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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th
+Centuries, by Rufus M. Jones
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries
+
+
+Author: Rufus M. Jones
+
+
+
+Release Date: March 28, 2008 [eBook #24934]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPIRITUAL REFORMERS IN THE 16TH &
+17TH CENTURIES***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+ Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed
+ in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page
+ breaks occurred in the original book.
+
+
+
+
+
+SPIRITUAL REFORMERS IN THE 16TH & 17TH CENTURIES
+
+by
+
+RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt.
+
+Professor Of Philosophy, Haverford College, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MacMillan and Co., Limited
+St. Martin's Street, London
+1914
+
+Copyright
+
+
+
+
+_OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES_
+
+_EDITED By RUFUS M. JONES_
+
+
+STUDIES IN MYSTICAL RELIGION. (1908.)
+ By Rufus M. Jones.
+
+THE QUAKERS IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES. (1911).
+ By Rufus M. Jones, assisted by Isaac Sharpless and Amelia M. Gummere.
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF QUAKERISM. (1912.)
+ By William Charles Braithwaite.
+
+THE SECOND PERIOD OF QUAKERISM. (_In preparation._)
+ By William Charles Braithwaite.
+
+THE LATER PERIODS OF QUAKERISM. (_In preparation._)
+ By Rufus M. Jones.
+
+
+
+
+{v}
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In my _Quakers in the American Colonies_ I announced the preparation of
+a volume to be devoted mainly to Jacob Boehme and his influence. I
+soon found, however, as my work of research proceeded, that Boehme was
+no isolated prophet who discovered in solitude a fresh way of approach
+to the supreme problems of the soul. I came upon very clear evidence
+that he was an organic part of a far-reaching and significant
+historical movement--a movement which consciously aimed, throughout its
+long period of travail, to carry the Reformation to its legitimate
+terminus, the restoration of apostolic Christianity. The men who
+originated the movement, so far as anything historical can be said to
+be "originated," were often scornfully called "Spirituals" by their
+opponents, while they thought of themselves as divinely commissioned
+and Spirit-guided "Reformers," so that I have with good right named
+them "Spiritual Reformers."
+
+I have had two purposes in view in these studies. One purpose was the
+tracing of a religious movement, profoundly interesting in itself, as a
+great side current of the Reformation. The other purpose was the
+discovery of the background and environment of seventeenth century
+Quakerism. There can be little doubt, I think, that I have here found
+at least one of the great historical sources of the Quaker movement.
+This volume, together with my _Studies in Mystical Religion_, will at
+any rate {vi} furnish convincing evidence that the ideas, aims,
+experiences, practices, and aspirations of the early Quakers were the
+fruit of long spiritual preparation. This movement, as a whole, has
+never been studied before, and my work has been beset with
+difficulties. I have been aided by helpful monographs on individual
+"Reformers," written mainly by German and French scholars, who have
+been duly credited at the proper places, but for the most part my
+material has been drawn from original sources. I am under much
+obligation to my friend, Theodor Sippell of Schweinsberg, Germany. I
+am glad to announce that he is preparing a critical historical study on
+John Everard and the Ranters, which will throw important light on the
+religious ideas of the English Commonwealth. He has read my proofs,
+and has, throughout my period of research, given me the benefit of his
+extensive knowledge of this historical field. I wish to express my
+appreciation of the courtesy and kindness which I have received from
+the officials of the University Library at Marburg. William Charles
+Braithwaite of Banbury, England, has given me valuable help. My wife
+has assisted me in all my work of research. She has read and re-read
+the proofs, made the Index, and given me an immense amount of patient
+help. I cannot close this Preface without again referring to the
+inspiration of my invisible friend, John Wilhelm Rowntree, in whose
+memory this series was undertaken.
+
+
+HAVERFORD, PENNSYLVANIA,
+
+_January_ 1914.
+
+
+
+
+{vii}
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+WHAT IS "SPIRITUAL RELIGION" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MAIN CURRENT OF THE REFORMATION . . . . . . . . . . . 1
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HANS DENCK AND THE INWARD WORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+TWO PROPHETS OF THE INWARD WORD: BÜNDERLIN AND ENTFELDER 31
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SEBASTIAN FRANCK: AN APOSTLE OF INWARD RELIGION . . . . . 46
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CASPAR SCHWENCKFELD AND THE REFORMATION OF THE "MIDDLE WAY" 64
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SEBASTIAN CASTELLIO: A FORGOTTEN PROPHET . . . . . . . . . 88
+
+
+
+{viii}
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+COORNHERT AND THE COLLEGIANTS--A MOVEMENT FOR
+ SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HOLLAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+VALENTINE WEIGEL AND NATURE MYSTICISM . . . . . . . . . . 133
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+JACOB BOEHME: HIS LIFE AND SPIRIT . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+BOEHME'S UNIVERSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+JACOB BOEHME'S "WAY OF SALVATION" . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+JACOB BOEHME'S INFLUENCE IN ENGLAND . . . . . . . . . . . 208
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+EARLY ENGLISH INTERPRETERS OF SPIRITUAL RELIGION:
+ JOHN EVERARD, GILES RANDALL, AND OTHERS . . . . . . . . 235
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HIGH PLACES--ROUS, VANE, AND STERRY 266
+
+
+{ix}
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, THE FIRST OF THE "LATITUDE-MEN" . . . 288
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+JOHN SMITH, PLATONIST--"AN INTERPRETER OF THE SPIRIT" . . 305
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THOMAS TRAHERNE AND THE SPIRITUAL POETS OF THE
+ SEVENTEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
+
+
+INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
+
+{x}
+
+ Within thy sheltering darkness spin the spheres;
+ Within the shaded hollow of thy wings.
+ The life of things,
+ The changeless pivot of the passing years--
+ These in thy bosom lie.
+ Restless we seek thy being; to and fro
+ Upon our little twisting earth we go:
+ We cry, "Lo, there!"
+ When some new avatar thy glory does declare,
+ When some new prophet of thy friendship sings,
+ And in his tracks we run
+ Like an enchanted child, that hastes to catch the sun.
+
+ And shall the soul thereby
+ Unto the All draw nigh?
+ Shall it avail to plumb the mystic deeps
+ Of flowery beauty, scale the icy steeps
+ Of perilous thought, thy hidden Face to find,
+ Or tread the starry paths to the utmost verge of the sky?
+ Nay, groping dull and blind
+ Within the sheltering dimness of thy wings--
+ Shade that their splendour flings
+ Athwart Eternity--
+ We, out of age-long wandering, but come
+ Back to our Father's heart, where now we are at home.
+
+
+ EVELYN UNDERHILL in _Immanence_, p. 82.
+
+
+
+
+{xi}
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+WHAT IS "SPIRITUAL RELIGION"
+
+I
+
+There is no magic in words, though, it must be confessed, they often
+exercise a psychological influence so profound and far-reaching that
+they seem to possess a miracle-working efficacy. Some persons live all
+their lives under the suggestive spell of certain words, and it
+sometimes happens that an entire epoch is more or less dominated by the
+mysterious fascination of a sacred word, which needs only to be spoken
+on the house-top to set hearts beating and legs marching.
+
+"Spiritual" has always been one of these wonder-working words. St.
+Paul, in Christian circles, was the first to give the word its unique
+value. For him it named a new order of life and a new level of being.
+In his thought, a deep cleavage runs through the human race and divides
+it into two sharply-sundered classes, "psychical men" and "pneumatical
+men"--men who live according to nature, and men who live by the life of
+the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth
+earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, _empirical_, parts of a vast
+nature-system, doomed, as is the entire system, to constant flux and
+mutability and eventually to irretrievable wreck and ruin; the natural,
+psychical, corruptible man cannot inherit incorruption.[1] On the
+other hand, the pneumatical or spiritual man {xii} "puts on"
+incorruption and immortality. He is a member of a new order; he is
+"heavenly," a creation "not made with hands," but wrought out of the
+substance of the spiritual world, and furnished with the inherent
+capacity of eternal duration, so that "mortality is swallowed up of
+life."[2]
+
+This word, thus made sacred by St. Paul's great use of it to designate
+the new race of the saved, was made the bearer in the Johannine
+writings of a no less exalted message, which has become a living and
+indissoluble part of the religious consciousness of the Christian
+world. "Eternal life"--or, what in these writings is the same thing,
+"life"--comes through the reception of the Spirit, in a birth from
+above. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is
+born of the Spirit is Spirit."[3] When the Spirit comes as the
+initiator of this abundant life, then we "know that we abide in Him and
+He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit," and it becomes
+possible for the Spirit-led person to be guided "into all the truth,"
+to "love even as He loved," and to "overcome the world."[4] Here,
+again, the human race is divided into those who have "received of the
+Spirit," and those who have not so received; those who are "born from
+above" and those who have had only a natural birth; the twice-born and
+the once-born; those who are "of the Spirit," _i.e._ spiritual, and
+those who are "of this world," _i.e._ empirical.
+
+The Gnostic Sects of the second century had one common link and badge;
+they all proposed a "way," often bizarre and strange-sounding to modern
+ears, by which the soul, astray, lost, encumbered, or imprisoned in
+matter, might attain its freedom and become _spiritual_. Most of the
+Gnostic teachers, who in their flourishing time were as thick as
+thistle-downs in summer, conceived of man as consisting of two "halves"
+which corresponded with two totally different world-orders. There was
+in man, or there belonged to man (1) a visible body, which {xiii} was
+again dichotomized, and believed to be composed, according to many of
+the Gnostics, of a subtle element like that of which they supposed Adam
+in his unfallen state was made, which they named the _hylic_ body, and
+a sheath of gross earthly matter which they called the _choical_
+body.[5] There was also (2) another, invisible, "half," generally
+divided into lower and higher stories. The lower story, the psychical,
+was created or furnished by the Demiurge, or sub-divine creator of the
+natural system, while the top-story, or pneumatical self, was a
+_spiritual seed_ derived from the supreme spiritual Origin, the Divine
+Pleroma, the Fulness of the Godhead. Those who possessed this
+spiritual seed were "the elect," "the saved," who eventually, stripped
+of their sheath of matter and their psychical dwelling, would be able
+to pass all "the keepers of the way," and rise to the pure spiritual
+life.
+
+The Montanists launched in the second century a movement, borne along
+on a mountain-wave of enthusiasm, for a "spiritual" Church composed
+only of "spiritual" persons. They called themselves "the Spirituals,"
+and they insisted that the age or dispensation of the Spirit had now
+come. The Church, rigidly organized with its ordained officials, its
+external machinery, and its accumulated traditions, was to them part of
+an old and outworn system to be left behind. In the place of it was to
+come a new order of "spiritual people" of whom the Montanist prophets
+were the "first fruits,"--a new and peculiar people, born from above,
+recipients of a divine energizing power, partakers in the life of the
+Spirit and capable of being guided on by progressive revelations into
+all the truth. To be "spiritual" in their vocabulary meant to be a
+participator in the Life of God, and to be a living member of a group
+that was led and guided by a continuously self-revealing Spirit. This
+Spirit was conceived, however, not as immanent and resident, not as the
+{xiv} indwelling and permeative Life of the human spirit, but as
+foreign and remote, and He was thought of as "coming" in sporadic
+visitations to whom He would, His coming being indicated in
+extraordinary and charismatic manifestations.
+
+This type of "spiritual religion," though eventually stamped out in the
+particular form of Montanism, reappeared again and again, with peculiar
+local and temporal variations, in the history of Christianity.[6] To
+the bearers of it, the historic Church, with its crystallized system
+and its vast machinery, always seemed "unspiritual" and traditional.
+They believed, each time the movement appeared, that _they_ had found
+the way to more abundant life, that the Spirit had come upon them in a
+special manner, and was through them inaugurating a higher order of
+Christianity, and they always felt that their religion of direct
+experience, of invading energy, of inspirational insights, of
+charismatic bestowals, and of profound emotional fervour was distinctly
+"spiritual," as contrasted with the historic Church which claimed
+indeed a divine origin and divine "deposits," but which, as they
+believed, lacked the continuous and progressive leadership of the
+Spirit. They were always very certain that their religion was
+characteristically "spiritual," and all other forms seemed to them
+cold, formal, or dead. In their estimates, men were still divided into
+spiritual persons and psychical persons--those who lived by the "heart"
+and those who lived by the "head."
+
+Parallel with the main current of the Protestant Reformation, a new
+type of "spiritual religion" appeared and continued to manifest itself
+with mutations and developments, throughout the entire Reformation era,
+with a wealth of results which are still operative in the life of the
+modern world. The period of this new birth was a time of profound
+transition and ferment, and a bewildering variety of roads was tried to
+spiritual Canaans and new Jerusalems, then fondly believed to {xv} be
+near at hand. It is a long-standing tragedy of history that the right
+wing of a revolutionary or transforming movement must always suffer for
+the unwisdom and lack of balance of those who constitute the left, or
+extreme radical, wing of the movement. So it happened here. The
+nobler leaders and the saner spirits were taken in the mass with those
+of an opposite character, and were grouped under comprehensive labels
+of reproach and scorn, such as "Antinomians," "Enthusiasts," or
+"Anabaptists," and in consequence still remain largely neglected and
+forgotten.
+
+The men who initiated and guided this significant undertaking--the
+exhibition in the world of what they persistently called "spiritual
+religion"--were influenced by three great historic tendencies, all
+three of which were harmoniously united in their type of Christianity.
+They were the Mystical tendency, the Humanistic or Rational tendency,
+and the distinctive Faith-tendency of the Reformation. These three
+strands are indissolubly woven together in this type of so-called
+spiritual Religion. It was an impressive attempt, whether completely
+successful or not, to widen the sphere and scope of religion, to carry
+it into _the whole of life_, to ground it in the very nature of the
+human spirit, and to demonstrate that to be a man, possessed of full
+life and complete health, is to be religious, to be spiritual. I
+propose, as a preliminary preparation for differentiating this special
+type of "spiritual religion," to undertake a study, as brief as
+possible, of these three underlying and fundamental strands or
+tendencies in religion which will, of course, involve some
+consideration of the inherent nature of religion itself.
+
+For my present purpose it is not necessary to study the twilight
+history of religion in primitive races nor to trace its origins in the
+cradle-stage of human life. Anthropologists are rendering a valuable
+service in their attempts to explore the baffling region of primitive
+man's mind, and they have hit upon some very suggestive clues, though
+so far only tentative ones, to the psychological experiences and
+attitudes which set man's feet on the {xvi} momentous religious trail.
+At every stage of its long and devious history, religion has been _some
+sort of life-adjustment to realities which were felt to be of supreme
+importance either to the individual or to the race_, and it becomes
+thus possible for the scientific observer to note a developmental
+process and to discover a principle which links it in with a universal
+scheme of evolution.
+
+But religion can never be adequately treated either in terms of racial
+origins or of biological history, though there can be no doubt whatever
+that there are genetic and biological factors to be considered. Nor,
+again, can religion be adequately and exhaustively dealt with by the
+psychological method of investigation. The psychological studies of
+religion in recent years have greatly enriched our knowledge of the
+range and scope and power of man's psychic nature and functions, of his
+instincts, desires, valuations, needs, yearnings, beliefs, and modes of
+activity and behaviour, and particularly of the important influence
+which the social group has exercised and still exercises in the
+furtherance of religious attitudes and ideals. But the psychological
+method has obvious and inherent limitations. Like any other natural
+science, psychology is limited to description and causal explanation of
+the phenomena of its special field, which in this case is states of
+consciousness. It does not pretend, or even aspire, to pronounce upon
+the ultimate nature of consciousness, nor upon the moral significance
+of personality. Psychology is as empirical as any other science. It
+modestly confines its scope of research to what _appears_ in finite and
+describable forms. It possesses no ladder by which it can transcend
+the empirical order, the fact-level. The religion which the
+psychologist reports upon is necessarily stripped of all transcendental
+and objective reference. Its wings are severely clipped. It is only
+one of man's multitudinous _reactions_ in the presence of the facts of
+his time and space world. It is nakedly subjective and _works_, not
+because there is Something or Some One beyond, which answers it, and
+corresponds with its up-reach, but only {xvii} because undivided
+faith-attitudes always liberate within the field of consciousness
+energy for life-activity.
+
+We need not blame the psychologist for this radical reduction of the
+age-long pretensions of religion. If he is to bring religion over into
+the purview of the scientific field, he can do nothing else but reduce
+it. Science can admit into its world nothing that successfully defies
+descriptive treatment. The poet may know of flowers which "can give
+thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," but science discovers
+no such flowers in its field. Its flowers are amazingly complex, but
+they call for no handkerchief. They are merely aggregations of
+describable parts, each of which has well-defined functions. The "man"
+whom science studies is complicated almost beyond belief. He is an
+aggregation of trillions of cells. He is such a centre of vibrations
+that a cyclone is almost a calm compared to the constant cyclic storms
+within the area of man's corporeal system. His "mental states" have
+their entries and exits before "the foot-lights of consciousness" and
+exhibit a drama more intricate than any which human genius has
+conceived. But each "state" is a definite, more or less describable,
+_fact_ or _phenomenon_. For science, "man's" inner life, as well as
+his corporeal bulk, is an aggregate of empirical items. No loophole is
+left for freedom--that is for any novel undetermined event. No
+shekinah remains within for a mysterious "conscience" to inject into
+this fact-world insights drawn from a higher world of noumenal, or
+absolute, reality. "Man" is merely a part of the naturalistic order,
+and has no way of getting out of the vast net in which science catches
+and holds "all that is."
+
+There is, I repeat, no ground for blaming the psychologist for making
+these reductions. His science can deal only with an order of facts
+which will conform to the scientific method, for wherever science
+invades a field, it ignores or eliminates every aspect of novelty or
+mystery or wonder, every aspect of reality which cannot be brought
+under scientific categories, _i.e._ every aspect which cannot be
+treated quantitatively and causally and {xviii} arranged in a congeries
+of interrelated facts occurring according to natural laws. The only
+cogent criticism is that any psychologist should suppose that his
+scientific account is the "last word" to be spoken, that his reports
+contain all the returns that can be expected, or that this method is
+the only way of approach to truth and reality. Such claims to the
+rights of eminent domain and such dogmatic assertions of exclusive
+finality always reveal the blind spot in the scientist's vision. He
+sees steadily but he does not see wholes. He is of necessity dealing
+with a reduced and simplified "nature" which he constantly tends to
+substitute for the vastly richer whole of reality that boils over and
+inundates the fragment which submits to his categories. We do well to
+gather in every available fact which biology or anthropology or
+psychology can give us that throws light on human behaviour, or on
+primitive cults, or on the richer subjective and social religious
+functions of full-grown men. But the interior insight got from
+religion itself, the rich wholeness of religious experience, the
+discovery within us of an inner nature which defies description and
+baffles all plumb-lines, and which _can draw out of itself more than it
+contains_, indicate that we here have dealings with a type of reality
+which demands for adequate treatment other methods of comprehension
+than those available to science.
+
+In the old Norse stories, Thor tried to empty the famous drinking-horn
+in the games of Utgard, but to his surprise he found that, though the
+horn looked small, he could not empty it, for it turned out that the
+horn was immersed in the limitless and bottomless ocean. Again he
+tried to lift a small and insignificant-looking animal, but, labour as
+he might, he could not lift it, for it was grown into, and was organic
+with, the whole world, and could not be raised without raising the very
+ground on which the lifter stood! Somewhat so, the reality of religion
+is so completely bound up with the whole personal life of man and with
+his conjunct life in the social group and in the world of nature; it
+is, in short, so much an {xix} affair of man's whole of experience, of
+his spirit in its undivided and synthetic aspects, that it can never be
+adequately dealt with by the analytic and descriptive method of this
+wonderful new god of science, however big with results that method may
+be.
+
+The interior insight, the appreciation of religion, the rich and
+concrete whole of religious consciousness, is, and will always remain,
+the primary way to the _secret_ of religion--religion in its "first
+intention"--as the experience of time-duration is the only possible way
+to the elemental meaning of time. It has in recent years in many
+quarters become the fashion to call this "interior insight," this
+appreciation of religion from within, "mysticism"; and to assume that
+here in mysticism we come upon the very essence of religion. This
+conclusion, however, is as narrow and as unwarranted as is the
+truncation of religion at the hands of science. The mystical element
+in religion is only one element in a vastly richer complex, and it must
+not be given undue emphasis and imperial sway in the appreciation of
+the complete whole of "spiritual religion." We must, too, carefully
+discriminate _mystical experience_ from the elaborate body of doctrines
+and theories, historically known as "mysticism," which is as much an
+_ism_ as are the other typical, partial, and more or less abstract
+formulations of religion.
+
+Mysticism for the mystic himself is characterized by a personal
+experience through which the ordinary limitations of life and the
+passionate pursuits of the soul are transcended, and a self-evident
+conviction is attained that he is in communion, or even in union, with
+some self-transcending Reality that absolutely satisfies and is what he
+has always sought. "This is He, this is He," the mystic exclaims:
+"There is no other: This is He whom I have waited for and sought after
+from my childhood!"[7]
+
+The experience is further characterized by the inrush {xx} of new
+energies as though a mysterious door had been pushed open--either out
+or in--admitting the human spirit to wider sources of life. "Fresh
+bubblings from the eternal streams of Life flowing into the soul" is
+the way the recipient often describes it. All the deep-lying powers of
+the inward self, usually so divergent and conflicting--the foreground
+purposes defeated by background inhibitions, and by doubts on the
+border,--become liberated and unified into one conscious life which is
+not merely intellectual, nor merely volitional, nor solely emotional,
+but an undivided whole of experience, intensely joyous, enriched with
+insight and pregnant with deeds of action. As in lofty experiences of
+appreciation of beauty, or of music, or when the chords of life are
+swept by a great love, or by a momentous moral issue, the spirit rises
+in mystical experience to a form of consciousness which no longer marks
+clock-time and succession of events, whether outward or inward. It may
+afterwards take hours or days or weeks or even years to spread out and
+review and apprehend and adjust to the experience--"the opening," to
+use George Fox's impressive word--but while it is _there_ it is held in
+one unbroken synthetic time-span. It is, to revive a scholastic
+phrase, a _totum simul_, an all-at-once experience, in which parts,
+however many, make one integral whole, as in a melody or in a work of
+art; so that the mystic has a real experience of what we try to express
+by the word Eternity. It feels as though the usual insulations of our
+own narrow personal life were suddenly broken through and we were in
+actual contact with an enfolding presence, life-giving, joy-bringing,
+and light-supplying.
+
+In instances where the intensity is great, unusual psychological
+phenomena appear. Sometimes voices are heard, or sounds "like a mighty
+rushing wind"; sometimes there are automatic visions of light, or of
+forms or figures, as, for instance, of Christ, or of a cross; sometimes
+automatic writing or speaking attends the experience; sometimes there
+are profound body-changes of a temporary, or even permanent character;
+sometimes there {xxi} is a state of swoon or ecstacy, lasting from a
+few seconds to entire days. These physical phenomena, however, are as
+spiritually unimportant and as devoid of religious significance as are
+the normal bodily resonances and reverberations which accompany, in
+milder degrees, all our psychic processes. They indicate no high rank
+of sainthood and they prove no miracle-working power. The significant
+features of the experience are the consciousness of fresh springs of
+life, the release of new energies, the inner integration and
+unification of personality, the inauguration of a sense of mission, the
+flooding of the life with hope and gladness, and the conviction,
+amounting in the mind of the recipient to certainty, that God is found
+as an environing and vitalizing presence--as the recipient already
+quoted reports his conviction: "I have met with my God; I have met with
+my Saviour. I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His
+wings."[8]
+
+If _everybody_ had experiences of that sort there would be no more
+doubt of the existence of an actual spiritual environment in vitalizing
+contact with the human spirit than there now is of an external world
+with which we correspond. There is _a priori_ no reason against the
+reality of such an inner spiritual universe. It is precisely as
+conceivable that constructive and illuminating influences should stream
+into our inner selves from that central Light with which our inmost
+self is allied, as that objects in space and time should bombard us
+with messages adapted to our senses. The difference is that we all
+experience the outer environment and only a few of us experience the
+inner. The mystic himself has no doubt--_he sees_, but he cannot give
+quite his certainty of vision to any one else. He cannot, like "the
+weird sisters" of Greek story, lend out his eye for others to see with.
+He can only talk about, or write about, what he has seen, and his words
+are often words of little meaning to those who lack the vision.
+
+{xxii}
+
+II
+
+But the very characteristics of mystical religion which give it its
+self-evidence and power at the same time mark limits to its scope and
+range. It is and must be primarily and essentially first-hand
+experience, and yet it is an experience that is by no means universal.
+It is not, so far as we can see from the facts at hand, an experience
+which attaches to the very nature of consciousness as such, or indeed
+one which is bound to occur even when the human subject strains forward
+all the energies of his will for the adventure, or when by strict
+obedience to the highest laws of life known to him he _waits_ for the
+high visitation. Some aspect is involved over which the will has no
+control. Some other factor is implied besides the passion and the
+purity of the seeking soul. The experience "comes," as an inrush, as
+an emergence from the deeper levels of the inner life, but the glad
+recipient does not know how he secured the prize or how to repeat the
+experience, or how to tell his friend the way to these "master moments"
+of blessedness.
+
+There are numerous persons who are as serious and earnest and
+passionate as the loftiest mystical saint, and who, in spite of all
+their listening for the inner flow of things, discover no inrushes,
+feel no invasions, are aware of no environing Companion, do not even
+feel a "More of Consciousness conterminous and continuous with their
+own." Their inner life appears impervious to divine bubblings. The
+only visitants that pass over the threshold of their consciousness are
+their own mental states, now bright and clear, now dim and strange, but
+all bearing the brand and mark of temporal origin. This type of
+experience must not, therefore, be insisted on as the only way to God
+or to the soul's homeland. Spiritual religion must not be put to the
+hazard of conditions that limit its universality and restrict it to a
+chosen few. To insist on mystical experience as the only path to
+religion would involve an "election" no less inscrutable and {xxiii}
+pitiless than that of the Calvinistic system--an "election" settled for
+each person by the peculiar psychic structure of his inner self.[9]
+
+There is another limitation which must always attach to religion of the
+purely mystical type. In so far as it is an _experience_ of the inward
+type, it is indescribable and incommunicable. That does not mean or
+imply any lessened value in the experience itself, it only means that
+it is very difficult to mint it into the universal coinage of the
+world. The recovery of faith, after some catastrophic bankruptcy of
+spiritual values, as with Job or Dante or Faust, cannot be described in
+analytic steps. The loss of faith in the rationality of the universe,
+the collapse of the "beautiful world" within, can be told step by step;
+the process of integration and reconstruction, on the other hand,
+always remains somewhat of a mystery, though it is plain enough that a
+new and richer inner world has been found. So, too, with Mysticism.
+The experience itself may, and often does, bring to the recipient an
+indubitable certainty of spiritual realities, revealing themselves
+within his own spirit, and, furthermore, it is often productive of
+permanent life-results, such as augmented conviction, heightened tone
+of joy, increased unification of personality, intense moral passion and
+larger conquering power, but he, nevertheless, finds it a baffling
+matter to draw from his mystical experience concrete information about
+the nature and character of God, or to supply, from the experience
+alone, definite contributions that can become part of the common
+spiritual inheritance of the race.
+
+ The soul
+ Remembering how she felt, but _what_ she felt
+ Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
+ Of possible sublimity.[10]
+
+
+{xxiv}
+
+There can be, I think, no doubt that the persons whom we call mystics
+have enormously added to the richness of our conception of God, or that
+they have made impressive contributions to the capital stock of our
+religious knowledge. But I question whether these increments of
+knowledge can be fairly traced to "information" which has entered the
+world through the secret door of mystical "openings." The conception
+of God by which we live, and our knowledge of eternal life, are in the
+main not formed of the material which has mysteriously dropped into the
+world by means of "sudden incursions," or "oracular communications"
+through persons of extraordinary psychical disposition. What we get
+from the mystic, or from the prophet, is not his "experience" but his
+interpretation, and as soon as he begins to _interpret_, he does so by
+means of the group-material which the race has gathered in its
+corporate experience through the ages. The valuable _content_ of his
+message, so far as he succeeds in delivering one, the ideas with which
+his words are freighted, bear the marks of the slow accumulations of
+spiritual experience, and they reveal the rich and penetrative
+influence of the social group in which the mystic's inner life formed
+and ripened. They have a history as all ideas do.
+
+The real fact of the matter is, that the great mystics are religious
+geniuses. They make their contribution to religion in ways similar to
+those in which the geniuses in other fields raise the level of human
+attainments and achievements. They swiftly seize upon and appreciate
+the specific achievements of the race behind them; they are profoundly
+sensitive to the aspirations of their time and to the deep-lying
+currents of their age; they are suggestible in an acute degree, through
+heightened interest, to certain ideas or truths or principles which
+they synthesise by such leaps of insight that slow-footed logic seems
+to be transcended. Then these unifying and intensifying experiences to
+which they are subject give them irresistible conviction, "a surge of
+certainty," a faith of the mountain-moving order, and an increasing
+{xxv} dynamic of life which, in the best cases, is manifest in thoughts
+and words and deeds. Their mystical experience seldom supplies them
+with a new intellectual content which they communicate, but their
+experience enables them rather to _see_ what they know, to get
+possession of themselves, and to fuse their truth with the heat of
+conviction. The mystical experience is thus a way of heightening life
+and of increasing its dynamic quality rather than a way to new
+knowledge.
+
+The _negative way_, which has been such a prominent and prevailing
+characteristic of historical mysticism that many writers have made it
+the distinct and sufficient differentia of mysticism, has often
+produced intensity and depth, but it is, nevertheless, a mark of the
+limitation of this type of religion. The indescribable and
+undifferentiated character of mystical experience is no doubt partly
+responsible for the emphatic place which negation has held in
+mysticism. The experience itself, which seems like "a flight of the
+alone to the Alone," can be told in no words except those of negation.
+"The mortal limit of the self" seems loosed, and the soul seems merged
+into that which it forever seeks but which having found it cannot
+utter. But the type of metaphysics through which most of the great
+mystics of history have done their thinking and have made their
+formulations is still further responsible for the excessive negativity
+of their systems.
+
+There is, of course, a negative element or aspect in all genuine
+religion. No person can grow rich in spiritual experience or can gain
+an intimate acquaintance with a God of purity and truth without
+negating the easy ways of instinct, the low pursuits of life which end
+in self, the habits of thought and action which limit and hamper the
+realization of the diviner possibilities of the whole nature.
+Sometimes the eye that hinders must be plucked out or the right hand
+cut off and thrust away for the sake of a freer pursuit of the soul's
+kingdom. There is, too, a still deeper principle of negativity
+involved in the very fibre of personal life itself. No one can advance
+without {xxvi} surrender, no one can have gains without losses, no one
+can reach great goals without giving up many things in themselves
+desirable. There is "a rivalry of me's" which no person can ever
+escape, for in order to choose and achieve one typical self another
+possible self must be sternly sacrificed. In a very real sense it
+remains forever true that we must die to live, we must die to the
+narrow self in order to be raised to the wider and richer self.
+
+But the _negative way_ of mysticism is more rigorous and more thorough
+in its negation than that. Its negations "wind up the hill all the way
+to the very top." Even the _self_ must be absolutely negated. "The
+self, the I, the me and the like, all belong to the evil spirit. The
+whole matter can be set forth in these words: Be simply and wholly
+bereft of self." "The I, the me, and the mine, nature, selfhood, the
+Devil, sin, are all one and the same thing."[11] Not only so, but all
+_desire_ for any particular thing, or any particular experience must be
+utterly extirpated. "Whatever Good the creature as creature can
+conceive of and understand is something this or that," and therefore
+not the One Real Good.[12] "So long as thy soul has an image, it is
+without simplicity, and so long as it is without simplicity it doth not
+rightly love God."[13] "Divine love can brook no rival." He who seeks
+God must "rid himself of all that pertains to the creature." He that
+would find the absolute Good must withdraw not only beyond all his
+senses, but beyond all desires, into an inner "solitude where no word
+is spoken, where is neither creature nor image nor fancy." "Everything
+depends," Tauler counsels us, "upon a fathomless sinking into a
+fathomless nothingness. . . . God has really no place to work in but
+the ground where all has been annihilated. . . . Then when all forms
+have ceased, in the twinkling of an eye, the man is transformed. . . .
+Thou must sink into the unknown and unnamed abyss, and above all ways,
+images, forms, and above all powers, {xxvii} lose thyself, deny
+thyself, and even unform thyself."[14] The moment the will focusses
+upon any concrete aim as its goal, it must thereby miss that Good which
+is above and beyond all particular "things" that can be conceived or
+named.
+
+But the _negative way_ winds up farther still. It ends in the
+absolutely negative Silent Desert of Godhead "where no one is at home."
+Its way up is the way of abstraction and withdrawal from everything
+finite. He whom the soul seeks cannot be found in anything "here" or
+"now"; He must be "yonder." "It is by no means permitted," says one of
+the great experts in negation, "to speak or even to think anything
+concerning the super-essential and hidden Deity. . . . It is a Unity
+above mind, a One above conception and inconceivable to all
+conceptions, a Good unutterable by word."[15] "Thou must love God,"
+Eckhart says, "as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He
+is, a sheer, pure, absolute One, sundered from all two-ness and in whom
+we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness."[16] God, the
+Godhead, is thus the absolute "Dark," "the nameless Nothing," an empty
+God, a characterless Infinite. "Why dost thou prate of God," Eckhart
+says, "whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue!" The rapt soul at the
+end of his road, at the top of the hill, only knows that every finite
+account is false and that the only adequate word is an everlasting Nay.
+
+ Whatever idea your mind comes at,
+ I tell you flat
+ God is _not_ that.[17]
+
+
+The great mystics have always saved themselves by neglecting to be
+consistent with this rigorous negation and abstraction. In their
+practice they have cut through their theory and gone on living the rich
+concrete life. {xxviii} But the theory itself is a false theory of
+life, and it leads only to a God of abstraction, not to the God of
+spiritual religion. The false trail, however, is to be charged, as I
+have said, not so much to mystical experience as to the metaphysics
+through which the mystics, not only of Christian communions, but of
+other faiths, were compelled to do their thinking. There was no other
+way of thinking known to them except this way of negation. The
+Infinite was the not-finite; the Absolute was precisely what the
+contingent was _not_. The perfect was free of every mark of
+imperfection. Behind all manifestations was the essential Substance
+which made the manifestations. The completely Real was above all
+mutation and process. "For one to assign," therefore, "to God any
+human attributes," as Spinoza, the supreme apostle of this negative way
+has said, "is to reveal that he has no true idea of God." It has taken
+all the philosophical and spiritual travail of the centuries to
+discover that there may be a concrete Infinite, an organic Absolute, an
+immanent Reality, and that the way to share in this comprehending Life
+is at least as much a way of affirmation as of negation, a way that
+leads not into "the Dark" but into the Light, and not into a
+"fathomless nothing," but into an abundant and radiant life.
+
+Mysticism, as a type of religion, has further staked its precious
+realities too exclusively upon the functions of what to-day we call the
+sub-conscious. Impressed with the divine significance of "inward
+bubblings," the mystic has made too slight an account of the testimony
+of Reason and the contribution of history. The subconscious functions
+are very real and very important aspects of personal life, and can
+never again be ignored in any full account of personality. They
+influence every thought, feeling, attitude, volition, opinion, mood,
+and insight, and are thus operative in all the higher as well as in all
+the lower phases of human life and character. Metaphorically, but only
+metaphorically, we speak of the sub-conscious as a vast zone, an
+indefinable margin, surrounding the narrow focus of attention, and we
+may {xxix} figuratively, but only figuratively, call it the subliminal
+"region" where all our life-gains, and often the gains of the race, are
+garnered. The contributions from this mental underworld are
+inestimable--we could not be men without them--but this subconscious
+zone is a source of things bad as well as good, things silly as well as
+things wise, of rubbish as well as of treasures, and it is diabolical
+as well as divine. It seems in rare moments to connect, as though it
+were a hidden inland stream, with the "immortal sea which brought us
+hither," and we feel at times, through its incomes, as though we were
+aware of _tides_ from beyond our own margin. And, in fact, I believe
+we are.
+
+But obviously we cannot assume that whatever comes spontaneously out of
+the subconscious is divinely given. It mothers strange
+offspring--Esaus as well as Jacobs; its openings, its inrushes, its
+bubblings must be severely tested. Impulses of many sorts feel
+categorically imperative, but some call to deeds of light and some to
+deeds of darkness. They cannot be taken at their face value; they must
+be judged in some Court which is less capricious and which is guided by
+a more universal principle--something _semper et ubique_. A spiritual
+religion of the full and complete type will, I believe, have inward,
+mystical depth, it will keep vitalized and intensified with its
+experiences of divine supplies, and of union and unification with an
+environing Spirit, but it must at the same time soundly supplement its
+more or less capricious and subjective, and always fragmentary,
+mystical insights with the steady and unwavering testimony of Reason,
+and no less with the immense objective illumination of History.
+
+
+
+III
+
+The men whom I am here calling Spiritual Reformers are examples of this
+wider synthesis. They all read and loved the mystics and they
+themselves enjoyed times of direct refreshment from an inward Source of
+Life, but {xxx} they were, most of them, at the same time, devoted
+Humanists. They shared with enthusiasm the rediscovery of those
+treasures which human Reason had produced, and they rose to a more
+virile confidence in the sphere and capacity of Reason than had
+prevailed in Christian circles since the days of the early Greek
+Fathers. They took a variety of roads to their conclusion, but in one
+way or another they all proclaimed that deep in the central nature of
+man--an inalienable part of Reason--there was a Light, a Word, an Image
+of God, something permanent, reliable, universal, and unsundered from
+God himself. They all knew that man is vastly more than "mere man."
+Hans Denck, one of the earliest of this group of Spiritual Reformers,
+declared that there is a _witness to God_ in the soul of every man, and
+that without this inward Word it would be as impossible to bring men to
+God by outward means as it would be to show sunlight to eyeless men.
+He anticipated the great saying of Pascal in these words, "Apart from
+God no one can either seek or find God, for he who seeks God already in
+truth has Him."[18] "We are," says Jacob Boehme, who belongs in this
+line of Spiritual Reformers, "of God's substance: we have heaven and
+hell in ourselves."[19] There is in us, Peter Sterry says, a _unity of
+spirit_ which holds all things together in an _at-once_ experience, "a
+spire-top of spirit where all things meet and sit recollected and
+concentred in an unfathomed Depth of Life."[20] Most of these men were
+in revolt against scholasticism and all its works. They speak often
+very slightingly of "Reasoning," the attempt to find a way to ultimate
+Realities by logical syllogisms, but they, nevertheless, believed great
+things of man's rational and moral nature. They are often confused and
+cloudy in their explicit accounts of this ultimate moral and rational
+nature. They everywhere indicate the conceptual limitations {xxxi}
+under which even those who were the most emancipated from tradition
+were compelled to do their thinking in that age. They could not break
+the age-long spell and mighty fascination with which the Adam story and
+the Garden of Eden picture had held the Christian world. They were
+convinced, however, that the Augustinian interpretation of the fall,
+with its entail of an indelible taint upon the race forever, was an
+inadequate, if not an untrue account, though they could not quite
+arrive at an insight which enabled them to speak with authority on the
+fundamental nature of man. But with an instinct that pointed right,
+they took Adam as a type of the unspoiled man, and they saw writ large
+in him the possibilities and potentialities of man. What had been
+originally possible in Adam became, according to their thought, actual
+realization in Jesus Christ--the form and type of man, the true Head of
+the race--and in spite of the havoc and spoiling, which sin had
+wrought, that original possibility, that divine potentiality, still
+reappears in every child, who comes now, as Adam did, made in the image
+of God, with the breath of God in him, and with creative freedom of
+will to settle his own destiny. Some of the Reformers whom I am here
+studying centre this image of God, this immense divine potentiality, in
+the ideal man, in man as God conceives him in his perfect state, or as
+God by His Grace intends him to be, and they do not go the whole bold
+way of asserting that this man we know, this man who lives in time and
+space, who loves and sins and suffers, has and always has, in the very
+structure of his inmost moral and rational being, a divine, unlost,
+inalienable, soul-centre which is unsundered from God, and bears
+eternal witness to our origin from Him, our potential likeness to Him,
+and our capacity to receive illumination from Him.[21] But this latter
+{xxxii} bolder view of the inherent greatness of man's essential nature
+is the prevailing tendency of these men. They are thus the forerunners
+of the Quaker faith that there is something of God in man, and they
+continue the direct line, which goes back for ancestry to the Socratic
+movement in philosophy of those who find God involved and implicated in
+the nature of normal self-consciousness and in the idea of the Good
+toward which we live.[22]
+
+Mystics and prophets, as Seely well says in _Ecce Homo_, seem to
+themselves to "discover truth not so much by a process of reasoning as
+by _an intense gaze_, and they announce their conclusions with the
+voice of a herald, using the name of God and giving no reasons." The
+rational way of approach is different. It seeks to draw out by a
+process of rational argument what is involved in the outer or inner
+facts that are present to consciousness. It does not claim the power
+to make bricks without clay, to construct its conclusions out of
+nothing. Its only legitimate field is that of interpreting experience.
+There have always been men who were religious because they could not
+help being religious, because a Universe without God seemed to them
+utterly irrational and unthinkable. Schleiermacher is only one witness
+in a long and impressive succession of thinkers that have insisted that
+"consciousness of God and self-consciousness are inseparable."[23] It
+is obvious even to the unmetaphysical person that self-consciousness
+always presupposes and involves something prior to one's own existence
+and some reality transcending the reality of one's own self. The
+finite is intelligible only through the infinite, the temporal only
+through the eternal. We cannot think at all without appealing to some
+_permanent more of reality_ than is just now given in our particular
+finite experience, and no matter how far one travels on the road of
+knowledge one always finds it still necessary to make reference to _a
+transcending more_. "All consciousness is," as Hegel {xxxiii} showed
+in 1807, in his philosophical Pilgrim's Progress, the _Phenomenology of
+Spirit_, "an appeal to more consciousness," and there is no rational
+halting-place short of a self-consistent and self-explanatory spiritual
+Reality, which explains the origin and furnishes the goal of all that
+is real.
+
+On the other hand, there have always been men who have not granted any
+such compelling implications to self-consciousness. They have
+maintained that "finites" are forever "finites," and that there are no
+bridges that carry us from our finite "nows" and "heres" to an infinite
+Reality. The infinite Reality, they all admit, is conceivable; it is
+"an idea" to which any mind can rise by normal processes of thought,
+"but," so they say, "an _idea_ of an infinite Reality, an Infinite
+merely conceived in the mind, is different, by the whole width of the
+sky, from an actual objective infinite Reality that is _there_, and
+that contains inherently all that our hearts seek in God."
