom he next applied, could make nothing of him, and in despair
recommended tobacco and psalm-singing (furthermore violating his
confidence, and letting young George’s spiritual distresses get wind
among a bevy of giggling milk-lasses),—because, after travelling seven
miles to a priest of reputed experience at Tamworth, he found him
after all ‘but like an empty hollow cask,’—because horticultural Dr.
Cradock of Coventry fell into a passion with him for accidentally
trampling on the border of his flower-bed,—because one Macham, a
priest in high account, offered him physic and prescribed
blood-letting,—_therefore_ the institution of a clerical order was an
error and a mischief, mainly chargeable with the disputings of the
church, and the ungodliness of the world. So, in his simplicity, he
regarded it as a momentous discovery to have it opened to him ‘that
being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify
men to be ministers of Christ.’[376]
GOWER. We may hold that without joining the Society of Friends.
ATHERTON. In like manner he argues that because believers are the temple
of the Spirit, and many venerate places superstitiously, or identify
church-going with religion, therefore ‘steeple-houses’ are a sinful
innovation, diffusing, for the most part, darkness rather than light.
Because it appeared to him that in his study of the Scriptures he knew
Christ ‘only as the light grew’—by inward revelation—‘as he that hath
the key did open,’ therefore the doctrine of the inward Light is
proclaimed to all as the central principle of Redemption.
GOWER. True. This proneness to extremes has led his followers often to
attach undue importance to the mere externals of a protest against
externalism. Those peculiarities of dress and speech are petty
formalities unworthy of their main principle. In his ‘_Epistle to
gathered Churches into outward forms upon the Earth_,’ Fox can see
scarce a vestige of spiritual religion anywhere beyond the pale of the
Society of Friends.
ATHERTON. Yet ascetic and narrow on many points as he unquestionably
was, and little disposed to make concession to human weakness, in
practical charity he was most abundant. Oppression and imprisonment
awakened the benevolent, never the malevolent impulses of his
nature,—only adding fervour to his plea for the captive and the
oppressed. His tender conscience could know no fellowship with the
pleasures of the world; his tender heart could know no weariness in
seeking to make less its sum of suffering. He is a Cato-Howard. You see
him in his early days, refusing to join in the festivities of the time
called Christmas; yet, if a stranger to the mirth, never to the mercy,
of that kindly season. From house to house he trudges in the snow,
visiting poor widows, and giving them money. Invited to marriage
merry-makings, he will not enter the house of feasting; but the next
day, or soon after, we find him there, offering, if the young couple are
poor, the effectual congratulation of pecuniary help. In the
prison-experiences of George Fox are to be found the germs of that
modern philanthropy in which his followers have distinguished themselves
so nobly. In Derby Jail he is ‘exceedingly exercised’ about the
proceedings of the judges and magistrates—concerning their putting men
to death for cattle, and money, and small matters,—and is moved to write
to them, showing the sin of such severity; and, moreover, ‘what an
hurtful thing it was that prisoners should lie so long in jail; how that
they learned badness one of another in talking of their bad deeds; and
therefore speedy justice should be done.’[377]
WILLOUGHBY. How the spirit of benevolence pervades all the Journals of
the early Friends. Look at John Woolman, who will neither write nor have
letters written to him by post, because the horses are overwrought, and
the hardships of the postboys so great. When farthest gone in rhapsody,
this redeeming characteristic was never wanting to the Quakers. It may
be said of some of them, as was said of dying Pope—uttering, between his
wanderings, only kindness—‘humanity seems to have outlasted
understanding.’
ATHERTON. As to doctrine, again, consider how much religious
extravagance was then afloat, and let us set it down to the credit of
Fox that his mystical excesses were no greater. At Coventry he finds men
in prison for religion who declared, to his horror, that they were God.
While at Derby, a soldier who had been a Baptist, comes to him from
Nottingham, and argues that Christ and the prophets suffered no one of
them externally, only internally. Another company, he says, came to him
there, who professed to be triers of spirits, and when he questioned
them, ‘were presently up in the airy mind,’ and said he was mad. The
priests and magistrates were not more violent against him than the
Ranters, who roved the country in great numbers, professing to work
miracles, forbidding other enthusiasts to preach, on pain of damnation;
and in comparison with whom, Fox was soberness itself. Rice Jones, the
Ranter, from Nottingham, prophesies against him with his company. At
Captain Bradford’s house, Ranters come from York to wrangle with him. In
the Peak country they oppose him, and ‘fall a-swearing.’ At Swanington,
in Leicestershire, they disturb the meeting—hound on the mob against the
Friends; they sing, whistle, and dance; but their leaders are confounded
everywhere by the power of the Lord, and many of their followers, says
the _Journal_, ’were reached and convinced, and received the Spirit of
God; and are come to be a pretty people, living and walking soberly in
the truth of Christ.’[378] Such facts should be remembered in our
estimate. Fox’s inner light does not profess to supersede, nor does it
designedly contradict, the external light of Revelation.
But hand me his _Journal_ a moment. Here is a curious passage. It shows
what a narrow escape Fox had of being resolved into an English Jacob
Behmen.
He says, ‘Now (he was about four-and-twenty at the time) was I come up
in spirit, through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All
things were new; and all the creation gave another smell unto me than
before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness and
innocency and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by
Christ Jesus; so that I say I was come up to the state of Adam which he
was in before he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed
me how all things had their names given them, according to their nature
and virtue. And I was at a stand in my mind whether I should practise
physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the
creatures were so opened to me by the Lord. But I was immediately taken
up in spirit to see into another or more stedfast state than Adam’s in
innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus, that should never fall.
And the Lord showed me that such as were faithful to Him in the power
and light of Christ, should come up into that state in which Adam was
before he fell; in which the admirable works of the creation, and the
virtues thereof may be known, through the openings of that divine word
of wisdom and power by which they were made. Great things did the Lord
lead me into, and wonderful depths were opened unto me, beyond what can
by words be declared; but as people come into subjection to the Spirit
of God, and grow up in the image and power of the Almighty, they may
receive the word of wisdom that opens all things, and come to know the
hidden unity in the Eternal Being.‘[379]
Here he has arrived on life’s road where two ways meet;—had he taken the
wrong alternative, and wandered down that shadowy and mysterious
theosophic avenue, ignorant that it was _no thoroughfare_, what a
different history! Imagine the intrepid, heart-searching preacher—the
redoubted ‘man in leather breeches’—transformed into the physician,
haply peruked and habited in black, dispensing inspired prescriptions,
and writing forgotten treatises on Qualities and Signatures, Sympathies
and Antipathies. What a waste of that indomitable energy!