+
+It is quite true, of course, that the presence of "an idea" in our mind
+does not of itself prove the existence of a corresponding objective
+reality _out there_ in a world independent of our mind. There is most
+assuredly no way of bridging "the chasm" between mind and an objective
+world beyond and outside of mind, when once the "chasm" is assumed.
+But the fundamental error lies in the assumption of any such "chasm."
+The "chasm" which yawns between the inner and outer world is of our own
+making. Whenever we know anything, wherever there is knowledge at all,
+there is a synthetic indivisible whole of experience in which a subject
+knows an object. Subject and object cannot be really sundered without
+putting an instant end to knowledge--leaving "a bare grin without a
+face!" The only way we know anything is that we know we know it in
+experience. We do not ever succeed in proving that objects exist _out
+there_ in the world beyond us exactly correspondent to these ideas in
+our minds. That is a feat of mental gymnastics quite parallel to that
+of "finding" {xxxiv} the self with which we do the seeking. The
+crucial problem of knowledge is not to discover a bridge to leap the
+chasm between the mind within and the world beyond. It is rather the
+problem of finding a basis of verifying and testing what we know, and
+of making knowledge a consistent rational whole.
+
+The method of testing and verifying any fact of truth which we have on
+our hands, is always to organize it and link it into a larger whole of
+knowledge which we ourselves, or the wider group of persons in which we
+are organic members, have verified, and to see that it fits in
+consistently into this larger whole, and in this rational process we
+always assume, and are bound to assume, some sort of Reality that
+transcends the fleeting and temporal, the caprice of the moment, the
+will of the subject, the here and the now. The mind that knows and
+knows that it knows must, as Plato centuries ago declared, rise from
+the welter and flux of momentary seemings to true Being, to the
+eternally Real,[24] and the knowledge process of binding fragments of
+experience into larger wholes and of getting articulate insight into
+the significance of many facts grasped in synthetic unity--in the
+"spire-top of spirit," as Sterry puts it--carries the mind steadily and
+irresistibly on to an infinitely-inclusive and self-explanatory
+spiritual Whole, which is always implied in knowledge. Some reference
+to the _permanent_ is necessary in judging even the fleetingness of the
+"now," some confidence in the eternally true is essential for any
+pronouncement upon the false, some assurance of the infinite is
+presupposed in the endless dissatisfaction with the finite, some appeal
+to a total whole of Reality is implicated in any assertion that _this
+fact here and now_ is known as real. Any one who feels the full
+significance of what is involved in knowing the _truth_ has a coercive
+feeling that Eternity has been set within us, that our finite life is
+deeply rooted in the all-pervading Infinite.
+
+The great thinkers of the first rank who have undertaken to sound the
+significance of rational knowledge, {xxxv} and who have appreciated the
+meaning of the synthetic unity of the knowing mind and the world of
+objects that submit to its forms of thought, have recognized that there
+must be some deep-lying fundamental relation between the mind that
+knows and the world that is known, some Reality common to both outer
+and inner realms. They have, almost without exception, found
+themselves carried along irresistibly to an ultimate Reality that is
+the ground and explanation of all the fragmentary facts of experience,
+and without which nothing can be held to be permanent or rational--
+
+ Something far more deeply interfused,
+ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+ And the round ocean and the living air,
+ And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
+ A motion and a Spirit, that impels
+ All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
+ And rolls through all things.[25]
+
+
+The technical logical formulation of arguments to _prove_ the existence
+of God as objectively real--arguments from causality, ontological
+arguments, and arguments from design--all of which assume a "chasm"
+between the knower and the object known, seem to us perhaps on critical
+analysis thin and insufficient. The bridge of formal logic seems too
+weak to carry us safely over from a finite here to an infinite yonder,
+from a contingent fact to an Absolute Reality, from something given
+_in_ consciousness to Something existent outside and beyond it; but it
+is an impressive and significant fact that all finite experience, both
+of inner and outer events, involves a More yet, that we cannot think
+finite and contingent things without rational appeal to Something
+infinite and necessary, that human experience cannot be rationally
+conceived except as a fragment of a vastly more inclusive Experience,
+always recognized within the finite spirit, that unifies and binds
+together into one self-explanatory whole all that is absolutely Real
+and True, and this is Reason's conviction of God.
+
+{xxxvi}
+
+When once the conviction is _felt_ and the rational postulate of God is
+made, it immediately verifies its practical value in the solution of
+our deepest problems. A happy illustration of the practical value and
+verifying evidence of the rational postulate of God has been given by
+James Ward: "Suppose," he says, "that the earth were wrapt in clouds
+all day while the sky was clear at night, so that we were able to see
+the planets and observe their movements as we do now, though the sun
+itself was invisible. The best account we could give of the planetary
+motions would still be to refer them to what for us, in accordance with
+our supposition, would only be an imaginary focus [or centre of
+physical energy], but one to which was assigned a position identical
+with the sun's [present] position."[26] This assumption would at once
+unlock the mystery and account for the varying movements of these
+visible bodies and the more rigorously the hypothesis were applied, the
+more exactly it would verify itself. So, too, with Reason's sublime
+venture of faith. The nature of self-consciousness demands the
+postulate, and once it is made it _works_.
+
+The same result follows any attempt adequately to account for the moral
+imperative--the will to live the truly good life. The moral will turns
+out always to be imbedded in a deeper, richer, more inclusive Life than
+that of the fragmentary finite individual. There is a creative and
+autonomous central self in us which puts before us ideals of truth and
+beauty and goodness that are nowhere to be "found" in this world of
+sense-facts, and that yet are more real and august than any things our
+eyes see or our hands handle. Our main moral problem is not to adjust
+our inner ideals to our environment, but rather to compel the
+environment to level up to our ideals. The world that ought to be
+makes us forever dissatisfied with the world that is, and sets us with
+a fixity of purpose at the task of realizing the Kingdom which might
+possibly be, which we know ought to be, and which, therefore, has our
+loyal endeavour that it {xxxvii} shall be, regardless of the cost in
+pain and sacrifice. Man, as William Wallace has put it, "projects his
+own self-to-be into the nature he seeks to conquer. Like an assailant
+who should succeed in throwing his standard into the strong central
+keep of the enemy's fortress, and fight his way thereto with assured
+victory in his eyes of hope, so man with the vision of his soul
+prognosticates his final triumph."[27] But if the life of moral
+endeavour is to be essentially consistent and reasonable there must be
+a world of Reality that transcends this realm of empirical, causal, and
+utilitarian happenings. Struggle for ends of goodness must be at least
+as significant in function as struggle for existence; our passion for
+what ought to be must have had birth in an inner eternal environment at
+least as real as that which produced our instincts and appetite for the
+things by which we live in time. If the universe is through and
+through rational, there must be some personal Heart that _cares_; some
+moral Will that guarantees and backs our painful strivings--our
+groaning and travailing--to make what ought to be come into play here
+in the world which is. This postulate is Reason's faith in God, and
+again it _works_.
+
+The evolution of life--if it is evolving as we believe it is,
+and if it is to be viewed with rational insight as an upward
+process--irresistibly involves and implies some sort of fundamental
+intelligence and conscious purpose, some Logos steering the mighty
+movement. We have outgrown crude arguments from "design," and we
+cannot think of God as a foreign and external Creator, working as a
+Potter on his clay; but it is irrational to "explain" a steadily
+unfolding movement, an ever-heightening procession of life, by
+"fortuitous variations," by "accidental" shifts of level, or even by a
+blind _élan vital_. If there is an increasing purpose and a clearly
+culminating drama unfolding in this moving flood of life, then there is
+some Mind that sees the way, and some Will that directs the march of
+Life. And this confidence of ours in some divine Event to which the
+whole creation moves, {xxxviii} this insight that there must be a
+significant and adequate explanation for the immanent teleology and
+beauty with which our universe is crammed, is, once more, Reason's
+postulate of God. There is something in us, indissoluble from Reason
+itself--a Light, a Word, a Witness as these Spiritual Reformers
+insisted--which links us in all the deeper processes of
+self-consciousness with _That Which Is_ and without which "knowledge"
+would be a mere flux of seemings, a flight of _seriatim_ items.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ When this world's pleasures for my soul sufficed,
+ Ere my heart's plummet sounded depths of pain,
+ I called on reason to control my brain,
+ And scoffed at that old story of the Christ.
+
+ But when o'er burning wastes my feet had trod,
+ And all my life was desolate with loss,
+ With bleeding hands I clung about the cross,
+ And cried aloud, "Man needs a suffering God."[28]
+
+
+There can be no doubt that the compulsions and implications of rational
+insight have brought multitudes of men to God, have given them an
+unescapable conviction of His reality, and have swayed their wills to
+live in conformity to His perfect Goodness; and it is also true that
+when for any cause this clue of rationality is missed or lost, men
+flounder about in the fog and pass through periods of inward tragedy
+amounting often to despair. But the approach of Reason still leaves
+much to be desired. It points to something deeper than the transitory
+flux of things, it raises our minds to some sort of ultimate and
+self-explanatory Reality, it compels the conviction that there is an
+all-inclusive Logos--Mind or Spirit--that explains what is and what
+ought to be, and what in the unfolding course of things is to be; but
+it does not bring us to a personal God who is our loving Friend and the
+{xxxix} intimate Companion of our souls, it does not help us solve the
+mystery of human suffering that lies heavily upon our lives, and it
+does not bring to our spirits _the saving reinforcement of personal
+Love_ that must be a central feature of a spiritual and adequate
+religion.
+
+There is still another way of approach to a Religion for mature minds
+which has been no less universally operative and no less dynamic in its
+transforming effects upon human lives than either of the two tendencies
+so far considered--I refer to the way of Faith. By Faith I mean the
+soul's moral or appreciative apprehension of God as _historically
+revealed_, particularly as revealed in the personal life of Jesus
+Christ. This Faith-way to God cannot be wholly separated--except by an
+artificial abstraction--from the inward way of mysticism, or from the
+implications of Reason. It is no blind acceptance of traditional
+opinions, no uncritical reliance on "authority," or on some mysterious
+infallible oracle. It is the spiritual response--or "assent," as
+Clement of Alexandria called it--the moral swing of our inmost self, as
+we catch insights of a loving Heart and holy Will revealed through the
+words and lives and sufferings of saints and prophets, who have lived
+by their vision of God, and supremely revealed in the Life and Love,
+the Passion and the Triumphs of that Person whose experience and
+character and incarnation of life's possibilities seem at last adequate
+for all the needs--the heights and the depths--of this complex life of
+ours.
+
+It was Luther's living word which first brought the momentous
+significance of Faith to clear consciousness in the sixteenth century.
+But the new way of Faith meant many and discordant things, according to
+the preparation of the ears of those who heard. It spoke, as all
+Pentecosts do, to each man in his own tongue. To those who came to the
+Lutheran insight with a deep hunger of spirit for reality and with
+minds liberated by Humanistic studies, the Faith-message meant new
+heavens and a new earth. It was a new discovery of God, and a new
+estimate of man. They suddenly caught {xl} a vision of life as it was
+capable of becoming, and they committed their fortunes to the task of
+making that possible world real. By a shift of view, as revolutionary
+as that from Ptolemaic astronomy to the verifiable insight of
+Copernicus, they passed over from the dogma of a Christ who came to
+appease an angry God, and to found a Church as an ark of safety in a
+doomed world, to the living apprehension of a Christ--verifiable in
+experience--who revealed to them, in terms of His own nature, an
+eternally tender, loving, suffering, self-giving God, and who made them
+see, with the enlightened eyes of their heart, the divine possibilities
+of human life. Through this insight, they were the beginners of a new
+type of Christianity, which has become wide-spread and impressive in
+the modern world, a type that finds the supreme significance of
+Christ's Life in His double revelation of the inherent nature of God,
+and the immense value and potentiality of man, and that changes the
+emphasis from schemes of salvation to interpretations of life, from the
+magic significance of doctrine to the incalculable worth of the moral
+will.
+
+These men were weak in historical sense, and, like everybody else in
+their generation, they used Scripture without much critical insight.
+But they hit upon a principle which saved them from slavery to texts,
+and which gave them a working faith in the steady moral and spiritual
+development of man. I mean the principle that this Christ whom they
+had discovered anew was an eternal manifestation of God, an immanent
+Word of God, a Spirit brooding over the world of men, as in the
+beginning over the face of the waters, present in the unfolding events
+of history as well as in the far-away "dispensations of Grace." As a
+result, they grew less interested in the problem that had fascinated so
+many mystics, the problem of the super-empirical evolution of the
+divine Consciousness; the super-temporal differentiation of the unity
+of the Godhead into a Father and Son and self-revealing Holy Ghost; and
+they tried rather to appreciate and to declare the concrete revelation
+through Christ, and {xli} the import of His visible and invisible
+presence in the world.[29]
+
+This approach of Faith, this appreciation of the nature of God as He
+has been unveiled in the ethical processes of history, especially in
+the Person of Christ, and in His expanding conquest of the world, must
+always be one of the great factors of spiritual religion. The profound
+results of higher criticism, with its stern winnowings, have brought us
+face to face with problems unknown to the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries. So much of what seemed the solid continent of historical
+truth has weathered and crumbled away that some have wondered whether
+any irreducible nucleus would remain firm and permanent above the flood
+of the years, and whether the religion of the future must not dispense
+with the historical element, and the Faith-aspect that goes with it,
+and rest wholly upon present inward experience.
+
+There are, however, I believe, no indications worth considering, of the
+disappearance of Jesus Christ from human history. On the contrary, He
+holds, as never before, the commanding place in history. He still
+dominates conscience, by the moral sway of His Life of Goodness, as
+does no other Person who has ever lived; and by the attractive power of
+His life and love He still sets men to living counter to the strong
+thrust of instinct and impulse as does no one else who has ever touched
+the springs of conduct. The Faith-aspect is still a very live element
+in religion, and it is, as it has been so often before, precisely the
+aspect which supplies concrete body and filling and objective ethical
+direction to our deep sub-conscious yearnings and strivings and
+experiences.
+
+Once at least there shone through the thin veil of matter a personal
+Life which brought another kind of world than this world of natural law
+and utilitarian aims full into light. There broke through here in the
+face of Jesus {xlii} Christ a revelation of Purpose in the universe so
+far beyond the vague trend of purpose dimly felt in slowly evolving
+life that it is possible here to catch an illuminating vision of what
+the goal of the long drama may be--the unveiling of sons of God. Here
+the discovery can be made that the deepest Reality toward which Reason
+points, and which the mystical experience _feels_, is no vague
+Something Beyond, but a living, loving Some One, dealing with us as
+Person with person. In Him there comes to focus in a Life that we can
+love and appreciate a personal character which impresses us as being
+absolutely good, and as being in its inexhaustible depth of Love and
+Grace worthy to be taken as the revelation of the true nature of the
+God whom all human hearts long for. And finally through this personal
+revelation of God in Christ there has come to us a clear insight that
+pain and suffering and tragedy can be taken up into a self-chosen Life
+and absorbed without spoiling its immense joy, and that precisely
+through suffering-love, joyously accepted, a Person expressing in the
+world the heart of God may become the moral and spiritual Saviour of
+others. As von Hugel has finely said: "A Person came and lived and
+loved, and did and taught, and died and rose again, and lives on by His
+power and His Spirit forever within us and amongst us, so unspeakably
+rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above
+us precisely in being so divinely near that His character and teaching
+require, for an ever fuller yet never complete understanding, the
+varying study, and different experiments and applications, embodiments
+and unrollings of all the races and civilizations, of all the
+individual and corporate, the simultaneous and successive experiences
+of the human race to the end of time."[30]
+
+The only salvation worth talking about is that which consists of an
+inner process of moral transformation, through which one passes over
+"the great divide" from a life that is self-centred and dominated by
+impulse and sin to a life that is assured of divine forgiveness, that
+has {xliii} conceived a passion for a redeemed inward nature, that is
+conscious of help from beyond its own resources, and that is dedicated
+to the task of making moral goodness triumph over the evil of the
+world. Any experience which brings to the soul a clear vision of the
+moral significance of human life, and that engenders in us a practical
+certainty that God is working with us in all our deepest undertakings,
+tends to have saving efficacy and to bring about this inward
+transformation. But nowhere else in the universe--above us or within
+us--has the moral significance of life come so full into sight, or the
+reality of actual divine fellowship, whether in our aspirations or in
+our failures, been raised to such a pitch of practical certainty as in
+the personal life and death and resurrection and steady historical
+triumph of Jesus Christ. He exhibits in living fulness, with
+transforming power, a Life which consciously felt itself one with the
+heart and will of God. He reveals the inherent blessedness of
+Love--even though it may involve suffering and pain and death. He
+shows the moral supremacy, even in this imperfect empirical world, of
+the perfectly good will, and He impresses those who _see_ Him--see Him,
+I mean, with eyes that can penetrate through the temporal to the
+eternal and find His real nature--as being the supreme personal
+unveiling of God, as worthy to be our Leader, our Ideal Life, our
+typical personal Character, and strong enough in His infinite Grace and
+divine self-giving to convince us of the eternal co-operation of God
+with our struggling humanity, and to settle our Faith in the essential
+Saviourhood of God.
+
+He who sees _that_ in Christ has found a real way to God and has
+discovered a genuine way of salvation. It is the way of Faith, but
+Faith is no airy and unsubstantial road, no capricious leap. There is
+no kind of aimful living conceivable that does not involve faith in
+something trans-subjective--faith in something not given in present
+empirical experience. Even in our most elementary life-adjustments
+there is something operative in us which far underlies our conscious
+perceiving and {xliv} the logic of our conclusions. We are moved, not
+alone by what we clearly picture and coldly analyse, but by deep-lying
+instincts which defy analysis, by background and foreground fringes of
+consciousness, by immanent and penetrative intelligence which cannot be
+brought to definite focus, by the vast reservoirs of accumulated wisdom
+through which we _feel_ the way to go, though we can pictorially
+envisage no "spotted trees" that mark the trail.
+
+This religious and saving Faith, through which the soul discovers God
+and makes the supreme life-adjustment to Him, is profoundly moral and,
+in the best sense of the word, rational. It does not begin with an
+assumption, blind or otherwise, as to Christ's metaphysical nature, it
+does not depend upon the adoption of systematically formulated
+doctrines; it becomes operative through the discovery of a personal
+Life, historically lived--and continued through the centuries as a
+transforming Spirit--rich enough in its experience to exhibit the
+infinite significance of life, inwardly deep enough in its spiritual
+resources to reveal the character of God, and strong enough in
+sympathy, in tenderness, in patience, and in self-giving love to beget
+forever trust and confidence and love on the part of all who thus find
+Him.
+
+The God whom we learn to know in Christ--the God historically
+revealed--is no vague first Cause, no abstract Reality, no all-negating
+Absolute. He is a concrete Person, whose traits of character are
+intensely moral and spiritual. His will is no fateful swing of
+mechanical law; it is a morally good will which works patiently and
+forever toward a harmonized world, a Kingdom of God. The central trait
+of His character is Love. He does not become Father, He is not
+reconciled to us by persuasive offerings and sacrifices. He is
+inherently and by essential disposition Father and the God of all
+Grace. He is not remote and absentee--making a world "in the
+beginning," and leaving it to run by law, or only occasionally
+interrupting its normal processes--He is immanent Spirit, working
+always, the God of beauty and organizing purpose. He {xlv} is Life and
+Light and Truth, an Immanuel God who can and does show Himself in a
+personal Incarnation, and so exhibits the course and goal of the race.
+The way of Faith is a way to God, and the religion of this type is as
+properly _a first-hand religion_ as that of any other type.
+
+I have, of course, by no means exhausted the types of mature religion.
+There are other ways of approach to God, other roads by which the soul
+finds the way home--"On the East three gates; on the North three gates;
+on the South three gates; and on the West three gates"--and they will
+continue to be sacred ways--_viae sacrae_--for those who travel them
+and thus find their heart's desire. What we should learn from this
+brief study is that religion is too rich and complex an experience to
+be squeezed down to some one isolated aspect of life or of
+consciousness. There are many ways to God and any way that actually
+brings the soul to Him is a good way, but the best way is that one
+which produces upon the imperfect personal life the profoundest saving
+effects, the most dynamic moral reinforcement, and which brings into
+sway over the will the goal of life most adequate for men like us in a
+social world like ours.
+
+For most of us no one way of approach--no single type of religion--is
+quite sufficient for all the needs of our life. Most of us are
+fortunate enough to have at least moments when we feel in warm and
+intimate _contact_ with a divine, enwrapping environment more real to
+us than things of sense and of arithmetic, and when the infinite and
+eternal is no less, but immeasurably more, sure than the finite and
+temporal. Most of us, again, succeed, at least on happy occasions of
+mental health, in finding rational clues which carry us through the
+maze of contingency and clock-time happenings, through the
+imperfections of our slow successive events, to the One Great Now of
+perfect Reality which explains the process, and we attain to an
+intellectual love of God. And in spite of the literary difficulties of
+primitive narratives and of false trails which the historical Church
+has again and again taken, almost any serious, earnest soul to-day
+{xlvi} may find that divine Face, that infinitely deep and luminous
+Personality who spoke as no man ever spake, who loved as none other
+ever loved, who saw more in humanity than anybody else has ever seen,
+and who felt as no other person ever has that He was one in heart and
+mind and will with God; and having found Him, by a morally responsive
+Faith which dominates and transforms the inward self, one has found God
+as Companion, Friend, and Saviour. Where all these ways converge, and
+a soul enjoys the privilege of mystical contact, the compulsion of
+rational insight, and the moral reinforcement of personal Faith in
+Christ, religion comes to its consummate flower, and may with some
+right be called "spiritual Religion."
+
+
+
+V
+
+The most radical step which these spiritual Reformers took--the step
+which put them most strikingly out of line with the main course of the
+Reformation--was their break with Protestant Theology. They were not
+satisfied with a programme which limited itself to a correction of
+abuses, an abolition of mediaeval superstitions, and a shift of
+external authority. They were determined to go the whole way to a
+Religion of inward life and power, to a Christianity whose only
+authority should be its dynamic and spiritual authority. They placed
+as low an estimate on the saving value of orthodox systems of
+theological formulation as the Protestant Reformers did on the saving
+value of "works." To the former, salvation was an affair neither of
+"works" nor of what they called "notions," _i.e._ views, beliefs, or
+creeds. They are never weary of insisting that a person may go on
+endless pilgrimages to holy places, he may repeat unnumbered
+"paternosters," he may mortify his body to the verge of
+self-destruction, and still be unsaved and unspiritual; so, too, he may
+"believe" all the dogma of the most orthodox system of faith, he may
+take on his lips the most sacred words of sound doctrine, and yet be
+utterly alien {xlvii} to the kingdom of God, a stranger and a foreigner
+to the spirit of Christ. They were determined, therefore, to go
+through to a deeper centre and to make only those things pivotal which
+are absolutely essential to life and salvation.
+
+They began their reconstruction of the meaning of salvation with (1) a
+new and fresh interpretation of God, and (2) with a transformed
+eschatology. As I have already said, they re-discovered God through
+Christ, and in terms of His revelation; and coming to God _this way_,
+they saw at once that the prevailing interpretations of the atonement
+were inadequate and unworthy. God, they declared, is not a Suzerain,
+treating men as his vassals, reckoning their sins up against them as
+infinite debts to be paid off at last in a vast commercial transaction
+only by the immeasurable price of a divine Life, given to pay the debt
+which had involved the entire race in hopeless bankruptcy. Nor, again,
+in their thought is He a mighty Sovereign, meting out to the world
+strict justice and holding all sin as flagrant disloyalty and appalling
+violation of law, never to be forgiven until the full requirements of
+sovereign justice are met and balanced and satisfied. All this seemed
+to them artificial and false. Salvation, as they understand it, cannot
+be conceived as escape from debt nor as the satisfaction of justice,
+since it is a personal life-relationship with a personal God who is and
+always was eternal Love. God's universe, both outer and inner, is
+loaded with moral significance, is meant for discipline, and therefore
+it has its stern aspects and drives its lessons home with the
+unswerving hammer of _consequences_. But in the personal Heart of the
+universe, Love and Tenderness and Sympathy and Forgiveness are supreme,
+and every process and every instrument of salvation, in the divine
+purpose, is vital, ethical, spiritual.
+
+God has shown Himself as Father. He has revealed the immeasurable
+suffering which sin inflicts on love. To find the Father-Heart; to cry
+"Abba" in filial joy; to die to sin and to be born to love, is to be
+saved. Jacob Boehme gave this new conception of God, and its bearing
+{xlviii} on the way of salvation, the most adequate expression that was
+given by any of this group, but all these so-called spiritual Reformers
+herein studied had reached the same insight at different levels of
+adequacy. Their return to a more vital conception of salvation, with
+its emphasis on the value of personality, brought with it, too, a new
+humanitarian spirit and a truer estimate of the worth of man. As they
+re-discovered the love of God, they also found again the gospel of love
+and brotherhood which is woven into the very tissue of the original
+gospel of divine Fatherhood.
+
+Their revised eschatology was due, at least partly, to this altered
+account of the character of God, but it was also partly due to their
+profound tendency to deal with all matters of the soul in terms of life
+and vital processes. Heaven and Hell were no longer thought of as
+terminal places, where the saved were everlastingly rewarded and the
+lost forever punished. Heaven and Hell were for them inward
+conditions, states of the soul, the normal gravitation of the Spirit
+toward its chosen centre. Heaven and Hell cease, therefore, to be
+eschatological in the true sense of the word; they become present
+realities, tendencies of life, ways of reacting toward the things of
+deepest import. Heaven, whether here or in any other world, is the
+condition of complete adjustment to the holy will of God; it is joy in
+the prevalence of His goodness; peace through harmonious correspondence
+with His purposes; the formation of a spirit of love, the creation of
+an inward nature that loves what God loves and enjoys what He enjoys.
+
+Hell, here or elsewhere, is a disordered life, out of adjustment with
+the universal will of God; it is concentration upon self and self-ends;
+the contraction of love; the shrinking of inward resources; the
+formation of a spirit of hate, the creation of an inward nature that
+hates what God loves. Hell is the inner condition inherently attaching
+to the kind of life that displays and exhibits the spirit and attitude
+which must be overcome before God with His purposes of goodness can be
+{xlix} ultimately triumphant and all in all. Salvation, therefore,
+cannot be thought of in terms of escape from a place that is dreaded to
+a place that is desired as a haven. It is through and through a
+spiritual process--escape from a wrongly fashioned will to a will
+rightly fashioned. It is complete spiritual health and wholeness of
+life, brought into operation and function by the soul's recovery of God
+and by joyous correspondence with Him.
+
+Here is the genuine beginning in modern times of what has come to be
+the deepest note of present-day Christianity, _the appreciation of
+personality as the highest thing in earth or heaven_, and the
+initiation of a movement to find the vital sources and resources for
+the inner kindling of the spirit, and for raising the whole personal
+life to higher functions and to higher powers.
+
+Putting the emphasis, as they did, on personal religion, _i.e._ on
+experience, instead of on theology, they naturally became exponents of
+free-will, and that, too, in a period when fore-ordination was a
+central dogma of theology. This problem of freedom, which is as deep
+as personality itself, always has its answer "determined" by the point
+of approach. For those who _begin_ with an absolute and omnipotent
+God, and work down from above, the necessarian position is determined.
+Their answer is: "All events are infallibly connected with God's
+disposal." For those who start, however, from actual experience and
+from the testimony of consciousness, freedom feels as certain as life
+itself. Their answer is: "Human will is a real factor in the direction
+of events and man shapes his own destiny toward good or evil."
+Calvin's logic is irresistible if his assumptions are once granted.
+These spiritual Reformers, however, were untouched by it, because they
+began from the interior life, with its dramatic movements, as their
+basal fact, and man as they knew him was free.
+
+This spiritual movement involved, as a natural development, an entire
+shift from the historical idea of the Church as an authoritative and
+supernatural instrument of salvation, to a Church whose authority was
+entirely vital, {l} ethical, spiritual, dynamic. The Church of these
+spiritual Reformers was a Fellowship, a Society, a Family, rather than
+a mysterious and supernatural entity. They felt once again, as
+powerfully perhaps as it was possible in their centuries to feel it,
+the immense significance of the Pauline conception of the Church as the
+continued embodiment and revelation of Christ, the communion of saints
+past and present who live or have lived by the Spirit. Through this
+spiritual group, part of whom are visible and part invisible, they held
+that the divine revelation is continued and the eternal Word of God is
+being uttered to the race. "The true religion of Christ," as one of
+these spiritual teachers well puts it, "is written in the soul and
+spirit of man by the Spirit of God; and the believer is the only book
+in which God now writes His New Testament."[31] This Church of the
+Spirit is always being built. Its power is proportional to the
+spiritual vitality of the membership, to the measure of apprehension of
+divine resources, to the depth of insight and grasp of truth, to the
+prevalence of love and brotherhood, to the character of service, which
+the members exhibit. It possesses no other kind of power or authority
+than the power and authority of personal lives formed into a community
+by living correspondence with God, and acting as human channels and
+organs of His Life and Spirit. Such a Church can meet new formulations
+of science and history and social ideals with no authoritative and
+conclusive word of God which automatically settles the issue. Its only
+weapons are truth and light, and these have to be continually
+re-discovered and re-fashioned to fit the facts which the age has found
+and verified. Its mission is _prophetic_. It does not dogmatically
+decide what facts must be believed, but it sees and announces the
+spiritual significance of the facts that are discovered and verified.
+It was, thus, in their thought a growing, changing, ever-adjusting
+body--the living body of Christ in the world. To the Protestant
+Reformers this spiritual ideal presented "a Church" so shorn and
+emasculated as to be {li} absolutely worthless. It seemed to them a
+propaganda which threatened and endangered the mighty work of
+reformation to which they felt themselves called, and they used all the
+forces available to suppress and annihilate those of this other "way."
+
+Nearly four hundred wonderful years have passed since the issue was
+first drawn, since the first of these spiritual prophets uttered his
+modest challenge. There can be no question that the current of
+Christian thought has been strongly setting in the direction which
+these brave and sincere innovators took. I feel confident that many
+persons to-day will be interested in these lonely men and will follow
+with sympathy their valiant struggles to discover the road to a genuine
+spiritual religion, and their efforts to live by the eternal Word of
+God as it was freely revealed as the Day Star to their souls.
+
+
+
+[1] 1 Cor. xv. 50.
+
+[2] 2 Cor. v. 1-4.
+
+[3] John iii. 6.
+
+[4] 1 John iv. 13; John xiii. 34 and xvi. 13; 1 John iv. 4.
+
+[5] They found their authority for this outer sheath of body in the
+text which says: "The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife coats of
+skins, and clothed them."--Gen. iii. 21.
+
+[6] Many of these historical reappearances are considered in my
+_Studies in Mystical Religion_.
+
+[7] Isaac Penington, "A True and Faithful Relation of my Spiritual
+Travails," _Works_ (edition of 1761), i. pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii.
+
+[8] Isaac Penington's _Works_, i. pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii.
+
+[9] The exact and sharply-defined "ladders" of mystic ascent which form
+a large part of the descriptive material in books on Mystical Religion
+are far from being universal ladders. Like creeds, or like religious
+institutions, they powerfully assist certain minds to find the way
+home, but they seem unreal and artificial to many other persons, and
+they must be considered only as symbolisms which speak to the condition
+of a limited number of spiritual pilgrims.
+
+[10] Wordsworth's "Prelude," Bk. ii.
+
+[11] _Theologia Germanica_, chaps. xxii. and xliii.
+
+[12] _Ibid._ chap. liii.
+
+[13] _Meister Eckhart_, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 20.
+
+[14] Tauler's Sermons. See especially Sermons IV. and XXIII. in
+Hutton's _Inner Way_.
+
+[15] _The Divine Names_ of Dionysius the Areopagite, chap. i. sec. i.
+
+[16] _Meister Eckhart_, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 25-30.
+
+[17] Quoted in W. H. J. Gairdner's _The Reproach of Islam_, p. 151.
+
+[19] Denck's _Was geredet sey, dass die Schrift_, B. 2. Pascal's
+saying is: "Comfort thyself; thou wouldst not be seeking Me hadst thou
+not already found Me."--Le Mystère de Jésus, sec. 2.
+
+[19] _The Threefold Life of Man_, xiv. 72.
+
+[20] Sterry's _Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the
+Soul of Man_, p. 24.
+
+[21] "The finite individual soul seems naturally to present a double
+aspect. It looks like, on the one hand, a climax or concentration of
+the nature beneath it and the community around it, and, on the other
+hand, a spark or fragment from what is above and beyond it. It is
+crystallized out of the collective soul of nature or society, or it
+falls down from the transcendental soul of heaven or what is above
+humanity. In both cases alike it has its share of divinity."--Bernard
+Bosanquet, _The Value and Destiny of the Individual_ (London, 1913), p.
+1.
+
+[22] The way to the world of Perfect Reality, Socrates says in the
+_Theaetetus_, consists in likeness to God, nor is there, he adds,
+anything more like God than is a good man.--_Theaetetus_ 176 A and B.
+
+[23] Schleiermacher's _Glaubenslehre_.
+
+[24] _Republic_ vii. 518 B.
+
+[25] Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."
+
+[26] _Realm of Ends_, p. 230.
+
+[27] _Lectures and Addresses_, p. 193.
+
+[28] Ella Wheeler Wilcox, _Poems of Life and Moments_.
+
+[29] Jacob Boehme, however, shows this fascination for the
+super-empirical at its height and culmination. It was an attempt,
+though a bungling attempt, to pass from an abstract God to a God of
+_character_, and it was a circuitous way of getting round the problem
+of evil.
+
+[30] _Mystical Elements of Religion_, i. p. 26.
+
+[31] William Dell's sermon on "The Trial of Spirits," _Works_, p. 438.
+
+
+
+
+{1}
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MAIN CURRENT OF THE REFORMATION
+
+I
+
+One of the greatest tragedies in Christian history is the division of
+forces which occurred in the Reformation movements of the sixteenth
+century. Division of forces in the supreme spiritual undertakings of
+the race is of course confined to no one century and to no one
+movement; it is a very ancient tragedy. But the tragedy of division is
+often relieved by the fact that through the differentiation of opposing
+parties a vigorous emphasis is placed upon aspects of truth which might
+otherwise have been allowed to drop out of focus. This
+sixteenth-century division is peculiarly tragic, because through the
+split in the lines the very aspects of truth which were most needed to
+give the movement a steady increment of insight and power were lost in
+the din and confusion of party warfare.
+
+There was a short but glorious period--the years from 1517 to
+1523--during which it seemed as though the spiritual and intellectual
+travail of the three preceding centuries was to consummate in the birth
+of a movement that would draw together and unify all the liberating
+forces which had slowly become available. The Humanists of the
+Renaissance, no less than Columbus, were finding a new world.[1] They
+had boldly travelled out beyond the {2} boundaries which the medieval
+mind had set to human interests, and had discovered that man was more
+than the abstract being whose "soul" had alone concerned ecclesiastics
+and schoolmen. Man, the Humanists saw, is possessed in his own right
+of great powers of reason. He is a creative and autonomous being, he
+has vast capacities for life and enjoyment to which the Church had
+failed to minister. They stood amazed at the artistic and literary
+culture, the political and intellectual freedom and the great richness
+of life which the newly discovered classical literature revealed as
+having existed in the pre-Christian world, and at the wonderful
+comprehension of life revealed in the Gospels. With commendable
+passion they proposed to refresh and reshape the world through the new
+models, the new ideals, and the new spirit which they had discovered.
+First of all they would wipe out the old Augustinian cleavage which had
+carried its sharp dualism wherever it ran. They would no longer
+recognize the double world scheme--a divine realm set over against an
+undivine realm, the "sacred" set over against the "secular," the
+spiritual set over against the natural, the Church set against the
+world, faith set in contrast to reason, the spirit pitted against the
+flesh, "the other world" put in such light that "this world" by
+contrast lay dull in the shadow. Those who were broadened and
+liberated by the new learning found not only a new world in classical
+literature, but they also found a new gospel in the Gospel. As they
+studied the New Testament documents themselves and became freed from
+the bondage of tradition they discovered that the primitive message
+dealt with life and action rather than with theology. They found the
+key to the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Parables of
+Jesus, and they shifted the emphasis from doctrine to ethics. This
+change of emphasis quite naturally involved another change. It brought
+man into greater prominence, and the Church as an ecclesiastical system
+into less prominence; for life, they discovered, was settled in the
+teaching of Christ by the {3} attitude of the will and by the formation
+of character, rather than by the mediation of a priesthood external to
+man. "I wish," Erasmus wrote to Capito in 1518, "that there could be
+an end of scholastic subtleties, or, if not an end, that they could be
+thrust into a second place and Christ be taught plainly and simply.
+The reading of the Bible and the early Fathers will have this effect.
+Doctrines are taught now which have no affinity with Christ, and only
+darken our eyes."[2] Again in 1521 he wrote to a friend, words which
+appear again and again in his letters: "It would be well for us if we
+thought less about our dogmas and more about the gospel,"[3] or, as he
+often puts it, "if we made less of dogmatic subtleties and more of
+Scripture." So far as Humanism was a religious force it was pushing
+toward a religion of the lay-type, with man himself--man with his
+momentous will--as the centre of interest.
+
+Another important influence was slowly but pervasively filtering down
+into the life of the people and preparing the way for a religion of
+greater personal vitality and spiritual inwardness; I mean the
+testimony of the great mystics. One has only to study the life and
+writings of such a scholar as Nicolaus Chrypffs--generally called
+Cusanus, or Nicholas of Cusa--who died shortly before Luther was
+born,[4] to see what a live force the mystical teaching was even in
+this period of Renaissance. God is for him, as for his great masters,
+Plotinus, Erigena, Eckhart, and Tauler, the infinite and indescribable
+subsoil of the universe, in whose Reality all the roots of life and all
+the reality of things are grounded. The soul, by nature spiritual and
+immortal, at its apex rises above the contradictions which lower
+knowledge everywhere meets and comes into possession, by a "learned
+ignorance," of Truth itself and into an unspeakable union with God.
+But it was not merely among scholars like Nicholas that mysticism
+formed the elemental basis of life and thought; it had, through the
+circles of the {4} "Brothers of the Common Life,"[5] and through such
+masterpieces as the _Imitation of Christ_, the _Theologia Germanica_,
+and the Sermons of Eckhart and of John Tauler, become a part of the
+spiritual atmosphere which serious-minded men breathed. Every one of
+the men who belong in my list of "Spiritual Reformers" read and loved
+"the golden book of German Theology," and most of them knew the other
+writings of the great fourteenth-century mystics. There are
+unmistakable evidences of a subtle formative influence from these rich
+sources, which explains the simultaneous sporadic outbreak of similar
+views in widely sundered places.
+
+There was, thus, abroad at the opening of the Reformation a deep
+yearning among serious people for a religion of inward experience, a
+religion based not on proof-texts nor on external authority of any
+kind, but on the native capacity of the soul to seek, to find and to
+enjoy the living God who is the Root and Sap of every twig and branch
+of the great tree of life. The general trend of this mystical
+tendency, as also of the Humanistic movement, was in the direction of
+lay-religion, and both movements alike emphasized the inherent and
+native capacity of man, whose destiny by his free choice is in his own
+hands.
+
+There were, too, at work many other deep-lying tendencies away from the
+bondage and traditions of the past; aspiration for economic and social
+reforms to liberate the common people and give them some real chance to
+be persons--tendencies which all the Reformers treated in this book
+deeply felt and shared.
+
+All these movements toward intellectual, spiritual, and social freedom
+seemed at first to find their champion in the dynamic hero, whose
+ninety-five theses on the door at Wittenberg shook the world awake in
+1517. He was by birth and spirit a child of the people--"ein Kind des
+Volkes"--and he seemed to be a prophet, divinely called to voice their
+dumb aspirations. He possessed, {5} like all great prophets, a
+straightforward moral honesty and sincerity, an absolute fearlessness,
+a magnetic and commanding personality, an unusual mastery of the
+vernacular speech, and an abundant power of pathos, humour, and satire.
+All the world loves a hero who can say in the face of real danger, "I
+would go forward to Worms if there were as many devils there as there
+are tiles on the roof!" or again, "I would go to Leipzig if it rained
+Duke Georges for nine days running!"[6]
+
+He had, too, unusual religious depth and power which sprang, as in the
+case of the great mystics, from a profound inward experience. Luther,
+like St. Paul and St. Augustine, and many another spiritual guide of
+the race, came upon his supreme insights in sudden epoch-making
+revelations or illuminations by which he found himself on a new level,
+with the line of march shifted and all values altered. His conversion
+and dedication to religion was an instance of this type. So, too, was
+his discovery of the way of Faith. Legend has very likely coloured our
+accounts of this experience, but for purposes of valuation it is of
+little moment to us whether the dynamic flash came to him in his cell
+at Wittenberg as he was studying the Epistle to the Romans, or whether
+it came while he was climbing the penitential stairway in Rome.[7] When
+all legendary coverings are stripped away we have left an inner event
+of the first importance, a _live idea_ bursting into consciousness like
+a new star on the field of vision. By processes much deeper and richer
+than those of logical argument, his mind leaped to the certainty of
+infinite grace and forgiving love in God as revealed in Christ. In a
+word, this baffled and despairing monk, striving in vain to heap up
+merits enough to win {6} divine favour, suddenly discovered a new God
+who filled his whole world with a new light and freedom and joy. His
+name for this discovery was Faith ["Glaube"], but Faith in its first
+intention for Luther meant a personal experience or discovery of God,
+brought into full view and clear apprehension in Christ. "No one can
+understand God or God's Word," Luther once wrote, "unless he has it
+revealed immediately ["on Mittel"] by the Holy Ghost, but nobody can
+receive anything from the Holy Ghost unless he experiences it. In
+experience the Holy Ghost teaches as in His own school, outside of
+which nothing of value can be learned."[8]
+
+Not only was Faith for Luther thus possessed of a mystical character as
+an inward discovery and as a personal experience which laid hold on God
+immediately, but it also owed its illuminating birth in his
+consciousness largely to the influence of the writings and the lives of
+the mystics. However suddenly the "revelation" seemed to burst into
+his mind, there had nevertheless been a long period of psychological
+gestation and preparation for it before the epoch-making moment finally
+came. He had already in his early convent days come under the spell of
+St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Gerson, and many another guide into the
+deep regions of inward personal religion, and his intimate friend, the
+Vicar-general Staupitz, had been to him in some sense a personal
+embodiment of this type of religion. But the German mystics of the
+fourteenth century, with their mighty experience and their
+extraordinary depth, carried him still farther in this direction. He
+was so enthusiastic over that beautiful anonymous classic of mystical
+religion, the _Theologia Germanica_, that he twice edited and published
+it, declaring in his Preface that he had learned from it "more of what
+God and Christ and man and all things are" than from any other book
+except the Bible and St. Augustine. John Tauler, the great Dominican
+preacher of Strasbourg, impressed him no less profoundly. "Neither in
+the Latin nor the German language," he {7} wrote to Spalatin in 1516,
+"have I ever found purer or more wholesome teaching, nor any that so
+agrees with the Gospel." Both these great teachers of spiritual
+religion helped him to see that complete confidence in and surrender to
+the will of God is salvation--"Put off thy own will and there will be
+no hell."