WILLOUGHBY. How destructive to human life might his very benevolence
have proved.
GOWER. Whatever direction the mysticism of a man like Fox might have
taken, it must have been always actively benevolent. His mysticism is
simple—no artificial stages of abstraction, mounting step by step above
the finite, to a solitary superhuman sanctity. It is beneficent—his many
and various spiritual distresses were permitted by God, he tells us, ‘in
order that he might have a sense of all conditions—how else should he
speak to all conditions?‘[380]
WILLOUGHBY. Truly, metaphysical refinements and Platonic abstraction
could have no charm for this most practical of mystics. What a contrast
here is his pietism to that of Zinzendorf—as abundant in sentiment as
Fox is devoid of it.
GOWER. Nicholas of Basle is more like Fox than any of the German
mystics—much more so than Tauler.
ATHERTON. Fox is, as you say, eminently practical in one sense, yet not
enough so in another. In one respect Behmen and Law are more practical
than he, because more comprehensive. They endeavour to infuse a higher
spiritual life into forms and communities already existing. Fox will
have no steeple-houses, vestments, forms of prayer, no ministry,
regularly paid and highly educated. Such a code is not practical, for it
rests on an abstraction: it does not legislate for men as they are.
Formalism does not lie in these outward things themselves—it consists in
the _spirit_ in which they are used. Here, you see, the mystic, who will
always go beneath the surface to the reality, is too superficial.
Formalism cannot be expelled by any such summary process. The evil lies
deeper.
WILLOUGHBY. So with the asceticism of the Friends. The worldly spirit is
too subtile to be exorcised by a strict outward separation between
church and world. How much easier is total abstinence from scenes of
amusement than temperance in money-getting.
GOWER. Yet I know men and women who pique themselves on their
separateness from the world, because they were never seen at a concert,
whose covetousness, insincerity, or censorious speech, proclaim them
steeped in worldliness to the very lips.
WILLOUGHBY. What say you, Atherton, to the doctrine of the Universal
Light? In their theory on this matter the mystics seem to divide into
two classes. With the mystics of the fourteenth century there is still
left in fallen man a native tendency Godward, on which grace lays hold.
With Behmen and Fox, on the contrary, the inward Seed is a supernatural
gift, distinct from conscience, reason, or any relics of natural
goodness—the hidden word of promise, inspoken into all men, in virtue of
the redeeming work of Christ.[381]
ATHERTON. I do not believe that fallen man required a divine bestowment
of this kind—a supernatural soul within the soul, to give him a moral
sense, and make him responsible. But I am so far a believer in the
doctrine that I would not go beyond what is written, and rigidly confine
all the benefits of Christ’s redemption to those only who have had
access to the Christian Scriptures. The words of the Apostle are still
applicable,—‘Is he the God of the Jews only, is he not of the Gentiles
also?’ I cannot suppose that all Pagan minds, past and present, have
been utterly and for ever abandoned by the Divine Spirit, because the
dispensation under which they have been placed is so much less
privileged than our own. God has light enough to be _Himself_, in the
twilight, even as in the noonday. Did He rule the rising and falling of
ancient nations, working all things toward the fulness of time;—did He
care for the bodies of those heathen, with seedtime and harvest for his
witness, and shall we suppose that He debarred Himself from all access
to their souls?
WILLOUGHBY. Yet no doctrine we can hold on this question materially
lessens the mystery of that dark fact—the prevalence of Evil.
ATHERTON. I am afraid not. Whether we call that better part of man the
light of nature, conscience, or the internal Word, we must admit that it
accomplished next to nothing for the restoration of the vast majority.
We must not judge of the moral effects of heathendom by the philosophic
few merely; we must remember the state of the superstitious many. And
mysticism will be the first to admit that an inoperative Christ (like
that of the Antinomian, for example) is a deceptive phantom or a vain
formula.
Our own position, however, is the same, let our theory or our hope,
concerning others, be what it may. Whatever it may be possible (under
the constitution of our nature) for the Spirit of God to make known
inwardly to that man who is shut out from external teaching, it is quite
certain that _we_ shall receive no inward communications of gracious
influence, while we neglect those outward means which are of divine
appointment.
Note to page 300.
The full title of the work referred to runs as follows: _The Improvement
of Human Reason, exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokhdan_: written in
Arabick about 500 years ago, by Abn Jaafer Ebn Tophail. In which is
demonstrated by what methods one may, by the mere _Light of Nature_,
attain the knowledge of things _Natural_ and _supernatural_; more
particularly the knowledge of God and the affairs of another Life. Newly
translated from the original Arabick by Simon Ockley, &c. 1708.
Ockley adds an Appendix, to guard the book from abuse by the Quakers,
wherein he proposes to examine ‘the fundamental error’ of his
author—viz. that ‘God has given such a power or faculty to man whereby
he may, without any external means, attain to the knowledge of all
things necessary to salvation, and even to the Beatifick Vision itself,
whilst in the state.’
The following is a specimen of the mystical progress which our Arabian
Defoe describes his Crusoe as making,—precisely that with which Ebn
Tophail was well acquainted, but which no real solitary Ebn Yokhdan
could ever have struck out for himself.
‘He began, therefore, to strip himself of all bodily properties, which
he had made some progress in before, during the time of the former
exercise, when he was employed in the imitation of the heavenly bodies;
but there still remained a great many relicks, as his circular motion
(motion being one of the most proper attributes of body), and his care
of animals and plants, compassion upon them, and industry in removing
whatever inconvenienced them. Now, all these things belong to corporeal
attributes, for he could not see these things at first, but by corporeal
faculties; and he was obliged to make use of the same faculties in
preserving them. Therefore he began to reject and remove all those
things from himself, as being in nowise consistent with that state which
he was now in search of. So he continued, after confining himself to
rest in the bottom of his cave, with his head bowed down and his eyes
shut, and turning himself altogether from all sensible things and the
corporeal faculties, and bending all his thoughts and meditations upon
the necessarily self-existent Being, without admitting anything else
besides him; and if any other object presented itself to his
imagination, he rejected it with his utmost force; and exercised himself
in this, and persisted in it to that degree, that sometimes he did
neither eat nor stir for a great many days together. And whilst he was
thus earnestly taken up in contemplation, sometimes all manner of beings
whatsoever would be quite out of his mind and thoughts, except his own
being only.
‘But he found that his own being was not excluded from his thoughts; no,
not at such times when he was most deeply immersed in the contemplation
of the first, true, necessarily self-existent Being; which concerned him
very much,—for he knew that even this was a mixture in this simple
vision, and the admission of an extraneous object in that contemplation.