+
+In Luther's earlier writings we come frequently upon passages which
+reveal the way in which experience still saturates Faith for him, and
+which exhibit the mystical depth of his Christianity at this period.
+Commenting on the phrase, "Christ liveth in me" (Gal. ii. 20), in his
+_Commentary on Galatians_[9] he says, "He [Christ] is my form, my
+furniture, and perfection, adorning and beautifying my faith as the
+colour, the clear light, the whiteness, do garnish and beautify the
+wall. Thus are we constrained grossly to set forth this matter. For
+we cannot _conceive_ that Christ is so nearly joined and united unto us
+as the colour or whiteness is unto the wall. But Christ thus joined
+and united unto me and abiding in me, liveth this life in me which now
+I live; yea, Christ Himself is this life which now I live. Wherefore
+Christ and I in this behalf are both one."[10] And in a famous passage
+in the tract "On Christian Liberty," he declares that "Faith has the
+incomparable grace of uniting the soul to Christ as bride to husband,
+so that the soul possesses whatever Christ Himself possesses."
+
+Not only was this Luther of the early period the hero of the people and
+the prophet of a deep and inward religion, he seemed also to have
+found, even more emphatically than had the Humanists, a far-reaching
+principle of individualism which took the key from the Church and put
+it into the hands of the Christian man himself. Salvation in its
+essence, he sees, is conferred upon no one from without. The soul is
+dependent for it upon no organization, no traditions, no dogma, no
+sacred performances. It is a transaction between the {8} individual
+soul and God, and the person who lays hold on God in living faith
+thereby has salvation, assurance, and joy. With this principle of
+individualism there came naturally to Luther a new conception of the
+Church altogether.[11] It was for him, in ideal at least, a community
+or congregation ["Gemeinde"] of believers, each member a spiritual
+priest, ministering to the spiritual and social life of all: "I believe
+that there is on earth, wide as the world is, not more than one holy
+universal Christian Church, which is nothing else than the community or
+assembly of the saints. . . . I believe that in this community or
+Christendom, all things are common, and each one shares the goods of
+the others and none calls anything his own. Therefore all the prayers
+and good works of the entire community help me and every believer, and
+support and strengthen us at every time in life and in death."[12]
+
+This ideal of a priesthood of believers, ministering to each other in
+mutual service and practising neighbourly love in daily life, would, if
+it had been actually carried into effect, have marked a great step in
+the direction in which the Humanists were going, namely, the transfer
+of the emphasis from dogma to life, from doctrine to ethics, from
+ecclesiasticism to personality. Luther's great discovery that personal
+faith is the only thing which counts toward God, and that love and
+service are the only things in the human sphere which have religious
+significance would have introduced, if it had been put full into play,
+a new era of personal freedom and a new stage in the progress of the
+Kingdom of God as a world-wide brotherhood of men engaged in mutual
+service.
+
+
+{9}
+
+II
+
+But the young Luther of these glowing ideals is not the actual Luther
+of the Protestant Reformation, any more than the Augustine of the
+mighty spiritual experiences portrayed in the _Confessions_ is the St.
+Augustine of history. The historical Luther had the hero-spirit in him
+in high degree; he had mystical depth and inward experience as we have
+seen, and he possessed the prophetic power of vision and forereach
+which makes him often seem far in advance of his time; but these
+dynamic traits were more than overbalanced by his fundamentally
+conservative disposition and by his determination not to go faster or
+farther than he could carry Germany, especially the nobility, with him.
+He was, in a very real sense, a child of his time, a product of
+medieval Europe, and he never succeeded in liberating himself from the
+tight swaddling-bands in which his youth was wrapped. He could not
+comprehend, as we shall see, the bold spirits who were dedicated to the
+task of reinterpreting Christianity in terms of the new age; he loved
+the old, in so far as it seemed to him unspoiled by apostacy and
+corruption, and he naturally kept reverting to the ancient dogma and
+the accepted theology of the old Church instead of leading the way into
+a fresh, vital, spiritual form of Christianity adapted to the social
+aspiration of the time.
+
+In spite of the fact that Luther knew and loved the German mystics and
+had himself received a powerful inward experience of Christ as the
+bridegroom of his soul--an experience which quickened all the forces of
+his will and raised him to the rank of a world-hero--nevertheless his
+normal tendency was toward a non-mystical type of Christianity, toward
+a Christianity thoroughly based on Scripture, logically constructed out
+of concepts of the nature of God and Man, so ancient, sacred, and
+orthodox, that they seemed to him axioms of theology and capable of
+being formulated into a saving {10} system of truth, as universal and
+as unalterable as the multiplication table.
+
+However unconscious Luther himself may have been of the shift of
+emphasis that was taking place in him as the movement progressed, the
+historical observer has no difficulty in noting the change from the
+Luther who is endeavouring to sound the deeps of life itself, and whose
+religion is the creation of the inward stream of life within him; and
+the Luther who wanders far afield from experience, draws curious
+conclusions from unverified concepts, piles text on text as though
+heaven could be scaled by another Pelion on Ossa, and once more turns
+religion back to the cooled lava-beds of theology. He never could
+succeed in getting the God of his heart's glowing faith into the
+theologies which he laboriously builded. As soon as he started
+constructing he invariably fell back upon the building-material which
+had already been quarried, and which lay at hand. His experimental
+Faith discovered a God of all Grace, but his inherited _concept_ of
+God, the God of the Old Testament and of theology, was vastly
+different, and remained to the end unrevolutionized by his heart's
+insight. This background conception of God comes to extreme expression
+in his _De servo arbitrio_ ["The Unfree Will"] of 1525: "This is the
+acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so
+many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us
+necessarily doomed to damnation, so that . . . He seems to delight in
+the tortures of the wretched and to be more deserving of hatred than of
+love. _If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows
+so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be
+no need of faith._" There could, in his thought, be no salvation for
+man, no hope, and no joy, until some way of escape was found from the
+stern judgments of this angry and wrathful God. This way of escape is
+found in what Luther calls "the Word of God," by which he means "the
+Gospel of God concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and
+glorified."[13] {11} This Word of God is for him the sum total of "the
+promises that God is _for us_": "the pure Gospel" of a pardoning,
+forgiving God; the revelation in the Cross of Christ that no self-merit
+counts or is needed, but that on Christ's account God forgives the
+sinner and bestows His Grace upon him.
+
+Speaking theologically, Faith consists in believing in the God whom
+Christ has historically revealed--believing without any doubt that He
+will be and will do to us according to the things which are said of Him
+in "the Word of God." It must be said that for Luther himself, Faith
+was an "active, powerful thing," "a deliberate confidence in the grace
+of God," which made him "joyous and intrepid" and "for which he could
+die a thousand deaths";[14] but there was always an irresistible
+tendency in the Lutheran teaching for faith to drop to the lower level
+of doctrine, and to consist in the acceptance of a scheme of
+justification.
+
+This tendency was, I say, easy and irresistible just because Luther did
+not normally and naturally think of God as being inherently and
+essentially loving, gracious, tender, and forgiving, that is to say,
+_fundamentally a Father_ and in his deepest nature like the self-giving
+Christ. For him, as for so many other theologians, God _becomes_
+forgiving and gracious on account of Christ's merit and righteousness
+and thus no longer imputes sin to us. Because of what Christ did, God
+now beholds us with an attitude of mercy, grace, and forgiveness, and,
+on condition of our faith, imputes to us the righteousness of Christ.
+Salvation is, thus, a plan by which we escape from the God of justice
+and wrath and have our dealings with a God who has become merciful
+because our sin has been balanced off by somebody else's merit and
+righteousness.
+
+Not only did Luther continue this medieval fiction of God's nature and
+character, he had also always in mind a fictitious and constructed
+"man." Man for him is a being devoid of "merit," a creature whose
+personal {12} goodness in and of itself is of no value. Even Faith
+itself, by which salvation is received, is not an attitude or function
+of man's own will or reason. It is, like everything else connected
+with salvation, something divinely given, supernaturally initiated, a
+work of God, an _opus operatum_--"Mit unserer Macht ist nichts
+gethan"--and therefore "faith" and "reason" belong in totally different
+compartments of the human being. Nor, furthermore, when he is absorbed
+with his system, is salvation ever synonymous for him with an
+inwardly-transformed and spiritually-renewed self. Salvation means for
+him _certainty of divine favour_. It does not inherently carry with it
+and involve in its intrinsic meaning a new life, a joyous adjustment of
+will to the Will of God. If man is to attain to a moral transformation
+of life, he must receive an added gift of supernatural grace, that is,
+the power of sanctification through the Holy Spirit. This conception
+made it impossible for him to look for the coming of a divine kingdom
+by slow processes now at work in the world.
+
+Luther did not intend to make the "Word of God" synonymous with the
+Scriptures, and in his great Prefaces to St. Paul's _Epistles_ he does
+not identify the two. The Word of God is, as we have seen, the
+revelation, the message, the gospel, of Grace through Christ Jesus,
+wherever expressed, enunciated, or preached. But the pledged Word of
+God found in the Scriptures seemed to him the main miracle of the ages,
+and as, in his contests with Zwickau "Prophets," "Anabaptists," and
+"Spiritualists," he found himself forced to produce a fixed touchstone
+of faith and a solid authority to take the place left vacant by the Old
+Church, he swung naturally toward the dogma of the absolute authority
+of Scripture, and he laid, without wishing to do so, the foundation for
+the view of the second generation of Protestantism, that the infallible
+Scripture is God's final communication to helpless man, and is the
+ultimate and only basis of authority in religion.
+
+His conception of the sacraments in like manner, {13} because of his
+crude supernaturalism and his inadequate intellectual and spiritual
+penetration, drifted to a semi-medieval view. He intended to transform
+these ceremonies and to have them fit "the pure Word of God." In his
+primary _intention_ they were to be no longer objective works of grace,
+but were to have a subjective value only, a faith-significance. They
+were to be conceived as pictorial, symbolic ways of learning the one
+important truth of salvation--God's grace and forgiveness; for God
+deigns, he said, to speak to his immature creatures by signs and
+pictures. But the imperial sway of the past powerfully moved him; his
+own conservative disposition carried him along paths which an
+enlightened reason would not have taken, and the heat of the
+controversy often blinded him to some of the precious truths that had
+seemed clear to him in the creative period of Faith. In the bitter
+controversy with the "spiritual prophets" on the question of
+sacraments, he wrote words which seem strangely out of harmony with his
+earlier views and with his own experience: "External things in religion
+must precede internal experiences which come through [_i.e._ are
+mediated by] external things, for God has resolved to give nobody the
+internal gifts except through the external things. He will give nobody
+the Spirit and Faith without the use of external word and sign."[15]
+Without meaning to surrender the precious jewel of a religion
+spiritually grounded, he once more introduced "the awful mystery" of
+the sacraments, and opened the door for the conception of the rite as
+an _opus operatum_--a grace of God objectively real. He retained
+infant baptism as _an efficacious act_, and, obsessed as he was by the
+literal words, _Hoc est corpus_--"this is my body"--he went back into
+the abandoned path of scholasticism,[16] and restored the mysterious
+and miraculous real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.[17] It is
+true, as Loofs has said, that {14} "Luther re-discovered Christianity
+as religion," but it is also unfortunately true as well that he lacked
+the insight, faith, and boldness of spirit to trust the people of his
+age and of the future with "Christianity as religion," and instead gave
+them a Christianity theologically constructed, deeply marred with
+residual superstitions and mysteries, and heavily laden with the
+inheritances of dark and medieval ages.
+
+
+
+III
+
+There are two types of religious genius, both of which play great roles
+in history. There is first the genius who, inspired by the ideal of
+some earlier prophet, or made wise because he has himself discovered
+the trend of celestial currents, sees through the complex and tangle of
+his time, and forecasts a truth which all men in a happier coming age
+will recognize. When he has once seen it, this vision transforms all
+his ideas and aims, and spoils forever for him all meaner gains, all
+half truths, all goods which must be won through surrender of a
+possible better. He will be obedient to that vision regardless of all
+cost. He will bear witness to the full light which he has seen even
+though he can compel nobody else in the heedless world of his
+generation to see it. He may only cry in the wilderness, but at all
+events he will _cry_, and he will cry of that highest thing his heart
+knows.
+
+There is, on the other hand, the genius who understands his own age
+like an open book. He is almost hypersensitive to the movings of his
+time. He feels the silent yearnings and strivings of the dumb
+multitudes about him; he anticipates in his thought what the rest are
+incipiently thinking--he is the clear voice and oracle of the spirit of
+his age. He knows to a nicety how far his contemporaries will allow
+themselves to be carried. {15} He will not over-hurry, he will not
+outrun their possible speed, and he will sacrifice everything to carry
+his epoch with him toward the goal which he sees. He is contented to
+keep his roots deep in the past, and he tempers all his creative
+insights with a judicious mixture of the experience of the past and the
+ideas which time has made sacred. He will not satisfy the idealist who
+wants leaps, and he will not please the radical in any period; but if
+he is brave, wise, and sincere, and, withal, possessed of rare gifts of
+interpretation and unusual powers of leadership, he may be able to
+shape the course of history no less effectively, perhaps more surely,
+than the genius who insists upon an immediate march straight across
+country to Canaan the moment he glimpses it from his Pisgah.
+
+Luther was a reformer of this second type. He was beset by very real
+limitations. Dr. McGiffert does not overstate the facts when he says:
+"He cared little for clearness and consistency of thought. A
+satisfactory and adequate world-view was not of his concern. Of
+intellectual curiosity he had scarcely any; of interest in truth for
+truth's sake none at all. . . . He remained entirely without
+intellectual difficulties, finding no trouble with the most extreme
+supernaturalism."[18] In many respects, as Harnack has insisted, his
+Christianity was a "medieval phenomenon."[19] Only in one thing was he
+supremely the master of his age and the hero of a new time--in his
+discovery of a way of Faith which makes a man "intrepid" even in the
+wreck of worlds and "in a thousand deaths." On the lower levels of
+life, where most of his work was done, he was strangely under the sway
+of the past, a distruster of reason, a restorer of ancient doctrine, a
+conservative in thought and action, a friend of rulers, a guardian, as
+far as he could be, of the _status quo_--a leader who anathematized
+radicals and enthusiasts and who staved off and postponed for nearly
+four hundred years the truly liberating and thoroughly {16} adequate
+reformation. He was determined to be the repairer of the "Old Church,"
+not the builder of a "New Church," and he was resolved not to travel
+farther nor faster than the substantial men of his time considered safe
+and wise.
+
+But less was perhaps more. There will at least always be those who
+think that the sinuous way of progress is the most certain way of
+advance. The slow incline, the gradual spiral, each wind of the curve
+"ever not quite" the old level--that is the most approved method of
+leaving an outworn past and of moving forward into a new stage of
+history. It may be so. It certainly is true that through Luther's
+_insight_ new reliance upon God came to men, new energy of faith was
+won, and by his work of repair, conservative and cautious though it
+was, in the long sweep of time a liberated Christianity has come, a
+vital social gospel has become effective, and great vistas of progress
+are opening out before the Church of Christ. But it is impossible to
+forget that other group--those men of the other type--who even in
+Luther's day saw the way straight across into Canaan, the men who saw
+their vision fade away unrealized, and who failed to behold the fruit
+of their spiritual travail largely because Luther misunderstood them,
+refused to give them aid and comfort, and finally helped to marshal the
+forces which submerged them and postponed their victory. We may not
+blame him, but it is not fair to these heroic souls that they should
+longer lie submerged in the oblivion of their defeat. I shall try in
+these pages to bring up into the light the principles and ideas which
+they proclaimed to Europe, perhaps ahead of their time.
+
+
+
+[1] In the South the movement showed a tendency to drift back into a
+refined paganism. In the North, however, it was deeply Christian in
+interest, in feeling, and in its moral aspirations. Erasmus was by far
+the greatest figure and the most influential person in the group of
+Humanists of this latter type.
+
+[2] Epistle CCVII.
+
+[3] Epistle DLXXXVII.
+
+[4] 1401-1464.
+
+[5] Nicholas belonged to one of these circles. "The Brethren of the
+Common Life" are treated in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_, chap.
+xiv.
+
+[6] Letter to the Elector Frederick, March 5, 1522.
+
+[7] The story that Luther, climbing the _Scala Santa_ in 1510, suddenly
+was impressed by the words, "The just shall live by faith," is based on
+a reminiscence of Luther's son Paul. Luther's own reference to the
+ascent of the _Scala Santa_ makes no allusion to any such experience.
+He merely says that when he reached the top of the stairs, which he
+climbed in the hope of getting the soul of an ancestor out of
+Purgatory, he thought to himself, "Who knows whether this prayer will
+avail?" Luther began his lectures on _Romans_ in 1515, and his dynamic
+experience probably belongs near this date.
+
+[8] Preface to the _Magnificat_ written in 1521.
+
+[9] First given as Lectures in 1516-17, and published in 1519.
+
+[10] A _Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians_.
+
+[11] Dilthey says in _Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie_, Bd. v.
+Heft 3, p. 358: "The Justification of which the medieval man had inward
+experience was the descending stream of objective forces upon the
+believer from the transcendental world, through the Incarnation, in the
+channels of the ecclesiastical institutions, priestly consecration,
+sacraments, confession, and works. It was something which took place
+in connection with a super-sensible regime. The Justification by faith
+of which Luther was inwardly aware was the personal experience of the
+believer standing in the continuous line of Christian fellowship, by
+whom assurance of the Grace of God is experienced in response to
+personal faith, an experience derived from the appropriation of the
+work of Christ."
+
+[12] _Sämmtliche Werke_ (Erlangen edition), xxii. p. 20.
+
+[13] On Christian Liberty, _Primary Works_, p. 106.
+
+[14] See his Preface to _The Epistle to the Romans_.
+
+[15] _Wider die himlichen Propheten vom Sacrament_, ii. Anno 1525.
+
+[16] See P. Loofs, _Dogmengeschichte_ (Vierte Auflage, 1906), pp.
+752-755.
+
+[17] In his instructions to Melanchthon for the Cassel Conference with
+Butzer in 1534, Luther said, "In and with the bread, the body of Christ
+is truly partaken of, accordingly all that takes place actively and
+passively in the bread takes place actively and passively in the body
+of Christ and the latter is distributed, eaten and masticated with the
+teeth."
+
+[18] McGiffert, _Protestant Thought before Kant_ (1911), p. 20. See
+also the same view in Troeltsch, _Protestantisches Christentum und
+Kirche in der Neuzeit_ (2nd Auflage), p. 481.
+
+[19] _History of Dogma_, vii. p. 169.
+
+
+
+
+{17}
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HANS DENCK AND THE INWARD WORD[1]
+
+Hans Denck has generally been enrolled among the Anabaptists, and it is
+possible to use that name of scorn with such a latitude and looseness
+that it includes not only Denck but all the sixteenth-century exponents
+of a free, inward religion. Anabaptism has often been treated as a
+sort of broad banyan-tree which flourished exuberantly and shot out
+far-reaching branches of very varied characters, but which held in one
+organic unity all the branches that found soil and took root. A name
+of such looseness and covering capacity is, however, of little worth,
+and it would promote historical accuracy if we should confine the term
+to those who opposed infant baptism and who insisted instead upon adult
+baptism, not as a means of Grace, but as a visible sign of the covenant
+of man with God. The further characteristic marks which may be
+selected to differentiate Anabaptism from other movements of the period
+are:
+
+1. The treatment of the Gospel as a new law to be literally followed
+and obeyed by all who are to have the right to be called "saints."
+
+2. The true Church is a _visible_ Church, the community of the saints,
+founded by covenant, with adult baptism as its sign, formed exactly on
+the pattern of the apostolic {18} Church and preserved in strict purity
+by rigorous church discipline; and
+
+3. The denial to magistrates of all power to persecute men for their
+faith and doctrine on the ground that the Gospel gives them no such
+authority--its great commandment being love.[2]
+
+Hans Denck, though in his early period of activity closely identified
+with this movement and regarded as one of its chief leaders in Germany,
+does not properly belong, however, to the banyan-tree of Anabaptism.
+His writings reveal ideas and tendencies of such enlarged scope that it
+appears clear that he had discovered and was teaching another type of
+Christianity altogether.[3] He is the earliest exponent in the
+sixteenth century of a fresh and unique type of religion, deeply
+influenced by the mystics of a former time, but even more profoundly
+moulded by the new humanistic conceptions of man's real nature.
+
+There are few biographical details of Denck's life available. He was,
+most probably, a native of Bavaria,[4] and he was born about the year
+1495. He studied in the University of Ingolstadt, where he was
+admitted among the baccalaureates in 1517.[5] In the year 1520 we
+catch a glimpse of him in close association with the Humanists of
+Augsburg.[6] In 1522 he was at work in Basle as proof-reader for the
+famous publisher, Valentin Curio, and was living in intimate fellowship
+with the great scholar OEcolampadius, whose lectures on the Prophet
+Isaiah he heard.[7] In the autumn of the same year, on the
+recommendation of OEcolampadius, he was appointed Director of St.
+Sebald's School in Nuremberg, which was then the foremost seat of
+learning in that city, {19} a great centre of classical humanistic
+studies. During the first period of his life in Nuremberg he was
+closely identified with the Lutheran movement, but he soon shifted his
+sympathies, and aligned himself with the radical tendencies which at
+this period were championed in Nuremberg by Thomas Münzer, who, in
+spite of his misguided leadership and fanatical traits, had discovered
+a genuine religious principle that was destined to become significant
+in safer hands.[8] Münzer read Tauler's sermons from his youth up; in
+his own copy of these sermons, preserved in the library at Gera, a
+marginal note says that he read them almost continually, and that here
+he learned of a divine interior Teaching. It was Münzer's teaching of
+the living Voice of God in the soul, his testimony to the reality of
+the inner heavenly Word, which God Himself speaks in the deeps of man's
+heart, that won the Humanist and teacher of St. Sebald's School to the
+new and perilous cause. He also formed a close friendship with Ludwig
+Hetzer, who, like Münzer, taught that the saving Word of God must be
+inward, and that the Scriptures can be understood only by those who
+belong to the School of Christ. Having once caught the _idea_ from
+these impassioned leaders, Denck proceeded directly to work it out and
+to develop its implications in his own fashion. He was himself sane,
+clear-minded, modest, sincere, far-removed from fanaticism, and eager
+only to find a form of religion which would fit the eternal nature of
+things on the one hand, and the true nature of man on the other--man, I
+mean, as the Humanist conceived him.[9]
+
+Already in this Nuremberg period, Denck became fully convinced that
+Luther's doctrine of sin and justification was an artificial
+construction--_Einbildung_--and that his conception of Scripture and
+the Sacraments was destined to clamp the new-found faith in iron bonds,
+tie it to outworn tradition, and make it incapable of a progressive
+{20} and vital unfolding. He declared in his testimony or "confession"
+to the city council of Nuremberg in 1524, that although he had not yet
+a full experience of the inward, powerful Word of God, he distinctly
+felt its life as an inner witness which God had planted within him, a
+spark of the Divine Light breaking into his own soul, and in the
+strength of this direct experience he denied the value of external
+ceremonies, and declared that even the Bible itself cannot bring men to
+God without the assistance of this inner Light and Spirit.[10]
+
+As a result of this change of attitude, the schoolmaster of St.
+Sebald's was banished from the city of Nuremberg, January 21, 1525, and
+from this time until his early death he was homeless and a wanderer.
+He spent some months--between September 1525 and October 1526--in
+Augsburg endeavouring to organize and direct the rapidly expanding
+forces of the liberal movement. He was during these months, and
+especially during the period of the great Anabaptist synod which was
+held at this time in Augsburg, endeavouring to give the chaotic
+movement of Anabaptism a definite direction, with the main emphasis on
+the mystical aspect of religion. He hoped to call a halt to the vague
+socialistic dreams and the fanatical tendencies that put the movement
+in constant jeopardy and peril, and he was striving to call his
+brotherhood to an inner religion, grounded on the inherent nature of
+the soul, and guided by the inner Word rather than on "a new law" set
+forth in the written word. There were, however, too many eddies and
+currents to be mastered by one mind, too many varieties of faith to be
+unified under one principle, and Denck's own view was too intangible,
+inward, and spiritual, to satisfy the enthusiasm either of the seething
+masses or of {21} the leaders who saw a new Jerusalem just ready to
+come down out of heaven from God.[11]
+
+After the Augsburg period, Denck spent some time in Strasbourg, where
+he gained many followers. Capito bears testimony at this time to the
+purity of Denck's life, to his moderation and goodwill, and to the
+impressive effect of his preaching and teaching upon the people of the
+city.[12] Vadian, the Humanist and reformer of St. Gall, too, in spite
+of his disapproval of some of Denck's ideas, speaking of him in
+retrospect after his death, called him "a most gifted youth, possessed
+of all excellencies." But his teaching was too strange and unusual to
+be allowed currency even in free Strasbourg. After being granted a
+public discussion he was ordered to leave the city forthwith. During a
+short stay in Worms, following the Strasbourg period, in collaboration
+with Ludwig Hetzer, they brought to a successful conclusion a German
+translation of the Prophets from the Hebrew, a work which Hetzer had
+begun. This important piece of scholarly work was published under the
+title, _Alle Propheten nach hebräischer Sprache verteutscht_, in Worms,
+April 3, 1527, and had a wide circulation and use, its main demerit
+being that it had been done by "Anabaptists."
+
+Pursued on every hand, hunted from place to place, he finally sought
+peace and shelter with his old friend, the teacher who had first
+inspired him in his youth, OEcolampadius, and here in Basle in a quiet
+retreat, he died of the plague in November 1527, hardly more than
+thirty-two years of age.[13]
+
+We must now turn to the little books of this persecuted and homeless
+Humanist to see what his religious teaching really was, and to discover
+the foundation principle which lay at the root of all the endeavours of
+this period to launch a Christianity grounded primarily on the {22}
+fundamental nature of man.[14] Denck writes like a man with a
+message--straight to the mark, lucid, vivid, and intense. He believes
+what he says and he wants others to see it and believe it. His
+writings are entirely free from the controversial temper, and they
+breathe throughout the spirit of tolerance and charity. He knows when
+to stop, and brings his books to an end as soon as he has made his
+points clear. The fundamental fact of man's nature for Denck is
+personal _freedom_. Starting with no theological presuppositions he is
+under no obligation to make the primary assumption common to all
+Augustinian systems that man is devoid of any native capacities which
+have to do with spiritual salvation. He begins instead with man as he
+knows him--a sadly marred and hampered being, but still possessed of a
+potentially Divine nature, and capable of co-operating, by inward
+choices and decisions, with the ceaseless effort of God to win him
+completely to Himself. His little book, _What does it mean when the
+Scripture says God does and works Good and Evil_, is throughout a
+protest against the idea of "election," which, he says, involves "a
+limitation of the Love of God," and it is a penetrating account of the
+way in which man by his free choices makes his eternal destiny.[15]
+"God compels nobody, for He will have no one saved by compulsion."[16]
+"God has given freewill to men that they may choose for themselves,
+either the good or the bad. Christ said to His disciples, 'Will ye
+{23} go away?' as though He would say, 'You are under no
+compulsion.'"[17] "God," he says again in the _Widerruf_, "forces no
+one, for love cannot compel, and God's service is, therefore, a thing
+of complete freedom."[18]
+
+It is freedom, too, which explains the fact of sin. God is in no way
+the author of sin; He is wholly good; He can do nothing but what is
+good; He ordains no one to sin; He is the instigator of no evil at all.
+All the sin and moral evil of the world have come from our own evil
+choices and purposes. "The thing which hinders and has always hindered
+is that our wills are different from God's will. God never seeks
+Himself in His willing--we do. There is no other way to blessedness
+than to lose one's self-will."[19] "He who surrenders his
+selfishness," he says in another treatise, "and uses the freedom which
+God has given him, and fights the spiritual battle as God wills that
+such battles are to be fought and as Christ fought His, can in his
+measure be like Christ."[20] The whole problem of salvation for him
+is, as we shall see, to bring about such a transformation in man that
+sin ceases, and the least thing thought, said, or done out of harmony
+with the will of God becomes bitter and painful to the soul.[21] "To
+be a Christian," he once wrote, "is to be in measure like Christ, and
+to be ready to be offered as He gave Himself to be offered. I do not
+say that we _are_ perfect as Christ was, but I say rather that we are
+to seek the perfection which Christ never lost. Christ calls Himself
+the Light of the world, but He also tells His disciples that _they_ too
+are the light of the world. All Christians in whom the Holy Ghost
+lives--that is all real Christians--are one with Christ in God and are
+like Christ. They will therefore have similar experiences, and what
+Christ did they will also do."[22]
+
+Not only is there a power of free choice in the soul; there is as well
+an elemental hunger in man which pushes him Godward. "God," he often
+says, "can give only {24} to those who hunger." In a very great
+passage which reminds one of Pascal he says: "The kingdom of God is in
+you and he who searches for it outside himself will never find it, for
+_apart from God no one can either seek or find God, for he who seeks
+God, already in truth has Him_."[23] He says nearly the same thing
+again in the little book, _Vom Gesetz Gottes_: "He who does not know
+God from God Himself does not ever know Him." This central insight of
+Denck's religious faith that God and man are not completely sundered,
+but meet, as he says,[24] in the deeps of ourselves, is grounded upon
+the fact of experience that there is within us a supra-individual
+Reality which becomes revealed to us sometimes as a Light, sometimes as
+a Word, sometimes as a Presence or environing Spirit. This testimony
+is Denck's main contribution, and we must next see how he sets it
+forth. There is, he says, a witness in every man. He who does not
+listen to it blinds himself, although God has given him originally a
+good inward eyesight. If a man will keep still and listen he will hear
+what the Spirit witnesses within him. Not only in _us_ but in the
+heathen and in Jews this witness is given, and men might be preached to
+outwardly forever without perceiving, if they did not have this witness
+in their own hearts.[25] The Light shines, the invisible Word of God
+is uttered in the hearts of all men who come into the world, and this
+Light gives all men freedom and power to become children of God.[26]
+There is both an inward principle of revelation which he calls _das
+innere Wort_, and a principle of active power which he calls _die Kraft
+des Allerhöchsten_ (the power of the Highest), not two things, but one
+reality under two aspects and two names, and he insists that he who
+turns to this Divine, spiritual reality, which is one with God, and
+obeys it and loves its leading has already found God and has come to
+himself. "Oh, who will give me a voice," he writes, "that I may cry
+aloud to the whole world that God, the all highest, is in the deepest
+abyss {25} within us and is waiting for us to return to Him. Oh, my
+God, how does it happen in this poor old world, that Thou art so great
+and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears
+Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest
+Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name! Men flee from Thee and
+say they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot
+see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee!"[27]
+
+This self-giving nature of God is everywhere taken for granted--it is
+just _that_ which he feels that Christ has once for all made sun-clear,
+and it is because He is essentially self-giving that God pours out His
+life and love upon us as He does His sunshine upon the grass and
+flowers. "The Word of God is with thee before thou seekest; He gives
+before thou hast asked; He opens to thee before thou hast knocked." God
+like a Father deals with His wayward children. "Oh, blessed is the
+man," he writes, "who in his need finds the love of God and comes to
+Him for forgiveness!"[28] No one of us who has been washed from his
+sins, he beautifully says, ought to eat a piece of bread without
+considering how God loves him and how he ought to love God, who in
+Jesus Christ His Son laid aside His right to Divinity that His love
+might appear complete.[29] "It has pleased the eternal Love," he
+writes, "that that Person in whom Love was shown in the highest degree
+should be called the Saviour of His people. Not that it would be
+possible for human nature to make anybody saved, but God was so
+completely identified in Love with Him that all the Will of God was the
+will of this Person, and the sufferings of this Person were and counted
+as the sufferings of God Himself."[30]
+
+Christ is for him the complete manifestation of life and the perfect
+exhibition or unveiling of God's love, and he who appreciates this
+love, feels its attraction, and lives a life which corresponds to his
+soul's insight, becomes {26} himself Christlike, forsakes sin and self,
+and enters upon a life of salvation. "All who are saved," he says,
+"are of one spirit with God, and he who is the foremost in love is the
+foremost of those who are saved."[31] "He who gets weary of God has
+never found Him," while the person who has found Him in this love-way
+will be ready and willing to give up even his own salvation and accept
+damnation for the love of God, since he knows in his heart that "God is
+so wholly good that He can give to such a man only what is highest and
+best, and that is Himself!"[32] That is to say, he who is willing to
+be damned for the love of God never will be damned!
+
+But salvation must never be conceived as something which is the result
+of a transaction. It is from beginning to end a life-process and can
+in no way be separated from character and personal attitude of will.
+"He who depends on the merit of Christ," he says, "and yet continues in
+a fleshly, wicked life, regards Christ precisely as in former times the
+heathen held their gods. He who really believes that Christ has saved
+him can no longer be a servant of sin, for no one believes rightly
+until he leaves his old life."[33] "It is not enough," he elsewhere
+writes, "that God is in thee; thou must also be in God, that is,
+partake of the life of God. It does not help to have God if thou dost
+not honour Him. It is no avail to call thyself His child _if thou dost
+not behave thyself like a child_!"[34] He insists that no one can be
+"called righteous" or be "counted righteous" until he actually _is_
+righteous. Nothing can be "imputed" to a man which is not ethically
+and morally present as a living feature of his character and conduct.
+No one, he truly says, can know _Christ as a means of salvation_ unless
+he follows Him in his life. He who does not witness to Christ in his
+daily walk grows into a different person from the one he is called to
+be.[35] The person who lives on in sin does not really know God, and,
+{27} to use his fine figure; is like a man who has lost his home and
+gone astray, and does not even know that he is _at home_, when his
+Father has found him and has welcomed him back, but still goes on
+hunting for home and for Father, since he does not recognize his home
+or his Father when he has found them![36]
+
+Salvation, then, for Hans Denck is wholly an inward process, initiated
+from above through the Divine Word, the Christ, whom we know outwardly
+as the historical Person of the Gospel, and whom we know inwardly as
+the Revealer of Light and Love, the Witness in us against sin, the
+Voice of the Father to our hearts, calling us home, the Goal of our
+spiritual quest, the Alpha and the Omega of all religious truth and all
+spiritual experience. The Way to God, he says, is Christ inwardly and
+spiritually known.[37] But however audible the inner Word may be;
+however vivid the illumination; however drawing the Love, there is
+never compulsion. The soul itself must hear and see and feel; must say
+yes to the appeal of Love, and must co-operate by a continuous
+adjustment of the personal will to the Will of God and "learn to behave
+as a child of God."
+
+Having reached the insight that salvation is entirely an affair of the
+spirit, an inward matter, Denck loosened his hold upon the external
+things which had through long centuries of history come to be
+considered essential to Christianity. Sacraments and ceremonies
+dropped to a lower level for him as things of no importance. With his
+characteristic breadth and sweetness, he does not smite them as an
+iconoclast would have done; he does not cry out against those who
+continue to use them. He merely considered them of no spiritual
+significance. "Ceremonies," he writes in his dying confession, "in
+themselves are not sin, but whoever supposes that he can attain to life
+either by baptism or by partaking of bread, is still in
+superstition."[38] "If all ceremonies," he adds, "were lost, little
+harm would come of it."[39] {28} He appeals to Christians to stop
+quarrelling over these outward and secondary matters, and to make
+religion consist in love to neighbour rather than in zeal for outward
+ceremonies. He laid down this great principle: "All externals must
+yield to love, for they are for the sake of love, and not love for
+their sake."[40]
+
+He was, consistently with his fundamental ideas, profoundly opposed to
+every tendency to make Christianity a legal religion. His friends, the
+Anabaptists, were inclined to turn the Gospel of Christ into "a new
+law," and to make religion consist largely in scrupulous obedience to
+this perfect law of life. To all this he was radically alien, for it
+was, he thought, only another road back to a religion of the letter,
+while Christ came to call us to a religion of the spirit. "He who has
+not the Spirit," he wrote, "and who fails to find Him in the
+Scriptures, seeks life and finds death; seeks light and finds darkness,
+whether it be in the Old or in the New Testament."[41] "He who thinks
+that he can be _made truly righteous_ by means of a Book is ascribing
+to the dead letter what belongs to the Spirit."[42] He does not
+belittle or undervalue the Scriptures--he knew them almost by heart and
+took the precious time out of his brief life to help to translate the
+Prophets into German--but he wants to make the fact forever plain that
+men are saved or lost as they say _yes_ or _no_ to a Light and Word
+within themselves. "The Holy Scriptures," he writes in his dying
+testimony, "I consider above every human treasure, but not so high as
+the Word of God which is living, powerful, and eternal, for it is God
+Himself, Spirit and no letter, written without pen or paper so that it
+can never be destroyed. For that reason, salvation is not bound up
+with the Scriptures, however necessary and good they may be for their
+purpose, because it is impossible for the Scriptures to make good a bad
+heart, even though it may be a learned one. A good heart, however,
+with a Divine Spark in it is improved by everything, and to such the
+Scriptures will bring blessedness {29} and goodness."[43] The
+Scriptures--the external Word--as he many times, in fact somewhat
+tediously, declares, are witnesses and pointers to the real and
+momentous thing, the Word which is very near to all souls and is
+written in the heart, and which increases in clearness and power as the
+will swings into parallelism with the will of God, and as the life
+grows in likeness to the Divine image revealed in Christ. This inward
+life and spiritual appreciation do not give any ground for relaxing the
+moral obligations of life. No fulfilling of the law by Christ, no
+vanishing of the outward and temporal, furnish any excuse to us for
+slacking a jot or tittle of anything which belongs to the inherent
+nature of moral goodness. "Christ," he says, "fulfilled the law, not
+to relieve us of it, but to show us how to keep it in truth. The
+member must partake of what the Head partakes."[44] _To love God alone
+and to hate everything that hinders love_ is a principle which, Denck
+believes, will fulfil all law, ancient or modern.[45]
+
+Such were the ideas which this young radical reformer, dreamer perhaps,
+tried to teach his age. The time was not ripe for him, and there was
+no environment ready for his message. He spoke to minds busy with
+theological systems, and to men whose battles were over the meaning of
+inherited medieval dogma. He thought and spoke as a child of another
+world, and he talked in a language which he had learned from his heart
+and not from books or from the schools. It is "the key of David," he
+says, that is, an inward experience, which unlocks all the solid doors
+of truth, but there were so few about him who really had this "key"!
+His task, which was destined to be hard and painful, which was in his
+lifetime doomed to failure, was not self-chosen. "I opened my mouth,"
+he says, "against my will and I am speaking to the world because God
+impels me so that I cannot keep silent. God has called me out and
+stationed me at my post, and He knows whether good will come of it or
+not."[46]
+
+{30}
+
+It is not often that a man living in the atmosphere of seething
+enthusiasm, pitilessly pricked and goaded by brutal and unfeeling
+persecutors, compelled to hear his precious truth persistently called
+error and pestilent heresy, keeps so calm and sane and sure that all
+will be well with him and with his truth as does Denck. "I am heartily
+well content," is his dying testimony, "that all shame and disgrace
+should fall on my face, if it is for the truth. It was when I began to
+love God that I got the disfavour of men."[47] He confesses that he
+has found it difficult to "keep a gentle and a humble heart" through
+all his work among men, to "temper his zeal with understanding," and to
+"make his lips say always what his heart meant,"[48] but he did, at
+least, succeed in loving God and in hating everything that hindered
+love. In an epoch in which the doctrine was new and revolutionary, he
+succeeded in presenting the principle of the Inward Word as the basis
+of religion without giving any encouragement to libertinism or moral
+laxity, for he found the way of freedom to be a life of growing
+likeness to Christ, he held the fulfilling of the law to be possible
+only for those who accept the burdens and sacrifices of love, and he
+insisted that the privileges of blessedness belong only to those who
+_behave like sons_.
+
+
+
+[1] The best studies on Denck are Heberle's articles in _Theol. Studien
+und Kritiken_ (1851), Erstes Heft, and (1855) Viertes Heft. Gustave
+Roehrich's _Essai sur la vie, les écrits et la doctrine de Jean Denk_
+(Strasbourg, 1853). Ludwig Keller's _Ein Apostel der Wiedertäufer_
+(Leipzig, 1882). The last two books must, however, be followed with
+much caution.
+
+[2] One branch of the Anabaptists held that the "saints" may, however,
+rightly use the sword to execute the purposes of God upon the godless,
+and to hasten the coming of the Thousand Years' Reign of the Kingdom.
+
+[3] I have included him, in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_ (1908),
+among the Anabaptists, but he can be called one only by such a loose
+use of the word that it ceases to have any _definite_ significance.
+
+[4] See J. Kessler's _Sabbata_ (1902), p. 150.
+
+[5] L. Keller, _Johann von Staupitz_, p. 207.
+
+[6] _Ibid._ p. 208.
+
+[7] OEcolampadius' Letter to Pirkheimer, April 25, 1525.
+
+[8] Georg Theodor Strobel, _Leben, Schriften und Lehren Münzers_
+(Nürnberg, 1795); J. R. Seidemann, _Thomas Münzer_ (Dresden, 1842).
+
+[9] A contemporary chronicle calls Denck a scholar, eloquent, modest
+and, withal, learned in Hebrew.--Kessler's _Sabbata_, p. 150.
+
+[10] This "Confession" is in the archives of Nuremberg, and has been
+extensively used in Keller's _Ein Apostel der Wiedertäufer_, see
+especially pp. 49-62. See also Th. Kolde, _Kirchengeschichtliche
+Studien_ (1888), p. 231 f. In this connection much interest attaches
+to a passage in a letter which Luther wrote to Johann Brismann,
+February 4, 1525. He says: "Satan has carried it so far that in
+Nuremberg some persons are denying that Christ is anything, that the
+Word of God is anything, that the Eucharist is anything, that
+Magistracy is anything. They say that only God is."
+
+[11] See Nicoladoni's _Johannes Bünderlin von Linz_ (Berlin, 1893), p.
+114.
+
+[12] Letter of Capita to Zwingli, December 26, 1526.