Upon which he endeavoured to disappear from himself, and be wholly taken
up in the vision of that true Being; till at last he attained it; and
then both the heavens and the earth, and whatsoever is between them, and
all spiritual forms, and corporeal faculties, and all those powers which
are separate from matter, and all those beings which know the
necessarily self-existent Being, all disappeared and vanished, and were
as if they had never been; and amongst these his own being disappeared
too, and there remained nothing but this one, true, perpetually
self-existent Being, who spoke thus in that saying of his (which is not
a notion superadded to his essence):—“To whom now belongs the kingdom?
To this One, Almighty God.”[382] Which words of his Hai Ebn Yokhdan
understood and heard his voice; nor was his being unacquainted with
words, and not being able to speak, any hindrance at all to the
understanding him. Wherefore he deeply immersed himself into this state,
and witnessed that which neither eye hath seen nor ear heard, nor hath
it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive.’—§§ 83, 84.
Footnote 374:
See Note on p. 310.
Footnote 375:
_Barclay’s Apology_, propp. v. and vi. § 27, p. 194. Fourth Edition,
1701.
Footnote 376:
Fox’s _Journal_, pp. 76-83.
Footnote 377:
Fox’s _Journal_, vol. i. p. 130.
Footnote 378:
Fox’s _Journal_, vol. i. pp. 109, 129, 232. Vaughan’s _Hist. of
England under the House of Stuart_, p. 539.
Footnote 379:
_Journal_, vol. i. p. 95.
Footnote 380:
_Journal_, p. 89. This theopathetic mysticism is emphatically
transitive. Every inward manifestation speedily becomes a something to
be done, a testimony to be delivered. The Quaker is ‘exercised,’ not
that he may deck himself in the glory of saintship, but to fit him for
rendering service, as he supposes, to his fellows. The early followers
of Fox often caricatured the acted symbolism of the Hebrew prophets
with the most profane or ludicrous unseemliness. Yet stark-mad as
seemed the fashion of their denunciations, their object was very
commonly some intelligible and actual error or abuse.
Footnote 381:
Barclay’s _Apology_, propp. v. and vi. 16. Sewell’s _History_, p. 544.
(Barclay’s _Letter to Paets_); also p. 646 (_The Christian Doctrine of
the People called Quakers_, &c., published 1693). Compare J. J.
Gurney’s _Observations on the Distinguishing Views and Practices of
the Society of Friends_, chap. i. p. 59.
Footnote 382:
Koran.
CHAPTER II.
And to such Enthusiasm as is but the triumph of the soul of man,
inebriated, as it were, with the delicious sense of the divine life,
that blessed Root, and Original of all holy wisdom and virtue, I am
as much a friend as I am to the vulgar fanatical Enthusiasm a
professed enemy.—HENRY MORE.
WILLOUGHBY. There is no mysticism in the doctrine of an immediate
influence exercised by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man.
ATHERTON. Certainly not. It would be strange if the Creator, in whom we
live and move, should have no direct access to the spirits of his own
creatures.
GOWER. Does not your admission indicate the line between the true and
the false in that aspiration after _immediate_ knowledge, intercourse,
or intuition, so common among the mystics? It is true that the divine
influence is exerted upon us directly. But it is not true that such
influence dispenses with rather than demands—suspends rather than
quickens, the desires and faculties of our nature. So it appears to me
at least.
ATHERTON. And to me also.
WILLOUGHBY. And again (to continue your negatives, Gower) it is not
true, as some of the mystics tell us, that we can transcend with
advantage the figurative language of Scripture; or gaze directly on the
Divine Subsistence,—that we can know without knowledge, believe without
a promise or a fact, and so dispense, in religious matters, with modes
and media.
ATHERTON. Agreed. For ourselves, I believe we shall always find it true
that the letter and the spirit do reciprocally set forth and consummate
each other,—
‘Like as the wind doth beautify a sail,
And as a sail becomes the unseen wind.’
We see truth in proportion as we are true. The outward written word in
our hands directs us to the unseen Word so high above us, yet so near.
The story of Christ’s life and death is our soul’s food. We find that we
may—we must, sit in spirit at his feet, who so spake, so lived, so died.
And, having been with him, we find a new power and attraction in the
words; we are led by the Spirit of Christ in the keeping of those
commandments, concerning which he said, ‘The words I speak unto you,
they are spirit and they are life.’
WILLOUGHBY. So Plotinus is right, in a sense, after all;—like only can
know like. Our likeness to Christ is our true knowledge of him.
ATHERTON. Yes. But we become partakers of the unseen life and light of
God only through the _manifestation_ of that life and light, Christ
Jesus. It is on this point that the theology of Fox is so defective.
WILLOUGHBY. His doctrine that the influence of the Spirit is
_perceptible_, as well as immediate, is still more questionable, surely?
GOWER. Perceptible! aye, and physically perceptible, he will have it, in
some cases,—manifested in a tremulous agitation of the frame.
WILLOUGHBY. True. The convulsive movements among the Protestant
peasantry of the Cevennes are a similar instance. This spasmodical
religious excitement is in a high degree infectious when many are
assembled together.
ATHERTON. Yet we should not reject the doctrine of perceptible spiritual
guidance because it is so liable to abuse. My objection is that I have
never seen satisfactory proof adduced. Do not let us think, however,
that we escape from the danger of self-delusion by denying this
doctrine, and can afford to be careless accordingly. You often see
persons who would think the Quaker belief a dangerous superstition,
unscrupulously identifying their personal or party interests with the
cause of God, as though they believed themselves divinely commissioned,
and could not possibly be liable to deception.
WILLOUGHBY. Here you see the value of the Quaker doctrine concerning
stillness and quiet. The soul must be withdrawn in a silent waiting, and
so hearken for the divine voice. The impulses which stir in the
unallayed tumult of the feelings are the promptings of passion or of
self, not of God. Wherever the belief in perceptible guidance is
entertained, this practice of tranquil tarrying should accompany it, as
its proper safeguard.
ATHERTON. The Quakers are wrong, I think, in separating particular
movements and monitions as divine. But, at the same time, the ‘witness
of the Spirit,’ as regards our state before God, is something more, I
believe, than the mere attestation to the written word.
WILLOUGHBY. The traditional asceticism of the Friends is their fatal
defect as a body.
ATHERTON. And their proneness to hazard good principles by pushing them
to some repulsive extreme. Thus, they propose to abolish physical force
by yielding everything to it;—to put an end to war by laying Europe at
the feet of a great military power,—by apologizing for the oppressor and
reviling those who resist him.
GOWER. I believe the man who says to me, I am trying to love my
neighbour as myself: I suspect him who professes to love him better. His
profession is worse than worthless unless he be consistent, and will
allow himself to be swindled with impunity.