+
+[13] Kessler says that OEcolampadius in a Christian spirit was with him
+at his death. _Op. cit._ p. 151.
+
+[14] The little books of Denck from which I shall extract his teaching
+are: (1) _Vom Gesetz Gottes_ ("On the Law of God"), printed without
+place or date, but probably published in 1526. I have used the copy in
+the Königliche Bibliothek in Berlin, sig. Co. 2152. (2) _Was geredet
+sey doss die Schrift sagt Gott thue und mache guts und böses_ ("What
+does it mean when the Scripture says God does and works Good and
+Evil"), 1526. Copies of this are to be found in the University Library
+of Marburg, also in the Königliche Bibliothek of Dresden. (3)
+_Widerruf_ ("Confession "), 1527. I have used the copy in the
+Königliche Bibliothek in Dresden sig. Theol. Cathol. 817 (4) _Ordnung
+Gottes und der Creaturen Werck_ ("The Divine Plan and the Work of the
+Creature"), 1527, in the above library in Dresden. (5) _Wer die
+Warheif warlich lieb hat_, etc., no date ("Whoever really loves the
+Truth," etc.), and (6) _Von der wahren Liebe_ ("On the True Love"),
+1527. This last tract has been republished in America by the
+Mennonitische Verlagshandlung, Elkhart, Indiana, 1888.
+
+[15] "To hear the Word of God," he elsewhere says, "means life; to hear
+it not means death."--_Ordnung Gottes_, p. 17.
+
+[16] _Was geredet sey_, p. C. (The paging is by letters.)
+
+[17] _Was geredet sey_, B. 3.
+
+[18] _Widerruf_, sec. iv.
+
+[19] _Was geredet sey_, B.
+
+[20] _Ibid._ B. 5.
+
+[21] _Venn Gesetz Gottes_, p. 15.
+
+[22] _Was geredet sey_, B. 6.
+
+[23] _Was geredet sey_, B. 2.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ B. 5.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ B. 1 and 2.
+
+[26] _Ordnung Gottes_, p. 7.
+
+[27] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 27.
+
+[28] _Was geredet sey_, D. 1 and 2.
+
+[29] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 33.
+
+[30] _Van der wahren Liebe_ (Elkhart reprint), p. 7.
+
+[31] _Van der wahren Liebe_ (Elkhart reprint), p. 8.
+
+[32] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 19.
+
+[33] _Widerruf_, ii.
+
+[34] _Was geredet sey_, B. 1.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ D.
+
+[36] _Was geredet sey_, A. 4 and 5.
+
+[37] _Ibid_. B. 3.
+
+[38] _Widerruf_, vii.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ vii.
+
+[40] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 33.
+
+[41] _Ibid._ p. 22.
+
+[42] _Ibid._ p. 21.
+
+[43] _Widerruf_, i.
+
+[44] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 9.
+
+[45] _Ibid._ p. 12.
+
+[46] _Was geredet sey_, Preface.
+
+[47] _Widerruf_, Preface.
+
+[48] _Ibid._, Preface.
+
+
+
+
+{31}
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+TWO PROPHETS OF THE INWARD WORD: BUNDERLIN AND ENTFELDER
+
+I
+
+The study of Denck in the previous chapter has furnished the main
+outlines of the type of Christianity which a little group of men,
+sometimes called "Enthusiasts," and sometimes called "Spirituals," but
+in reality sixteenth-century Quakers, proclaimed and faithfully
+practised in the opening period of the Reformation. They differed
+fundamentally from Luther in their conception of salvation and in their
+basis of authority, although they owed their first awakening to him;
+and they were not truly Anabaptists, though they allied themselves at
+first with this movement, and earnestly laboured to check the ominous
+signs of Ranterism and Fanaticism, and the misguided "return" to
+millennial hopes and expectations, to which many of the Anabaptist
+leaders were prone.
+
+The inner circle of "Spirituals" which we are now engaged in
+investigating was never numerically large or impressive, nor was it in
+the public mind well differentiated within the larger circle of
+seething ideas and revolutionary propaganda. The men themselves,
+however, who composed it had a very sure grasp of a few definite,
+central truths to which they were dedicated, and they never lost sight,
+in the hurly-burly of contention and in the storm of persecution, of
+the goal toward which they were bending their steps. They did not
+endeavour {32} to found a Church, to organize a sect, or to gain a
+personal following, because it was a deeply settled idea with them all
+that the true Church is invisible. It is a communion of saints,
+including those of all centuries, past and present, who have heard and
+obeyed the divine inner Word, and through co-operation with God's
+inward revelation and transforming Presence have risen to a mystical
+union of heart and life with Him. Their apostolic mission--for they
+fully believed that they were "called" and "sent"--was to bear witness
+to this eternal Word within the soul, to extend the fellowship of this
+invisible Zion, and to gather out of all lands and peoples and visible
+folds of the Church those who were ready for membership in the one
+family and brotherhood of the Spirit of God. They made the mistake,
+which has been very often made before and since, of undervaluing
+external helps and of failing to appreciate how important is the
+visible fellowship, the social group, working at common tasks and
+problems, the temporal Church witnessing to its tested faith and
+proclaiming its message to the ears of the world; but they did
+nevertheless perform a very great service in their generation, and they
+are the unrecognized forerunners of much which we highly prize in the
+spiritual heritage of the modern world.
+
+The two men whose spiritual views we are about to study are, I am
+afraid, hardly even "names" to the world of to-day. They were not on
+the popular and winning side and they have fallen into oblivion, and
+the busy world has gone on and left them and their little books to lie
+buried in a forgotten past. They are surely worthy of a resurrection,
+and those who take the pains will discover that the ideas which they
+promulgated never really died, but were quick and powerful in the
+formation of the inner life of the religious societies of the English
+Commonwealth, and so of many things which have touched our inner world
+to-day.
+
+Johann Bünderlin, like his inspirer Denck, was a scholar of no mean
+rank. He understood Hebrew; he knew the Church Fathers both in Greek
+and Latin; he {33} makes frequent reference to Greek literature for
+illustration, and he was well versed in the dialectic of the schools,
+though he disapproved of it as a religious method.[1] He was enrolled
+as a student in the University of Vienna in 1515, under the name of
+Johann Wunderl aus Linz, Linz being a town of Upper Austria. After
+four years of study he left the University in 1519, being compelled to
+forgo his Bachelor's degree because he was too poor to pay the required
+fee.[2] The next five years of his life are submerged beyond recovery,
+but we hear of him in 1526 as a preacher in the service of Bartholomäus
+von Starhemberg, a prominent nobleman of Upper Austria, and he was at
+this time a devout adherent of the Lutheran faith. He was in Augsburg
+this same year, 1526, at the time of the great gathering of
+Anabaptists, and here he probably met Hans Denck, at any rate he
+testified in 1529 before the investigating Judge in Strasbourg that he
+received adult baptism in Augsburg three years before. He seems to
+have gone from Augsburg to Nikolsburg, where he was present at a public
+Discussion in which a definite differentiation appeared between the
+moderate and the radical, the right and left, wings of the Anabaptists.
+Bünderlin took part in this Discussion on the "moderate" side. He
+remained for some time--perhaps two years--in Nikolsburg and faced the
+persecution which prevailed in that city during the winter of
+1527-1528. The next year he comes to notice in Strasbourg where, for a
+long time, a much larger freedom of thought was allowed than in any
+other German city of the period. The great tragedy which he had to
+experience was the frustration of the work of his life by the growth
+and spread of the Ranter influence in the Anabaptist circles, through
+the leadership of Melchior Hoffman and others of a similar spirit. He
+loved freedom, and here he saw it degenerating into license. He was
+devoted to a religion of experience and of inner authority, and now
+{34} he saw the wild extremes to which such a religion was exposed. He
+was dedicated to a spiritual Christianity, and now he was compelled to
+learn the bitter lesson that there are many types and varieties of
+"spiritual religion," and that the masses are inclined to go with those
+who supply them with a variety which is spectacular and which produces
+emotional thrills. Our last definite information concerning Bünderlin
+shows him to have been in Constance in 1530, from which city he was
+expelled as a result of information against the "soundness" of his
+doctrine, furnished in a letter from OEcolampadius. From this time he
+drops completely out of notice, and we are left only with conjectures.
+One possible reference to him occurs in a letter from Julius Pflug, the
+Humanist, to Erasmus in 1533. Pflug says that a person has newly
+arrived in Litium (probably Lützen) who teaches that there are no words
+of Christ as a warrant for the celebration of the Sacrament of the
+Supper, and that it is to be partaken of only in a spiritual way. He
+adds that God had intervened to protect the people from such heresy and
+that the heretic had been imprisoned. The usual penalty for such
+heresy was probably imposed. This description would well fit Johann
+Bünderlin, but we can only guess that he was the opponent of the
+visible Sacrament mentioned in the letter which Erasmus received in
+1533.[3]
+
+Bünderlin's religious contribution is preserved in three little books
+which are now extremely rare, the central ideas of which I shall give
+in condensed form and largely in my own words, though I have faithfully
+endeavoured to render him fairly.[4] His style is difficult, {35}
+mainly because he abounds in repetition and has not learned to write in
+an orderly way. I am inclined to believe that he sometimes wrote, as
+he would no doubt preach, in a prophetic, rapturous, spontaneous
+fashion, hardly steering his train of thought by his intellect, but
+letting it go along lines of least resistance and in a rhythmic flood
+of words; his central ideas of course all the time holding the
+predominant place in his utterance. He is essentially a mystic both in
+experience and in the ground and basis of his conception of God and
+man. This mystical feature is especially prominent in his second book
+on why God became incarnate in Christ, and I shall begin my exposition
+with that aspect of his thought.
+
+God, he says, who is the eternal and only goodness, has always been
+going out of Himself into forms of self-expression. His highest
+expression is made in a heavenly and purely spiritual order of angelic
+beings. Through these spiritual beings He objectifies Himself, mirrors
+Himself, knows Himself, and becomes revealed.[5] He has also poured
+Himself out in a lower order of manifestation in the visible creation
+where spirit often finds itself in opposition and contrast to that
+which is not spirit. The highest being in this second order is man,
+who in inward essence is made in the image and likeness of God, but
+binds together in one personal life both sensuous elements and divine
+and spiritual elements which are always in collision and warfare with
+each other. Man has full freedom of choice and can swing his will over
+to either side--he can live upward toward the divine goodness, or he
+can live downward toward the poor, thin, limiting isolation of
+individual selfhood. But {36} through the shifting drama of our human
+destiny God never leaves us. He is always within us, as near to the
+heart of our being as the Light is to the eye. Conscience is the
+witness of His continued Presence; the drawing which we feel toward
+higher things is born in the unlost image of God which is planted in
+our nature "like the tree of Life in Eden." He pleads in our hearts by
+His inner Word; He reveals the goodness of Himself in His vocal
+opposition to all that would harm and spoil us, and He labours
+unceasingly to be born in us and to bring forth His love and His
+spiritual kingdom in the domain of our own spirits. The way of life is
+to die to the flesh and to the narrow will of the self, and to become
+alive to the Spirit and Word of God in the soul, to enter into and
+participate in that eternal love with which God loves us. This central
+idea of the double nature of man--an upper self indissolubly linked
+with God and a lower self rooted in fleshly and selfish desires--runs
+through all his writings, and in his view all the processes of
+revelation are to further the liberation and development of the higher
+and to weaken the gravitation of the lower self.
+
+His first book deals with God's twofold revelation of
+Himself--primarily as a living Word in the soul of man, and secondarily
+through external signs and events, in an historical word, and in a
+temporal incarnation. With a wealth and variety of expression and
+illustration he insists and reiterates that only through the
+citadel--or better the sanctuary--of his inner self can man be
+spiritually reached, and won, and saved. Nobody can be saved until he
+knows himself at one with God; until he finds his will at peace and in
+harmony with God's will; until his inward spirit is conscious of unity
+with the eternal Spirit; in short, until love sets him free with the
+freedom and joy of sons of God. Priests may absolve men if they will,
+and ministers may pronounce them saved, but all _that_ counts for
+nothing until the inward transformation is a fact and the will has
+found its goal in the will of God: "Love must bloom and the spirit {37}
+of the man must follow the will of God written in his heart."[6]
+
+All external means in religion have one purpose and one function; they
+are to awaken the mind and to direct it to the inward Word. The most
+startling miracle, the most momentous event in the sphere of temporal
+sequences, the most appealing account of historical occurrences can do
+nothing more than give in parable-fashion hints and suggestions of the
+real nature of that God who is eternally present within human spirits,
+and who is working endlessly to conform all lives to His perfect type
+and pattern. In the infant period of the race, both among the Hebrews
+and the Gentile peoples, God has used, like a wise Teacher, the symbol
+and picture-book method. He has disciplined them with external laws
+and with ceremonies which would move their child-minded imaginations;
+but all this method was used only because they were not ripe and ready
+for the true and higher form of goodness. "They used the face of Moses
+until they could come to the full Light of the truth and righteousness
+of God, for which all the time their spirits really hungered and
+thirsted."[7] The supreme instance of the divine pictorial method was
+the sending of Christ to reveal God visibly. Before seeing God in
+Christ men falsely thought of Him as hostile, stern, and wrathful; now
+they may see Him in this unveiling of Himself as He actually is,
+eternally loving, patiently forgiving, and seeking only to draw the
+world into His love and peace: "When the Abba-crying spirit of Christ
+awakens in our hearts we commune with God in peace and love."[8] But
+no one must content himself with Christ after the flesh, Christ
+historically known. That is to make an idol of Him. We can be saved
+through Him only when by His help we discover the essential nature of
+God and when He moves us to go to living in the spirit and power as
+Christ Himself lived. His death as an outward, historical fact does
+not save us; it is the supreme expression of His limitless love and the
+complete dedication {38} of His spirit in self-giving, and it is
+effective for our salvation only when it draws us into a similar way of
+living, unites us in spirit with Him and makes us in reality partakers
+of His blood spiritually apprehended. Christ is our Mediator in that
+He reveals the love of God towards us and moves our will to appreciate
+it.[9]
+
+Every step of human progress and of spiritual advance is marked by a
+passage from the dominion of the external to the sway and power of
+inward experience. God is training us for a time when images, figures,
+and picture-book methods will be no longer needed, but all men will
+live by the inward Word and have the witness--"the Abba-crying
+voice"--in their own hearts. But this process from outward to inward,
+from virtue impelled by fear and mediated by law to goodness generated
+by love, gives no place for license. Bünderlin has no fellowship with
+antinomianism, and is opposed to any tendency which gives rein to the
+flesh. The outward law, the external restraint, the discipline of fear
+and punishment are to be used so long as they are needed, and the
+written word and the pictorial image will always serve as a norm and
+standard, but the true spiritual goal of life is the formation of a
+rightly fashioned will, the creation of a controlling personal love,
+the experience of a guiding inward Spirit, which keep the awakened soul
+steadily approximating the perfect Life which Christ has revealed.
+
+The true Church is for Bünderlin as for Denck, the communion and
+fellowship of spiritual persons--an invisible congregation;
+ever-enlarging with the process of the ages and with the expanding
+light of the Spirit. He blames Luther for having stopped short of a
+real reformation, of having "mixed with the Midianites instead of going
+on into the promised Canaan," and of having failed to dig down to the
+fundamental basis of spiritual religion.[10]
+
+In his final treatise[11] he goes to the full length of the implication
+of his principle. He recounts with luminous {39} simplicity the
+mystical _unity_ of the spiritual Universe and tells of the divine
+purpose to draw all our finite and divided wills into moral harmony
+with the Central Will. Once more religion is presented as wholly a
+matter of the inward spirit, a thing of insight, of obedience to a
+living Word, of love for an infinite Lover, the bubbling of living
+streams of water in the heart of man. He declares that the period of
+signs and symbols and of "the scholastic way of truth" is passing away,
+and the religion of the New Testament, the religion of life and spirit,
+is coming in place of the old. As fast as the new comes ceremonies and
+sacraments vanish and fall away. They do not belong to a religion of
+the Spirit; they are for the infant race and for those who have not
+outgrown the picture-book. Christ's baptism is with power from above,
+and He cleanses from sin not with water but with the Holy Ghost and the
+burning fire of love. As soon as the spiritual man possesses "the key
+of David," and has entered upon "the true Sabbath of his soul," he
+holds lightly all forms and ceremonies which are outward and which can
+be gone through with in a mechanical fashion without creating the
+essential attitude of worship and of inner harmony of will with God:
+"When the Kingdom of God with its joy and love has come in us we do not
+much care for those things which can only happen outside us."[12]
+
+
+
+II
+
+Christian Entfelder held almost precisely the same views as those which
+we have found in the teaching of Bünderlin. He has become even more
+submerged than has Bünderlin, and one hunts almost in vain for the
+events of his life. Hagen does not mention him. Grützmacher in his
+_Wort und Geist_ never refers to him. The great _Realencyklopädie fur
+protestantische Theologie und Kirche_ has no article on him. Gottfried
+Arnold in his {40} _Kirchenund Ketzer-Historien_ merely mentions him in
+his list of "Witnesses to the Truth." The only article I have ever
+found on him is one by Professor Veesenmeyer in Gabler's _N. theol.
+Journal_ (1800), iv. 4, pp. 309-334.
+
+He first appears in the group of Balthasar Hübmaier's followers and at
+this period he had evidently allied himself with the Anabaptist
+movement, which gathered into itself many young men of the time who
+were eager for a new and more spiritual type of Christianity. Hübmaier
+mentions Entfelder in 1527 as pastor at Ewanzig, a small town in
+Moravia, where, as he himself later says, he diligently taught his
+little flock the things which concerned their inner life. In the
+eventful years of 1520-1530 he was in Strasbourg in company with
+Bünderlin,[13] and in this latter year he published his first book,
+with the title: _Von den manigfaltigen in Glauben Zerspaltungen dise
+jar erstanden_. ("On the many Separations which have this year arisen
+in Belief.") A second book, which is also dated 1530, bears the title:
+Von waren Gotseligkayt, etc. ("On true Salvation.") He wrote also a
+third book, which appeared in 1533 under the title: _Von Gottes und
+Christi Jesu unseres Herren Erkandtnuss_, etc. ("On the Knowledge of
+God and Jesus Christ our Lord.")
+
+His style is simpler than that of Bünderlin. He appears more as a man
+of the people; he is fond of vigorous, graphic figures of speech taken
+from the life of the common people, much in the manner of Luther, and
+he breathes forth in all three books a spirit of deep and saintly life.
+His fundamental idea of the Universe is like that of Bünderlin. The
+visible and invisible creation, in all its degrees and stages, is the
+outgoing and unfolding of God, who in His Essence and Godhead is one,
+indivisible and incomprehensible. But as He is essentially and
+eternally Good, He _expresses_ Himself in revelation, and goes out of
+Unity into differentiation and multiplicity; but the entire spiritual
+movement of the universe is back again toward the fundamental Unity,
+for Divine Unity is both the Alpha and the Omega of the {41} deeper
+inner world. His main interest is, however, not philosophical and
+speculative; his mind focuses always on the practical matters of a true
+and saintly life. Like his teacher, Bünderlin, his whole view of life
+and salvation is mystical; everything which concerns religion occurs in
+the realm of the soul and is the outcome of direct relations between
+the human spirit and the Divine Spirit. In every age, and in every
+land, the inner Word of God, the Voice of the Spirit speaking within,
+clarifying the mind and training the spiritual perceptions by a
+progressive experience, has made for itself a chosen people and has
+gathered out of the world a little inner circle of those who know the
+Truth because it was formed within themselves. This "inner circle of
+those who know" is the true Church: "The Church is a chosen, saved,
+purified, sanctified group in whom God dwells, upon whom the Holy Ghost
+was poured out His gifts and with whom Christ the Lord shares His
+offices and His mission."[14]
+
+There is however, through the ages a steady ripening of the Divine
+Harvest, a gradual and progressive onward movement of the spiritual
+process, ever within the lives of men: "Time brings roses. He who
+thinks that he has all the fruit when strawberries are ripe forgets
+that grapes are still to come. We should always be eagerly looking for
+something better."[15] There are, he says, three well-marked stages of
+revelation: (1) The stage of the law, when God, the Father, was making
+Himself known through His external creation and by outward forms of
+training and discipline; (2) the stage of self-revelation through the
+Son, that men might see in Him and His personal activity the actual
+character and heart of God; and (3) the stage of the Holy Spirit which
+fills all deeps and heights, flows into all lives, and is the One God
+revealed in His essential nature of active Goodness--Goodness at work
+in the world. Externals of every type--law, ceremonies, rewards and
+punishments, {42} historical happenings, written Scriptures, even the
+historical doings and sufferings of Christ--are only pointers and
+suggestion-material to bring the soul to the living Word within, "to
+the Lord Himself who is never absent," and who will be spiritually born
+within man. "God," he says, "has once become flesh in Christ and has
+revealed thus the hidden God and, as happened in a fleshly way in Mary,
+even so Christ must be spiritually born in us." So, too, everything
+which Christ experienced and endured in His earthly mission must be
+re-lived and reproduced in the life of His true disciples. There is no
+salvation possible without the new birth of Christ in us, without
+self-surrender and the losing of oneself, without being buried with
+Christ in a death to self-will and without rising with Him in joy and
+peace and victory.[16] He who rightly loves his Christ will speak no
+word, will eat no bit of bread, nor taste of water, nor put a stitch of
+clothes upon his body without thinking of the Beloved of his
+soul. . . . In this state he can rid himself of all pictures and
+symbols, renounce everything which he possesses, take up his cross with
+Christ, join Him in an inward, dying life, allow himself, like grain,
+to be threshed, winnowed, ground, bolted, and baked that he may become
+spiritual food as Christ has done for us. Then there comes a state in
+which poverty and riches, pain and joy, life and death are alike, when
+the soul has found its sabbath-peace in the Origin and Fount of all
+Love.[17] His first book closes with a beautiful account of the return
+of the prodigal to His Father and to His Father's love, and then he
+breaks into a joyous cry, as if it all came out of his own experience:
+"Who then can separate us from the Love of God?"
+
+Those who rightly understand religion and have had this birth and this
+Sabbath-peace within themselves will stop contending over outward,
+external things, which make separations but do not minister to the
+spirit; they will give up the Babel-habit of constructing theological
+{43} systems,[18] they will pass upward from elements to the essence,
+they will stop building the city-walls of the Church out of baptism and
+the supper, which furnish "only clay-plastered walls" at best, and they
+will found the Church instead upon the true sacramental power of the
+inward Spirit of God.[19] The true goal of the spiritual life is such
+a oneness with God that He is in us and we in Him, so that the inner
+joy and power take our outer life captive and draw us away from the
+world and its "pictures," and make it a heartfelt delight to do all His
+commandments and to suffer anything for Him.[20]
+
+Here, then, in the third decade of the sixteenth century, when the
+leaders of the Reformation were using all their powers of dialectic to
+formulate in new scholastic phrase the sound creed for Protestant
+Christendom, and while the fierce and decisive battle was being waged
+over the new form in which the Eucharist must be celebrated, there
+appeared a little group of men who proposed that Christianity should be
+conceived and practised as _a way of living_--nothing more nor less.
+They rejected theological language and terminology root and branch.
+They are as innocent of scholastic subtlety and forensic conceptions as
+though they had been born in this generation. They seem to have wiped
+their slate clean of the long line of Augustinian contributions, and to
+have begun afresh with the life and message of Jesus Christ, coloured,
+if at all, by local and temporal backgrounds, by the experience of the
+earlier German mystics who helped them to interpret their own simple
+and sincere experiences. They are as naïve and artless as little
+children, and they expect, as all enthusiasts do in their youth, that
+they have only to announce their wonderful truths and to proclaim their
+"openings" in order to bring the world to the light! They go to the
+full length of the implications of their {44} fresh insight without
+ever dreaming that all the theological world will unite, across the
+yawning chasms of difference, to stamp out their "pestilent heresy,"
+and to rid the earth of persons who dare to question the traditions and
+the practices of the centuries.
+
+Instead of beginning with the presupposition of original sin, they
+quietly assert that the soul of man is inherently bound up in the Life
+and Nature of God, and that goodness is at least as "original" as
+badness. They fly in the face of the age-long view that the doctrine
+of Grace makes freewill impossible and reduces salvation wholly to a
+work of God, and they assert as the ineradicable testimony of their own
+consciousness that human choices between Light and Darkness, the
+personal response to the character of God as He reveals Himself, the
+co-operation of the will of man with the processes of a living and
+spiritual God are the things which save a man--and this salvation is
+possible in a pagan, in a Jew, in a Turk even, as well as in a man who
+ranges himself under Christian rubrics and who says paternosters. They
+reject all the scholastic accounts of Christ's metaphysical nature,
+they will not use the term Trinity, nor will they admit that it is
+right to employ any words which imply that God is divided into
+multiform personalities; but nevertheless they hold, with all the
+fervour of their earnest spirits, that Christ is God historically and
+humanly revealed, and that to see Christ is to see the true and only
+God, and to love Christ is to love the Eternal Love.
+
+In an age which settled back upon the Scriptures as the only basis of
+authority in religious faith and practice, they boldly challenged that
+course as a dangerous return to a lower form of religion than that to
+which Christ had called men and as only legalism and scribism in a new
+dress. They insisted that the Eternal Spirit, who had been educating
+the race from its birth, bringing all things up to better, and who had
+used now one symbol and now another to fit the growing spiritual
+perception of men, is a real Presence in the deeps of men's {45}
+consciousness, and is ceaselessly voicing Himself there as a living
+Word whom it is life to obey and death to disregard and slight. Having
+found this present, immanent Spirit and being deeply convinced that all
+that really matters happens in the dread region of the human heart,
+they turned away from all ceremonies and sacraments and tried to form a
+Church which should be purely and simply a Communion of saints--a
+brotherhood of believers living in the joy of an inward experience of
+God, and bound together in common love to Christ and in common service
+to all who are potential sons of God.
+
+
+
+[1] See Veesenmeyer's article on Bünderlin in _N. lit. Anzeiger_ for
+August 1807, P. 535.
+
+[2] The details of his life here given have been gathered mainly from
+the excellent monograph on _Johannes Bünderlin_ by Dr. Alexander
+Nicoladoni. (Berlin, 1893.)
+
+[3] This incident is given in Dr. Carl Hagen's _Deutschlands
+literarischt und religiöse Verhältnisse im Reformalionszeitalter_,
+1868, iii. p. 310.
+
+[4] The books are:--
+
+(1) _Ein gemayne Berechnung über der Heiligen Schrift Inhalt_, etc.
+("A General Consideration of the Contents of Holy Scripture.") Printed
+in Strasbourg in 1529.
+
+(2) _Aus was Ursach sich Gott in die nyder gelassen und in Christo
+vermenschet ist_, etc., 1529. ("For what cause God has descended here
+below and has become incarnate in Christ.")
+
+(3) _Erklärung durch Vergleichung der biblischen Geschrift, doss der
+Wassertauf sammt andern äusserlichen Gebräuchen in der apostolischen
+Kirchen geubet, on Gottes Befelch und Zeugniss der Geschrift, von
+etlichen dieser Zeit wider efert wird_, etc., 1530. ("Declaration by
+comparison of the Biblical Writings that Baptism with Water, together
+with other External Customs practised in the Apostolic Church, have
+been reinstated by some at this time without the Command of God or the
+Witness of the Scriptures.")
+
+These three books can be found bound in one volume, with writings of
+Denck and others, in the Königliche Bibliothek in Dresden. There is
+also a copy of his third book in Utrecht. Besides using the books
+themselves I have also used the monograph by Nicoladoni and the study
+of Bünderlin in Hagen, _op. cit._ iii. pp. 295-310.
+
+[5] This idea is reproduced and greatly expanded in the writings of the
+famous Silesian Mystic, Jacob Boehme.
+
+[6] _Ein gemayne Berechnung_, p. 57.
+
+[7] _Ibid._ p. 14.
+
+[8] _Ibid._ p. 221.
+
+[9] _Ein gemayne Berechnung_, pp. 218-221, freely rendered.
+
+[10] _Ibid_. pp. 30-34.
+
+[11] _Erklärung durch Vergleichung._
+
+[12] _Aus was Ursach_, p. 33. These phrases, "Key of David" and
+"Sabbath Rest for the Soul," occur in the writings of all the spiritual
+reformers.
+
+[13] See _N. lit. Anzeiger_ (1807), p. 515.
+
+[14] Entfelder to his brethren at the end of his first book: _Von
+Zerspaltungen_.
+
+[15] Vorrede to _Von Zerspaltungen_.
+
+[16] _Von waren Gotseligkayt_, pp. 18-21.
+
+[17] See especially _Von Zerspaltungen_, pp. 6-8.
+
+[18] This "Babel-habit of constructing theological systems" is
+constantly referred to by Jacob Boehme, as we shall see. I believe
+that Boehme had read both Bünderlin and Entfelder.
+
+[19] See _Von Zerspaltungen_, passim, especially p. 17.
+
+[20] _Von waren Gotseligkayt_, p. 13.
+
+
+
+
+{46}
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SEBASTIAN FRANCK: AN APOSTLE OF INWARD RELIGION
+
+Sebastian Franck is one of the most interesting figures in the group of
+German Reformers, a man of heroic spirit and a path-breaking genius,
+though for many reasons his influence upon his epoch was in no degree
+comparable with that of many of his great contemporaries. No person,
+however great a genius he may be, can get wholly free from the
+intellectual climate and the social ideals of his period, but
+occasionally a man appears who has the skill and vision to hit upon
+nascent aspirations and tendencies which are big with futurity, and who
+thereby seems to be far ahead of his age and not explicable by any
+lineage or pedigree. Sebastian Franck was a man of this sort. He was
+extraordinarily unfettered by medieval inheritance, and he would be able
+to adjust himself with perfect ease to the spirit and ideas of the modern
+world if he could be dropped forward into it.
+
+He is especially interesting and important as an exponent and interpreter
+of a religion based on inward authority because he unites, in an unusual
+manner, the intellectual ideals of the Humanist with the experience and
+attitude of the Mystic. In him we have a Christian thinker who is able
+to detach himself from the theological formulations of his own and of
+earlier times, and who could draw, with breadth of mind and depth of
+insight, from the wells of the great original thinkers of all ages, and
+who, besides, in his own deep and serious soul could feel the inner flow
+of central realities. He was no doubt {47} too much detached to be a
+successful Reformer of the historical Church, and he was too little
+interested in external organisations to be the leader of a new sect; but
+he was, what he aspired to be, a sincere and unselfish contributor to the
+spread of the Kingdom of God, and a significant apostle of the invisible
+Church.[1]
+
+Sebastian Franck was born in 1499 at Donauwürth in Schwabia. He began
+his higher education in the University of Ingolstadt, which he entered
+March 26, 1515. He went from Ingolstadt to Heidelberg, where he
+continued his studies in the Dominican College which was incorporated
+with the University. Here he was associated in the friendly fellowship
+of student life with two of his later opponents, Martin Frecht and Martin
+Bucer, and here he came under the influence of Humanism which in the
+scholarly circles in Heidelberg was beginning to take a place along with
+the current Scholasticism of the period. While a student in Heidelberg
+he first heard Martin Luther speak on the insufficiency of works and on
+faith as the way of salvation, and though he must have felt the power of
+this great personality and the freshness of the message, he was not yet
+ripe for a radical change of front.[2] He seems to have felt through
+these student years that a new age was in process of birth, but though he
+was following the great events he remained to the end of his University
+period an adherent of the ancient Church and was ordained a priest about
+the year 1524; but very soon after he went over to the party of Reform,
+and was settled as a reforming preacher in the little church at
+Gustenfelden near Nuremberg. During this period he came into close and
+intimate relation with the powerful humanistic spirit of that important
+city. Hans Sachs was already a person of fame and influence in
+Nuremberg, and here he became acquainted with the writings of the most
+famous humanists of the day--Erasmus, Hutten, Reuchlin, Pirkheimer, {48}
+Althamer and others. In 1528 he married Ottilie Behaim, a woman of rare
+gifts, whose brothers were pupils of Albrecht Dürer, and who were
+themselves in sympathy with the freer tendencies of the time as expressed
+by the Anabaptists. Franck, however, though sympathizing with the
+aspirations of the Anabaptists for a new age, did not feel confidence in
+their views or their methods. His first literary work was a translation
+into German of Althamer's _Diallage_, which contained an attack from the
+Lutheran point of view upon the various Enthusiasts of the period,
+especially the Anabaptists. In his original preface to this work Franck,
+though still in most respects a Lutheran, already reveals unmistakable
+signs of variation from the Wittenberg type, and he is plainly moving in
+the direction of a religion of the spiritual and mystical type freed from
+the limitations of sect and party. Even in this formative stage he
+insists that the Spirit, and not commentaries, is the true guide for the
+interpretation of Scripture; he already contrasts Spirit and letter,
+outer man and inner man, and he here lays down the radical principle,
+which he himself soon put into practice, that a minister of the Gospel
+should resign his charge as soon as he discovers that his preaching is
+not bearing spiritual fruit in the transformation of the lives of his
+congregation.[3]
+
+Sometime before 1530 Franck had come into intimate connection with Denck,
+Bünderlin, Schwenckfeld, and other contemporary leaders of the
+"Spiritual" movement, and their influence upon him was profound and
+lasting, because their message fitted the aspirations which, though not
+yet well defined, were surging subconsciously in him.[4] There are
+throughout his writings very clear marks of Schwenckfeld's influence upon
+him, but Bünderlin especially spoke to his condition and helped him
+discover the road which his feet were seeking. In an important letter
+which Franck wrote to Johann Campanus in 1531, he calls Bünderlin a
+scholar, a {49} wonderfully reverent man, dead to the world, powerful in
+the Scriptures, and mightily gifted with an enlightened reason; and this
+letter shows that he himself has been moving rapidly in the direction in
+which Bünderlin and Denck were travelling, though neither now nor at any
+time was Franck a mere copier of other men's ideas.[5] "We must
+unlearn," he writes, "all that we have learned from our youth up from the
+papists, and we must change everything we have got from the Pope or from
+Luther and Zwingli." He predicts that the external Church will never be
+set up again, "for the inward enlightenment by the Spirit of God is
+sufficient."
+
+In his _Türkenchronik_, or "Chronicle and Description of Turkey,"
+published in 1530, he had already declared his dissatisfaction with
+ceremonies and outward forms of any sort, his refusal to be identified
+with any existing, empirical Church, his solemn dedication to the
+invisible Church, and his determination to be an apostle of the Spirit.
+"There already are in our times," he writes, "three distinct Faiths,
+which have a large following, the Lutheran, Zwinglian and Anabaptist; and
+a _fourth_ is well on the way to birth, which will dispense with external
+preaching, ceremonies, sacraments, bann and office as unnecessary, and
+which seeks solely to gather among all peoples an invisible, spiritual
+Church in the unity of the Spirit and of faith, to be governed wholly by
+the eternal, invisible Word of God, without external means, as the
+apostolic Church was governed before its apostasy, which occurred after
+the death of the apostles."[6]
+
+The year that dates his autobiographical letter to Campanus saw the
+publication in Strasbourg of Franck's best-known literary work:
+_Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel_ ("A Universal Chronicle of the
+World's History from the Earliest Times to the Present").[7] It has {50}
+often been pointed out that much of the material of this great Chronicle
+is taken over from earlier Chroniclers, especially from the Nuremberger
+Schedel, and it is furthermore true that Franck's _Book of the Ages_
+contains large tracts of unhistorical narrative, set forth after the
+manner of Chroniclers without much critical insight, but the book,
+nevertheless, has a unique value. It abounds in Franck's peculiar irony
+and paradox, and it unfolds his conception of the spiritual history of
+the race, under the tuition of the Divine Word. At the beginning are
+patriarchs living in the dawn of the world under the guidance of inward
+vision, and at the end are saints and heretics, whom Franck finds among
+all races, bravely following the same inward Light, now after the ages
+grown clearer and more luminous, and sufficient for those who will
+patiently and faithfully heed it, while the real "heretics" for him are
+"heretics of the letter." "We ought to act carefully before God"--this
+is Franck's constant testimony--"hold to God alone and look upon Him as
+the cause of all things, and we ought always in all matters to notice
+what God says in us, to pay attention to the witness of our hearts, and
+never to think, or act, against our conscience. For everything does not
+hang upon the bare letter of Scripture; everything hangs, rather, on the
+spirit of Scripture and on a spiritual understanding of the inner meaning
+of what God has said. If we weigh every matter carefully we shall find
+its true meaning in the depth of our spiritual understanding and by the
+mind of Christ. Otherwise, the dead letter of Scripture would make us
+all heretics and fools, for everything can be bedecked and defended with
+texts, therefore let nobody confound himself and confuse himself with
+Scripture, but let every one weigh and test Scripture to see how it fits
+his own heart. If it is against his conscience and the Word within his
+own soul, then be sure he has not reached the right meaning, according to
+the mind of the Spirit, for the Scriptures must give witness to the
+Spirit, never against it."[8]
+
+{51}
+
+The _Chronica_ naturally aroused a storm of opposition against this bold
+advocate of the inner Way. Even Erasmus, who had been canonized in
+Franck's list of heretics, joined in the outcry against the chronicler of
+the world's spiritual development. His book was confiscated, he was
+temporarily imprisoned, and for the years immediately following he was
+never secure in any city where he endeavoured to pursue his labours. He
+supported himself and his family, now by the humble occupation of a
+soap-boiler, now by working in a printing-house, sometimes in Strasbourg,
+sometimes in Esslingen, and sometimes in Ulm, only asking that he "might
+not be forced to bury the talent which God had given him, but might be
+allowed to use it for the good of the people of God."
+
+In 1534 his _Weltbuch_ appeared from a press in Tübingen, and the same
+year he published his famous _Paradoxa_, which contains the most clear
+and consistent exposition of his mystical and spiritual religion. Other
+significant books from his pen are his translation of Erasmus' _Moriae
+Encomion_ ("Praise of Folly"), with very important additions; _Von der
+Eitelkeit aller menschlichen Kunst und Weisheit_ ("The Vanity of Arts and
+Sciences"), following the treatise by Agrippa von Nettesheim; _Von dem
+Baum des Wissens Gutes und Böses ("Of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
+and Evil");[9] the _Germaniae Chronicon_ ("Chronicle of Germany"), 1538;
+_Die guldin Arch_ ("Golden Arch"), 1538; and _Das verbütschiert mit 7
+Siegeln verschlossene Buch ("The Seven-sealed Book"), 1539.
+
+The closing years of his life were passed in Basle, where he peacefully
+worked at his books and at type-setting, while the theologians fired
+their paper guns against him, and here in Basle he "went forth with God"
+on his last journey to find a safe and quiet "city with foundations,"
+probably about the end of the year 1542. Three years before his {52}
+death he had written in his "Seven-sealed Book" of the soul's journey
+toward God in these words: "The longer one travels toward the city he
+seeks the nearer and nearer he comes to the goal of his journey; exactly
+so is it with the soul that is seeking God. If he will travel away from
+himself and away from the world and seek only God as the precious pearl
+of his soul, he will come steadily nearer to God, until he becomes one
+spirit with God the Spirit; but let him not be afraid of mountains and
+valleys on the way, and let him not give up because he is tired and
+weary, _for he who seeks finds_."[10] "The Sealed Book" contains an
+"apology" by Franck which is one of the most touching and one of the most
+noble documents from any opponent of the course which the German
+Reformation was taking. "I want my writings accepted," he declares,
+"only in so far as they fit the spirit of Scripture, the teaching of the
+prophets, and only so far as the anointing of the Word of God, Christ the
+inward Life and Light of men, gives witness to them. . . . Nobody is the
+master of my faith, and I desire to be the master of the faith of no one.
+I love any man whom I can help, and I call him brother whether he be Jew
+or Samaritan. . . . I cannot belong to any separate sect, but I believe
+in a holy, Christlike Church, a fellowship of saints, and I hold as my
+brother, my neighbour, my flesh and blood, all men who belong to Christ
+among all sects, faiths, and peoples scattered throughout the whole
+world--only I allow nobody to have dominion over the one place which I am
+pledged to the Lord to keep as pure virgin, namely my heart and my
+conscience. If you try to bind my conscience, to rule over my faith, or
+to be master of my heart, then I must leave you. Except _that_,
+everything I am or have is thine, whoever thou art or whatever thou
+mayest believe."[11]
+
+It was Franck's primary idea--the principle to which he was dedicated and
+for which he was content to suffer, {53} in the faith that men in future
+times would come to see as he did[12]--that man's soul possesses a native
+capacity to hear the inward Word of God. He often calls Plato and
+Plotinus and "Hermes Trismegistus" his teachers, who "had spoken to him
+more clearly than Moses did"[13] and, like these Greek teachers of the
+nature of the soul's furnishings, he insisted that we come "not in entire
+forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness," but that there is a divine
+element, an innermost essence in us, in the very structure of the soul,
+which is the starting-point of all spiritual progress, the mark of man's
+dignity, the real source of all religious experience, and the eternal
+basis of the soul's salvation and joy. He names this inward endowment by
+many names. It is the Word of God ("Wort Gottes"), the Power of God
+("Kraft Gottes"), Spirit ("Geist"), Mind of Christ ("Sinn Christi"),
+Divine Activity ("göttliche Wirkung"), Divine Origin ("göttlicher
+Ursprung"), the inward Light ("das innere Licht"), the true Light ("das
+wahre Licht"), the Lamp of the soul ("das innere Ampellicht"). "The
+inward Light," Franck says in the _Paradoxa_, "is nothing else than the
+Word of God, God Himself, by whom all things were made and by whom all
+men are enlightened." It is, in Franck's thought, not a capricious,
+subjective impulse or vision, and it is not to be discovered in sudden
+ecstatic experiences; nor, on the other hand, is the divine Word, for
+Franck, something purely objective and transcendent. It is rather a
+common ground and essence for God and man. It is God in His
+self-revealing activity; God in His self-giving grace; God as the
+immanent ground of all that is permanently real, and at the same time
+this divine endowment forms the fundamental nature of man's soul--"Gottes
+Wort ist in der menschlichen Natur angelegt"[14]--and is the original
+substance of our being. Consciousness of God and consciousness of self
+have one fundamental source in this deep where God and man are
+unsundered. "No man can see or know himself unless he sees and knows, by
+the Light and Life that is {54} in him. God the eternally true Light and
+Life; wherefore nobody can ever know God outside of himself, outside that
+region where he knows himself in the ground of himself. . . . Man must
+seek, find, and know God through an interrelation--he must find God in
+himself and himself in God."[15] This deep ground of inner reality is in
+every person, so far as he is a person; it shines forth as a steady
+illumination in the soul, and, while everything else is transitory, this
+Word is eternal and has been the moral and spiritual guide of all peoples
+in all ages.
+
+Franck thus differs in a vital point from Schwenckfeld. The latter
+starts with man as utterly lost and devoid of any inherent goodness. By
+a sudden, supernatural event, at a temporal moment, divine forces break
+into the soul from without and supply it with a revitalizing energy.
+Man--lost, fallen, sin-blasted and utterly helpless--is by a divine and
+heavenly creative movement _made_ a new Adam. For Franck, the soul has
+never lost the divine Image, the pearl of supreme price, the original
+element which is God Himself in the soul. We are all, in the deepest
+centre of our being, like Adam, possessed of a substantial essence, not
+of earth, not of time and space, not of the shadow but of the eternal,
+spiritual, and heavenly type. It may become overlaid with the rubbish of
+earth, it may long lie buried in the field of the human heart, it may
+remain concealed, like the grain of radium in a mass of dark pitchblende,
+and be forgotten, but we have only to return home within ourselves to
+find the God who has never been sundered from us and who could not leave
+us without leaving Himself. We do not need to cross the sea to find Him,
+we do not need to climb the heavens to reach Him--the Word is nigh thee,
+the Image is in thy heart, turn home and thou shalt find Him.[16]
+
+The bottomless and abysmal nature of the human soul comes first into
+clear revelation in the Person of Christ, who is, Franck declares, truly
+and essentially both God and Man. In Christ the invisible, eternal, {55}
+self-existent God has clothed Himself with flesh and become Man, has made
+Himself visible and vocal to our spiritual eyes and ears, and in Christ
+God has given us an adequate goal and norm of life, a perfect pattern
+("Muster") to walk by and to live by. Here we can see both the character
+of God and the measure of His expectation for us. But we must not stop
+with the Christ after the flesh, the Christ without. He first becomes
+our life and salvation when He is born within us and is revealed in our
+hearts, and has become the Life of our lives. We must eat His body,
+drink His blood until our nature is one with His nature and our spirit
+one in will and purpose with His spirit.[17]
+
+Franck belongs in many respects among the mystics, but with peculiar
+variations of his own from the prevailing historical type of mysticism.
+He is without question saturated with the spirit of the great mystics; he
+approves their inner way to God and he has learned from them to view this
+world of time and space as shadow and not as reality. No mystic,
+further, could say harsher things than he does of "Reason."[18] Human
+reason--or more properly "reasoning"--has for him, as for them, a very
+limited area for its demesne. It is a good guide in the realm of earthly
+affairs. It can deal wisely with matters that affect our bodily comfort
+and our social welfare, but it is "barren" in the sphere of eternal
+issues. It has no eye for realities beyond the world of three
+dimensions. It goes blind as soon as it tries to speculate about God.
+He looks for no final results in spiritual matters from intellectual
+dialectics, whether they be of the old scholastic type, or of the new
+type of speculations, formulations and subtleties of the Protestant
+theologians.
+
+Franck always comes back to _experience_ as his basis of religion, as his
+way to truth and to divine things. "Many," he says, "know and teach only
+what they have picked up and gathered in, without having experienced it
+{56} in the deeps of themselves."[19] "He who wishes to know what is in
+the Temple must not stand outside, merely hearing people read and talk
+about God. _That_ is all a dead thing. He must go inside and have the
+experience for himself ("selbst erfahren"). Then first everything
+springs into life."[20] But "experience" with him does not mean
+enthusiastic visions and raptures. He puts as little value on ecstasies
+and emotional vapourings as he does on dialectic. Ecstasies lead men as
+often on false trails as on right tracks. They supply no criterion of
+certitude; they furnish no concrete ideas or ideals to live by; but still
+further, they do not bring all the deep-lying powers of the soul into
+play as any true source of religion must do. _He_ is striving to find a
+foundation-principle for the spiritual life which shall not be capricious
+or sporadic, and which shall not be confined to one aspect of the inner
+self, but which shall burn on as a steady illumination in the soul and be
+the basis of all moral activity and all spiritual development. He finds
+this principle, as we have seen, in the Word of God, which is a divine
+reality, an eternal and self-existent activity, opening upward into all
+the resources of God, and at the same time forming the fundamental nature
+and ground-structure of the soul. A person may live--many persons do--in
+the outer region of the self, using the natural instincts with which he
+is supplied, pursuing the goals of life which appeal to common sense and
+steering the earthly course by custom and by reason, but it is always
+possible to have a wider range of experience, to live in deeper currents,
+and to draw upon a _profounder source of insight_. This deeper
+experience--which is the basis of Franck's mysticism and, for him, the
+very heart of any genuine religion--consists of a personal discovery of
+this eternal Word of God within and an irradiation of the whole being
+through the co-operation of the will with it. The will is king in
+man,[21] and can open or shut the gate which leads to life. It can make
+its world good or it {57} can make it evil; just as out of one and the
+same flower the bee gets honey and the spider poison.[22] It can swing
+over its allegiance to God the Spirit of truth, or to the god of the
+world who is anti-Christ.
+
+This experience of the Word of God which is thus brought about by the
+will of man--by an innermost personal choice--affects, Franck insists,
+all the faculties of the inner life. Reason now becomes illumined with a
+Light which it never had until the gate into its deeper region was
+opened. Now, through co-operation with the Spirit of God, reason becomes
+capable of higher processes, and can deal with divine things because it
+has actual _data_ to work upon. The emotions, too, are no longer blind
+and instinctive, they no longer carry the will whither it would not.
+They are now the overflow of an inner experience which is too rich and
+full for expression,[23] which transcends the intellectual apprehension
+of it, but they are spiritualized and controlled from within. The moral
+life is especially heightened, and this is for Franck one of the main
+evidences that a divine source has been tapped. The discovery of the
+Word of God creates and constructs an autonomous "kingdom of the
+conscience" ("Reich des Gewissens"), gives us "a thousand-fold witness of
+God," and becomes to us the tree of life and the tree of knowledge.[24]
+
+In his little book on "the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil"--a
+book which was destined to have a far-reaching influence--he declares
+that the Garden-of-Eden story is a mighty parable of the human soul. All
+that is told in the Genesis account is told of what goes on in the
+mysterious realm within us. It is told as though it were an external
+happening, it is in reality an internal affair. The Paradise and the
+Fall, the Voice of God and the tempting voice of the serpent, the Tree of
+Life and the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, are all in our own
+hearts as they were in the heart of Adam. Heaven and Hell are there.
+The one stands fully revealed in the triumphant Adam, who is Christ; the
+other is {58} exhibited in its awfulness in the disobedient Adam of the
+Fall.
+
+As fast as the life comes under the sway of the "kingdom of conscience"
+and a solid moral character is formed, the inner guidance of the Word of
+God becomes more certain and more reliable. Only the good person has a
+sure and unerring perception of the truth, just as only the scientist
+sees the laws of the world, and as only the musician perceives the
+harmony of sounds. Not only must all spiritual experience be subject to
+the moral test, it must further be tested by the Light of God in other
+men and in history, and by the _spirit of Scripture_, which is the
+noblest permanent fruit of the Eternal Word. Every person must _prove_
+the authority of his religion. He must have his heart conquered and his
+mind taken captive and his will directed by his truth so that he would be
+ready to face a thousand deaths for it,[25] and he must, through his
+truth and insight, come into spiritual unity and co-operation with all
+who form the invisible Church.
+
+The invisible Church forms the central loyalty of Franck's fervent soul.
+"The true Church," he writes, "is not a separate mass of people, not a
+particular sect to be pointed out with the finger, not confined to one
+time or one place; it is rather a spiritual and invisible body of all the
+members of Christ, born of God, of one mind, spirit, and faith, but not
+gathered in any one external city or place. It is a Fellowship, seen
+with the spiritual eye and by the inner man. It is the assembly and
+communion of all truly God-fearing, good-hearted, new-born persons in all
+the world, bound together by the Holy Spirit in the peace of God and the
+bonds of love--a Communion outside of which there is no salvation, no
+Christ, no God, no comprehension of Scripture, no Holy Spirit, and no
+Gospel. I belong to this Fellowship. I believe in the Communion of
+saints, and I am in this Church, let me be where I may; and therefore I
+no {59} longer look for Christ in lo heres or lo theres."[26] This
+Church, which the Spirit is building through the ages and in all lands,
+is, once more, like the experience of the individual Christian, entirely
+an inward affair. "Love is the one mark and badge of Fellowship in
+it."[27] No outward forms of any sort seem to him necessary for
+membership in this true Church. "External gifts and offices make no
+Christian, and just as little does the standing of the person, or
+locality, or time, or dress, or food, or anything external. The kingdom
+of God is neither prince nor peasant, food nor drink, hat nor coat, here
+nor there, yesterday nor to-morrow, baptism nor circumcision, nor
+anything whatever that is external, but peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,
+unalloyed love out of a pure heart and good conscience, and an unfeigned
+faith."[28]
+
+In his Apology he says that he has withdrawn "from all theological
+disputations, from all sectarian statements of creed, from baptism and
+all ceremonies," and "I stand now," he adds, "only for what is
+fundamental and essential for salvation"--that is, vital participation in
+the Life of God revealed in the soul.[29] "I am looking," he writes in
+the opening of the _Paradoxa_, "for no new and separate Church, no new
+commission, no new baptism, no new dispensation. The Church has already
+been founded on Christ the Rock, and since the outward keys and
+sacraments have been misused and have gone by, He now administers the
+sacraments inwardly in spirit and in truth. He baptizes His own, even in
+the midst of Babylon, and feeds them with His own body, and will do so
+unto the end of the world."[30]
+
+In a letter to Campanus he says, "I am fully convinced [by a study of the
+early Church Fathers] that, after the death of the apostles, the external
+Church of Christ, with its gifts and sacraments, vanished from the earth
+and withdrew into heaven, and is now hidden in spirit and in truth, and
+for these past fourteen hundred years {60} there has existed no true
+external Church and no efficacious sacraments."[31]
+
+His valuation of Scripture fits perfectly into this religion of the
+inward life and the invisible Church. The true and essential Word of God
+is the divine revelation in the soul of man. It is the _prius_ of all
+Scripture and it is the key to the spiritual meaning of all Scripture.
+To substitute Scripture for the self-revealing Spirit is to put the dead
+letter in the place of the living Word, the outer Ark in place of the
+inner sanctuary, the sheath in place of the sword, the horn-pane Lantern
+in place of the Light.[32] This letter killed Christ in Judea; it is
+killing Him now. It has split the Church into fragments and sects and is
+splitting it now.[33] It always makes a "Babel" instead of a Church. It
+kept the Pharisees from seeing Moses face to face; it keeps men now from
+seeing the Lord face to face.[34] Franck insists that, from its inherent
+nature, a written Scripture cannot be the final authority in religion:
+(_a_) It is outward, external, while the seat of religion is in the soul
+of man. (_b_) It is transitory and shifting, for language is always in
+process of change, and written words have different meanings to different
+ages and in different countries, while for a permanent religion there
+must be a living, eternal Word that fits all ages, lands, and conditions.
+(_c_) Scripture is full of mystery, contradiction, and paradox which only
+"The key of David"--the inner experience of the heart--can unlock.
+Scripture is the Manger, but, unless the Holy Spirit comes as the day
+star in the heart, the Wise man will not find the Christ.[35] (_d_)
+Scripture at best brings only knowledge. It lacks the power to deliver
+from the sin which it describes. It cannot create the faith, the desire,
+the love, the will purpose which are necessary to win that which the
+Scriptures portray. No book--no amount of "ink, paper, and letters"--can
+make a man good, since religion is not knowledge, but a way of living, a
+{61} transformed life, and _that_ involves an inward life-process, a
+resident creative power. "In Pentecost all books are transcended."[36]
+
+As Franck pushes back through "the ink, paper, and letters of Scripture"
+to the Spirit and Truth which these great writings reveal, when they are
+read and apprehended in the light of an inward spiritual experience, so,
+too, he is always seeking, _through_ the historical Christ, to find the
+Eternal Christ--the ever-living, ever-present, personal Self-Revelation
+of God. He says, in his "Seven-Sealed Book," "I esteem Christ the Word
+of God above all else, for without Him there is no salvation, and without
+Him no one can enjoy God."[37] "Christ," he says in the _Paradoxa_, "has
+been called the Image, the Character, the Expression of God, yes, the
+Glory and Effulgence of His Splendour, the very Impression of His
+Substance, so that in Him God Himself is seen and heard and known. For
+it is God Himself whom we see and hear and perceive in Christ. In Him
+God becomes visible and His nature is revealed. Everything that God is,
+or knows, or wills, or possesses, or can do, is incarnated in Christ and
+put before our eyes. Everything that can be said of God can as truly be
+said of Christ."[38]
+
+But this Christ, who is the very Nature and Character of God made visible
+and vocal, is, as we have seen, not limited to the historical Person who
+lived in Galilee and Judea. He is an eternal Logos, a living Word,
+coming to expression, in some degree, in all times and lands, revealing
+His Light through the dim lantern of many human lives--a Christ reborn in
+many souls, raised again in many victorious lives, and endlessly
+spreading His Kingdom through the ever-widening membership of the
+invisible Church.[39] Without this eternal revelation of Himself in a
+spiritual Fellowship of many members, God would not be God, as a Vine
+would not be a Vine without branches; and contrariwise there could be no
+spiritual humanity without the inward immanent {62} presence of this
+Self-Revealing God in Christ.[40] As in Palestine, so everywhere,
+Christ--not only Christ after the flesh, but after the Spirit--is a
+crucified Christ. Only those can open the Sealed Book--can penetrate the
+divine Revelation--who bear the mark of the Cross on their forehead, who
+have eaten the flesh and drunk the blood of the suffering and crucified
+Christ, who have discovered that the Word of God is eternally a Word of
+the Cross.[41] God is nearest to us when He seems farthest away. He was
+nearest to Christ when He was crying: "My God, why hast Thou forsaken
+me?" So, too, now he who is nearest to the cross is nearest to God, and
+where the flesh is being crucified and the end of all outward things is
+reached, _there God is found_.[42]
+
+Sin means, for Franck as for all mystics of his type, the _free choice_
+of something for one's private and particular self in place of life-aims
+that fulfil the good of the whole and realize the universal Will of God.
+To live for the flesh instead of for the spirit, to pursue the aims of a
+narrow private self where they conflict with the spirit of universal
+love, to turn from the Word of God in the soul to follow the idle voices
+of the moment--that is the very essence of sin. It is not inherited, it
+is self-chosen, and yet there is something in our disposition which sets
+itself in array against the divine revelation within us. The Adam-story
+is a genuine life-picture. It is a chapter out of the book of the ages,
+the life of humanity. We do not sin and fall because he did; we sin and
+fall because we are human and finite, as he was, and choose the darkness
+instead of the Light, prefer Satan to God, pursue the way of death
+instead of the way of Life, as he did.[43]
+
+This will be sufficient to show the essential character of the religion
+of this lonely man and to present the main tendencies of his bold and
+independent thought. He had no desire to be the head of a party; he was
+too remote {63} from the currents of evangelical Christianity to impress
+the common people whom he loved, and he was too radical a thinker to lead
+even the scholars who had become liberated from tradition by their
+humanistic studies and by historical insight. He was a kind of
+sixteenth-century Heraclitus, seeing the flow and flux of all things
+temporal, finding paradox and contradiction everywhere, discovering life
+to be a clash of opposites, with its "way up" and its "way down," on the
+surface a pessimist, but at the heart of himself an optimist; and
+finally, beneath all the folly of history and all the sin and stupidity
+of human life, seeing with the eye of his spirit One Eternal Logos who
+steers all things toward purpose, who suffers as a Lamb slain for the
+flock, who reveals His Truth and Life in the sanctuary of the soul, and
+who through the ages is building an invisible Church, a divine Kingdom of
+many members, in whom He lives as the Life of their lives.
+
+
+
+[1] Troeltsch calls him a "literarischer Prophet der alleinigen
+Erlösungskraft des Geistes und des inneren Wortes," _Die Soziallehren_,
+p. 886.
+
+[2] See article by M. Cunitz in _Nouvelle Revue de Théologie_, vol. v. p.
+361.
+
+[3] See Alfred Hegler's _Geist und Schrift bei Sebastian Franck_
+(Freiburg), 1892, pp. 28-48.
+
+[4] See next chapter for an account of Caspar Schwenckfeld.
+
+[5] This Letter to Campanus, written originally in Latin, is extant in a
+Dutch translation, "Eyn Brieff van Sebastiaen Franck van Weirdt,
+geschreven over etlicken jaren in Latijn, tho synen vriendt Johan
+Campaen." See Hegler, _op. cit._ pp. 50-53.
+
+[6] _Chronica und Beschreibung der Türkey_ (Nurnberg, 1530), K. 3 b.
+
+[7] My copy is the first edition, printed in Strasbourg by Balthasser
+Beck, 1531.
+
+[8] _Chronica_, p. 452 b.
+
+[9] These three books were included in a volume entitled _Die vier
+kronbüchlein_ (1534).
+
+[10] _Das verbütschterte Buch_, p. 5.
+
+[11] Pp. 5-8 of the Apologia to _Das verbütschierte Buch_.
+
+[12] See _Apologia_, p. 2.
+
+[13] _Ibid._ p. 3.
+
+[14] Hegler, _op. cit._ p. 98.
+
+[15] _Die guldin Arch_, Preface 3b-4a.
+
+[16] _Paradoxa_, sec. 101.
+
+[17] _Paradoxa_, sec. 99 and 138.
+
+[18] Franck translated both Erasmus' _Praise of Folly_ and Agrippa's
+_Vanity of Arts and Sciences_.
+
+[19] _Moriae Encomion_, p. 149.
+
+[20] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 13.
+
+[21] _Moriae Enc._ p. 97b.
+
+[22] _Paradoxa_, sec. 29.
+
+[23] _Moriae Enc._ p. 93a.
+
+[24] _Paradoxa_, sec. 63.
+
+[25] _Moriae Enc._ p. 110. For the testing of the Word, see Hegler, _op.
+cit._ pp. 117-119.
+
+[26] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 8.
+
+[27] _Paradoxa_, sec. 9.
+
+[28] _Ibid._ sec. 45.
+
+[29] _Das verbütschierte Buch_, Apology, p. 11.
+
+[30] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 8.
+
+[31] This Letter is preserved in J. G. Schellhorn's _Amoenitates
+literariae_ (1729), xi. pp. 59-61.
+
+[32] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 4.
+
+[33] _Ibid._ sec. 6.
+
+[34] _Ibid._ sec. 2.
+
+[35] See _Das verbütschierte Buch_, passim.
+
+[36] Quoted from Hegler, _op. cit._ p. 104.
+
+[37] _Das verbütschierte Buch_, p. 3.
+
+[38] _Paradoxa_, sec. 101.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ sec. 101.
+
+[40] _Paradoxa_, sec. 8.
+
+[41] _Das verbütschierte Buch_, pp. 6-9, and _Paradoxa_, sec. 41.
+
+[42] _Paradoxa_, sec. 41 and 42.
+
+[43] _Moriae Enc._ p. 111. _Paradoxa_, passim, especially sec. 28-32.
+See also Hegler _op. cit._ pp. 127-136.
+
+
+
+
+{64}
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CASPAR SCHWENCKFELD AND THE REFORMATION OF THE "MIDDLE WAY"[1]
+
+Among all the Reformers of the sixteenth century who worked at the
+immense task of recovering, purifying, and restating the Christian
+Faith, no one was nobler in life and personality, and no one was more
+uncompromisingly dedicated to the mission of bringing into the life of
+the people a type of Christianity winnowed clean from the husks of
+superstition and tradition and grounded in ethical and spiritual
+reality, than was Caspar Schwenckfeld, the Silesian noble. No one, to
+a greater degree than he, succeeded in going behind, not only
+Scholastic formulations but even behind Pauline interpretations of
+Christ, to Christ Himself. The aspects of the Christ-life which
+powerfully moved him were very different from {65} those which moved
+Francis of Assisi three centuries earlier, but the two men had this
+much in common--they both went to Jesus Christ for the source and
+inspiration of their religion, they both lived under the spell of that
+dominating Personality of the Gospels, they both felt the power of the
+Cross and saw with their inner spirits that the real healing of the
+human soul and the eternal destiny of man were indissolubly bound up
+with the Person of Christ.[2] Here again, as in the early years of the
+thirteenth century, there came a gentle Reformer of religion, who would
+use no compulsion but love, who knew how to suffer patiently with his
+Lord, and whose entire programme was the restoration of primitive
+Christianity, though of necessity it would be restored, if at all, in
+terms of the spiritual ideals of the sixteenth century, as the
+Christianity of St. Francis had been in terms of thirteenth-century
+ideals.
+
+Caspar Schwenckfeld was born of a noble family in the duchy of
+Liegnitz, in Lower Silesia, in 1489. He studied in Cologne, in
+Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and probably also in the University of Erfurt,
+though he attained no University degree. His period of systematic
+study being over, about 1511 he threw himself into the life of a
+courtier, with the prospect of a successful worldly career before him.
+Luther's heroic contest against the evils and corruptions of the Church
+and his proclamation of a Reforming faith shook the prosperous courtier
+wide awake and turned the currents of his life powerfully toward
+religion. He deeply felt at this time, what he expressed a few years
+later, that a new world was coming to birth and the old one dying away.
+To the end of his days, and in spite of the harsh treatment which he
+later received from the Wittenberg Reformer, Schwenckfeld always
+remembered that it was the prophetic trumpet-call of Luther which had
+summoned him to a new life, and he always carried about with him in his
+long exile--an exile for which Luther was largely responsible--a
+beautiful respect and {66} appreciation for the man who had first
+turned him to a knowledge of the truth.[3]
+
+From the very beginning of his awakening he shows the moral earnestness
+of a prophet, and even in his earliest writings he emphasizes the
+inwardness of true religion and the importance of a personal experience
+of the living, creative Divine Word.[4] As a result of this passion of
+his for the formation of moral and spiritual character in the lives of
+the people, he was very acute and sensitive to note the condition which
+actually existed around him, and he was not long in detecting, much to
+his sorrow, aspects of weakness in the new type of Christianity which
+was spreading over Germany. Even as early as 1524, in _An Admonition
+to all the Brethren of Silesia_[5] he called attention to the
+superficiality of the change which was taking place in men's lives as a
+result of the Reformation--"the lack of inward grasp" as he calls
+it--and to the externality of the new Reform, the tendency to stop at
+"alphabetical promises of salvation." He gives a searching examination
+to the central principles of Luther's teachings and approves of them
+all, but at the same time he points out that little will be gained if
+they be adopted only as intellectual statements and formulated views.
+He pleads for a faith in Christ and an appreciation of Him that shall
+"reach the deep regions of the spirit," renew the heart, and produce a
+new man in the believer--"the atoning work of Christ must be
+vital"--and for a type of religion that will involve suffering with
+Christ, real conformity of will to His will, dying to self and rising
+again with Him, which means that we cannot "take the {67} cross at its
+softest spot."[6] He calls with glowing passion for a radical
+transformation of personal and social life, and for a serious attempt
+to revive primitive Christianity with its conquering power.
+
+Luther himself was always impressed with the lack of real, intense,
+personal religion which resulted from the Reformation movement, and he
+often bewailed this lack. He said once to Schwenckfeld in this early
+period, "Dear Caspar, genuine Christians are none too common. I wish I
+could see two together in a place!" But with all his titanic power to
+shake the old Church, Luther was not able to sift away the accumulated
+chaff of the ages and to seize upon the inward, living kernel of
+Christ's Gospel in such a real and vivid presentation that men were
+once again able to find the entire Christ, and were once again lifted
+into apostolic power through the discovery of Him. This was the task
+to which Schwenckfeld now felt himself summoned. It seemed to him that
+the entire basis of salvation should be grasped in a way quite
+different from Luther's way of formulation, and this called for a
+restatement of the whole revelation of God in Christ and of the work of
+Christ in the soul of man.[7]
+
+Luther's final break with the spiritual Reformer of Silesia, which
+occurred in 1527, was primarily occasioned by Schwenckfeld's teaching
+on the meaning and value of the Lord's Supper, though their difference
+was by no means confined to that point. Schwenckfeld's position had
+culminated in 1526 in a suspension of the celebration of the Lord's
+Supper--the so-called _Stillstand_--until a right understanding and
+true practice of it according to the will of the Lord should be
+revealed.[8] "We know at present of no apostolic commission," he
+wrote, "nor {68} again do we make any claim to be regarded as apostles,
+for we have neither received the fulness of the Holy Spirit nor the
+apostolic seal for such an office. We dwell in humility and ascribe
+nothing to ourselves, except that we bear witness to Christ, invite men
+to Christ, preach Christ and His infinite work of salvation, and labour
+as much as we can that Christ may be truly known."[9]
+
+Into the bitter controversy over the Sacrament--a controversy between
+noble and sincere Reformers, which forms the supreme internal tragedy
+of the Reformation--we need not now enter. We shall in the proper
+place give Schwenckfeld's position upon it, though only in so far as it
+belongs in an exposition of his type of spiritual Christianity; but the
+immediate effect of his position and practices was such a collision
+with Luther, and the arousal of such hostility on the part of the
+Lutherans of Silesia, that the continued pursuit of Schwenckfeld's
+mission in that country became impossible. He was, however, not
+expelled by edict, but under compulsion of the existing situation; and
+in order not to be a trouble to his friend, the Duke of Liegnitz, he
+went in 1529 into voluntary exile, never to return. For thirty years
+he was a wanderer without a permanent home on the earth, but he could
+thank his Lord Christ, as he did, for granting him through all these
+years an inward freedom, and for bringing him into "His castle of
+Peace." He once wrote: "If I had wanted a good place on earth, if I
+had cared more for temporal than for eternal things, and if I would
+have deserted my Christ, then I might have stayed in my fatherland and
+in my own house, and I might have had the powerful of this world for my
+friends."[10]
+
+He sojourned for longer or shorter periods in Strasbourg, Augsburg,
+Ulm, and other cities, but nowhere was he safe from his enemies, and he
+always faced the prospect of banishment even from his place of
+temporary sojourn. {69} Furious declarations were passed against him
+by the Schmalkald League in 1540, for to his anti-Lutheran views on the
+sacraments he had now added teachings on the nature of Christ which the
+theologians pronounced unorthodox. Three years later he sent a
+messenger to Luther in hope of a friendly understanding. Luther's
+answer was brief and final: "The stupid fool, possessed by the devil,
+understands nothing. He does not know what he is babbling. But if he
+won't stop his drivel, let him at least not bother me with the booklets
+which the devil spues out of him."[11] At the ministerial Council of
+Protestant States in 1556 Schwenckfeld was denounced in the most
+vituperous language of the period, and the civil authorities were urged
+to proceed against him as a dangerous heretic. He always had,
+notwithstanding this pursuit of theological hate, many powerful
+friends, and a large number of brave and devoted followers who were
+glad to risk goods, home, and life for the sake of what was to them the
+living Word of God. He died--or as his friends preferred to say, he
+had a quiet and peaceful "home passage"--at Ulm in 1561. Of the
+purity, the brave sincerity, the nobility, the outward and inward
+consistency of his life there is no question. His enemies had no word
+to say which reflected upon the motives of his heart or upon the
+genuine piety of his life. His religion cost him all that he held dear
+in the outer world--he had not taken "the cross at the softest
+spot"--and he practised his faith as the most precious thing a man
+could possess in this world or in any other.
+
+We must now turn to a study of his type of Christianity, which will be
+presented here not in the order of its historical development, but as
+it appears in perspective in his life and writings. He does not ground
+his conception of salvation, his idea of religion _überhaupt_, as the
+humanistic Reformers, Denck, Bünderlin, Entfelder, and Franck, do, on
+the essentially divine nature of the {70} soul in its deepest
+reality,[12] nor again as the medieval mystics do, on the substantial
+presence within the soul of a divine soul-centre, an unlost and
+inalienable Spark or Image of God which can turn back home and unite
+itself with its Source, the Godhead. He begins, as Luther does, with
+man "fallen," "dead in sin," by nature "blind and deaf" to divine
+realities. For him, as for Luther, there exists no _natural_ freedom
+of the will, by which a person can spontaneously and of his own
+initiative rise up, shake off the shackles of sin, and go to living as
+a son of God. This stupendous event, this absolute shift of the
+life-level, comes, and can come, he thinks, only through an act of God,
+directly, immediately wrought upon the soul. Salvation must be a
+supernatural event. Through this act of God from above there results
+within the soul an experience which in every respect is a new creation.
+It is a cataclysmic event of the same order as the _fiat lux_ of cosmic
+creation, a rebirth through which the man who has it once again comes
+into the condition Adam was in before he fell.
+
+Everything which has to do with salvation in Schwenckfeld's
+Christianity goes back to the historical Christ.[13] Christ is the
+first-born of this new creation. He is the first "new Adam," who by
+His triumphant life and victorious resurrection has become for ever "a
+life-giving Spirit," the creative Principle of a new humanity. In
+Christ the Word of God, the actual Divine Seed of God, became flesh,
+entered into our human nature and penetrated it with Spirit and with
+Life, conquered its stubborn bent toward sin, and transfigured and
+transformed this human flesh into a divine and heavenly substance. By
+obedience to the complete will of God, even to the extreme depths of
+suffering, sacrifice, and death on the Cross for {71} the love of men,
+Christ glorified human flesh, exalted it from flesh to spirit, and in
+His resurrected heavenly life He is able to unite Himself inwardly with
+the souls of believers, so that His spiritual resurrected flesh and
+blood can be their food and drink, and He can become the life-giving
+source of a new order of humanity, the spiritual Head of a new race.
+"If the soul of man," he wrote, "is to be truly nourished, vitally fed
+and watered, so that it comes into possession of Eternal Life, it must
+die to its fleshly life and _receive into itself a divine and spiritual
+Life, having its source in the Being of God and mediated to the soul by
+the living, inward-working Flesh and Blood of Jesus Christ_," through
+which mediation we come into spiritual union and vital fellowship with
+God who is Spirit.[14]
+
+Salvation for Schwenckfeld, therefore, is participation in the life of
+this new creation, this new world-order. To become a Christian, in his
+sense of the word, is to pass over one of the most decisive watersheds
+in the universe, to go from one kingdom to another kingdom of a higher
+rank. The _process_--for it is a vital process--is from beginning to
+end in the realm of experience. By the exercise of faith in the
+crucified, risen, and glorified God-Man, as the life-giving Spirit,
+real power from a higher world streams into the soul. Something
+"pneumatic," something which belongs ontologically to a higher
+spiritual world-order, comes into the person as a divinely bestowed
+germ-plasm, with living, renewing, organizing power. As with Irenaeus,
+so with Schwenckfeld, salvation is "real redemption," the "deification"
+of mortal man, the actual formation of an immortal nature, the
+restoration of humanity to what it originally was, through the
+in-streaming life-energy of a mystical Adam-Christ, the Founder and
+Head of a new spiritual race.[15]
+
+By this incoming spiritual power and life-substance the entire
+personality of the recipient is affected. The {72} recreative energy
+which pours in transforms both soul and body. The inner eternal Word
+of God, who became flesh, acts upon the inner nature of man, so that
+the believing man is changed into something spiritual, divine and
+heavenly, and like Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word of God.[16] There
+comes, with this epoch-making experience, a sense of freedom not known
+before, a power of control over the body and its appetites, an
+illumination of the intellect, a new sensitiveness of conscience to the
+meaning of sin, an extraordinary expansion of the vision of the goal of
+life--which is a full-grown man in Christ,--and an apprehension of the
+gift of the Spirit sufficient for the achievement of that goal. Not
+least among the signs of transfiguration and of heightened life is the
+attainment of a joy which spreads through the inward spirit and shines
+on the face--a joy which can turn hard exile into a _Ruheschloss_, "a
+castle of peace."
+
+Those who have experienced this dynamic transfiguration gain thereby
+gifts, capacities, and powers to hear the Word of God within their own
+souls, and thus this Word, which is the same life-giving Spirit that
+became flesh in Christ and that produces the new creation in man,
+becomes a perpetual inward Teacher in those who are reborn. "Precious
+gifts of the Holy Ghost flow from the essential Being of God into the
+heart of the believer." There is, Schwenckfeld holds, a double
+revelation of God. The primary Word of God is eternal, spiritual,
+inward. "The Word, when spiritual messengers preach or teach, is of
+two kinds with a decided difference in their manner of working. One is
+of God, even is God, and lives and works in the heart of the messenger.
+This is the inner Word, and is in reality nothing else than the
+continued manifestation of Christ. He is inwardly revealed, and heard
+with the inward ears of the heart."[17] It is, in fact, God Himself
+_operating_ as Life and Spirit and Light upon the spiritual substance
+of the human soul, first as the Life-Seed which forms the new creation
+in man, and afterwards as the permanent {73} nourishing and tutoring
+Spirit who leads the obedient soul on into all the Truth, and perfects
+it into the likeness and stature of Christ. "There is a living, inner
+Scripture, written in the believer's heart by the finger of God."
+"This inner Scripture has an active creative power of holiness, and
+makes holy, living, righteous and saved all those in whose hearts it is
+written."
+
+The _divine word_ in the secondary sense is the outward word--the word
+of Scripture. "The other word which serves the inner Word with voice,
+sound, and expression is the external word, and is heard by the
+external man with his ears of sense, and is written and read in
+letters. He who has read and heard only that, and not the inner Word,
+has not heard the Gospel of Christ, the Gospel of Grace, nor has he
+received or understood it."[18] It is at best only the witness or
+testimony which assists the soul to find the real life-giving Word.
+Cut apart from the inner spiritual Word, the word of the letter is
+"dead," as the body would be if sundered from the spirit. "It paints
+truth powerfully for the eye, but it cannot bring it into the
+heart."[19] "The Scriptures cannot bring to the soul that of which
+they speak. This must be sought directly from God Himself."[20] In
+his practical use of Scripture and in his estimate of its importance he
+is hardly behind Luther himself. "There is," he says, "no writing on
+earth like the Holy Scriptures."[21] His Christianity is penetrated
+and illuminated at every point by the profound spiritual experiences of
+the saints of the Bible, and still more by the vivid portraits of
+Christ in the Gospels, by the words from His lips recorded there, and
+by the experiences of the apostles and the development of the primitive
+Church. He never doubts or questions the inspiration of the
+Scriptures; quite the contrary, he holds that Scripture is "given by
+God" and is an inexhaustible well of inspired truth from which the soul
+can endlessly draw. The actual content of Christian faith is supplied
+by the historical revelation; {74} but Schwenckfeld always insists that
+written words, however inspired, are still external to the soul, and
+merely record historical events which have happened to others in other
+ages. "If man," he writes, "is to understand spiritual things and is
+to know and judge rightly, he must bring the divine Light to the
+Scriptures, the Spirit to the letter, the Truth to the picture, and the
+Master to His created work. . . . In a word, to understand the
+Scriptures a man must become a new man, a man of God; he must be in
+Christ who gave forth the Scriptures."[2] That which is to change the
+inner nature of a man must be something personally experienced and not
+external to him; must be in its own nature as spiritual as the soul
+itself is and not material, as written words are. "The pen cannot
+completely bring the heart to the paper, nor can the mouth entirely
+express the well of living water within itself."[23] The Bible leads
+to Christ and bears witness of Him as no other book does, but it is not
+Christ. And even the Bible remains a closed book until Christ opens
+it.[24] The Scriptures tell, as no other writings do, of the Word of
+God and its life-operations in the world, but they are still not the
+Word of God. The spiritual realities of life cannot be settled by
+laboriously piling up texts of Scripture, by subtle theological
+dialectic, or by learned exegesis of sacred words. If these spiritual
+realities are to become real and effective to us, it must be through
+the direct relation of the human spirit with the divine Spirit--the
+inward spiritual Word of God.[25] "He who will see the truth must have
+God for eyes."[26]
+
+Schwenckfeld's view of the process of salvation and the permanent
+illumination of the reborn soul by a real incoming divine
+substance--whether called Word or Seed--is the _dynamic_ feature of his
+Christianity. He is endeavouring to find a foundation for a religious
+energism that will avoid the dangers which beset Luther's principle
+{75} of "justification by faith." From the inception of the
+Reformation movement there had appeared a tendency to regard the
+exercise of "faith" as all that was required for human salvation.
+Luther did not mean it so, but it was the easy line of least resistance
+to hold that "faith" had a magic effect in the invisible realm, that is
+to say: As soon as a person exercised "faith," God counted the "faith"
+for righteousness, and regarded that person as "justified." The
+important operation was thus in a region outside the soul. The
+momentous shift was not in the personal character of the individual,
+but in the way the individual was regarded and valued in the heavenly
+estimates. It was the discovery of the prevalence of this crude and
+magical reliance on "faith" which first drove Schwenckfeld to a deeper
+study of the problems of religion. It was the necessity that he felt
+to discover some way by which man himself could be actually renewed,
+transformed, recreated, and _made_ righteous--rather than merely
+counted or reckoned righteous by some magical transaction--that made
+him an independent reformer and set him on his solitary way.
+
+To this deep and central question of religion, How is a human soul
+saved? there were in Schwenckfeld's day four well-known answers:
+
+(1) There was the answer of the Church in which he was born. Salvation
+is by Grace, mediated through the sacramental channels of the
+mysterious and divinely founded Church. Man's part consists in the
+performance of the "works" which the Church requires of him and the
+proper use of the sacramental means of Grace. Through these
+sacramental channels actual Grace, substantial divine help, comes into
+man and works the miracle of salvation in him.
+
+(2) There was the answer of the great mystics, not always clear and
+simple, but very profound and significant. The Ground and the Abyss of
+the soul is one substance with the eternal and absolute Godhead.
+Finite strivings, isolated purposes, selfish aims, centrifugal pursuits
+are vain and illusory. We lose our lives in so far as we live {76} in
+self-will and in self-centred joys. The way home, the way of
+salvation, is a return to that Ground-Reality from which we have gone
+out--a return to union and oneness of Life with the infinite Godhead.
+
+(3) The third answer is that of Luther: "Salvation is by faith." This
+seems at first to be a dynamic answer. It breaks in on the distracted
+world like a new moral trumpet-call to the soul. It comes to men like
+a fresh Copernican insight which discovers a new religious
+world-centre. The soul by its own inward vision, by its moral
+attitude, by the swing of the will, can initiate a new relation with
+God, and so produce a new inward kingdom. That, however, is not
+Luther's message. He could not take that optimistic view of life
+because it implied that man has within himself a native capacity for
+God, and can rise to the vision and attitude which lead to a moral
+renewal of the self. Luther never succeeded in clearing his principle
+from scholastic complications. He never put it upon a moral and
+dynamic foundation. It remains to the last a mysterious principle, and
+was easily open to the antinomian interpretation, that upon the
+exercise of faith God for Christ's merits "counts man justified"--an
+interpretation dear to those who are slack-minded and prone to forensic
+schemes of salvation.
+
+(4) The fourth view was that of the humanist-spiritual Reformers, men
+of the type of Denck and Bünderlin, who are the precursors of what we
+to-day call the ethical way of salvation. They assume that salvation
+is from beginning to end a moral process. God is in essence and nature
+a loving, self-revealing, self-giving God, who has in all ages unveiled
+Himself in revelations suited to the spiritual stature of man, has in
+the fulness of time become incarnate in Christ, and forever pleads with
+men through His Spirit to come to Him. Those who see and hear, those
+who respond and co-operate, _i.e._ those who exercise faith, are
+thereby morally transformed into an inward likeness to Him, and so
+enter upon a life which prefers light to darkness, goodness to sin,
+love to hate.
+
+{77}
+
+Schwenckfeld was not satisfied with any of these views. He knew and
+loved the mystics, but he was too much impressed with the mighty Life
+and message of the historical Christ to adopt the mystic's way. He
+felt that Lutheran Christianity was too scholastic, too dependent on
+externals, too inclined to an antinomian use of "faith." He could not
+go along the path of the Humanist-Spirituals, for he believed that man
+had been ruined in the Fall, was too deeply scarred with sin to help
+himself, was without freewill, was devoid of native capacity for
+spiritual vision and saving faith. Salvation, if it is to be effected
+at all, must be initiated by Divine Grace and must be accomplished _for
+man_ by God. But it could be for Schwenckfeld no forensic adjustment,
+no change of reckoning in the heavenly ledgers. "Justification," he
+once wrote, "is not only forgiveness of sins, but it is more, it is the
+actual healing and renewing of the inward man."[27] It must involve a
+real and radical transformation of man's nature--man must cease from
+sin and the love of it, he must receive from beyond himself a passion
+for goodness and a power to enable him to achieve it. The _passion_
+for goodness, in Schwenckfeld's view, is created through the vision of
+the God-Man who has suffered and died on the Cross for us, and has been
+glorified in absolute newness of life; and the _power_ for moral
+holiness is supplied to the soul by the direct inflowing of divine
+Life-streams from this new Adam, who is henceforth the Head of the
+spiritual order of humanity, the Life-giving Spirit who renews all who
+receive Him in faith. "Faith," he says, "is a penetrating stream of
+light flowing out from the central divine Light and Fire, which is God
+Himself, into our hearts by which we are inflamed with love for God and
+for our neighbour, and by which we see both what we lack in ourselves
+and what can abundantly supply our lack, so that we may be made ready
+for the Kingdom of God and be prepared to become children of God."[28]
+"Real faith," he elsewhere says, "that is to say, justifying faith, can
+come from nothing {78} external. It is a gracious and gratuitous gift
+of God through the Holy Spirit. It is an emanation ["Tröpflein"] from
+the eternal Life of God, and is of the same essence and substance as
+God Himself."[29] It is, in fact, the Eternal Word of God become vocal
+and vital within the inner region of our own lives.[30]
+
+The Church, in Schwenckfeld's conception, is this complete spiritual
+community of which Christ is the Head. "We maintain," he wrote in the
+early period of his mission, and it remained the settled view of his
+life, "that the Christian Church according to the usage of the
+Scripture is the congregation or assembly of all or of many who with
+heart and soul are believers in Christ, whose Head is Christ our Lord,
+as St. Paul writes to the Ephesians and elsewhere, and who are born of
+God's Word alone, and are nourished and ruled by God's Word."[31] "The
+Christian Church," he elsewhere says, "is the entire community of the
+children of God. It is the actual Body of Christ, the Seed of Abraham,
+the House of the living God, the Temple of the Holy Spirit. It has its
+life and power through the obedience of faith, it manifests to the
+world the Name of the Lord, the goodness and the glory of Him who
+called its members from darkness into His marvellous Light. Wherever
+such a Church is gathered, there also is Christ, its Head, who governs
+it, teaches it, guards and defends it, works in it and pours His Life
+into its members, to each according to the measure of his living faith.