ATHERTON. We may well be suspicious when we see this super-Christian
morality defended by arguments which can only be valid with the meanest
and most grovelling selfishness. Such ethics are, in promise, more than
human; in performance—less.
WILLOUGHBY. But, leaving this question, I am sure no sect which
systematically secludes itself from every province of philosophy,
literature, and art, can grow largely in numbers and in influence in a
state of society like ours.
GOWER. Our English Platonists contrast strongly, in this respect, with
George Fox and his followers.
WILLOUGHBY. How incomprehensible must have been the rude fervour and
symbolic prophesyings of the Quakers to the refined scholarship and
retiring devotion of men like More and Norris, Gale and Cudworth. But
can you call them mystics?
ATHERTON. Scarcely so, except in as far as Platonism is always in a
measure mystical. A vein of mysticism peeps out here and there in their
writings. Cold rationalism they hate. They warm, with a ready sympathy,
to every utterance of the tender and the lofty in the aspirations of the
soul. But their practical English sense shows itself in their instant
rejection of sentimentalism, extravagance, or profanity. This is
especially the case with More—as shrewd in some things as he was
credulous in others, and gifted with so quick an eye for the ridiculous.
GOWER. Delightful reading, those racy pages of his, running over with
quaint fancies.
ATHERTON. More’s position as regards mysticism is, in the main, that of
a comprehensive and judicial mind. He goes a considerable distance with
the enthusiast,—for he believes that love for the supreme Beautiful and
Good may well carry men out of themselves; but for fanatical presumption
he has no mercy.[383]
WILLOUGHBY. The Romanist type of mysticism would be the most repugnant
of all, I should think, to these somewhat free-thinking English
scholars.
ATHERTON. So I have found. More has no notion of professing to give up
his reason, like Poiret; still less of awaiting a suspension of our
powers, like John of the Cross. He believes that ‘the Spirit doth
accomplish and enlarge our humane faculties.’[384]
GOWER. Yet Norris is less remote than More from the Romish mysticism, is
he not? I mean that his Platonism seemed to me a little more monastic,
and less philosophical.
ATHERTON. He has, it must be confessed, his four gradations of love—akin
to the class-religion of the Romish Church;—as though a certain degree
were incumbent on all Christians, but higher stages of devout affection
(above mere duty) were set before the eminently religious.[385] Yet let
us do full justice to the good sense of that excellent man. The Quietist
doctrine of unconsciousness appears to him an unnatural refinement. He
cannot conceive how it should be expected that a man was to be ‘such an
America to himself,’ as not to know what his own wishes and attainments
are. The infused virtue of the Spanish mystics appears to his
discriminating eye ‘as great a paradox in divinity, as occult qualities
in philosophy.‘[386]
WILLOUGHBY. And none of them, I think, distress themselves, as did
Fénélon, about purely disinterested love.
ATHERTON. They are too close followers of Plato to do that. They do not
disguise their impatience of the bodily prison-house. Neither have they
any love for the divine ignorance and holy darkness of Dionysius. They
are eager to catch every ray of knowledge—to know and to rejoice, to the
utmost that our mortality may, upon its heavenward pilgrimage.[387]
Footnote 383:
Let the reader consult his _Enthusiasmus Triumphatus_, or read his
caustic observations upon the _Anima Magica Abscondita_, and his
_Second Lash of Alazonomastix_. Among the high-flyers of his day,
there appear to have been some who spoke of being ‘godded with God,’
and ‘Christed with Christ,’ much after the manner of some of Eckart’s
followers.
Footnote 384:
‘But now seeing the _Logos_ or steady comprehensive wisdom of God, in
which all Ideas and their respects are contained, is but _universal
stable reason_, how can there be any pretence of being so highly
inspired as to be blown above reason itself, unlesse men will fancy
themselves wiser than God, or their understandings above the natures
and reasons of things themselves.’—Preface to the _Conjectura
Cabbalistica_.
Footnote 385:
See Norris’s _Miscellanies_ (1699):
_An Idea of Happiness: enquiring wherein the greatest happiness
attainable by Man in this Life does consist_, pp. 326-341.
Footnote 386:
_Miscellanies_, p. 276 (in a Discourse on Rom. xii. 3), and p. 334.
Footnote 387:
Norris says, in his _Hymn to Darkness_—
‘The blest above do thy sweet umbrage prize,
When cloyed with light, they veil their eyes.
The vision of the Deity is made
More sweet and beatific by thy shade.
But we poor tenants of this orb below
Don’t here thy excellencies know,
Till death our understandings does improve,
And then our wiser ghosts thy silent night-walks love.’
In the writings of Henry More we can see, by a notice here and there,
how Quakerism looked in the eyes of a retired scholar, by no means
indiscriminately adverse to enthusiasm. The word enthusiasm itself, he
always uses more in the classical than the modern sense. ‘To tell you
my opinion of that sect which are called Quakers, though I must allow
that there may be some amongst them good and sincere-hearted men, and
it may be nearer to the purity of Christianity for the life and power
of it than many others, yet I am well assured that the generality of
them are prodigiously melancholy, and some few perhaps possessed with
the devil.’ He thinks their doctrine highly dangerous, as mingling
with so many good and wholesome things an abominable ‘slighting of the
history of Christ, and making a mere allegory of it,—tending to the
utter overthrow of that warrantable though more external frame of
Christianity which Scripture itself points out to us.’ Yet he takes
wise occasion, from the very existence of such a sect, to bid us all
look at home, and see that we do not content ourselves with the mere
Tabernacle without the Presence and Power of God therein.—_Mastix, his
Letter to a Friend_, p. 306.
BOOK THE TWELFTH
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
CHAPTER I.
What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought.
MILTON.
Here follow extracts from a section in Atherton’s Note-book, entitled
‘Remarks on Swedenborg.’
The doctrine of Correspondence is the central idea of Swedenborg’s
system. Everything visible has belonging to it an appropriate
spiritual reality. The history of man is an acted parable; the
universe, a temple covered with hieroglyphics. Behmen, from the
light which flashes on certain exalted moments, imagines that he
receives the key to these hidden significances,—that he can
interpret the _Signatura Rerum_. But he does not see spirits, or
talk with angels. According to him, such communications would be
less reliable than the intuition he enjoyed. Swedenborg takes
opposite ground. ‘What I relate,’ he would say, ‘comes from no such
mere inward persuasion. I recount the things I have seen. I do not
labour to recall and to express the manifestation made me in some
moment of ecstatic exaltation. I write you down a plain statement of
journeys and conversations in the spiritual world, which have made
the greater part of my daily history for many years together. I take
my stand upon experience. I have proceeded by observation and
induction as strict as that of any man of science among you. Only it
has been given me to enjoy an experience reaching into two
worlds—that of spirit, as well as that of matter.’