+This inward invisible Christ belongs to all ages and all times and
+lands."[32] The Church, in its true life and power, is thus for him a
+continuation of the apostolic type. He had no interest in the
+formation of a sectarian denomination, and he was fundamentally averse
+to a State-Church system. The true Church community can be identified
+with no temporal, empirical organization--whether established or
+separatist. It is a spiritual invisible community as wide as the
+world, including all persons in all regions of {79} the earth and in
+all religious communions who are joined in life and spirit to the
+Divine Head. It expands and is enlarged by a process of organic growth
+under the organizing direction of the Holy Spirit. "As often," he
+writes, "as a new warrior comes to the heavenly army, as often as a
+poor sinner repents, the body of Christ becomes larger, the King more
+splendid, His Kingdom stronger, His might more perfect. Not that God
+becomes greater or more perfect in His essence, but that flesh becomes
+more perfect in God, and God dwells in all His fulness in the flesh
+into which in Jesus Christ He ever more pours Himself."[33] Each soul
+that enters the _kingdom of experience_ through the work of the
+Life-giving Spirit is builded into this invisible expanding Church of
+the ages, and is endowed with some "gift" to become an organ of the
+Divine Head. All spiritual service arises through the definite call
+and commission of God, and the persons so called and commissioned are
+rightly prepared for their service, not by election and ordination, but
+by inward compulsion and illumination through the Word of God. The
+preacher possesses no magical efficacy. His only power lies in his
+spiritual experience, his clarified vision, and his organic connection
+with Christ the Head of the Church and the source of its energy. If
+his life is spiritually poor and weak and thin, if it lacks moral
+passion and insight, his ministry will be correspondingly ineffective
+and futile, for the dynamic spiritual impact of a life is in proportion
+to its personal experience and its moral capacity to transmit divine
+power. Here again the emphasis is on the moral aspect of religion as
+contrasted with the magical. There can be no severing of the
+ecclesiastical office or function from the moral character of the
+person himself. Schwenckfeld has cut away completely from
+sacerdotalism and has returned, as far as with his limited historical
+insight he knew how to do it, to the ideal of the primitive Apostolic
+Church. The true mark and sign of membership in the community of
+saints--the invisible Church--is, for him as for St. Paul, {80}
+possession of the mind of Christ, faith, patience, integrity, peace,
+unity of spirit, the power of God, joy in the Holy Ghost, and the
+abounding gifts and fruits of the Spirit. "No outward unity or
+uniformity, either in doctrine or ceremonies, or rules or sacraments,
+can make a Christian Church; but inner unity of spirit, of heart, soul
+and conscience in Christ and in the knowledge of Him, a unity in love
+and faith, does make a Church of Christ."[34] The Church is in a very
+true sense bone of Christ's bone and flesh of His flesh, vitalized by
+His blood, empowered by His real presence, and formed into an organism
+which reveals and exhibits the divine and heavenly Life--a world-order
+as far above the natural human life as that is above the plant.
+
+Quite consistently with this spiritual view of religion--this view that
+the true Church is an invisible Church--Schwenckfeld taught that the
+true sacrament is an inner and spiritual sacrament, and not legal and
+external like those of the Old Testament. "God must Himself, apart
+from all external means, through Christ touch the soul, speak in it,
+work in it, if we are to experience salvation and eternal life."[35]
+The direct incoming of the Divine Spirit, producing a rebirth and a new
+creation in the man himself, is the only baptism which avails with God
+or which makes any difference in the actual condition of man. Baptism
+in its true significance is the reception of cleansing power, it is an
+inward process which purifies the heart, illuminates the conscience,
+and is not only necessary for salvation but in fact _is_ salvation.
+Christian baptism is therefore not with water, but with Christ: it is
+the immersion of the soul in the life-giving streams of Christ's
+spiritual presence.
+
+Schwenckfeld was always kindly disposed toward the Anabaptists, but he
+was not of them. He presented a very different type of Christianity to
+their type, which he penetratingly criticized, though in a kindly
+spirit. He did not approve of rebaptism, for he insisted that the
+all-important matter was not how or when water was applied, {81} but
+the reception of _Christ's real baptism_, an inner baptism, a baptism
+of spirit and power, by which the believing soul, the inner man, is
+clarified, strengthened, and made pure.[36]
+
+His view of the Lord's Supper in the same way fits his entire
+conception of Christianity as an inward religion. It was through his
+study of the meaning and significance of the Supper that he arrived at
+his peculiar and unique type of religion. He began his meditation with
+the practical test--the case of Judas. If the bread and wine of the
+Last Supper were identical with the body and blood of Christ, then
+Judas must have eaten of Christ as the other disciples did, and,
+notwithstanding his evil spirit, he must have received the divine
+nature into himself--but that is impossible.
+
+In his intellectual difficulty he turned to the great mystical
+discourse in the sixth chapter of John, in the final interpretation of
+which he received important suggestion and help from Valentine
+Crautwald, Lector of the Dom in Liegnitz. In this remarkable discourse
+Christ promises to feed His disciples, His followers, with His own
+flesh and blood, by which they will partake of the eternal nature and
+enter with Him into a resurrection life. The "flesh and blood" here
+offered to men cannot refer to an outward sacrament which is eaten in a
+physical way, because in the very same discourse Christ says that
+outward, physical flesh profits nothing. It is the Spirit that gives
+life, and, therefore, the "flesh and blood" of Christ must be
+synonymous with the Word if they are actually to recreate and nourish
+the soul and to renew and vitalize the spirit of man.
+
+This feeding and renewing of the soul through Christ's "flesh and
+blood," Schwenckfeld treats, as we have seen, not as a figure or
+symbol, but as a literal fact of Christian experience. Through the
+exercise of faith in the person of the crucified, risen, and glorified
+Christ--the creative Adam--incorruptible, life-giving substance comes
+into the soul and transfigures it. Something from the divine {82} and
+heavenly world, something from that spiritualized and glorified nature
+of Christ, becomes the actual food of man's spirit, so that through it
+he partakes of the same nature as that of the God-Man. Not once or
+twice, but as a continuous experience, the soul may share this glorious
+meal of spiritual renewal--this eating and drinking of Christ.
+
+The external supper--and for that matter the external baptism too--may
+have a place in the Church of Christ as a pictorial symbol of the
+actual experience, or as a visible profession of faith, but this
+outward sign is, in his view, of little moment, and must not occupy the
+foreground of attention, nor be made a subject of polemic or of
+insistence. The new Creation, the response of faith to the living
+Word, the transfiguration of life into the likeness of Christ, are the
+momentous facts of a Christian experience, and none of these things is
+_mediated_ by external ceremonies.
+
+It was his ideal purpose to promote the formation of little groups of
+spiritual Christians which should live in the land in quietness, and
+spread by an inward power and inspiration received from above. He saw
+clearly that no true Reformation could be carried through by edicts or
+by the proclamations of rulers, or by the decision of councils. A
+permanent work, from his point of view, could be accomplished only by
+the slow and patient development of the religious life and spiritual
+experience of the people, since the goal which he sought was the
+formation, not of state-made Churches, but of renewed personal lives,
+awakened consciences, burning moral passion, and first-hand conviction
+of immediate relation with the World of Divine Reality. To this work
+of arousing individual souls to these deeper issues of life, and of
+building up little scattered societies under the headship of Christ,
+which should be, as it were, oases of the Kingdom of God in the world,
+he dedicated his years of exile. All such quiet inward movements
+progress, as Christ foresaw, too slowly and gradually "for
+observation"; but this method of reforming the Church through rebirth
+and the creation of Christ-guided societies {83} accomplished, even
+during Schwenckfeld's life, impressive results. There were many, not
+only in Silesia but in all regions which the missionary-reformer was
+able to reach, who "preferred salt and bread in the school of Christ"
+to ease and plenty elsewhere, and they formed their little groups in
+the midst of a hostile world. The public records of Augsburg reveal
+the existence, during Schwenckfeld's life, of a remarkable group of
+these quiet, spiritual worshippers in that city. Their leaders were
+men of menial occupations--men who would have attracted no notice from
+the officials of city or Church if they had been contented to conform
+to any prevailing or recognized type of religion. Under the
+inspiration which they received from the writings of Schwenckfeld they
+formed "a little meeting"--in every respect like a seventeenth-century
+Quaker meeting--in their own homes, meeting about in turn, discarding
+all use of sacraments, and waiting on God for edification rather than
+on public preaching. They read the books and epistles of Schwenckfeld
+in their gatherings, they wrote epistles to other groups of
+Schwenckfeldians, and received epistles in turn and read them in their
+gatherings. They objected to any form of religious exercise which
+seemed to them incomprehensible to their spirits and which did not
+spring directly out of the inward ministry of the Word of God. They
+were eventually discovered, their leaders banished, their books burned,
+and their little meeting of "quiet spirituals" ("stillen Frommen") as
+they called themselves was ruthlessly stamped out.[37] Societies
+something like this were formed in scores of places, and continued to
+cultivate their inward piety in the Fatherland, until harried by
+persecution they migrated in 1734 to Pennsylvania, where they have
+continued to maintain their community life until the present day.
+
+But the most important effect of Schwenckfeld's life and work must not
+be sought in the history of these {84} visible societies which owed
+their origin to his apostolic activity. His first concern was always
+for the building of the invisible community of God throughout the whole
+world--not for the promotion of a sect--and his greatest contribution
+will be found in the silent, often unnoticed, propagation of his
+spirit, the contagious dissemination of his ideas, the gradual
+influence of his truth and insight upon Christian communions and upon
+individual believers that hardly knew his name. His correspondence was
+extraordinarily extensive; his books and tracts, which were legion,
+found eager readers and transmitters, and slowly--too slowly for
+observation--the spiritual message of the homeless reformer made its
+way into the inner life of faithful souls, who in all lands were
+praying for the consolation of God's new Israel. Even so early as
+1551, an English writer, Wyllyam Turner, in a book written as "a
+preservative and treacle against the poyson of Pelagius," especially as
+"renewed" in the "furious secte of the Annabaptistes," mentions the
+"Swengfeldianes" as one of the heads of "this monstre in many poyntes
+lyke unto the watersnake with seven heads."[38] There is, however,
+slight evidence of the spread of Schwenckfeld's views, whether they be
+called "poyson" or "treacle," in England during the sixteenth century,
+though they are clearly in evidence in the seventeenth century. One of
+the most obvious signs of his influence in the seventeenth century,
+both in England and in Holland, appears in the spread of principles
+which were embodied in the "Collegiants" of Holland and the
+corresponding societies of "Seekers" in England.[39] The cardinal
+principle of these groups in both countries was the belief that the
+visible Church had become apostate and had lost its divine
+authoritative power, that it now lacked apostolic ministry and
+efficacious sacraments and "the gifts of the Spirit" which demonstrate
+the true apostolic succession. Therefore those who held this view,
+"like doves without their mates," were _waiting_ and _seeking_ for the
+appearing of a {85} new apostolic commission, for the fresh outpouring
+of God's Spirit on men, and for the refounding of the Church, as
+originally, in actual demonstration and power.
+
+It was a settled view of Schwenckfeld's that the visible Church had
+lost its original power and authority, and he cherished, too, a
+persistent faith and hope that in God's good time it would again be
+restored to its pristine vitality and its original conquering power.
+"We ask," he writes, "where in the world to-day there is gathered
+together an external Church of the apostolic form and type, and
+according to the will of Christ."[40] And yet scattered everywhere
+throughout the world--even in Turkey and Calcutta[41]--God has, he
+says, His own faithful people, known only to Him, who live Christlike
+and holy lives, whom Christ the living Word, that became flesh,
+baptizes inwardly with the Holy Spirit and inwardly feeds without
+external preaching or sacrament, writes His law in their hearts and
+guides into Eternal Life.[42] But the time is coming when once more
+there will be in the world an apostolic and completely reformed Church
+of Christ, His living body and the organ of the Spirit, with divine
+gifts and powers and commission. In the interim let the chosen
+children of God, he writes, rejoice and comfort themselves in this,
+that their salvation rests neither in an external Church, nor in the
+external use of sacraments, nor in any external thing, but that it
+rests alone in Jesus Christ our Lord, and is received through true and
+living faith.[43]
+
+For Schwenckfeld himself the important matter was the increase of this
+inward life, the silent growth of this kingdom of God in the hearts of
+men, the spread of this invisible Church, but his writings plainly
+suggest that God will eventually restore the former glory to His
+visible Church. "You are," he says, in one of his epistles, "to pray
+earnestly that God will raise up true apostles and preachers and
+evangelists, so that His Church may {86} be reformed in Christ, edified
+in the Holy Ghost, and unified into one, and so that our boasting of
+the pure preaching of the Gospel and the right understanding and use of
+the sacraments may be true before God,"[44] and the time is coming, we
+may in good faith believe, when the sacraments will be used according
+to the will of Christ, and then there will be a true Christian Church,
+taught outwardly by apostolic ministers and taught inwardly by the Lord
+Himself.[45] Fortunately, however, salvation does not depend upon
+anything outward, and during the _Stillstand_ or interim there is no
+danger to be feared from the intermission of outward ceremonies.[46]
+
+Sebastian Franck graphically describes this waiting, seeking attitude
+as well known in his time. He wrote in his "Chronicle" (1531): "Some
+are ready to allow Baptism and other ceremonies to remain in abeyance
+["stilston," evidently Schwenckfeld's _Stillstand_] until God gives a
+further command and sends true labourers into His harvest-field. For
+this some have great longings and yearnings and wish nothing else."[47]
+The intense _expectation_ which the Seekers, both in Holland and
+England, exhibit was, of course, a much later development, was due to
+many influences, and is connected only indirectly with the reforming
+work and the Gospel message of Schwenckfeld. It indicates, in the
+exaggerated emphasis of the Seekers, a failure to grasp the deeper
+significance of spiritual Christianity as a present reality, and it
+misses the truth, which the world has so painfully slowly grasped, that
+the only way to form an apostolic and efficacious visible Church is not
+through sudden miracles and cataclysmic "restorations" and
+"commissions," but by the slow contagion and conquering power of this
+inward kingdom, of this invisible Church, as it becomes the spirit and
+life of the outward and visible Church. This truth the Silesian
+reformer knew full well, and for this reason he was ready at all costs
+to be a quiet apostle of the invisible Community of God and let the
+outward {87} organism and organ of its ministry come in God's own way.
+The nobler men among the English Seekers, as also among the Dutch
+Societies, rose gradually to this larger view of spiritual religion,
+and came to realize, as Schwenckfeld did, that the real processes of
+salvation are inward and dynamic. Samuel Rutherford is not a very safe
+witness in matters which involve impartial judgment, or which concern
+types of spiritual experience foreign to his own type, but he is
+following a real clew when he connects, as he does, the leaders of
+spiritual, inward religion in his day, especially those who had shared
+the seeker aspirations, with Schwenckfeld.[48] Rutherford's account is
+thoroughly unfair and full of inaccuracies, but it suffices at least to
+reveal the fact that Schwenckfeld was a living force in the period of
+the English Commonwealth, and that, though almost a hundred years had
+passed since his "home-passage" from Ulm was accomplished, he was still
+making disciples for the ever-enlarging community and household of God.
+
+
+
+[1] The most important material for a study of Schwenckfeld is the
+following:--
+
+_Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum_, edited by C. D. Hartranft. Published
+Leipzig, vol. i. (1907); vol. ii. (1911); vol. iii. (1913). Other
+volumes to follow.
+
+_Schriften von Kaspar Schwenckfeld_, in 4 folio volumes. Published
+between the years 1564-1570. Indicated in my notes as vol. i., vol.
+ii., vol. iii. A, vol. iii. B. There are, too, many uncollected books
+and tracts, to some of which I refer in footnotes.
+
+Karl Ecke, _Schwenckfeld, Luther, und der Gedanke einer apostolischen
+Reformation_ (Berlin, 1911). Important book, but to be followed with
+caution.
+
+R. H. Grützmacher, _Wort und Geist_ (Leipzig, 1902).
+
+Gottfried Arnold, _Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historien_, i. pp. 1246-1299.
+(Edition of 1740.)
+
+H. W. Erbkam, _Geschichte der prolestantischen Sekten im Zeitaller der
+Reformation_ (Hamburg und Gotha, 1848), pp. 357-475.
+
+Döllinger, _Die Reformation_, i. pp. 257-280.
+
+Ernst Troeltsch, _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und
+Gruppen_ (Tübingen, 1912), pp. 881-886.
+
+[2] Christ, Schwenckfeld insisted, is the sum of the whole Bible, and
+to learn to know Christ fundamentally is to grasp the substance of the
+entire Scripture.
+
+[3] He wrote in 1543 to Luther: "I owe to you in God and the truth all
+honour, love, and goodwill, because from the first I have reaped much
+fruit from your service, and I have not ceased to pray for you
+according to my poor powers."--_Schriften_, ii. p. 701 d.
+
+[4] In _An Epistle to the Sisters in the Cloister at Naumberg_, written
+probably in the autumn of 1523, he says: "A true Christian life in its
+essential requirements does not consist in external appearance . . .
+but quite the contrary, it does consist in personal trust in God
+through an experience of Jesus Christ, which the Holy Ghost brings
+forth in the heart by the hearing of the Divine Word."--_Corpus
+Schwenckfeldianorum_, i. p. 118.
+
+[5] _Ermahnung dess Missbrauchs etlicher fürnemsten Artikel des
+Evangelii_ (1524). _Corpus Schw._ ii. pp. 26-105.
+
+[6] "Wir greyffen das Creutz noch am waichsten Ort an."--_Ermahnung
+dess Missbrauchs_. Corpus Schw. ii. p. 89.
+
+[7] "There are now in general two parties that make wrong use of the
+Gospel of Christ, one of which turns to the right and the other to the
+left of the only true and straight way. The first party is that of the
+Papacy . . . the other party consists of those to whom God has now
+granted a gracious light--But!"--_Ermahnung dess Missbrauchs_.
+
+[8] The _Stillstand_ was proposed in a _Circular Letter_ written by
+Schwenckfeld, Valentine Crautwald, and the Liegnitz Pastors, April 21,
+1526.--_Corpus Schwenckfeld_, i. pp. 325-333.
+
+[9] The revival of this idea of a _Stillstand_, that is, of a
+suspension of certain time-honoured practices of the Church until a
+further revelation and new enduement should be granted, will be
+referred to in later chapters, especially in connection with the
+_Collegiants_ of Holland and the English _Seekers_.
+
+[10] Ecke, _op. cit._ p. 217.
+
+[11] Arnold, _op. cit._ ii. p. 251. There are many similar references
+to Schwenckfeld in Luther's _Table Talk_, and he usually calls him by
+the opprobrious name of "Stenkfeld."
+
+[12] "Ein natürliches Licht kennt Schwenckfeld nicht."--Grützmacher,
+_Wort und Grist_ (Leipzig, 1902), p. 168.
+
+[13] The important data for Schwenckfeld's doctrine of Christ and the
+way of salvation will be found in the following writings by him:--
+
+_Von der göttlichen Kindschaft und Herrlichkeit des ganzen Sones
+Gottes_ (1538).
+
+_Ermanunge zum wahren und selig machende Erkänntnis Christi_ (1539).
+
+_Konfession und Erklärung von Erkänntnus Christi und seiner göttlichen
+Herrlichkeit_ (1540).
+
+[14] _Schriften_, i. p. 664. See also p. 662.
+
+[15] For the doctrine of deification in Irenaeus see Harnack, _Hist. of
+Dogma_, ii. pp. 230-318.
+
+[16] See _Schriften_, i. p. 768.
+
+[17] _Ibid._ i. p. 767 a.
+
+[18] _Schriften_, i. p. 767 a.
+
+[19] _Die heilige Schrift_. x. d.
+
+[20] _Ibid._ cviii. c.
+
+[21] _Ibid._ ii. b.
+
+[22] _Die heilige Schrift._ vi. and vii.
+
+[23] _Vom Worte Gottes_, xxii. c.
+
+[24] _Die heilige Schrift._ iv. b.
+
+[25] _Catechismus vom Wort des Creütses, vom Wort Gottes, und vom
+Underscheide des Worts des Geists und Buchstabens._
+
+[26] _Die heilige Schrift._ iv. c.
+
+[27] _Schriften_, i. p. 725.
+
+[28] _Ibid._ i. p. 634.
+
+[29] _Schriften_, i. p. 380.
+
+[30] See _ibid._ ii. p. 421.
+
+[31] _Corpus Schwenck._ i. p. 295.
+
+[32] _Schriften_, iii. A.
+
+[33] _Schriften_, ii. p. 290.
+
+[34] _Schriften_, ii. p. 785.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ i. p. 768 b.
+
+[36] _Schriften_, i. p. 513. For a criticism of the legalism of the
+Anabaptists see _ibid._ i. pp. 801-808.
+
+[37] The details are given in Friederich Roth's _Augsburgs
+Reformations-Geschichte_ (München, 1907), iii. p. 245 ff.
+
+[38] _A Preservative or Treacle against the Poyson of Pelagius, etc._
+(1551), A iii.
+
+[39] For a fuller account of the Collegiants see Chap. VII.
+
+[40] _Schriften_, iii. B, p. 572.
+
+[41] _Ibid._ ii. p. 783.
+
+[42] _Ibid._ a. p. 784.
+
+[43] _Ibid._ iii. A, p. 146.
+
+[44] _Schriften_, ii. p. 785.
+
+[45] _Ibid._ ii. p. 783.
+
+[46] _Ibid._ iii. A, p. 74.
+
+[47] Franck's _Chronica_ (1531), p. ccccli.
+
+[48] Rutherford, _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_ (1648), chap. v.
+
+
+
+
+{88}
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SEBASTIAN CASTELLIO: A FORGOTTEN PROPHET[1]
+
+Reformation history has been far too closely confined to a few main
+highways of thought, and few persons therefore realize how rich in
+ideas and how complex in typical religious conceptions this spiritual
+upheaval really was. The types that prevailed and won their way to
+wide favour have naturally compelled attention and are adequately
+known. There were, however, very serious and impressive attempts made
+to give the Reformation a totally different course from the one it
+finally took in history, and these attempts, defeated by the sweep of
+the main current, became submerged, and their dedicated and heroic
+leaders became forgotten. Many of these spiritual ventures which for
+the moment failed and were submerged are in striking parallelism with
+currents of thought to-day, and our generation can perhaps appreciate
+at their real worth these solitary souls who were destined to see their
+cause defeated, to hear their names defamed, and to live in jeopardy
+among the very people whom they most longed to help.
+
+Sebastian Castellio is one of these submerged venturers. While he
+lived he was so absolutely absorbed in the battle for truth that he
+took no pains at all to acquaint posterity with the details of his
+life, or to make his name quick and powerful in the ears of men. When
+he died {89} and laid down the weapons of his spiritual warfare his
+pious opponents thanked God for the relief and did what they could to
+consign him to oblivion. But after the long and silent flow of years
+the world has come up to his position and can appreciate a spirit who
+was too far in advance of the line of march to be comprehended in his
+lifetime. He was born in the little French village of St. Martin du
+Fresne--not many miles west of Lake Geneva in the year 1515. The home
+was pinched with poverty, but somebody in the home or in the village
+discovered that little Bastian was endowed with unusual gifts and must
+be given the chance to realize the life which his youth forecast; and
+that ancient family sacrifice, which has glorified so many homes of
+poverty, was made here in St. Martin, and the boy, possessed with his
+eager passion for knowledge, was started on his course in the Collège
+de la Trinité in Lyons. He soon found himself bursting into a new
+world, the world of classic antiquity, which the Humanists were
+restoring to the youth of that period, and he experienced that
+emancipating leap of soul and thrill of joy which such a world of
+beauty can produce upon a lofty spirit that sees and appreciates it.
+Some time during the Lyons period he came also under a still greater
+and more emancipating influence, the divine and simple Christ of the
+Gospels, whom the most serious of the Humanists had rediscovered, and
+to whom Castellio now dedicated the central loyalty of his soul.
+
+At twenty-five years of age, now a splendid classical scholar, radiant
+with faith and hope and the vision of a new age for humanity which the
+recovered gospel was to bring in, Castellio went to Strasbourg to share
+the task of the Reformers and to put his life into the new movement.
+Calvin, then living in Strasbourg, received the brilliant recruit with
+joy and took him into his own home. When the great Reformer returned
+to Geneva in 1541 to take up the mighty task of his life he summoned
+Castellio to help him, and made him Principal of the College of Geneva,
+which Calvin planned to make one of the {90} foremost seats of Greek
+learning and one of the most illuminating centres for the study of the
+Scriptures. The young scholar's career seemed assured. He had the
+friendship of Calvin, he was head of an important institution of
+learning, the opportunity for creative literary work was opening before
+him, and he was aspiring soon to fulfil the clearest call of his
+life--to become a minister of the new gospel. His first contribution
+to religious literature was his volume of "Sacred Dialogues," a series
+of vivid scenes out of the Old and New Testaments, told in dialogue
+fashion, both in Latin and French.[2] They were to serve a double
+purpose: first, to teach French boys to read Latin, and secondly, to
+form in them a love for the great characters of the Bible and an
+appreciation of its lofty message of life. The stories were really
+good stories, simple enough for children, and yet freighted with a
+depth of meaning which made them suitable for mature minds. Their
+success was extraordinary, and their fine quality was almost
+universally recognized. They went through twenty-eight editions in
+their author's lifetime, and they were translated into many
+languages.[3] His bent toward a religion of a deeply ethical and
+spiritual type already appears in this early work, and here he
+announces a principle that was to rule his later life and was to cost
+him much suffering: "The friend of Truth obeys not the multitude _but
+the Truth_."
+
+At the very time this book was appearing, an opportunity offered for
+testing the mettle of his courage. One of those ever-recurrent plagues
+that harassed former ages, before microbes were discovered, fell upon
+Geneva. The minister, who had volunteered to give spiritual comfort to
+those who were suffering with the plague in the hospital, was stricken
+with the dread disease, and a new volunteer was asked for. The records
+of the city show that Castellio, though not yet ordained, and under no
+obligation to take such risk, offered himself for the {91} hazardous
+service when the ministers of the city declined it. The ordination
+through human hands was, however, never to come to him, and a harder
+test of courage than the plague was before him. In the course of his
+studies he found himself compelled to take the position that the "Song
+of Solomon" was an ancient love poem, and that the traditional
+interpretation of it as a revelation of the true relation between
+Christ and the Church was a strained and unnatural interpretation. He
+also felt that as a scholar he could not with intellectual honesty
+agree with the statement in the Catechism that "Christ descended into
+Hell." Calvin challenged both these positions of Castellio, but his
+opposition to him was clearly far deeper than a difference of opinion
+on these two points. Calvin instinctively felt that the bold and
+independent spirit of this young scholar, his qualities of leadership,
+and his literary genius marked him out as a man who could not long be
+an easy-minded and supple subordinate. A letter which Calvin wrote at
+this time to his friend Viret shows where the real tension lay.
+"Castellio has got it into his head," he writes, "that I want to rule!"
+The great Reformer may not have been conscious yet of such a purpose,
+but there can be no question that Castellio read the signs correctly,
+and he was to be the first, as Buisson has said, to discover that "to
+resist Calvin was in the mind of the latter, to resist the Holy
+Ghost."[4] Calvin successfully opposed his ordination, and made it
+impossible for him to continue in Geneva his work as an honest scholar.
+To remain meant that he must surrender his right of independent
+judgment, he must cease to follow the line of emancipated scholarship,
+he must adjust his conscience to fit the ideas that were coming to be
+counted orthodox in the circle of the Reformed faith. _That_ surrender
+he could no more make than Luther could surrender to the demands of his
+opponents at Worms. He quietly closed up his work in the College of
+Geneva and went into voluntary exile, to seek a sphere of life where he
+might think and speak as {92} he saw the truth and where he could keep
+his conscience a pure virgin.
+
+He settled in Basle, where Erasmus had found a refuge, and where, two
+years before, the exiled and hunted Sebastian Franck, the spiritual
+forerunner of Castellio, had died in peace. For ten years (1545-1555)
+he lived with his large family in pitiable poverty. He read proof for
+the Humanist printer Oporin, he fished with a boat-hook for drift-wood
+along the shores of the Rhine,--"rude labour no doubt," he says, "but
+honest, and I do not blush for having done it,"--and he did whatever
+honest work he could find that would help keep body and soul together.
+Through all these years, every moment of the day that could be saved
+from bread-winning toil, and much of his night-time, went into the
+herculean task to which he had dedicated himself--the complete
+translation of the Bible from its original languages into both Latin
+and French.[5] Being himself one of the common people he always had
+the interests and needs of the common people in view, and he put the
+Bible into current sixteenth-century speech. His French translation
+has the marked characteristics of the Renaissance period. He makes
+patriarchs, prophets, and the persons of the New Testament live again
+in his vivid word-pictures, as the great contemporary painters were
+making them live on their canvases. But that which gave his
+translation its great human merit and popular interest was a serious
+defect in the eyes of the theologians. It was vivid, full of the
+native Oriental colour, true in the main to the original, and strong in
+its appeal to religious imagination, but painfully weak in its support
+of the dogmas and doctrines around which the theological battles of the
+Reformation were centring. Still less were the theologians pleased
+with the Preface of his Latin Bible, dedicated to the boy-king of
+England, Edward VI. Here he boldly insists that the Reformation, {93}
+wherever it spreads, shall champion the principle of _free conscience_,
+and shall wage its battles with spiritual weapons alone. The only
+enemies of our faith, he says, are vices, and vices can be conquered
+only by virtues. The Christ who said if they strike you on one cheek
+turn the other, has called us to the spiritual task of instructing men
+in the truth, and that work can never be put into the hands of an
+executioner! "I address you, O king," he concludes, "not as a prophet
+sent from God, but as a man of the people who abhors quarrels and
+hatred, and who wishes to see religion spread by love rather than by
+fierce controversy, by purity of heart rather than by external methods.
+. . . Read these sacred writings with a pious and religious heart, and
+prepare yourself to reign as a mortal man who must give an account to
+immortal God. I desire that you may have the meekness of Moses, the
+piety of David, and the wisdom of Solomon."[6]
+
+Two years after this appeal to the new Protestantism to make the great
+venture of spreading its truth by love and persuasion, there came from
+Geneva the decisive answer in the burning of Servetus, followed by the
+famous _Defence_ before the world, written mainly by Calvin, of the
+course that had been taken. One month later, a brief Latin work
+appeared from the press with the title, _De haereticis, an sint
+persequendi, etc._ (Magdeburgi, 1554), followed in very short time by a
+French edition (Rouen, 1554). The body of the work contained
+impressive passages in favour of toleration from Church Fathers, from
+Luther, Erasmus, Sebastian Franck, and others, concluding with a
+passage from "Basil Montfort," a name which thinly veils Bastian
+Castellio himself. The Preface was addressed to the Duke of
+Wurtemberg, bore the name of "Martinus Bellius," and was beyond doubt
+written by Castellio, who inspired and directed the entire work, in
+which he was assisted by a very small group of refugees in Basle of
+similar ideas on this subject to his {94} own. This Preface is one of
+the mother documents on freedom of conscience, from which in time came
+a large offspring, and it is, furthermore, an interesting
+interpretation of a type of Christianity then somewhat new in the
+world. Its simplicity, its human appeal, its restrained emotional
+power, its prophetic tone, its sincerity and depth of earnestness mark
+it as a distinct work of genius, almost in the class with Pascal's
+_Provincial Letters_.
+
+"If thou, illustrious Prince, had informed thy subjects that thou wert
+coming to visit them at an unnamed time and had requested them to be
+prepared in white garments to meet thee on thy coming; what wouldst
+thou do, if, on arrival, thou shouldst find that instead of robing
+themselves in white they had occupied themselves in violent debate
+about thy person--some insisting that thou wert in France, others that
+thou wert in Spain; some declaring that thou would come on horseback,
+others that thou would come by chariot; some holding that thou would
+come with great pomp, others that thou would come without train or
+following? And what especially wouldst thou say if they debated not
+only with words but with blows of fist and strokes of sword, and if
+some succeeded in killing and destroying others who differed from them?
+'He will come on horseback.' 'No, he won't; he will come by chariot.'
+'You lie.' 'No, I do not; _you_ are the liar.' 'Take _that_'--a blow
+with the fist. 'You take _that_'--a sword-thrust through the body. O
+Prince, what would you think of such citizens? Christ asked us to put
+on the white robes of a pure and holy life, but what occupies our
+thought? We dispute not only of the way to Christ, but of His relation
+to God the Father, of the Trinity, of predestination, of free will, of
+the nature of God, of angels, of the condition of the soul after
+death,--of a multitude of matters that are not essential for salvation,
+and _matters, in fact, which never can be known until our hearts are
+pure, for they are things which must be spiritually perceived_."
+
+With a striking boldness, but with beautiful simplicity of spirit, he
+describes "an honest follower of Christ"--and {95} it is himself whom
+he is describing--"who believes in God the Father and in His Son Jesus
+Christ, and who wants to do His will, but cannot see that will just as
+others about him see it, in matters of intellectual formulation and in
+matters of external practice." "I cannot," he adds, "do violence to my
+conscience for fear of disobeying Christ. I must be saved or lost by
+my own personal faith, not by that of another. I ask you, whether
+Christ, who forgave those who went astray, and commanded His followers
+to forgive until seventy times seven, Christ who is the final Judge of
+us all, if He were here, would command a person like that to be killed!
+. . . O Christ, Creator and King of the world," he cries out, "dost
+Thou see and approve these things? Hast Thou become a totally
+different person from what Thou wert? When Thou wert on earth, nothing
+could be more gentle and kind, more ready to suffer injuries. Thou
+wert like a sheep dumb before the shearers. Beaten, spit upon, mocked,
+crowned with thorns, crucified between thieves, Thou didst pray for
+those who injured Thee. Hast Thou changed to this? Art Thou now so
+cruel and contrary to Thyself? Dost Thou command that those who do not
+understand Thy ordinances and commandments as those over us require,
+should be drowned, or drawn and quartered, and burned at the stake!"
+
+The Christian world holds this view now. It is a part of the necessary
+air we breathe. But at this crisis in modern history it was
+unforgivably _new_.[7] One man's soul had the vision, one man's entire
+moral fibre throbbed with passion for it, and his rich intellectual
+nature pleaded for it as the only course of reason: "To burn a man is
+not to defend a doctrine, it is to _burn a man_!" But it was a voice
+crying in a wilderness, and from henceforth Castellio was a marked and
+dangerous man in the eyes of all who were opposed to "Bellianism "--as
+the principle of toleration was nicknamed in honour of Martinus
+Bellius--and that included almost all the world. But to the end of his
+life, and in almost every one of his multitudinous {96} tracts he
+continued to announce the principle of religious liberty, and to work
+for a type of Christianity which depended for its conquering power
+solely on its inherent truth and on its moral dynamic.
+
+Calvin, who recognized the hand of Castellio in this powerful defence
+of freedom of thought, called his opponent "a monster full of poison
+and madness," and proceeded to demolish him in a Reply. In his _Contra
+libellum Calvini_, which is an answer to this Reply, Castellio declares
+that Calvin's act in burning Servetus was a bloody act, and that now
+his book is a direct menace to honest, pious people. "I," he adds,
+"who have a horror of blood, propose to examine the book. I do not
+defend Servetus. I have never read his books. Calvin burned them
+together with their author. I do not want to burn Calvin or to burn
+his book. I am only going to _answer_ it." He notes that Calvin
+complains of "novelties and innovations," a strange complaint, he
+thinks, from a man who "has introduced more innovations in ten years
+than the entire Church had introduced in six centuries!" All the
+sects, he reminds the great Reformer, claim to be founded on the Word
+of God. They all believe that their religion is true. Calvin says
+that his is _the only true one_. Each of the others says that his is
+the only true one. Calvin says that they are wrong. He makes himself
+(by what right I do not know) the judge and sovereign arbiter. He
+claims that he has on his side the sure evidence of the Word of God.
+Then why does he write so many books to prove what is evident? The
+truth is surely not evident to those who die denying that it is truth!
+Calvin asks how doctrine is to be guarded if heretics are not to be
+punished. "Doctrine," cries Castellio, "Christ's doctrine means loving
+one's enemies, returning good for evil, having a pure heart and a
+hunger and thirst for righteousness. _You_ may return to Moses if you
+will, but for us others Christ has come."
+
+Love, he constantly insists, is the supreme badge of any true
+Christianity, and the traits of the beatitudes in a person's life are a
+surer evidence that he belongs in {97} Christ's family, than is the
+fact that he holds current opinions on obscure questions of belief.
+"Before God," he writes in his _Defensio_, a work of the year 1562, to
+those who wish to hunt him off the face of the earth, "and from the
+bottom of my heart, I call you to the spirit of love." "By the bowels
+of Christ, I ask and implore you to leave me in peace, to stop
+persecuting me. Let me have the liberty of my faith as you have of
+yours. At the heart of religion I am one with you. It is in reality
+the same religion; only on certain points of interpretation I see
+differently from you. But however we differ in opinion, why cannot we
+love one another?"
+
+He was, however, never to have the peace for which he pleaded, and he
+was never to experience the love and brotherly kindness for which he
+longed. Whole sheaves of fiery arrows were shot at him, and in tract
+after tract he had to see himself called "monster," "wretch," "dog,"
+"pest," "fog-bank," and finally to see himself proclaimed to the world
+as a petty thief "who was supporting himself by stealing wood from his
+neighbours"! With beautiful dignity Castellio tells the story of how
+he fished for public drift-wood on the shores of the Rhine, and how he
+kept his family alive by honest toil, when he was living in pitiable
+poverty, "to which," he says to Calvin, "everybody knows that thy
+attacks had brought me." "I cannot conceive how thou of all persons,
+thou who knowest me, can have believed a tale of theft about me, and in
+any case have told it to others."[9]
+
+Compelled, as he was, to see the Reformation take what seemed to him
+the false course--the course of defending itself by persecution, of
+buttressing itself on election, of elevating, through a new
+scholasticism, doctrine above life,--he turned more and more, as time
+went on, toward interior religion, the cultivation of an inner
+sanctuary, the deepening of the mystical roots of his life, and the
+perfection of a religion of inner and spiritual life. "I have never
+taken holy things lightly," {98} he once wrote, and in the later years
+of what proved to be his brief as well as stormy life, he drew nearer
+to Christ as the Life of his life, and laboured with deepening passion
+to practise and present a religion of veracity, of reality and of
+transforming power. "It is certain," he says in his _Contra libellum
+Calvini_, "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and there is
+furthermore no doubt about the worth of love--love to God and love to
+man. There is no doubt, again, of the worth of forgiveness, of
+patience, of pity, of kindness, and of obedience to duty. Why leave
+these sure things and quarrel over inscrutable mysteries?"
+
+This point that the things which are essential to salvation are clear
+and luminous is a frequently occurring one in his writings.
+Impenetrable mysteries do not interest him, and he declares with
+reiteration that controversies and divisions are occasioned mainly by
+the proclamation of dogma on these inscrutable things. In a remarkable
+work, which remains still in manuscript--his _De arte dubitandi et
+confidendi, sciendi et ignorandi_,--he pleads for a religion that fits
+the facts of life and for the use of intelligence even in these lofty
+matters of spiritual experience where most astonishing miracles occur.
+He returns, in this writing, to his old position that the truths which
+concern salvation are clear and appeal powerfully to human reason.
+"There are, I know," he says, "persons who insist that we should
+believe even against reason. It is, however, the worst of all errors,
+and it is laid upon me to fight it. I may not be able to exterminate
+the monster, but I hope to give it such a blow that it will know that
+it has been hit. Let no one think that he is doing wrong in using his
+mental faculties. It is our proper way of arriving at the truth."[9]
+
+Without entering in detail into the bottomless controversy of those
+times, let us endeavour to get an adequate view of Castellio's type of
+Christianity, and then we shall be able to form an estimate of the man
+who in the {99} strong power of his faith stood almost alone as the
+great battle of words raged around him.[10]
+
+Those on the other side of the controversy began always from the
+opposite end of the spiritual universe to his point of departure.
+_They_ were fascinated with the mysteries of the Eternal Will, and used
+all the keys of their logic to unlock the mysteries of foreknowledge,
+predestination, and grace which has wrought the miracle of salvation
+for the elect. Castellio, on the other hand, in true modern fashion,
+starts always with the concrete, the near and the known, to work upward
+to the nature of the unknown. We must, he says, try to discover the
+Divine attributes and the Divine Character by first finding out what
+our own deepest nature implies. If God is to speak to us it must be in
+terms of our nature. Before undertaking to fathom with the plummet of
+logic the unsoundable mystery of foreknowledge, let us see what we can
+know through a return to the real nature of man as he is, and
+especially to the real nature of the new Adam who is Christ, the Son of
+God. Man, as both Scripture and his own inner self testify, is made
+_in the image of God_, is dowered with freedom to determine his own
+destiny, may go upward into light, or downward into darkness. Man thus
+made, when put to trial, _failed_, followed lower instincts instead of
+higher, and experienced the awful penalty of sin, namely its cumulative
+power, the tendency of sin to beget sin, and to make higher choices
+ever more difficult. Christ, however, the new Adam, has _succeeded_.
+He has completely revealed the way of obedience, the way in which
+spirit conquers flesh. He is the new kind of Person who lives from
+above and who exhibits the cumulative power of goodness. His victory,
+which was won by His own free choice, inspires all men who see it with
+faith and hope in man's spiritual possibilities. Castellio declines to
+discuss Christ's metaphysical nature, except in so far as His life has
+revealed {100} it to us. He sees in Him the Heart and Character of
+God, the certainty of Divine love and forgiveness, and the way of life
+for all who desire to be spiritually saved, which means, for him, the
+formation of a new inward self, a purified nature, a morally
+transformed man, a will which no longer loves or wills sin. "Christ
+alone," he says, "can heal the malady of the soul, but He can heal it."
+"There is," he says again, "no other way of salvation for any man than
+the way of self-denial. He must put off his old man and put on
+Christ--however much blood and sweat the struggle may cost." Man, he
+insists, is always wrong when he represents God as angry. Christ
+showed that God needed no appeasing, but rather that man needed to be
+brought back to God by the drawing of Love, and be reconciled to Him.
+
+Faith--which for every prophet of human redemption is the key that
+unlocks all doors for the soul--is for Castellio the supreme moral
+force by which man turns God's revelations of Himself into spiritual
+victories and into personal conquests of character. It is never
+something forensic, something magical. It is, as little, mere belief
+of historical facts and events. It is, on the contrary, a moral power
+that moves mountains of difficulty, works miracles of transformation,
+and enables the person who has it to participate in the life of God.
+It is a passionate leap ("élan") of the soul of the creature toward the
+Creator; it is a way of renewing strength in Him and of becoming a
+participator in His divine nature. It is a return of the soul to its
+source. It is a _persistent will_, which multiplies one's strength a
+hundredfold, makes Pentecost possible again, and enables us to achieve
+the goal which the vision of our heart sees. The only obstacle to this
+all-conquering faith is selfishness, the only mortal enemy is
+self-will.[11]
+
+There have been, Castellio holds, progressive stages in the Divine
+education of the race, and in man's apprehension of God. The mark of
+advance is always found in the progress from law and letter to spirit,
+and from {101} outward practices and ceremonies to inward experience.
+Divine revelations can always be taken at different levels. They can
+be seen in a literal, pictorial, temporal way, or they can be read
+deeper--by those who are purified by faith and love, and made partakers
+of the self-giving Life of God--as eternal and spiritual realities.
+The written word of God is the garment of the Divine Thought which is
+the real Word of God. It takes more than eyes of flesh to see through
+the temporal garment to the inner Life and Spirit beneath. Only the
+person who has in himself the illumination of the same Spirit that gave
+the original revelation can see through the garment of the letter to
+the eternal message, the ever-living Word hidden within.[12] In the
+Christianity of the full-grown spiritual man, sacraments and everything
+external must be used only as pictorial helps and symbolic suggestions
+for the furtherance of spiritual life. Within us, as direct offspring
+of God, as image of God, there is a Divine Reason, which existed before
+books, before rites, before the foundation of the world, and will exist
+after books and rites have vanished, and the world has gone to wreck.
+It can no more be abolished than God Himself can be. It was by this
+that Jesus Christ, the Son of God--called, in fact, Logos of God--lived
+and taught us how to live. It was in the Light of this that He
+transcended books and rites and declared, without quoting text, "God is
+Spirit and thou shalt worship God in spirit and in truth." This Reason
+is in all ages the right investigator and interpreter of Truth, even
+though time changes outward things and written texts grow corrupt.[13]
+
+As his life was drawing to a close, he sent forth anonymously another
+powerful prophet-call for the complete liberation of mind and
+conscience. Ten years before the awful deeds of St. Bartholomew's Day,
+he issued his little French book with the title _Conseil à la France
+désolée_--Counsel {102} to France in her Distress. It is a calm and
+penetrating diagnosis of the evils which are destroying the life of
+France and working her desolation. It throbs with noble patriotism and
+is full of real prophetic insight, though he spoke to deaf ears and
+wrote for blind eyes. The woes of France--her torn and distracted
+condition--are mainly due to the blind and foolish method of attempting
+to force intelligent men to accept a form of religion which in their
+hearts they do not believe is true. There can be no united people,
+strong and happy, until the blunder of compelling conscience entirely
+ceases. He pleads in tenderness and love with both religious parties,
+Catholics and Evangelicals, to leave the outgrown legalism of Moses and
+go to the Gospels for a religion which leads into truth and freedom.
+"O France, France," he cries--as formerly a greater One had said, "O
+Jerusalem, Jerusalem"--"my counsel is that thou cease to compel men's
+consciences, that thou cease to kill and to persecute, that thou grant
+to men who believe in Jesus Christ the privilege of serving God
+according to their own innermost faith and not according to some one
+else's faith. And you, that are private people, do not be so ready to
+follow those who lead you astray and push you to take up arms and kill
+your brothers. And Thou, O Lord our Saviour, wilt Thou give to us all
+grace to awake and come to our senses before it is forever too late.
+I, at least, have now done my duty and spoken my word of truth." St.
+Bartholomew's Day was the answer to this searching appeal, and the
+land, deaf to the call of its prophet, was to become more "desolate"
+still.
+
+Just as the storm of persecution that had been gathering around him for
+years was about to burst pitilessly upon him in 1563, he quietly died,
+worn out in body, and "passed to where beyond these voices there is
+peace." His students in the University of Basle, where, in spite of
+the opposition from Geneva, he had been Professor of Greek for ten
+years, bore his coffin in honour on their shoulders to his grave, and
+his little band of disciples devoted themselves to spreading, in
+Holland and wherever {103} they could find soil for it, the precious
+seed of his truth, which had in later years a very wide harvest.[14]
+
+He was not a theologian of the Reformation type. He did not think the
+thoughts nor speak the dialect of his contemporaries. They need not be
+blamed for thanking God at his death nor for seeing in him an
+arch-enemy of their work. They were honestly working for one goal, and
+he was as honestly living by the light of a far different ideal. The
+spiritual discipline of the modern world was to come through their
+laborious systems, but he, anticipating the results of the travail and
+the slow spiral progress, and seeing in clear vision the triumph of
+man's liberated spirit, with exuberant optimism believed that the
+religion of the Spirit could be had for the taking--and he stretched
+out his hand for it!
+
+"I am," he cried out beneath the bludgeons, "a poor little man, more
+than simple, humble and peaceable, with no desire for glory, only
+affirming what in my heart I believe; why cannot I live and say my
+honest word and have your love?" The time was not ready for him, but
+he did his day's work with loyalty, sincerity, and bravery, and seen in
+perspective is worthy to be honoured as a hero and a saint.[15]
+
+
+
+[1] F. Buisson, _Sébastien Castellion, sa vie et son oeuvre_ (Paris,
+1892), 2 vols.; Charles Jarrin, _Deux Oubliés_ (Bourg, 1889); Émile
+Broussoux, Sébastien Castellion, sa vie, ses oeuvres, et sa théologie
+(Strasbourg, 1867); A. Schweizer, _Die protestantischen Centraldogmen_
+(Zürich, 1854), pp. 311-373.
+
+[2] _Dialogi sacri, latino-gallici, ad linguas moresque puerorum
+formandos_. Liber primus. Genève, 1543.
+
+[3] There were at least three English translations--1610, 1715, and
+1743.
+
+[4] Buisson, _op. cit._ i. p. 205.
+
+[5] His Latin Bible appeared in 1551 and the French Bible in 1555.
+During this period he also brought out a new edition of his "Sacred
+Dialogues," an edition of Xenophon, a translation of the Sibylline
+Oracles, a Latin poem on Jonah, and a Greek poem on John the Baptist,
+the Forerunner.
+
+[6] Calvin, in striking contrast, had written to the same boy-king in
+1548: "Under the cover of the Gospel, foolish people would throw
+everything into confusion. Others cling to the superstitions of the
+Antichrist at Rome. _They all deserve to be repressed by the sword
+which is committed to you_."
+
+[7] Beza called it "diabolical doctrine."
+
+[8] He selected as the title of this book the opprobrious word which
+Calvin had used in the charge--_Harpago_, _i.e._ "Boat-hook."
+
+[9] This MS. is in the Bibliothèque de l'Église des Remontrants in
+Rotterdam. I have used only the extracts given from it in Buisson and
+Jarrin.
+
+[10] The main lines of Castellio's Christianity can be found in his
+_Dialogi quatuor_: (i.) De praedestinatione, (ii.) De electione, (iii.)
+De libero arbitrio, (iv.) De fide (Gouda, 1613) and in his _Scripta
+selecta_. (1596).
+
+[11] For Faith see _De fide and De arts dub._ ii. 212.
+
+[12] This idea comes out in his Preface to the Bible, in his _Moses
+latinus_, and in his manuscript work, _De arte dubitandi_.
+
+[13] _De arte dubitandi_.
+
+[14] Under the nom-de-plume of John Theophilus, Castellio translated
+the _Theologia Germanica_ into Latin, and published it with an
+Introduction. His translation carried this "golden book" of mystical
+religion into very wide circulation, and became a powerful influence,
+especially in England, as we shall see, in reproducing a similar type
+of religious thought.
+
+The Quaker William Caton, who spent the latter part of his life in
+Holland, cites Castellio seven times in his Tract, _The Testimony of a
+Cloud of Witnesses, who in their Generation have testified against that
+horrible Evil of Forcing of Conscience and Persecution about Matters of
+Religion_ (1662), and he seems very familiar with his writings. He
+also cites Schwenckfeld and Franck on pp. 37 and 17 respectively.
+
+[15] Castellio's plea for toleration, _Traité des Hérétiques à savoir,
+si on les doit persécuter_ (Rouen, 1554), has just been reissued in
+attractive form in Geneva, edited by Olivet and Choisy.
+
+
+
+
+{104}
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+COORNHERT AND THE COLLEGIANTS--A MOVEMENT
+ FOR SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HOLLAND
+
+The struggle for political liberty in the Netherlands forms one of the
+most dramatic and impressive chapters in modern history, but the story of
+the long struggle in these same Provinces for the right to believe and to
+think according to the dictates of conscience is hardly less dramatic and
+impressive. Everybody knows that during the early years of the
+seventeenth century Holland was the one country in Europe which furnished
+cities of refuge for the persecuted and hunted exponents of unpopular
+faiths, and that the little band of Pilgrims who brought their precious
+seed to the new world had first preserved and nurtured it in a safe
+asylum among the Dutch; but the slow spiritual travail that won this soul
+freedom, and the brave work of spreading, on that soil, a religion of
+personal insight and individual experience are not so well known.[1] The
+growth and development of this great movement, with its numerous
+ramifications and differentiations, obviously cannot be told here, but
+one or two specimen lines of the movement will be briefly studied for the
+light they throw upon this general type of religion under consideration,
+and for their specific influence {105} upon corresponding spiritual
+movements in England and America.
+
+The silent propagation and germination of religious ideas in lands far
+away from their original habitat, their sudden appearance in a new spot
+like an outbreak of contagion, are always mysterious and fascinating
+subjects of research. Some chance talk with a disciple plants the seed,
+or some stray book comes to the hand of a baffled seeker at the moment
+when his soul is in a suggestible state, and lo! a new vision is created
+and a new apostle of the movement is prepared, often so inwardly and
+mysteriously that to himself he seems to be "an apostle not of men nor by
+man." One of the earliest Dutch exponents and interpreters of this type
+of spiritual religion which we have been studying as a by-product of the
+Reformation in Germany, and one who became an apostle of it because at a
+critical period of his life the seeds of it had fallen into his awakened
+mind, was Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert.[2]
+
+He was born in Amsterdam in 1522. He perfected himself as expert in
+copper-plate engraving and etching, and intended to pursue a quiet career
+in his adopted city of Haarlem, but he found himself disturbed with
+"intimations clear of wider scope." A keen desire to go back to the
+original sources of religious truth and to read the New Testament and the
+Fathers in their own tongue induced him to learn Greek and Latin after he
+was thirty years of age. He possessed excellent gifts and natural
+abilities of mind, and he soon had an enviable reputation for skill and
+learning. Like Sebastian Franck, whom he resembled in many points, he
+was profoundly interested in history and in the stages of man's
+historical development, and, like the former, he undertook the
+translation of great masterpieces which expressed the ideas that
+peculiarly suited his own temper of mind, such as Boethius' _Consolation
+of Philosophy_; Cicero, _On Duties_; and Erasmus' _Paraphrases of the New
+Testament_. He was throughout {106} his life deeply influenced by
+Erasmus, and his writings show everywhere a very strong humanistic
+colouring. It was no accident that one of his most important literary
+works was on Ethics ("Sittenkunst"), for his primary interest centred in
+man and in the art of living well ("Die Kunst wohl zu leben").[3]
+
+As he developed into independent manhood, he threw himself with great
+zeal into the cause of political freedom for the city of Haarlem, on
+account of which he suffered a severe imprisonment in the Hague in 1560,
+and at a later time was compelled to flee into temporary exile. He
+attracted the attention of William of Orange, who discovered his
+abilities and made him Secretary to the States-General in 1572, prized
+him highly for his character and abilities, commissioned him to write
+important state papers, and intrusted very weighty affairs to him.
+
+In his youth he had been an extensive traveller and had seen with his own
+eyes the methods which the Spanish Inquisition employed to compel
+uniformity of faith and, with his whole moral being revolting from these
+unspiritual methods, he dedicated himself to the cause of liberty of
+religious thought, and for this he wrote and spoke and wrought with a
+fearlessness and bravery not often surpassed.[4] With this passion of
+his for intellectual and spiritual freedom was joined a deeply grounded
+disapproval of the fundamental ideas of Calvinism, as he found it
+expounded by the preachers and theologians of the Reformed Church in
+Holland. As a Humanist, he was convinced of man's freedom of will, and
+he was equally convinced that however man had been marred by a _fall_
+from his highest possibilities, he was still possessed of native gifts
+and graces, and bore deep within himself an unlost central being, which
+in all his wanderings joined him indissolubly to God. On the great
+theological {107} issues of the day he "disputed," with penetrating
+insight, against the leading theologians of the Netherlands, and he
+always proved to be a formidable antagonist who could not be put down or
+kept refuted. Jacobus Arminius, at the turning of his career, was
+selected by the Consistory to make once for all a refutation of
+Coornhert's dangerous writings. He, however, became so impressed, as he
+studied the works which he was to refute, that he shifted his own
+fundamental points of belief, accepted many of Coornhert's views, and
+became himself a greater "heretic" and a more dangerous opponent of
+Calvinism than the man whom he was chosen to annihilate.[5]
+
+Sometime in his religious development--it is impossible to settle
+precisely when or where--he read the writings of the spiritual Reformers,
+and received from them formative influences which turned him powerfully
+to the cultivation of inward religion for his own soul and to the
+expression and interpretation of a universal Christianity--a Christianity
+of the inward Word and of an invisible Church. The lines of similarity
+between many of his views and those of Franck are so marked that no one
+can doubt that he read the books and meditated upon the bold teachings of
+this solitary apostle of the invisible Church. In fact he frequently
+mentions Franck by name in his writings and quotes his views. It is
+certain, too, that he admired, loved, and translated the writings of
+Sebastian Castellio, the French Humanist, first an admirer and then
+opponent of Calvin, pioneer defender of freedom of thought, and exponent
+of inward and spiritual religion of the type of the German Spiritual
+Reformers,[6] and it is unmistakable that we have, in this Dutch
+self-taught scholar, a virile interpreter of this same type of
+Christianity, marked with his own peculiar variation, and penetrated with
+the living convictions of his personal faith and first-hand experience.
+While putting emphasis on personal experience and on inward insight he
+nevertheless, like Franck, was suspicious {108} and wary of mystical
+"enthusiasm" and of "private openings." He criticized the "revelations"
+of David Joris and Henry Nicholas, and in place of their caprice he
+endeavoured to find the way to a religion grounded in the nature of
+things and of universal value. He was deeply read in the Mystics and
+constantly used their terminology, but he often gave new meaning to their
+words and pursued quite a different goal from that which absorbs the true
+mystic.
+
+Coornhert makes a sharp distinction between lower knowledge and higher
+knowledge--knowledge proper. Lower knowledge does not get beyond images
+and copies of true reality. It is sufficient for man's practical
+guidance in the affairs of this world of space and time, but it becomes
+only a "dead knowledge" when it is applied to matters of eternal moment.
+The higher knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge won through direct
+experience and practice of the will. This higher knowledge is possible
+for man because through Reason he partakes of the Word of God which is
+Reason itself revealed and uttered, and therefore he may know God and
+know of his own salvation with a certainty that far transcends the lower
+knowledge which he possesses of external things, or of mere historical
+happenings.[7]
+
+This Word of God is eternal, and is the source of all spiritual light and
+truth that have come to the race in all ages. Through it the patriarchs
+discovered how to live well, even in a world of sin, and through this
+same Word the prophets saw the line of march for their people, and by the
+power and inspiration of this Word the written word was given as a
+temporary guidance, as a pedagogical help, as a lantern on men's paths,
+until the morning Star, Jesus Christ, the living Word, should rise and
+shine in men's hearts. The living Word is, thus, vastly different from
+the written word. One is essence, the other only image or shadow; one is
+eternal, the other is temporal; one is uncreated, the other is made; one
+is the Light itself, the other is the lantern through which the {109}
+Light shines; one is Life itself, the other is only the witness of this
+Life--the finger which points toward it.[8]
+
+True religion is distinguished from all false or lower forms of religion
+in this, that true religion is always inward and spiritual, is directly
+initiated within the soul, is independent of form and letter, is
+concerned solely with the eternal and invisible, and verifies itself by
+producing within man a nature like that of God as He is seen in Christ.
+The "law" of true religion is a new and divinely formed disposition
+toward goodness--a law written in the heart; its temple is not of stone
+or wood, but is a living and spiritual temple, its worship consists
+entirely of spiritual activities, _i.e._ the offering of genuine praise
+from appreciative hearts, the sacrifice of the self to God, and the
+partaking of divine food and drink through living communion with Christ
+the Life. Religion, of this true and saving sort, never comes through
+hearsay knowledge, or along the channels of tradition, or by a head
+knowledge of texts of the written word. It comes only with inward
+experience of the Word of God, and it grows and deepens as the will of
+man lives by the Will of God, and as the kingdom of God comes, not in
+some far-away Jerusalem, or in some remote realm above the sky, but _in a
+man's own heart_.
+
+This true and saving religion is begun, and completed, within the soul by
+a process which Coornhert names by the great historic word, _faith_.
+Faith is the soul's free assent to the living Word of God as, through
+amazing grace, it offers itself to man in the desperate straits of his
+life. Man is so made that he perpetually seeks some desired satisfaction
+and, in his restless search for this unattained good, he tries many false
+and specious trails, is endlessly baffled and deceived, and finally
+discovers, if he is fortunate enough to come to himself, that he is like
+a shipwrecked man on a single plank with sea everywhere about him and no
+haven in sight. In this strait the Light, which he has not noted before,
+breaks in on his darkness, and the way of Grace is presented to him in
+{110} Christ. He feels himself called to a strange way of finding his
+desired satisfaction--no longer the way of flesh and worldly wisdom, but
+the way of the cross, of suffering, and of sacrifice. Reason,
+enlightened by the Word of God, prompts him to assent; the Scriptures,
+laden with promises, bear their affirmative testimony, and thus he makes
+his venture of faith, takes the risk of the voluntary sacrifice of his
+own pleasant desires, his preference for ways of ease and comfort, his
+self-will, and makes the bold experiment of trusting the Word of God, as
+it reveals itself to him, and of following Christ. He finds that his
+faith verifies itself at every step, his experiment carries him on into
+an experience, his venture brings him to the reality he is seeking.
+Every stage of this pragmatic faith, which in a word is _obedience to the
+Light_, makes the fact and the meaning of sin clearer, at the same time
+makes the knowledge of God more real and the nature of goodness more
+plain, and it leads away from a superstition of fear to a religion of
+love and of joy.[9]
+
+All other religions, besides this true and inward religion of the spirit,
+called by Coornhert "outer or external religions," are considered of
+value only as preparatory stages toward the one true religion which
+establishes the kingdom of God in man's heart. With this fundamental
+view, he quite naturally regards all external forms and ceremonies as
+temporary, and he holds that all of them, even the highest of them, are
+nothing else than visible signs, figures, shadows, symbols, pointing to
+invisible, spiritual, eternal realities, which in their nature are far
+different from the signs and symbols. The signs and symbols can in no
+way effect salvation; they can at best only suggest to the quickened soul
+the true realities, to know which is salvation. The real and availing
+circumcision, as the spiritual prophets and apostles always knew, was a
+circumcision of the heart, and not of the flesh, and so, too, the true
+and availing baptism is a baptism into the life, death, and resurrection
+of Christ, {111} and cleanses the soul of its sins and produces "a good
+conscience toward God"--the old sinful man is buried and a new and
+Christlike man is raised. The same transforming effects attach to the
+real communion in which the finite human spirit feeds upon its true
+divine food and drink--the Life of Christ given for us. The real Sabbath
+is not a sacred day, kept in a ceremonial and legal sense, but rather an
+inward quiet, a prevailing peace of soul, a rest in the life of God from
+stress and strain and passion. The Church has been pitiably torn and
+mutilated by disputes over the genuine form of administering these outer
+ceremonies, supposing them to be in themselves sacraments of life. As
+soon as they are recognized to be what they really are, only temporary
+signs and symbols, then the main emphasis can be put where it properly
+belongs, and where Christ himself always put it, on love and on the
+practice of love. No ceremony, even though instituted by Christ himself
+and practised with absolute correctness, can make a bad heart good, but
+love--love which suffers long and is kind--flows only from a renewed and
+transformed heart which already partakes of the same nature as that which
+was incarnate in Christ. Imprisonment, isolation, exile, excommunication
+may deprive one of the outward ceremonies, but neither death nor life,
+nor any outward circumstance in the universe, need separate the soul from
+the love of God in Christ, or deprive it of the privilege of loving![10]
+
+Coornhert criticizes the great Reformers for having put far too weighty
+emphasis on externals, and he especially criticizes Calvin for having
+given undue prominence to "pure doctrine" and to the right use of
+sacraments. It is impossible, he insists, to establish authoritatively
+from Scripture this so-called "pure doctrine." In fact, many parts of
+Scripture are against the doctrine of predestination, and Scripture is
+always against the doctrine of perseverance in sin. All speculations
+about the Trinity, or about the dual nature of Christ, transcend our
+knowledge and should be rejected. Furthermore {112} there is no
+authoritative Scripture or revelation for the new forms of the sacrament
+that have been introduced by the Reformers and are being made essential
+to salvation. The true Reformation, he thinks, should be devoted to the
+construction of the invisible Church, which has existed in all ages of
+the world, but which is kept from realizing its full scope and power
+because the attention of men is too greatly absorbed with signs and
+symbols and outward things.[11]
+
+For similar reasons he disapproved of the Anabaptists, even in their
+purified form as worked out under the guidance of Menno Simons. They
+still held, as did the reformed churches, that the true Church is a
+visible church which every one to be a Christian must join, though this
+true Church, as they conceive it, consists only of "saints." They claim
+the authoritative right to ban all persons who, according to their
+opinion, are not "saints." This right Coornhert denies. He further
+disapproves of their literal interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount,
+and of the obstacles which they put in the way of the free exercise of
+prophecy on the part of the members of the community. He insists that a
+person may be a Christian and yet belong to no visible church, if
+meantime he is a true member of the invisible Communion. He himself
+refrained from taking the communion supper, either with Papists,
+Lutherans, or Calvinists, because he said they all set the sacrament
+above the real characteristic mark of Christian membership, which is
+love, and because there is no divine command, with distinct and
+unambiguous authority, for the efficacious celebration of the sacrament,
+which in any case could not be rightly kept so long as sectarian
+hostility and lack of love prevail in the contending visible
+churches.[12] Under these circumstances, Coornhert, who was intensely
+concerned for the sincere, simple-minded souls, perplexed by the maze of
+varying sects and parties, refused to found a new sect or to head a new
+schismatic movement. On behalf of those who could not {113} conform, he
+pleaded for freedom of conscience and for the right to live in the world
+undisturbed as members of the invisible Church, using or omitting outward
+ceremonies as conscience might direct, waiting meantime and seeking in
+quiet faith for the coming of new and divinely commissioned apostles who
+would _really reform_ the apostate Churches, unite all divided sects, and
+gather in the world a true Church of Christ.[13]
+
+Meantime, while waiting for this true apostolic Church to appear,
+Coornhert approved of the formation of an _interim-Church_. This Church,
+according to his programme, would accept as truth, and as true practice,
+anything plainly and clearly taught in the canonical Scripture, but he
+advised against using glosses and commentaries made by men, since that is
+to turn from the sun to the stars and from the spring to the cistern.
+This interim-Church was to have no authoritative teachers or preachers.
+In place of official ministry, the members were to edify one another in
+Christian love, with the reservation that they would welcome further
+illumination out of the Scriptures wherever they have made a mistake or
+gone wrong. All persons who confess God as Father, and Jesus Christ as
+sent by God, and who in the power of faith abstain from sins, may belong
+to this interim-Church. For the sake of those who are still weak and
+spiritually immature, he allowed the use of ceremonies in the
+interim-Church, but all ceremonies are held as having no essential
+function for salvation, and the believer is at liberty to make use of
+them or to abstain from using them as he prefers.[14]
+
+
+
+II
+
+Coornhert's proposed interim-Church, which at best was conceived as only
+a temporary substitute for the true apostolic Church, for which every
+spiritual Christian is a "waiter" or "seeker," found actual embodiment in
+a very interesting movement of the early seventeenth {114} century, known
+in Dutch history as the "Collegiants" or "Rynsburgers," which we shall
+now proceed to study.[15] The Collegiants had their origin in one of the
+stormiest of the many theological controversies which swept over the
+Netherlands in this critical period of religious history, a controversy
+arising over the views taught by Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609). The Dutch
+Protestants who accepted his views presented a "Remonstrance" to the
+States of Holland and Friesland in 1610, in which they formulated their
+departure from strict, orthodox Calvinism. The "Remonstrance" contained
+five main Articles: (1) that the divine decrees of predestination are
+conditioned and not absolute; (2) that the atonement is in intention
+universal; (3) that a man cannot of himself do anything good without
+regeneration; (4) that though the Grace of God is a necessary condition
+of human effort it does not act irresistibly in man; (5) that believers
+are able to resist sin, but are not beyond the possibility of falling
+from Grace. The opponents to these views, often called "Gomarists,"
+issued a counter-blast from which they received the name
+"counter-Remonstrants." The States-General passed an edict tolerating
+both parties and forbidding further dispute, but the conflict of views
+would not down. It spread like a prairie fire, became complicated with
+political issues, had its martyrdoms, and produced far-reaching results
+and consequences.[16] At the Synod of Dort, on April 24, 1619, the
+Remonstrants were declared guilty of falsifying religion and of
+destroying the unity of the Church, and were deposed from all their
+ecclesiastical and academic offices and positions. Two hundred were
+deposed from the ministerial office for life, and one hundred were
+banished.
+
+Among the number of deposed ministers was Christian {115} Sopingius, the
+pastor of Warmund, and the "Remonstrants," who formed an important part
+of his congregation, were left without the opportunity of hearing any
+ministry of which they approved. In this strait Giesbert Van der Kodde,
+an Elder in the Warmund church, took a bold step. He was the son of a
+prosperous farmer who had given his children, John, William, Adrian, and
+Giesbert, an unusually extended education. All the sons learned Latin,
+Italian, French, and English, while William (known in the scholarly world
+as Gulielmus Coddaeus) was a Hebrew and Oriental scholar of note, and at
+the age of twenty-six was made Professor of Hebrew in the University of
+Leyden. They owed the course of their religious development and their
+particular bent of mind to the writings of men like Sebastian Castellio;
+Coornhert, whose views have been given above; and Jacobus Acontius, the
+Italian humanist, who laid down the principles that no majority can make
+a binding law in matters of faith, that only God's Spirit in the hearts
+of men can certify what is the truth, and that "Confessions of Faith"
+have been the ruinous source of endless divisions in the Church. Deeply
+imbued with the ideas of these spiritual reformers, and in sympathy as
+they were with many of the views and practices of the Mennonites about
+them, the Van der Kodde brothers decided, under the leadership of the
+boldest and most conscientious of them, Giesbert, to come together
+without any minister and hold a meeting of a free congregational type.
+At first the meeting was probably held in Giesbert's house, and consisted
+of readings from the Scripture, prayers, and the public utterance of
+messages of edification by those who formed the group. A little later a
+"Remonstrant" preacher was sent to care for the orphaned Church in
+Warmund, but Giesbert had become satisfied with the new type of meeting,
+and now expressed himself emphatically against listening to preachers who
+lived without working and at the expense of the community, and who
+hindered the free exercise of "prophecy." Many of the members of the
+Church did not share these views, but {116} much preferred to have the
+comfort of a minister, so that a "separation" occurred, and Giesbert,
+with his brothers and fellow-believers, rented a house and perfected
+their new type of congregational meeting. They soon moved their meeting
+(called a "Collegium," _i.e._ gathering) to the neighbouring town of
+Rynsburg, where it received additions to its adherents, largely drawn
+from the Mennonites, many of whose ideas were strongly impressed upon the
+little "Society,"--for example, opposition to taking oaths, refusal to
+fight, or even to take measures of self-defence, and rejection of the
+right of magistrates and other political officers to inflict punishment.
+They also adopted, as the Mennonites did, the Sermon on the Mount as the
+basis of their ethical standard, which they applied with literalness and
+rigour. They insisted on simplicity of life, the denial of "worldly"
+occupations or professions, plainness of garb, rejection of the world's
+etiquette, absence of titles in addressing persons, and equality of men
+and women, even in public ministry. They introduced the practice of
+immersion ("Dompeldoop") as a mark of initiation into the Society, but
+they considered true Christian baptism to be with the Spirit and not with
+water, and they allowed their members a large range of liberty in the use
+or disuse of water baptism, as well as in the form of receiving it. They
+rejected the Supper as an ecclesiastical ceremony, but they highly prized
+it as an occasion of fellowship and of group worship. Every person might
+share the supper with them if he confessed his faith in Christ and were
+not living in unrepented sin, though they were inclined to exclude
+persons occupying offices which involved the violation of the Sermon on
+the Mount. The one essential mark of fellowship was brother-love, which
+was not to be confined to the narrow limits of the Society, but that
+person was regarded the truest disciple of Christ who practised the
+neighbour-spirit in the broadest and most effective manner. They cared
+for their own sick and poor, and they had a wide sympathy for all
+oppressed and suffering people. They pushed to the farthest limit {117}
+their opposition to war and all other forms of destroying human life.
+
+From the first there was a decided strain of "Enthusiasm" evident in the
+movement, and a pronounced tendency to encourage a ministry of "prophetic
+openings." One of the original members, John Van der Kodde, declared
+that he should fear the loss of his salvation if he failed in a meeting
+to give utterance to the Word of God revealed to him in his inner being.
+They encouraged the custom of silent waiting in their gatherings as a
+preparation for "openings." They proved from the fourteenth chapter of 1
+Corinthians that free prophecy is the highest form of ministry, and they
+held that God by His grace could pour out His Spirit upon men in the
+seventeenth century as well as in the days of the Apostles and
+Evangelists, who did their mighty work, not as Church officials, but as
+recipients of gifts from God. They felt that prayer accompanied by
+_tears_ was true prayer, "moved" from above. They, however, were persons
+of scholarship and refinement, and not tumultuous or strongly emotional,
+but, on the contrary, they highly valued dignity and propriety of
+behaviour.
+
+As the movement spread, _Collegia_, or societies, were formed in Leyden,
+Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and in other localities, essentially like the
+mother-society in Rynsburg, but with characteristic variations and with
+particular lines of local developments. Once every year they had a large
+yearly meeting in Rynsburg, to which the scattered members came from all
+parts of Holland where there were societies. As time went on, two marked
+lines of differentiation appeared in the movement, due to the trend of
+the influence of important leaders, one group emphasizing especially the
+_seeker-attitude_, and the other group receiving its formative influence
+from Cartesian philosophy. Daniel Van Breen, Adam Boreel, and Michael
+Comans were the early leaders and pillars of the Amsterdam _Collegium_,
+which was begun in 1645, and some years later the group was greatly
+strengthened by the "convincement" of the young Mennonite doctor and
+{118} teacher, Galenus Abrahams, who soon became the most prominent
+Collegiant leader in Holland.
+
+Adam Boreel gave the movement a strong impetus and did much toward
+putting the teachings of Coornhert into practice. He was born at
+Middleburg in 1603. He was a man of good scholarship, being especially
+learned in Hebrew, and he was thoroughly impregnated with the views of
+the spiritualistic Humanists of the former century, Franck, Castellio,
+and Coornhert, as well as with the views of the mystics, and he was
+himself a champion of individual religious freedom. He held that the
+visible Church since the apostolic age has been astray and apostate, that
+Confessions of faith, Church officers, and sacraments are without
+"authority," that the uncontaminated teaching of the Holy Scripture is
+the only safe norm of faith, and that until a true apostolic Church is
+again established in the world by divine commission, each faithful,
+believing Christian should maintain meantime the worship of God in his
+own way and wait in faith for a fuller revelation.[17] His mystical
+piety appears strongly in his hymns, which are preserved in his complete
+works. One of these hymns of Boreel has been very freely translated into
+English "by a Lover of the Life of our Lord Jesus," probably Henry More,
+the Platonist. More says that he finds the hymn "running much upon the
+mortification of our own wills and of our union and communion with God,"
+and he loves it as a deep expression of his own faith that "no man can
+really adhere to Christ, and unwaveringly, but by union to Him by His
+Spirit." I give a few extracts from More's free Translation:
+
+ 1. O Heavenly Light! my spirit to Thee draw,
+ With powerful touch my senses smite,
+ Thine arrows of Love into me throw
+ With flaming dart
+ Deep wound my heart,
+ And wounded seize for ever, as thy right.
+
+{119}
+
+ 3. Do thou my faculties all captivate
+ Unto thyself with strongest tye;
+ My will entirely regulate:
+ Make me thy slave,
+ Nought else I crave
+ For this I know is perfect Liberty.
+
+ 5. O endless good!
+ Break like a flood
+ Into my soul, and water my dry earth,
+
+ 6. That by this mighty power I being reft
+ Of everything that is not One,
+ To Thee alone I may be left
+ By a firm will
+ Fixt to Thee still
+ And inwardly united into one.
+
+ 11. So that at last, I being quite released
+ From this strait-laced Egoity
+ My soul will vastly be increased
+ Into that All
+ Which One we call,
+ And One in itself alone doth All imply.
+
+ 12. Here's Rest, here's Peace, here's Joy and Holy Love,
+ The heaven is here of true Content,
+ For those that seek the things above,
+ Here's the true light
+ Of Wisdom bright
+ And Prudence pure with no self-seeking blent.
+
+ 15. Thus shall you be united with that One,
+ That One where's no Duality,
+ For from that perfect Good alone
+ Ever doth spring
+ Each pleasant thing
+ The hungry soul to feed and satisfy.[18]
+
+
+Stoupe, in his _Religion of the Dutch_,[19] gives some interesting
+contemporary light on this branch of Collegiants whom he calls
+"Borellists," as follows: "The Borellists had their name from one
+Borrell, the Ringleader of their {120} sect, a man very learned,
+especially in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latine tongues. He was brother to
+Monsieur Borrell, ambassador from the States-General to his most
+Christian Majesty. These Borrellists do for the most part maintain the
+opinions of the Mennonites though they come not to their assemblies.
+They have made choice of a most austere kind of life, spending a
+considerable part of their Estates in almsgiving and a careful discharge
+of all the duties incumbent on a Christian. They have an aversion for
+all Churches, as also for the use of the Sacraments, publick prayers, and
+all other external functions of God's Service. They maintain that all
+Churches which are in the world and have been since the death of the
+apostles and their first subsequent successors have degenerated from the
+pure doctrine which they preached to the world; for this reason, that
+they have suffered the infallible Word of God contained in the Old and
+New Testaments to be expounded and corrupted by Doctors who are not
+infallible and would have their own confessions, their catechisms, and
+their Liturgies and their sermons, which are the works of men, to pass
+for what they really are not, to wit, for the pure Word of God. They
+hold also that men are not to read anything but the Word of God alone
+without any additional application of men."
+
+Abrahams (b. 1622) intensified the _seeker_ aspect of the Amsterdam
+group, emphasizing the view that the existing Church, even in its best
+form, is only an interim-Church with no saving sacraments and no
+compelling authority. His position is expressed in the highly important
+"Nineteen Articles" which he, and his fellow-believer, David Spruyt, drew
+up in 1658, and in the further Exposition _Nader Verklaringe_ of 1659.
+These documents present the apostolic pattern or model as the ideal of
+the visible Church for all ages. There neither is nor can be any other
+true Church. It is essentially a Church managed, maintained, and
+governed through "gifts" bestowed by the Holy Spirit, and in this Church
+each spiritual member takes his part according to the measure of his
+special "gift." This pattern Church, however, {121} _fell away_ and
+became corrupted after the death of the apostles, and instead of this
+glorious Church an external Church was established, claiming to possess
+authoritative officials, saving sacraments, and infallible doctrines, but
+really lacking the inward power of the apostolic Church, no longer
+following and imitating Christ, on the contrary adopting the world's way
+and the world's type of authority, and destitute of the very mark and
+essence of real Christianity, _the spirit of love_. Through all the
+apostasy of the visible Church, however, an invisible Church has survived
+and preserved the eternal ideal. It consists of all those, in whatever
+ages and lands, who have lived by their faith in Christ, have kept
+themselves pure and stainless in the midst of a sinful world, have
+practised love, even when they have received the buffets of hate, have
+lived above division and schism and sect, and have steadily believed that
+their names were written in heaven and that their Church was visible to
+God, even though none on earth called them brother, or recognized their
+membership in the body of Christ. Some time, in God's good time, that
+invisible Church, which no apostasy has annulled or destroyed, will
+become once again a visible Church, equipped with "gifted" teachers and
+with apostolic leaders as at the first, beautiful once more as a bride
+adorned for her husband, and powerful again as the irresistible sword of
+the Spirit.
+
+But the Reformers--Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and even Menno Simons--have
+taken an unwarranted course toward the reform and restoration of the
+Church. It was within their right and power to _improve_ the unbearable
+condition of the outward Church, by faithfully following the plain
+teaching of the New Testament, and without usurping authority. They,
+however, have not been satisfied to do what lay within the narrow limits
+of their commission. They have ambitiously undertaken to set up again an
+authoritative visible Church, even though they lacked the gifts of the
+Spirit for it, and were without the necessary apostolic commission. They
+insisted on their form of sacraments as essential to salvation; they
+{122} drew up their infallible creeds; they set up Church officials who
+were to rule over other men's faith, and they assumed a certain divine
+right to compel the consciences of their members. Most of the Reformers
+have even sanctioned the use of bonds and prisons to secure uniformity of
+faith! The primitive apostles claimed no such right and made use of no
+such unspiritual methods. Order is a good thing and is everywhere to be
+sought, but God nowhere has conferred upon the heads of His Church the
+authority to compel conscience or to force tender souls to submit to a
+system which reveals in itself no inherent evidences of divine origin.
+
+The writers of these Nineteen Articles fail to see anywhere in the world
+a divinely established and spiritually endowed Church of Jesus Christ.
+They are determined to live in purity and love, to avoid dissension and
+strife, to guard their membership in the invisible Church, and to wait in
+faith for the outpouring of the Spirit and the bestowal of miraculous
+gifts for the restoration of the Church in its pristine apostolic purity
+and power. We have thus, here in Holland, an almost exact parallel to
+the "Seekers" who were very numerous in England in the middle decades of
+the seventeenth century.
+
+We get a very interesting side-light on Galenus Abrahams in the _Journal_
+of George Fox. William Penn and George Keith held a "discussion" with
+this famous Collegiant leader in 1677, at which time the latter "asserted
+that nobody nowadays could be accepted as a messenger of God unless he
+confirmed his doctrine by miracle,"[20] and Fox says that Abrahams was
+"much confounded and truth gained ground."[21] Fox himself was not
+present at the "discussion," but he had a personal interview with
+Abrahams at about the same time as the "discussion." The interview was
+not very satisfactory. Fox says that he found this "notable teacher"
+"very high and shy, so that he would not let me touch him nor look upon
+him, but he bid me keep my eyes off him, for {123} he said they pierced
+him!"[22] But at a later visit, in 1684, Fox found the Collegiant
+doctor, now venerable with years, "very loving and tender." "He
+confessed in some measure to truth," Fox says, "and we parted very
+lovingly." At a meeting, held in Amsterdam a few weeks later, Abrahams
+was among the large group of attenders, and "was very attentive to the
+testimony of the truth," and, when the meeting was over, Fox says, "he
+came and got me by the hand very lovingly,"[23] and seemed no longer
+afraid of the Quaker's "piercing eyes." In spirit they were very near
+together, and with a little more insight on both sides the two movements
+might have joined in one single stream. For many years afterwards the
+common people, not given to nice distinctions, called the annual
+gathering of the Collegiants at Rynsburg "the meeting of the Quakers."[24]
+
+The other tendency in the movement, which received its fullest expression
+in the group of Collegiants at Rynsburg and their friends in Amsterdam,
+had a still greater parallelism with Quakerism, in fact, the most
+important book which came from a member of this group--_The Light on the
+Candlestick_--is indistinguishable in its body of ideas from Quaker
+teaching, and differs only in one point, that it reveals a more
+philosophically trained mind in the writer than does any early Quaker
+book with the single exception of Barclay's _Apology_. The author of
+_The Light on the Candlestick_--written originally in Dutch and published
+in 1662 under the title _Lucerna super candelabro_--was probably Peter
+Balling, though the book, with characteristic Collegiant modesty, was
+published anonymously. Peter Balling was one of an interesting group of
+scholarly Collegiants who became very intimate friends of Baruch Spinoza,
+and who received from the Jewish philosopher a strong impulse toward
+mystical religion. Before they became acquainted with the young Spinoza,
+however, they had already received through Descartes a powerful
+intellectual awakening, {124} and had discovered that consciousness
+itself, when fully sounded, has its own unescapable evidence of God. It
+is not possible here to turn aside and study adequately this
+extraordinary philosophical movement known as Cartesianism, beginning in
+Descartes (1596-1650) and culminating in Spinoza (1632-1677), but the
+distinct religious influence of it is so profoundly apparent, both in
+Peter Balling and in the Quaker apologist Robert Barclay (1648-1690),
+that a very brief review of the contribution from this source seems
+necessary.