A mysticism like that of Tauler strives, and strives in vain, to
escape all image and ‘figuration.’ A mysticism like that of
Swedenborg clothes every spiritual truth in some substantial
envelope, and discerns a habitant spirit in every variety of form.
The follower of Plato essays to rise from the visible to the
invisible. But he spurns each ladder in succession by which he has
ascended. The follower of Swedenborg seeks a similar ascent; but he
never flings away, as common, the husk which guards the precious
spiritual kernel. He will not shun the material, or diminish his
relations to it. Rather will he surround himself by those objects
and those ties of earth which, spiritually regarded, speak
constantly of heaven. To look thus on life, I need not enter the
school of Swedenborg.
But in this freedom from asceticism,—this tendency to see the
spiritual, not beyond, but in, the natural,—the mysticism of
Swedenborg, like that of Behmen, has advanced far beyond its
mediæval type. Religion no longer plays the despot toward science;
the flesh is no longer evil; this beautiful world no longer yielded
over to that father of lies who called it his.
As regards the scriptures, I find Swedenborg less one-sided than
mystics like Frank, Weigel, or the more extreme among the Quakers.
He displays no inclination to depreciate the letter of scripture in
favour of the inward teaching of the Word. Without this
‘book-revelation,’ he tells us, man would have remained in gross
ignorance concerning his Maker and his future destinies. The literal
sense of the word is the basis of the spiritual and celestial sense;
and the word, for this very reason, holy in every syllable. He sets
up no doctrine based on arbitrary or fantastical interpretations.
His doctrinal system is drawn from the literal sense, and calmly, if
not always satisfactorily deduced, by citation, exegesis, and
comparison of passages, without any mysticism whatever. Thus the
balance between the letter and the spirit is maintained in his
theology with a fairness almost unparalleled in the history of
mysticism.[388]
According to Swedenborg, all the mythology and the symbolisms of
ancient times were so many refracted or fragmentary
correspondences—relics of that better day when every outward object
suggested to man’s mind its appropriate divine truth. Such desultory
and uncertain links between the seen and the unseen are so many
imperfect attempts toward that harmony of the two worlds which he
believed himself commissioned to reveal. The happy thoughts of the
artist, the imaginative analogies of the poet, are exchanged with
Swedenborg for an elaborate system. All the terms and objects in the
natural and spiritual worlds are catalogued in pairs. This method
appears so much formal pedantry. Our fancies will not work to order.
The meaning and the life with which we continually inform outward
objects,—those suggestions from sight and sound, which make almost
every man at times a poet,—are our own creations, are determined by
the mood of the hour, cannot be imposed from without, cannot be
arranged like the nomenclature of a science. As regards the inner
sense of scripture, at all events, Swedenborg introduces some such
yoke. In that province, however, it is perhaps as well that those
who are not satisfied with the obvious sense should find some
restraint for their imagination, some method for their ingenuity,
some guidance in a curiosity irresistible to a certain class of
minds. If an objector say, ‘I do not see why the ass should
correspond to scientific truth, and the horse to intellectual
truth,’ Swedenborg will reply, ‘This analogy rests on no fancy of
mine, but on actual experience and observation in the spiritual
world. I have always seen horses and asses present and
circumstanced, when, and according as, those inward qualities were
central.’[389] But I do not believe that it was the design of
Swedenborg rigidly to determine the relationships by which men are
continually uniting the seen and unseen worlds. He probably
conceived it his mission to disclose to men the divinely-ordered
correspondences of scripture, the close relationship of man’s
several states of being, and to make mankind more fully aware that
matter and spirit were associated, not only in the varying analogies
of imagination, but by the deeper affinity of eternal law. In this
way, he sought to impart an impulse rather than to prescribe a
scheme. His consistent followers will acknowledge that had he lived
in another age, and occupied a different social position, the forms
under which the spiritual world presented itself to him would have
been different. To a large extent, therefore, his _Memorable
Relations_ must be regarded as true for him only,—for such a
character, in such a day, though containing principles independent
of personal peculiarity and local colouring. It would have been
indeed inconsistent, had the Protestant who (as himself a Reformer)
essayed to supply the defects and correct the errors of the
Reformation,—had he designed to prohibit all advance beyond his own
position.
There is great depth and beauty in that idea of Dante’s, according
to which he represents himself as conscious of ascending from heaven
to heaven in Paradise, not by perception of a transit through space,
but by seeing his Beatrice grow more and more lovely:—
Io non m’accorsi del salire in ella;
Ma d’esserv’ entro mi fece assai fede
La donna mia ch’ io vidi far più bella.
What is an imagination with Dante, acquires, in the theosophy of
Swedenborg, the constancy of law. According to him, the more I have
of goodness in me, the more shall I discern of the loveliness
belonging to the form of a good angel. If I am evil, the hideous
forms of evil natures will not be repulsive to me; and if I were
placed in heaven, the glory would afflict me with pain. To three
persons, in three different states of holiness and knowledge, a
fourth would present three several aspects in the spiritual world.
Thus, spirits see as they themselves are; their character modifies
their vision; their nature creates for them their world. All this
seems so much mere idealism, extended from this life into the next.
I ask, Where is the absolute truth, then? My German neighbour
quietly inquires, ‘Is there, or is there not, any _Ding an sich_?’
The Swedenborgian replies, ‘Swedenborg is no idealist, as you
suspect. The absolute truth is with God; and the more goodness and
wisdom the creatures have from him, the more truly do they see. The
reality external to self, I do not take away; yea, rather I
establish it on a divine basis. For the reality is even this divine
order, which the Omniscient hath established and maintains,—that
form and vision shall answer exactly to spirit and insight. Such
correspondence is but partial in this masquerading world of ours, so
full of polite pretences and seemly forms. But in the spiritual
world every one appears by degrees only what he is. He gravitates
towards that circle or association of spirits where all see as much
as he does. His character is written, past all disguise, in his
form; and so ‘the things spoken in the ear in closets are proclaimed
upon the housetops.’
Humanity stands high with Behmen, higher yet with Swedenborg. The
Divine Humanity is at once the Lord and pattern of all creation. The
innumerable worlds of space are arranged after the human form. The
universe is a kind of constellation _Homo_. Every spirit belongs to
some province in Swedenborg’s ‘Grand Man,’ and affects the
correspondent part of the human body. A spirit dwelling in those
parts of the universe which answer to the heart or the liver, makes
his influx felt in the cardiac or hepatic regions of Swedenborg’s
frame before he becomes visible to the eye. Evil spirits, again,
produced their correspondent maladies on his system, during the time
of his intercourse with them. Hypocrites gave him a pain in the
teeth, because hypocrisy is spiritual toothache. The inhabitants of
Mercury correspond to a province of memory in the ‘grand man:’ the
Lunarians to the ensiform cartilage at the bottom of the
breast-bone. With Swedenborg likeness is proximity: space and time
are states of love and thought. Hence his journeys from world to
world;—passing through states being equivalent to travelling over
spaces. Thus it took him ten hours to reach one planet, while at
another he arrived in two, because a longer time was required to
approximate the state of his mind to that of the inhabitants of the
former.[390]
The thoughts of Swedenborg have never to struggle for expression,
like those of the half-educated Behmen. The mind of the Swedish seer
was of the methodical and scientific cast. His style is calm and
clear. He is easily understood in detail. The metaphors of poets are
objects of vision with him: every abstraction takes some concrete
form: his illustrations are incessant. He describes with the graphic
minuteness of Defoe. Nothing is lost in cloud. With a distinct and
steady outline he pourtrays, to the smallest circumstance, the
habitations, the amusements, the occupations, the penalties, the
economy, the marriages of the unseen world. He is never amazed, he
never exaggerates. He is unimpassioned, and wholly careless of
effect. Those of his followers with whom I have come in contact,
partake of their master’s philosophy. They are liberal in spirit,
and nowise impatient of unbelief in others. Swedenborg never pants
and strives—has none of the tearful vehemence and glowing emotion
which choke the utterance of Behmen. He is never familiar in this
page, and rhapsodical in that. Always serene, this imperturbable
philosopher is the Olympian Jove of mystics. He writes like a man
who was sufficient to himself; who could afford to wait. He lived
much alone; and strong and deep is the stream of this mysticism
which carries no fleck of foam.
Other mystics seem to know times of wavering, when enthusiasm burns
low. To Swedenborg sunrise and sunset are not more constant and
familiar than the divine mission which he claims. Other mystics are
overpowered by manifestations from the unseen world. Horror seizes
them, or a dizzy joy, or the vision leaves them faint and trembling.
They have their alternations; their lights and shadows are in
keeping; they will topple headlong from some sunny pinnacle into an
abysmal misery. But Swedenborg is ‘in the spirit’ for near two score
years, and in his easy chair, or at his window, or on his walks,
holds converse, as a matter of course, with angels and departed
great ones, with patriarchs and devils. He can even instruct some of
the angels, who have had experience only of their own world, and are
guileless accordingly.
Footnote 388:
See Swedenborg’s _True Christian Religion_, chap. iv.
Footnote 389:
See _E. Swedenborg, a Biography_, by J. G. Wilkinson, p. 99; a
succinct and well-written account of the man, and the best
introduction to his writings I have met with.
Footnote 390:
Wilkinson, pp. 187, 118.
CHAPTER II.
We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from Thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.
TENNYSON.
I find Swedenborg, in the midst of his spiritual interviews and
voluminous authorship, taking his part for some time in the Diet of
1761, and presenting three memorials with high repute for practical
sagacity. He publishes ‘_A New Method of finding the Longitude_,’
simultaneously with the ‘_Apocalypse Revealed_.’
He appears to have possessed a remarkable power of inward
respiration. He says that he received from the Lord a conformation
enabling him to breathe inwardly for a long time, without the aid of
the external air, while his outward senses continued their
operation.[391]
Swedenborg is strongly opposed to ascetic practice in every form. He
contradicts all the cloistered contemplative mystics, when he
declares that ‘man cannot be formed for heaven except by means of
the world.’ He represents the ‘religious,’ and devotees who have
renounced the world for pious meditation, as by no means agreeable
or enviable personages in the other life. They are of a sorrowful
temper, despising others, discontented at not having been honoured
with superior happiness, selfish, turning away from offices of
charity (the very means of conjunction with heaven), soon betaking
themselves to solitary places. Truly, many of the first in the
heaven of the Romish calendar are the last in the heaven of
Swedenborg. And I doubt not that his arrangement is, in such cases,
the more near the truth of the two. For, as he justly says, ‘a life
of charity towards our neighbour (which consists in doing what is
just and right in every employment) can only be exercised in general
as man is engaged in some employment.’ Such a life, he declares,
tends heavenward,—not so a life of piety without a life of
charity.[392]
‘In heaven,’ says Swedenborg, ‘instruction is committed, not to
memory, but to _life_;‘—a goodly saying.
Swedenborg’s ‘Christian Religion’ is a system of theology, calm and
orderly throughout, illustrated with plates—the _Memorable
Relations_. I interpret these marvellous narratives much as
Swedenborg does the Mosaic record. I do not question their historic
truth, _for Swedenborg_. Such things he saw and heard; for to such a
mind all abstraction takes substantial form. His mental transitions
are journeys. Every proposition has its appropriate scenery; every
group of verities incorporates itself in a drama, and becomes a
speech and action. But I put an inner sense into these _Relations_,
and so reading them, find charming allegories, just in moral and
elegant in style.
What Swedenborg tells us about a future state I am certainly not in
a position to contradict, for I know nothing about such matters. The
general conviction of the Christian world seems to me true in the
main,—that the silence of the scriptures concerning such details is
an argument for their inspiration—was wisely designed to check
curiosity and to exercise faith. Yet it cannot be denied that after
all Swedenborg’s disclosures, the Christian conflict, and the
motives to that holy warfare, remain very much as the Bible presents
them. Selfishness is still the root of evil; God the sole foundation
of truth and goodness; faith alone, working by love, can overcome
the world. If the arrangements he relates as finding place in heaven
and hell, be regarded as the unconscious creation of his own brain,
an extraordinary genius for legislature must be allowed him by all.
There is generally an obvious fitness in the economy he describes.
Here and there he is whimsical and Quevedo-like. Sometimes a certain
grim satire peeps out. As regards individuals, we suspect prejudice
or caprice. He represents Melanchthon as faring but poorly, for a
long time, in the other world, because he would not let go his
doctrine of justification by faith. He elevates Mahomet in his
heaven, and lowers Paul. Who does not think of Dante, carrying the
feud of Guelph and Ghibelline beyond the grave?[393]
It shocks such preconceived ideas as we may most of us have formed
concerning heaven, to find it represented as so like earth. That in
the spiritual world there should be towns and cities, gymnasia and
theological discussions, sermons and book-writing, courts of law,
and games, yea marriage, of a refined species, the progeny whereof
are inward joys and virtues;—all this is novel.[394] Our notions
here are mostly taken from Milton, and his, in considerable measure,
from ecclesiastical and scholastic tradition. After the sublimity of
the poet, the homely circumstantialities of the theosophist appear
cruelly prosaic. Yet Swedenborg’s view of the future state may be
regarded as, in many respects, a wholesome corrective to the popular
conception. The truth, I should dimly surmise, may lie between the
two. The general apprehension does perhaps make the transition at
death too abrupt; forgets too much the great variety of degrees and
societies of spirits which must distinguish the inhabitants of hell
and heaven,—how completely the inward tendency will make the grief
or the joy,—how little mere change of scene and mode of existence
can constitute the bliss or woe,—and how various must be the
occupations and enjoyments of a world which is to consummate, not
our adoration merely, but active love and knowledge.
Very beautiful is Swedenborg’s description of infants in heaven, and
the instruction they receive ‘from angels of the female sex, who in
the life of the body, loved infants tenderly, and at the same time
loved God.’[395]
Even wicked men, immediately after death, are kindly received by
good angels—such mercy is there for our poor mortality at the last
trying hour. But the evil nature of such persons soon resumes its
former ascendancy. The society of those pure associates grows
irksome, and is forsaken by the sinful for evil companionship
similar to themselves.
Swedenborg cannot be considered mystical in his doctrine concerning
spiritual influence—that customary seat of mysticism. Such influence
he pronounces immediate on the divine part, but not perceptible on
ours, nor such as to exclude the necessity of instruction and the
use of means. The good we do, God alone worketh in us; but we are
conscious only of effort on our own part, though believing that we
receive divine assistance. There is to be no tarrying, he says, for
magical grace; no crying ‘Wash me!’ while the divinely given means
of purification lie unused at our side. The _proprium_, or own-hood
of every angel, spirit, or man, is only evil. (All angels and devils
were once good and bad men.) To live only from God and not from
self, is the true purity. Every man is an organ of life, deriving
his life and free-will from God, and receptive of the Divine
influx—enjoying more or less, as he opens or closes his nature
thereto. If the lower regions of his spiritual nature be closed
against this influx, God is still in him, but he is not in God.[396]
Swedenborg declares that the Church has been corrupted by the
doctrine of three divine persons existing from eternity. He
maintains that such a belief must in reality involve the conception
of three several gods, however loudly those who hold it may profess
to acknowledge the Divine Unity. In his theology, the Father, Son,
and Spirit, are ‘the three essentials of one God, which make One,
like Soul, Body, and Operation in man.’
The doctrine of Swedenborg concerning the work of Christ appears to
have received its peculiar complexion, at least in great measure,
from his repugnance to Calvinism. He saw that the theology of the
Reformation had unduly elaborated into doctrine, the forensic and
pecuniary metaphors of Scripture, concerning justification and
redemption. In his reaction, he is too much inclined to give to
those figures a meaning considerably short of that which a
consistent interpretation must assign them. Yet the results at which
he arrives are not so decidedly opposed to those reached by the
theology usually termed evangelical, as might have been anticipated.
But the process of redemption in Swedenborg’s system differs widely.
He says he cannot believe that the Father, in his wrath, condemned
the human race, and in his mercy sent his Son to bear their curse;
that out of love for his suffering Son he cancelled the sentence of
damnation, yet only in favour of those for whom the Son should
intercede, who was thus to be a perpetual Mediator in the presence
of the Father.[397] He declares it a fundamental error of the Church
to believe the passion of the Cross to be redemption itself. He
pronounces imputed righteousness a subversion of the divine
order.—So much for what he denies. On the other hand, he affirms
that in the fulness of time, Jehovah assumed humanity to redeem and
save mankind. Both in the spiritual regions and among men, evil had
been gradually outgrowing and threatening to overpower good. The
equilibrium between the heavenly and hellish worlds was lost. It was
as though a dyke had been broken down, and sin were about to
overflow the universe. Then God took to himself our nature, to
subjugate the hells and to restore to order the heavens. Every
victory gained by Christ over the temptations which assailed Him,
distanced and enfeebled the powers of evil everywhere. It was the
driving back of ravenous beasts to their dens,—the delivery and
feeding of his flock, both men and angels. This victory of the
Saviour is our victory, is that redemption in virtue of which we are
able, believing in Him, to resist and vanquish evil. Mediation,
Intercession, Atonement, Propitiation, are forms of speech
‘expressive of the approach which is opened to God, and of the grace
communicated from God, by means of His Humanity.’ Thus Swedenborg
also believes in a violated order and an impending perdition; in the
redemption of the race from such a fate by the incarnate One; in the
vindication or restoration of the divine law and order by his
conflict and victory on our behalf; and in a life lived _for_ us,
which becomes also a life quickened _in_ us. He appears to object to
the idea of sacrifice as necessarily concentrating the work of
redemption in the shedding of the Saviour’s blood. Such may have
been the limited conception of sacrifice in the theology he opposed;
but that error could be no good reason for explaining away the idea
of sacrifice altogether. The language of Christ concerning himself
must be strangely misinterpreted if no such idea is to be found
there. But that sacrifice was constituted by his whole life, as well
as by its last act—the laying down thereof. The distinction drawn by
some divines between the active and passive obedience—as though the
death alone were our atonement, and the life alone our example—is a
most unhappy refinement.
In Swedenborg’s doctrine concerning union with Christ there is
nothing mystical. From the passionate and sensuous union of some
mystics, and from the pantheistic confusion of others, he is
completely free.
It is to be regretted that the work of redemption should still be so
partially regarded by opposing sections of the Church. On the one
side are those who hold the doctrine of an exact satisfaction (the
commercial theory); who suppose that, in virtue of imputed
righteousness, God sees in his people no sin; and who would say that
men _may_, rather than that they _must_, be exhorted to maintain
good works. This covert and generally theoretical antinomianism is
happily rare. Yet there are some well-meaning men, desirous of doing
a reforming work among us, who actually imagine such an extreme as
this to be the ordinary evangelical doctrine. On the other side are
those whose tendency is to resolve the historical into the inward
Christ. From any such leaning Swedenborg is more free than George
Fox. On this side, too, stand those with whom Christ’s work is
rather a first sample of restored humanity than the way of
restoration, and who seem to suppose that in admitting God to be
just, they make Him cruel. In this extreme aversion to acknowledge
an external law, and an external danger consequent on its violation,
Swedenborg does not share. But, like most of the mystics, he
conceives of redemption as wrought for us only as it is wrought in
us; takes justification for granted, if we have but sanctification;
and regards our sins as remitted just in proportion as we are
reclaimed from them. If we must lean towards some extreme, this is
the more safe, because containing the larger measure of truth. It
appears to me that the ‘divine order’ requires that man be accepted
of God in a way consistent with the divine righteousness; and so
also as, at the very same time, to become conformed to that
righteousness. The sacred writers constantly combine those two
aspects of redemption which our systems are so prone to separate. On
the one side, Christ’s example is pressed upon us, even in those
very acts which are peculiar to Himself as divine. On the other, the
blood of Christ is represented as sanctifying us—purging our
consciences from dead works to serve the living God; while it is
also stated expressly that He died, the just for the unjust.
Similar as Swedenborg’s theology is in its spirit to that of Behmen,
I find him expressly stating that he had never read the German
theosophist.
Concerning the Church of the New Jerusalem, Swedenborg says, ‘Since
the Lord cannot manifest himself in person (to the world), which has
just been shown to be impossible, and yet He has foretold that He
would come and establish a New Church, which is the New Jerusalem,
it follows that He will effect this by the instrumentality of a man,
who is able not only to receive the doctrines of that Church in his
understanding, but also to make them known by the press. That the
Lord manifested Himself before me His servant, that He sent me on
this office, and afterwards opened the sight of my spirit, and so
let me into the spiritual world, permitting me to see the heavens
and the hells, and also to converse with angels and spirits; and
this now continually for many years, I attest in truth; and farther,
that from the first day of my call to this office, I have never
received anything appertaining to the doctrines of that Church from
any angel, but from the Lord alone, whilst I was reading the
Word.’—_True Christian Religion_, § 779.
Footnote 391:
Wilkinson, pp. 79, 130.
Footnote 392:
_Heaven and Hell_, § 360.
Footnote 393:
_True Christian Religion_, § 796.
Footnote 394:
See the description of the heavenly palaces, of divine worship in
heaven, and of the angelic employments, _Heaven and Hell_, §§ 183,
221, 387. _True Christian Religion_, §§ 694, 697. Also concerning
marriages in heaven, _Heaven and Hell_, §§ 366-386.
Footnote 395:
_Heaven and Hell_, §§ 329-345.
Footnote 396:
_True Christian Religion_, chap. vi. 6, 7; _Heaven and Hell_, § 592.
Footnote 397:
_True Christian Religion_, chap. ii. 1-7. I give here Swedenborg’s
idea of the evangelical theology. See especially §§ 132-135, where he
represents himself as correcting the false doctrine of certain spirits
in the other world concerning the Divine Nature.
BOOK THE THIRTEENTH
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER I.
Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Wie könnten wir zur Sonne blicken?
Wär nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,
Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?[398]
GOETHE.
Early in December, Atherton was called away from Ashfield by some
matters of business. His solitary evenings were spent in the chief inn
of a quiet cathedral town, and solaced by the drawing up of a kind of
summary, which was to indicate the main results arrived at by so much
reading and talking about the mystics. This final review was despatched
in a letter to Gower,—was read aloud by him to a full auditory
(comprising, beside its ordinary members, Mr. and Mrs. Lowestoffe, who
had come up to spend Christmas),—and is here inserted.
_Old Red Dragon, Snorumbury._
MY DEAR GOWER,
I had purposed keeping this concluding paper, which you asked of me,
till I could rejoin you once more, and we might read and talk over
it together. But I cannot say how long I may be detained here: so I
send it you at once, that our mystical inquiries may be wound up
before the Christmas merry-makings begin.
In the present day, there are few who will acknowledge the name of
mystic. Indeed, Mysticism is now held in combination with so many
modifying or even counteracting elements, that a very
strongly-marked or extreme expression of it is scarcely possible.
Yet in many and very diverse forms of religious opinion, a mystical
tendency may be discerned. It is apparent in the descendant of
Irving, with his supernatural gifts; among some of the followers of
Fox, where the inner light eclipses the outer; in the disciple of
Swedenborg, so familiar with the world of spirits. The mystical
tendency is present, also, wherever the subjective constituent of
religion decidedly overbalances the objective. It is to be found
whereever the religionist (under whatever pretence) refuses to allow
the understanding to judge concerning what falls within its proper
province. Thus, I tend toward mysticism, if I invest either my
religious intuitions or my particular interpretation of scripture,
with a divine halo—with a virtual infallibility—and charge with
profanity the man whose understanding is dissatisfied with my
conclusions. The ‘evangelical’ is wrong, if he hastily condemns, as
‘carnal,’ him who does not find his express doctrines in the
Bible;—if, instead of attempting to satisfy the understanding of the
objector with reasons, he summarily dismisses it, by misquoting the
passage, ‘the natural man discerneth not the things of the spirit.’
The ‘spiritualist’ errs, in precisely the same way, when he assumes
that his intuitions are too holy to be questioned by the logical
faculty,—proclaims his religious sentiment above criticism, and
pronounces every objection the utterance of a pedantic formalism, or
a miserable conventionality. So to do, is to confound the childlike
and the childish,—to forget that we should be, in malice, children;
but in understanding, men. If the intuition of the one man, or the
faith of the other, be removed from the sphere of knowing, and the
court of evidence,—be an impulse or an instinct, rather than a
conviction, and be rendered inaccessible utterly to the
understanding, then is the bridge broken down between them and their
fellows. The common tongue of interpretation and the common ground
of argument are taken altogether away. For such faith no reason can
be rendered to him who has it not.
In Germany, it may be questioned whether the efforts of the
‘faith-philosophers’ were not more injurious than helpful to the
cause which they espoused. They endeavoured to shelter religion from
Rationalism by relegating it to the province of feeling or
sentiment. Hamann and Jacobi[399] might have withstood Rationalism
on its own ground. But these defenders abandoned, without a blow,
the fortifications of an impregnable argument, and shut themselves
up in the citadel—faith. Both were soon eclipsed by the deservedly
great name of Schleiermacher. His position was a stronger one than
theirs, and more comprehensive; yet, in the issue, scarcely more
satisfactory. In Schleiermacher’s theology, the individual
‘Christian consciousness’ is made the test according to which more
or less of the recorded history of the Saviour is to be received.
The supposed facts of Christianity contract or expand according to
the supposed spiritual wants of the individual Christian. Thus, if
any say, ‘Certain of the miracles, the resurrection and ascension of
Christ, do not make a part of my Christian consciousness,—I can
realize spiritual communion with Christ, independently of these
accessories,’—Schleiermacher tells him he may dispense with
believing them. Here, again, too much is conceded: portions of the
very heart are set aside as non-essentials. Christianity is a
_living_ whole, and cannot be thus dismembered without peril to
life. This baptism of Schleiermacher is rapid and sweeping, and the
veriest sceptics are Christianized in spite of themselves. Men whose
Christianity is historic, much as Mahommedanism is historic, turn
out excellent Christians, notwithstanding.