+
+René Descartes, like almost every other supreme genius who has discovered
+a new way and has forever shifted the line of march for the race, passed
+through a momentous inward upheaval, amounting to a conversion
+experience, and emerged into a new moral and intellectual world.[25] It
+was on November 10, 1619, in the midst of a great campaign during the
+opening stages of the Thirty Years' War, in which at this time the young
+Frenchman was a soldier on the Roman Catholic side, that Descartes,
+sitting alone all day in a heated room of some German house, resolved to
+have done with outworn systems of thought and with tradition, and
+determined to make the search for truth the object of his life.[26] The
+new scientific method, which was the fruit of his reflections and
+experiments, and which has since been carried into every field of human
+research, does not now concern us. The feature of his philosophy which
+impressed these serious seekers after God was his fresh discovery of what
+is involved in the nature of self-consciousness. Beginning with the bold
+resolution to accept nothing untested, to doubt everything in the
+universe that can be doubted, and to receive as truth only that which
+successfully resists every attempt to doubt it, he found one absolutely
+solid point with which to start, in the self-existence of
+self-consciousness--"At least I who am doubting am thinking, and to think
+is to exist." {125} Pushing his search deeper down to see what is further
+involved in the constitution of this self-consciousness, he discovered a
+consciousness of God--the idea of an infinitely perfect Being--within
+himself, and this consciousness of God seemed to him to be the underlying
+condition of every kind of knowledge whatever. It turns out to be
+impossible, he believes, to think of the "finite" without contrasting it,
+in implication at least, with the "infinite" which is therefore in
+consciousness, just as it is impossible to talk of "spaces" without
+presupposing the one space of which given "spaces" are parts. That we
+are oppressed with our own littleness, that we "look before and after and
+sigh for what is not," that we are conscious of finiteness, means that we
+partake in some way of an infinite which reveals itself in us by an
+inherent necessity of self-consciousness. There are, then, some ideas
+within us--at least there is this one idea of an infinitely perfect
+reality--_implanted_ in the very structure of our thinking self, which
+could have come from no other source but from God, who is that infinitely
+perfect Reality. Other things may still be doubtful, and a tinge of
+uncertainty may rest upon everything external to the mind that perceives
+them, but _the soul and God are sure_, and, of these two certainties, God
+is as sure as the soul itself, because an idea of Him is native to the
+soul as a necessary part of its "furnishings," and is the condition of
+thinking anything at all.[27]
+
+Spinoza, though bringing to his philosophy elements which are foreign to
+Descartes, and though fusing his otherwise mathematical and logical
+system with the warmth and fervour of mystical experience that is wholly
+lacking in the French philosopher, carried Cartesianism to its logical
+culmination, and has given the world one of the most impressive
+presentations that ever has been given of the view that all things centre
+in God and are involved in His existence, that it belongs to the very
+nature of the {126} human mind to know God, and that all peace and
+felicity come from "the love of an infinite and eternal object which
+feeds the soul with changeless and unmingled joy." He, too, had his
+conversion-awakening which took him above the love of earthly things, and
+through it he found an unvarying centre for his heart's devotion, which
+made his life, outwardly extremely humble, inwardly one of the noblest
+and most saintly in the history of philosophy. "After experience had
+taught me," he writes in the opening of his early _Treatise on the
+Improvement of the Understanding_, "that all things which are ordinarily
+encountered in common life are vain and futile~.~.~. I at length
+determined to inquire if there were anything which was a TRUE GOOD,
+capable of imparting itself, and by which alone the mind could be
+affected to the exclusion of all else; whether, indeed, anything existed
+by the discovery and acquisition of which I might have continuous and
+supreme joy to all eternity," and the remainder of his life was
+penetrated by a noble passion for the Eternal, and dedicated to the
+interpretation of the Highest Good which he had discovered, and which
+henceforth no rival good was ever to eclipse. Dr. A. Wolf well says of
+him: "His moral ardour seems almost aglow with mystic fire, and if we may
+not call him a priest of the most high God, yet he was certainly a
+prophet of the power which makes for righteousness."[28] He is giving
+his own experience in the spiritual principle which he laid down early in
+his life: "So long as we have not such a clear idea of God as shall unite
+us with Him in such a way that it will not let us love anything beside
+Him, we cannot truly say that we are united with God, so as to depend
+immediately on Him."[29]
+
+It is Spinoza's primary principle that the only Reality in the universe
+is an all-inclusive Reality which is the origin, source, and explanation
+of all that is. All human experience, either of an inward or outward
+world, if it is to have any meaning and reality at all, involves the
+{127} existence of this inclusive Whole of Reality, that is of God. It
+belongs, thus, fundamentally to the nature of human consciousness to know
+God, for if we did not know Him we should not know anything else. The
+moment a "finite thing" or a "finite idea" is severed from the Whole in
+which it has its ground and meaning, it becomes _nothing_; it is "real"
+only so long as it is a part of a larger Reality, and so every attempt to
+understand a "flower in a crannied wall," or any other object in the
+universe, drives us higher up until we come at last to that which is the
+_prius_ of all being and knowledge, the explanation of all that is.
+
+But this ultimate Reality up to which all our experience carries us--if
+we take the pains to think out what is involved in the experience--is no
+mere sum of "finites," no bare aggregation of "parts," no heaped-up
+totality of separate "units." It is an Absolute Unity which binds all
+that is into one living, organic Whole, a Divine Nature,--_natura
+naturans_ Spinoza calls it,--and which lives and is manifested in all the
+finite "parts," in so far as they are real at all. And as soon as the
+mind finds itself in living unity with the eternal Nature of things, and
+views all things from their centre in God, and sees how all objects and
+events flow from the eternal Being of God, it is "led as by the hand to
+its highest blessedness."[30] The complications of Spinoza's system, and
+the difficulty of finding a "way down" from the Absolute Unity of God to
+the differentiation of the modes of a world--_natura naturata_--here, in
+space and time, do not now concern us.
+
+The point of contact between Spinoza and the spiritual movement which we
+are studying is found in his central principles that God is the _prius_
+of all finite reality, that to know things or to know one's own mind
+truly is to know God, and that a man who has formed a pure love for the
+eternal is above the variations of temporal fortune, is not disturbed in
+spirit by changes in the object of his love, but loves with a love which
+eternally feeds the soul with joy.
+
+{128}
+
+During the most important period of his intellectual and spiritual
+development, Spinoza spent three years (1660-1663) in the quiet village
+of Rynsburg, living in close and intimate contact with his Collegiant
+friends. It was here during these happiest years of his life, in this
+quiet retreat and surrounded with spiritually-minded men with whom he had
+much in common, that he wrote his _Short Treatise on God, Man and His
+Well-Being_, as well as his _Treatise on the Improvement of the
+Understanding_, which opens with his account of the birth of his own
+spiritual passion. These intellectual and high-minded Collegiants had
+their influence upon the philosopher, and he in turn had a deep influence
+upon them. Peter Balling translated into Dutch in 1664 Spinoza's version
+of Descartes' _Principia_, and Balling turned to his friend Spinoza for
+consolation in his great loss occasioned by the death of his child that
+same year,[31] while the philosopher at his death left all his
+unpublished manuscripts to another life-long intimate Collegiant friend
+of his, John Rieuwertsz.
+
+_The Light on the Candlestick_, to which we shall now turn for the ripest
+ideas of the little sect, was written while Spinoza was living among the
+Collegiants in Rynsburg. It was very quickly discovered by the Quakers,
+who immediately recognized it as "bone of their bone," and circulated it
+as a Quaker Tract. It was translated into English in 1663 by B. F.,[32]
+who published it with this curious title-page: "The Light upon the
+Candlestick. Serving for Observation of the Principal things in the Book
+called, _The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, &c. Against several
+Professors, Treated of, and written by Will Ames_. Printed in Low Dutch
+for the Author, 1662, and translated into English by B. F."
+
+The Collegiant author, quite in the spirit and style of Spinoza, urges
+the importance of discovering a central love for "things which are
+durable and incorruptible," "knowing thereby better things than those to
+which the {129} multitude are link't so fast with love." We have
+outgrown the "toyes with which we played as children," there is now "no
+desire or moving thereunto, because we have found better things for our
+minds"; so, too, "all those things in which men, even to old age, so much
+delight" would seem like "toyes" if they once discovered the true Light
+"which abides forever unchangeable," and if through it they got a sight
+of "those things which are alone worthy to be known." This "true and
+lasting change," from "toyes" to "the things which are durable and
+eternal," can come only through an inward conversion. When a new vision
+begins from within, then the outward action follows of itself, but no man
+will part with what he judges best till he sees something better, and
+then the weaker yields to the stronger without any forcing.[33] This
+whole work of conversion, of transformation, of "lasting change," must
+have its origin in something within ourselves. We cannot turn from
+baubles and "toyes" and our "desire for that which is high in the world"
+until a Light from some source plainly shows us an eternal reality for
+which we may "highly adventure the tryal." There is, our author insists,
+only one place where such a guiding Light could arise, and that is within
+the soul itself, as an inward and immediate knowledge: "'Tis not far to
+seek. We direct thee to within thyself. Thou oughtest to turn into, to
+mind and have regard unto, that which is within thee, to wit, the Light
+of Truth, the true Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into
+the world. Here 'tis that thou must be and not without thee. Here thou
+shalt find a Principle certain and infallible, through which increasing
+and going on into, thou mayest at length arrive unto a happy condition.
+Of this thou mayest highly adventure the tryal. And if thou happenest to
+be one of those that would know all things before thou dost begin~.~.~.
+know this, Thou dost therein just as those that would learn to read
+without knowing the Letters. He that will not adventure till he be fully
+satisfied, shall never begin, much less finish {130} his own salvation.
+We say then, that we exhort every one to turn unto the Light that's in
+him."[34]
+
+In true Cartesian fashion, he demonstrates why this Light must have its
+locus within the soul and not in some external means or medium. All
+knowledge that God is being revealed in external signs, or through
+external means, already presupposes a prior knowledge of God. We can
+judge no doctrine, no Book to be Divine except by some inward and
+immediate knowledge of what really is Divine. Without this Light the
+Scriptures are only Words and Letters. But "if we experience that the
+Book called the Bible in regard to the Divine doctrine therein comprised
+hath such a harmony with That [in us] by which God is known, that He must
+needs have been the Author of it, there cannot rationally be any more
+powerful demonstration."[35]
+
+The same principle is true with regard to every conceivable form of
+revelation which could be made to our outward senses, whether by words,
+or by miracles, or by any other visible "operations." No finite thing
+can bring us a knowledge of God unless we already have within us a
+sufficient knowledge of Him to make us able to appreciate and judge the
+Divine character of the particular revelation; that is to say, we must
+already have God in order either to seek Him or to find Him; or, as
+Balling puts it, "Unless the knowledge of God precedes, no man can
+discern Him." God is, therefore, the prius of all knowledge: "The
+knowledge of God must first be, before there can be knowledge of any
+particular things,"[36] and God must be assumed as present in the soul
+before any basis of truth or of religion can be found. "The Light is the
+first Principle of Religion; for, seeing there can be no true Religion
+without the knowledge of God, and no knowledge of God without this Light,
+Religion must necessarily have this Light for its first Principle."[37]
+"Without thyself, O Man," he concludes, "thou hast no {131} means to look
+for, by which thou mayest know God. Thou must abide within thyself; to
+the Light that is in thee thou must turn thee; there thou wilt find it
+and nowhere else. God is nearest unto thee and to every man. He that
+goes forth of himself to any creature, thereby to know God, departs from
+God. God is nearer unto every man than himself, because He penetrates
+the most inward and intimate parts of man and is the Life of the inmost
+spirit. Mind, therefore, the Light that is in thee."[38]
+
+This Light--the first Principle of all Religion--is also called in this
+little Book by many other names. It is "the living Word," "the Truth of
+God," "the Light of Truth"; it is "Christ"; it is the "Spirit."[39] As a
+Divine Light, it reproves man of sin, shows him that he has strayed from
+God, accuses him of the evil he commits. It leads man into Truth, "even
+though he has never heard or read of Scripture"; it shows him the way to
+God; it gives him peace of conscience in well-doing; and, if followed and
+obeyed, it brings him into union with God, "wherein all happiness and
+salvation doth consist."[40] It operates in all men, though in many men
+there are serious "impediments" which hinder its operations--"the lets to
+it are manifold"--but as soon as a man turns to it and cleanses his inner
+eye--removes the "lets"--he discovers "a firm foundation upon which he
+may build stable and enduring things: A Principle whereby he may, without
+ever erring, guide the whole course of his life, how he is to carry
+himself toward God, his Neighbour and himself."[41] The writer, having
+thus delivered his message, wishes to have it distinctly understood that
+he is not trying to draw his readers to any new sect, or to any outward
+and visible church. "Go to, then, O Man," he says, "whoever thou art, we
+will not draw thee off from one heap of men to carry thee over unto
+another, 'tis somewhat else we invite thee to! We invite thee to
+Something which may be a means to attain thy own {132} salvation and
+well-being membership in the invisible Church."
+
+Such is the teaching of this strange little book, written by the friend
+of Spinoza, and revealing the maturest expression of this slowly
+developing spiritual movement, which began with Hans Denck and flowed
+uninterruptedly through many lives and along many channels and burst out
+full flood in England in "the Children of the Light," who were known to
+the world as Quakers.
+
+
+
+[1] Three important books on this subject are C. B. Hylkema,
+_Réformateurs_ (Haarlem, 1902); Dr. Heinrich Heppe, _Geschichte des
+Pietismus und der Mystik in der reformirten Kirche, namentlich der
+Niederlande_ (Leiden, 1879); and Wilhelm Goeters, _Die Vorbereitung des
+Pietismus in der reformierten Kirche der Niederlande_ (Leipzig, 1911).
+
+[2] The biographical details of his life are given in a Preface to the
+three-volume edition of his collected works, published in Amsterdam in
+1631.
+
+[3] The title of this work is _Zedekunst, dat is, Wellevens Kunst,
+vermits waarheydts kennisse vanden Mensche, vande Zonden ende vande
+Deughden. Nu aldereerst beschreven in't Neerlandtsch_. Coornhert's
+_Wercken_ (1631), i. fol. 268-3353.
+
+[4] Two of his powerful pleas for the freedom of the mind are, _Epitome
+processus de occidendis haereticis et vi conscientiis inferenda_ (Gouda,
+1591), and _Defensio processus de non occidendis haereticis_ (Hannover,
+1593).
+
+[5] Gottfried Arnold, _Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historien_, ii. p. 378, sec. 3.
+
+[6] See Chap. VI.
+
+[7] _Zedekunst_, chaps. i. and ii.
+
+[8] _Zedekunst_, chaps. iv. and v.
+
+[9] Wercken, iii. fol. 413-427. See also "Hert-Spiegel godlycker
+Schrifturen," _Wercken_, i. fol. 1-44.
+
+[10] _Wercken_, iii. fol. 413-427.
+
+[11] See Arnold, _op. cit._ ii. p. 380, sec. 8.
+
+[12] His views in this particular are very similar to those of
+Schwenckfeld.
+
+[13] Arnold, _op. cit_. pp. 381-382.
+
+[14] _Wercken_, i. fol. 554 ff.
+
+[15] The best history of the Collegiants is J. C. Van Sloe's _De
+Rijnsburger Collegianten_ (Haarlem, 1895).
+
+[16] One of the most tragic consequences of the controversy was the
+martyrdom of John of Barneveldt, the political head of the Remonstrants.
+Hugo Grotius was thrown into prison, but escaped through the bold
+ingenuity of his wife.
+
+[17] Adam Boreel's teaching is set forth in his treatise, _Ad. legem et
+testimonium_ (Amsterdam, 1643). Information upon his life and teaching
+is given in Arnold, _op. cit._ ii. 386-387; in Hylkema, _Reformateurs_;
+and in Walter Schneider, _Adam Boreel_ (Giessen, 1911).
+
+[18] Henry More's _Annotations upon the Discourse of Truth_ (London,
+1682), pp. 271-276.
+
+[19] Stoupe, _La Réligion des Hollandois_ (Paris, 1673), translated into
+English under the title _The Religion of the Dutch_ (London, 1680). The
+extract is from p. 82 of the French edition and pp. 26-28 of the English
+edition.
+
+[20] Sewel, _History of the People called Quakers_ (Phila. edition,
+1823), ii. p. 368.
+
+[21] _Journal_, (ed. 1901), ii. p. 310.
+
+[22] _Journal_, ii. p. 401.
+
+[23] _Ibid._ ii. pp. 401-402.
+
+[24] Simeon Friderich Rues, _Mennoniten und Collegianten_ (Jena, 1743),
+p. 244.
+
+[25] See E. S. Haldane, _Descartes, His Life and Times_ (1905), pp. 51-53.
+
+[26] The autobiographical account of this experience is given in the
+opening of part ii. of the _Discourse on Method_.
+
+[27] Descartes' famous argument is found in Meditations III. and IV. of
+his _Meditations on First Philosophy_, first published in 1641. For an
+illuminating interpretation of the entire movement, see Edward Caird's
+Essay on Cartesianism in _Essays on Literature and Philosophy_ (1892),
+ii. pp. 267-383.
+
+[28] Spinoza, _Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being_, Wolf's
+edition (London, 1910), p. 102.
+
+[29] _Ibid._ p. 40.
+
+[30] _Ethics_, part ii. Preface.
+
+[31] See Spinoza's _Correspondence_, Letter No. XXX.
+
+[32] Benjamin Furley, a Quaker merchant of Colchester, then living in
+Rotterdam.
+
+[33] _The Light upon the Candlestick_, p. 8, freely rendered.
+
+[34] _The Light upon the Candlestick_, pp. 3-4.
+
+[35] _Op. cit._ p. 10. He uses also the Cartesian argument that there
+must at least be as much reality in the cause as there is in the effect,
+p. 12.
+
+[36] _Op. cit._ p. 12.
+
+[37] _Ibid._ p. 6.
+
+[38] _The Light upon the Candlestick_, pp. 12-13.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ pp. 4 and 9.
+
+[40] _Ibid._ p. 5.
+
+[41] _Ibid._ p. 6.
+
+
+
+
+{133}
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+VALENTINE WEIGEL AND NATURE MYSTICISM
+
+It is a central idea of mysticism that there is a way to God through
+the human soul. The gate to Heaven is thus kept, not by St. Peter or
+by any other saint of the calendar; it is kept by each individual
+person himself as he opens or closes within himself the spiritual
+circuit of connection with God. The door into the Eternal swings
+within the circle of our own inner life, and all things are ours if we
+learn how to use the key that opens, for "to open" and "to find God"
+are one and the same thing. The emphasis in "Nature Mysticism" lies
+not so much on this direct pathway to God through the soul as upon the
+symbolic character of the world of Nature as a visible revelation of an
+invisible Universe, and upon the idea that man is a microcosm, a little
+world, reproducing in epitome, point for point, though in miniature,
+the great world, or macrocosm. On this line of thought, _everything is
+double_. The things that are seen are parables of other things which
+are not seen. They are like printed words which _mean_ something
+vastly more and deeper than what the eye sees as it scans mere letters.
+One indwelling Life, one animating Soul, lives in and moves through the
+whole mighty frame of things and expresses its Life through visible
+things in manifold ways, as the invisible human soul expresses itself
+through the visible body. Everything is thus, in a fragmentary way, a
+focus of revelation for the Divine Spirit, whose garment is this vast
+web of the visible world. But man in a very special way, as a complete
+microcosm, is a concentrated extract, a {134} comprehensive
+quintessence of the whole cosmos, visible and invisible--an image of
+God and a mirror of the Universe.
+
+These views have a very ancient history and unite many strands of
+historic thought. They came to light in the sixteenth century with the
+revival through Greek literature of Stoic, Neo-Platonic, and
+Neo-Pythagorean ideas. But the Greek stream of thought as it now
+reappeared was fused with streams of thought from many other
+sources--medieval mysticism, Persian astrology, Arabian philosophy, and
+the Jewish Cabala, which, in turn, was a fusing of many elements--and
+the mixture was honestly believed to be genuine, revived Christianity,
+and Christ, as the new Adam, is throughout the central Figure of these
+systems.
+
+Marsilius Ficino, the Italian Humanist, who translated Plato and the
+writings of the Neo-Platonists into Latin and so made them current for
+the readers of the sixteenth century, gave a profoundly mystical
+colouring to the revived classical philosophy and identified it with
+pure and unadulterated Christianity.[1] His contemporary, Pico of
+Mirandola (1463-94), joined the teachings of the Cabala with his
+Neo-Platonized Christianity and so produced a new blend. Johann
+Reuchlin (1455-1522), great German classical and Hebrew scholar, brave
+opponent of obscurantism, forerunner of the Reformation, introduced the
+Neo-Platonic and Cabalistic blend of ideas into German thought.
+
+The Cabala, it may be said briefly, in the primary meaning of the word,
+is the doctrine received by oral tradition as an important supplement
+to the written Jewish Scriptures, but the Cabala as we know it is an
+esoteric system which was formed under the influence of many streams of
+ancient thought-systems, and which came into vogue about the thirteenth
+century, though its devout adherents claimed that it had been orally
+transmitted through the intervening ages from Adam in Paradise.
+According to the teaching of the Cabala, the original Godhead, called
+_En-Soph_, the Infinite, is in essence {135} incomprehensible and
+immutable, and capable of description only in negations. God, the
+En-Soph, is above and beyond contact with anything finite, material, or
+imperfect. It would be blasphemous to suppose that God the infinitely
+perfect, God the absolutely immutable One, by direct act made a world
+of matter or created a realm of existence marked with evil as this
+lower realm of ours is. Instead of supposing a creative act,
+therefore, the Cabala supposes a series of emanations, or overflows of
+divine splendour, arranged in three groups of threes, called
+_Sephiroth_, which reveal all that is revealable in God, and by means
+of which invisible and visible worlds come into being. These
+_Sephiroth_, or orders of emanation, are _thoughts_ of the Wisdom of
+God become objectively and permanently real, just because He thought
+them; and though He is vastly, inexhaustibly more than they, yet He is
+actually immanent in them and the ground of their being. They are (1)
+the intelligible world, or world of creative ideas; (2) the world of
+spiritual forms, such as the hierarchies of angels, souls, and the
+entire universe of immaterial beings, the world of astral substance or
+of creative soul-matter; and (3) the natural world, in which the divine
+plan of Wisdom, the creative ideas, and the astral soul become visibly
+and concretely revealed. Man unites all the worlds in himself, and in
+his unfallen state as Adam-Cadmon combined all men in one ideal,
+undifferentiated Man. The visible world is full of hints and symbols
+of the invisible, and the initiated learn to read the _signs_ of things
+seen, the meanings of sacred letters, and so to discover the secrets
+and mysteries of the inner world. The Cabala is full of unrestrained
+oriental imagination, of fancies run riot, and of symbolisms ridden to
+death. Its confusion of style and thought and its predilection for
+magic unfortunately proved contagious, and played havoc with the
+productions of those who came under its spell. Its marvels, however,
+powerfully impressed the minds of its German readers. Through it they
+believed they were privileged to share in mysteries which had been hid
+from the creation of the world, and {136} they conceived the idea that
+they had at last discovered a clue that would eventually lead them into
+all the secrets of the universe.[2]
+
+Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1487-1535) by his writings increased
+the prevailing fascination for occult knowledge and pushed this
+particular line of speculation into an acute stage. He was a man of
+large learning and of heroic temper, and, possessed as he was of
+undoubted gifts, in a different period and in a different environment
+he would, no doubt, have played a notable part in the development of
+human thought. But he became enamoured in his youth with the
+adventurous quest for the discovery of Nature's stupendous secrets, and
+under the spell of the Cabala, and under the influence of eager
+expectations entertained in his day by men of rank and learning, that
+fresh light was about to dawn upon the ancient mysteries of the world,
+he took the false path of magic as the way to the conquest of the great
+secret. It was, however, not the crude, cheap magic of popular fancy,
+a magic of mad and lawless caprice, to which he was devoted; it was a
+magic grounded in the nature of the deeper inner world which he
+believed was the Soul of the world we see and touch. The English
+translator of Agrippa's _Occult Philosophy_ in 1651 very clearly
+apprehended and stated in his quaint "Preface to the Judicious Reader,"
+the foundation idea of Agrippa's magic: "This is," he says, "true and
+sublime Occult Philosophy--to understand the mysterious influence of
+the intellectual world upon the celestial world, and of both upon the
+terrestrial world, and to know how to dispose and fit ourselves so as
+to be capable of receiving the _superior operations of these worlds,
+whereby we may be enabled to operate wonderful things by a natural
+power_."[3] That saying precisely defines Agrippa's faith. There are,
+he thinks, {137} three worlds: (1) the Intellectual world; (2) the
+Celestial, or Astral, world; and (3) the Terrestrial world; and man,
+who is a microcosm embodying in himself all these worlds, may, in the
+innermost ground of his being, come upon a divine knowledge which will
+enable him to unlock the mysteries of all worlds and to "operate
+wonderful things." In quite other ways than Agrippa dreamed, science
+has found the keys to many of these mysteries, and has learned how to
+"operate wonderful things by a natural power." His enthusiasm and
+passion were right, but he had not learned the slow and patient and
+laborious way.
+
+A still greater figure in this field of occult knowledge and of nature
+mysticism was the far-travelled man and medical genius, Aureolus
+Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, generally known as Paracelsus. He
+was born in 1493 in the neighbourhood of Einsiedeln, not far from
+Zurich, the son of a physician of repute. He studied in the University
+of Basle, and later was instructed by Trithemius, Abbot of St. Jacobs
+at Wurtzburg, an adept in magic, alchemy, and astrology. He passed a
+long period--probably ten years--of his later youth in travel, studying
+humanity at close range, gathering all sorts of information, forming
+his theories of diseases and their cure, and learning to know Nature
+"by treading her Books, through land after land, with his feet," which,
+he once testified, is the only way of knowing her truly.[4]
+
+In 1525 he settled in Basle, and, on the recommendation of
+OEcolampadius was appointed professor of physic, medicine, and surgery
+in 1527, but his revolutionary teaching and practice, his scorn for
+traditional methods, his attacks on the ignorance and greed of
+apothecaries raised a storm which he could not weather, and he secretly
+left the city in 1528. Again he became a wanderer, having
+extraordinary experiences of success and defeat, treating all manner of
+diseases, writing books on medicine and on the fundamental nature of
+things, and finally died at Salzburg in Bavaria in 1541.
+
+Paracelsus is a strange and baffling character. He had {138} much of
+the spirit of the new age, tangled with many of the ideas and fancies
+of his time. His aspirations were lofty, his medical skill was unique
+for his day, he was in large measure liberated from tradition, and he
+was dedicated, as Browning truly represents him, to his mission, but he
+was still under the spell of "mystic" categories, and he still held the
+faith that Nature's secrets were to be suddenly surprised by an inward
+way and by an inward Light:
+
+ Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
+ From outward things, whate'er you may believe.
+ There is an inmost centre in us all,
+ Where truth abides in fulness; and around,
+ Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
+ This perfect, clear perception--which is truth,
+ A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
+ Binds it, and makes all error: and, to KNOW,
+ Rather consists in opening out a way
+ Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
+ Than in effecting entry for a light
+ Supposed to be without.[5]
+
+
+There are, again, in his Universe, as in the other occult systems,
+three elemental worlds--the spiritual or intellectual world, the astral
+world or universal Soul, and the terrestrial world; and all three
+worlds are man's "mothers." Man is a quintessence of all the elements,
+visible and invisible. He has a spiritual essence within him which is
+an emanation of God; he has an astral-soul essence, from the Soul of
+the world; and he partakes, too, of the material and earthly world.
+His supreme aim in life should be to establish, or rather re-establish,
+a harmony between his own little world and the great Universe, so that
+all the worlds have their right proportions in him, and so that through
+his highest essence he can win the secrets of the lower worlds--the
+astral and the material. To accomplish _that_ is to be spiritual, to
+become like Adam, {139} a paradisaical Man, or like Christ the new
+Adam. Even the lowest world is penetrated with the spiritual "seed" or
+"element." The very basic substances of which it is composed--sulphur,
+mercury, and salt--are in essence spiritual principles, elemental
+forces, rather than crude matter, and the lower world is written over,
+like a palimpsest, with "signatures" of the divine world to which it
+belongs. All doors into all the worlds of God open to faith and
+prayer, and he who subordinates lower elements in himself to higher has
+power and potency in all realms.
+
+But far more important for the development of spiritual religion, and
+far more important as a living link between Reformers like Denck,
+Schwenckfeld, and Franck of the sixteenth century, and Jacob Boehme and
+the spiritual interpreters of the English Commonwealth, was Valentine
+Weigel, Pastor of Zschopau. Like so many of the men who figure in
+these chapters, he is little known, seldom read, not a quick and
+powerful name in the world, but he is worth knowing, and he was the
+bearer of a burning and kindling torch of truth. He was born at
+Naundorf, a suburb of Grossenhain, District of Meissen, in 1533. He
+received the Bachelor's and Master's degree of the University of
+Leipzig, and he pursued his studies still further in the University of
+Wittenberg, his study-period having continued until 1567. In the
+autumn of that year he was ordained and called to be Pastor of
+Zschopau, where he passed as a minister his entire public life, which
+came to a peaceful end in 1588. He was an ideal pastor and true
+shepherd of his flock--loving them and being beloved by them. His
+ministry was fresh and vital, and made his hearers _feel_ the presence
+and the power of the Spirit of God.
+
+There was, so far as I can discover the facts, only one blemish on his
+really beautiful character. He lacked that robust, unswerving
+conscience which compels a man who sees a new vision of the truth to
+proclaim it, to champion it, and to suffer and even die for it when it
+comes into collision with views which his own soul has outgrown. {140}
+Weigel was resolved not to have his heart's deepest faith, his mind's
+most certain truth, known, at least during his lifetime, by the persons
+who were the guardians of orthodoxy. He signed the "Confessions" of
+his time as though they expressed his own convictions; he counted it a
+duty of the first importance to guard his pastoral flock from the
+distractions and assaults of heresy-hunters, and he left his matured
+and deeply meditated views for posterity to discover. How far he was
+personally timid cannot now be determined. It would seem, however,
+from his own words,[6] that he was especially concerned for the safety
+and welfare of his own flock, who would suffer if he were cried down as
+an enthusiast or a spiritual prophet. But even so, it is very doubtful
+if any man can rightly permit anything on earth to take precedence to
+his own loyalty to the vision of truth which his soul sees. As a
+result, however, of the course he took, he died in good odour of
+sanctity, and the epigones of that day had no suspicion of the ideas
+that were swarming in the mind of the quiet Pastor of Zschopau, or of
+the mass of manuscripts proclaiming his faith in the inner Word which
+he was leaving behind him, to fly over the world like the loose leaves
+of the Sibyl.
+
+His writings were not printed until 1609 and onwards, and as his
+disciples went on producing writings, somewhat in the style and spirit
+of the master who inspired them, the list of books in Weigel's name is
+considerably larger than the actual number of manuscripts extant at his
+death in 1588. It is not always easy to distinguish the
+pseudo-writings from the genuine ones, but there is a vividness and
+pregnancy of style, a spiritual depth and power in the earlier writings
+which are lacking in the later group, and there is an emphasis on the
+magical and occult in the secondary writings that is largely absent in
+the primary ones.[7] The most important of his books will be referred
+to and quoted from as I present his type of religion and his message,
+but I shall draw especially upon his little {141} book, _Von dem Leben
+Christi, das ist, vom wahren Glauben_ ("On the Life of Christ, or True
+Faith"), as it is the one of Weigel's writings which, in English
+translation, most deeply influenced kindred spirits in the English
+Commonwealth.[8]
+
+His spiritual conception of Christianity was formed and fed by the
+sermons of Tauler, and by that little book which was "the hidden Manna"
+for all the spiritual leaders of these two centuries--the _German
+Theology_. Weigel edited it with an introduction. He calls it "a
+precious little book," "a noble book"; but he tells his readers that
+they can understand it and find it fruitful only if they read it "with
+a pure eye" and with "the key of David," _i.e._ with a personal
+experience. But while he loved the golden book of mysticism and the
+sermons of the great Strasbourg preacher, and was led by the hand of
+these guides, he drew also from many other sources and finally arrived
+at a type of religion, still interior and personal, but less negative
+and abstract than that of the fourteenth-century mystics, and more
+penetrated and informed with the presence of the Christ of the Gospels.
+He insists always that in the last analysis it is Christ in us that
+saves us, but it was Christ in the flesh, the Christ of Galilee and
+Golgotha, that revealed to men the way to apprehend the inward and
+eternal Christ of God. "The indwelling Christ," he wrote, "is all in
+all. He saves thee. He is thy peace and thy comfort. The outward
+Christ, the Christ in the flesh, and according to the flesh, cannot
+save thee in an external way. He must be in thee and thou must abide
+in Him. Why then did He become man and suffer on the Cross? There are
+many reasons why, but it was especially that God by the death and
+suffering of Christ might take the wrath and hostility out of _our_
+hearts, on account of which we falsely conceive of God as a wrathful
+enemy to us. He had to deal that way with poor blind men like us and
+so reconcile us with Himself. {142} There was no need of it on His
+part. He was always Love and He always loved us, even when we were
+enemies to Him, but we should never have known it if God had not
+condescended to show Himself to us in His Son and had not suffered for
+us."[9]
+
+Weigel everywhere maintains Christ's double identity--an identity with
+God, so that in Christ we see God; and an equal identity with man, so
+that Christ is man revealed in his fulfilled possibilities. In Him God
+and man are _one_. In this deep-lying and fundamental idea of his
+entire Christianity he was undoubtedly influenced, profoundly
+influenced, by Schwenckfeld. He presents in chapter i. of his _Life of
+Christ_ the Schwenckfeldian view that Christ is God and Man in _one_.
+But He is Man not in the crass, crude and earthly form: He is not
+composed of mortal and earthly substance as our "Adamical bodies" are.
+He is wholly and absolutely composed of heavenly, spiritual, divine
+substance. His flesh and blood are as divine and spiritual in origin
+as is His spirit, so that His resurrection and ascension are the normal
+outcome of His nature. It was as natural for Him to rise into life and
+to ascend into glory as it is for heavy things to fall. But that
+divine, spiritual, heavenly nature, which appeared in Him, is the true,
+original, consummate nature of Man. Man, as we know him, is cloudy, or
+even muddy, with a vesture of decay, but that is not a feature of his
+_real_ nature--either in its original or its potential form--and all
+who "put on Christ," all who have "Christ in them," become one flesh
+with Him and gain an indestructible and permanent inward substance like
+His.
+
+Consistently with this view, Weigel declares that here lies the
+significance of Christ's saying, "I am Bread"; "I am Meat and Drink."
+The only adequate Supper of the Lord, he says, is real feeding upon His
+spiritual, life-giving flesh and blood, so that Salvation is not tied
+to external sacraments, but stands only in the faith that Christ feeds
+us with Himself.[10] There are, he proceeds to show, two radically
+diverse natures, the traits and {143} characteristics of which he
+arranges in opposing pairs, in two parallel columns as follows:
+
+ A. The Nature of Christ and B. The nature of Adam and
+ of those who live in Him those who live by him,
+ and by Him. _i.e._ those who live the
+ natural, earthly life.
+
+ 1. This Nature turns from 1. This nature turns from God
+ creatures to God. to creatures.
+
+ 2. This Nature hates itself and 2. This nature loves itself
+ loves others. more than it loves God or
+ others.
+
+ 3. This Nature abhors all it 3. This nature delights only
+ itself does or omits. in itself and in things of
+ self.
+
+ 4. This Nature seeks to lose 4. This nature seeks itself in
+ self. everything.
+
+ 5. This Nature denies self. 5. This nature cleaves to self.
+
+ 6. This Nature patiently bears 6. This nature thrusts the
+ the Cross. Cross away.
+
+
+ 15. This Nature desires to be 15. This nature desires to be
+ conformed to Christ and equal with God without
+ His Cross in all things. any humility at all.[11]
+
+
+Christ is thus for Weigel entirely a new order of Being--the Beginner
+of a new race. Adam had in himself all the possibilities which Christ
+realized, but the former failed and the latter succeeded and so has
+become the Head of a divine and heavenly type of humanity. By "a new
+nativity," a rebirth from above, any man in the world who wills it in
+living faith may be a recipient of the divine-principle, the
+Christ-Life, and may thereby be raised to membership in the Kingdom of
+the Christ-Humanity, which is as far above the Adam-Humanity as the
+flower is above the soil from which it first sprang. When Christ is
+formed within and the Humanity which He produces appears in the world,
+then a new way of living comes into operation. Love is the supreme
+"sign" of the new type or order. "The man who has the Christ-Life in
+him does not quarrel; he does not go to law for temporall goods; he
+does not kill; he lets his coat and cloke go rather than oppose
+another."[12] "If Christ were of the seed of Adam, He would have the
+{144} nature and inclinations of Adam. He would hang thieves, behead
+adulterers, rack murderers with the wheel, kill hereticks, and put
+corporeally to death all manner of sinners; but now He is tender, kind,
+loving. He kills no one. The Lamb kills no woolf."[13] Weigel goes
+the whole bold way in his revolt from legalism, and he accepts the
+principle of love as a structural principle of the society which Christ
+is forming in the world: "Where the Life of Christ is, there is no
+warre made with corporall weapons." "The world wars but Christ doth
+not so. His warfare is spiritual." "He that maketh warre is no
+Christian but a woolf, ana belongs not to the sheepfold nor hath he
+anything to expect of the Kingdom of God, nor may the warrs of the Old
+Testament, of the time of darknesse serve his turne, for Christians
+deal not after a Mosaicall, earthly fashion, but they walke in the Life
+of Christ, without all revenge." "We walk no longer under Moses but
+under Christ."[14]
+
+The Christian man, however, even with his new "nativity" and with his
+re-created spirit of love, differs in one respect from Christ. Christ
+is wholly heavenly, His Nature is woven throughout of spiritual and
+divine substance. There is no rent nor seam in it. Man, on the other
+hand, is double, and throughout his temporal period he remains double.
+By his new "nativity" man can become inwardly spirit though he remains
+outwardly composed of flesh.[15]
+
+Before the "fall" Adam was unsundered from God. It was sin which made
+the cleft or rent which separated God and man. Through Christ, the new
+and heavenly Adam, the _junction_ may be formed again in man's inner
+self, and once again God and man in us may be unsundered. The flesh is
+not destroyed, but it ceases to be the dominating factor. It serves
+now merely as the "habitation" of an invisible spirit, and it exists
+for the spirit, not the spirit for it.[16] Not only is the body a
+{145} "habitation" for the Christ-formed soul, but the world now
+becomes to the enlightened soul an Inn for a transient guest rather
+than a permanent abiding-place: "like as in an Inne there is meat set
+before the guest and bedding is allowed to him, even so Christians are
+in this world guests and their country is above." "It is not fitting
+for a guest that comes into an Inne, where nothing is his own, that he
+should appropriate things to himself and quarrel about them!"[17]
+
+As fast as Christ is formed within, as the Life of one's life, the
+believer attains thereby a peace and a power which make the "rent"
+between flesh and spirit ever less disturbing, though it still remains
+until the fleshly tabernacle dissolves. The goal of the spiritual life
+here on earth is the attainment of "the silent Sabbath of the soul," in
+which God becomes so completely the soul's sufficiency that the flesh
+has little scope or sway any more, and there is no longer need of
+furious struggle against it, "like a serpent between two rocks, trying
+to pull off his old skin!"[18] In his _Heavenly Jerusalem in Us_, he
+says: "It is an attribute of God that He is the Eternal Peace which is
+longed for by us men, but found by few because they do not _mind
+Christ_, who is the Way. God has not grounded either thy Peace or thy
+Salvation on thy running hither and yon, nor on thy works and thy
+creaturely activities, but on an inner calm and quiet, on a Sabbath of
+the soul, in which thou canst hear, with the simple and the
+tender-minded, what the Lord is saying and doing."[19]
+
+In close conformity to the teaching of Sebastian Franck,[20] Weigel
+thinks of the Church of God as an invisible Assembly of all true
+Believers in the entire world, united, not outwardly but inwardly, in
+the unity of the Spirit and by the bond of Love and Peace. There are
+for him, as for Franck and other "Spirituals," two kinds of churches:
+(1) The church composed of a visible group, {146} "to be pointed out
+with the finger," located in a definite country, allied with a temporal
+government, held together by a body of doctrine, "tied to" certain
+sacraments and possessed of force to constrain men, by "carnall
+perswasions," to conform.[21] Then there is (2) the real Church of
+God, "the upper Jerusalem," a body visible in no one locality, but
+dispersed over the earth like wheat in chaff, held together by no
+declarations of doctrine, tied to no sacraments, dependent on no
+earthly Lieutenant or Vice-gerent, and on no university-trained
+Doctors, which recognizes Prince and Ploughman alike, and secures its
+unity through Christ and through the invisible cement of Love. "To
+this Assembly," writes Weigel, "doe I stick; in this holy Church doe I
+rejoice to be. . . . Jesus Christ is my Head, my Teacher. He is
+everywhere with me and in me, and I in Him. Although the Protestants
+should chase me amongst Papists or Atheists, yet I should still be in
+the holy Church and should have all the heavenly Gifts common to all
+Believers, and although the Papists should banish me into Turkey, yet
+even there should I be in the holy Church."[22]
+
+No book appeared in England before 1648--the date of the translation of
+Weigel's _Life of Christ_--which more closely approached the Quaker
+position. That religion must have an inward seat and origin; that
+divine things must be learned of God, are taken as axiomatic truths
+throughout this book. If a man is to _see_, he must have eyes of his
+own; if he is to teach, he must have the Word of God within him.
+People say that "there can be no true Faith without outward preaching
+ministry." That is not so, Weigel declares. The way to heaven is open
+to hungry penitent souls everywhere, although, as is the case with
+infants, they may hear no sermons at all: "Faith comes by inward
+hearing. Good books, outward verbal ministry have their place, they
+testify to the real Treasure, they are witnesses to the inner Word
+within us, but Faith is not tied to books; it is a new nativity which
+{147} cannot be found in a book. He who hath the inward Schoolmaster
+loseth nothing of his Salvation although all preachers should be dead
+and all books burned."[23] Many take great pains to be baptized, and
+"to hear sermons of their hired priests," and to use the Lord's Supper,
+and to read theological books, who, nevertheless, show no "spiritual
+profit" therefrom. The reason is that "Truth runs into no one by a
+pipe!"[24] "In the Church of men--the man-made Church--the
+measuring-line," or standard, he says, is the written Scripture,
+according to one's own interpretation, or according to books, or
+according to University men; but in the true Church the measuring-reed
+is the inward Word, the Spirit of Christ, within the believer. Those
+who are in the Universities and Churches of men have Christ in their
+mouths, and they have a measuring-reed by their side--the inhabitants
+of God's Church on the other hand have the Life of Christ and the
+testing-standard within themselves.[25] Those who are "nominal
+professors" hang salvation on a literal knowledge of the merit secured
+by Christ's death; the true believer knows that salvation is never a
+purchase, is never outwardly effected, but is a new self, a new spirit,
+a new relation to God: "Man must cease to be what he is before he can
+come to be another kind of person."[26] Outward baptism and external
+supper may, if one wishes, be used as symbols of the soul's supreme
+events, but they cannot rightly be thought of as effecting any change
+of themselves in the real nature of the man; only Christ the
+Life-bringer, only the resident work of God within the soul, can
+produce the transformation from old self to new self. "Salvation is
+not tyed to sacraments."[27]
+
+It is a well-settled view of Weigel's that Heaven and Hell are
+primarily in the soul of man. He says, in _Know Thyself_, that both
+the Trees of Paradise are in us; and in his _Ort der Welt_ he declares
+that "the Eternal Hell of the lost will be their own Hell."[28] And in
+his _Christliches {148} Gespräch_ he insists that the holy Spirit, the
+present Christ, does not need to _come down_ from Heaven to meet with
+us, for when He is in our hearts there then is Heaven.[29] No person
+can ever be in Heaven until Heaven is in him.
+
+In _Der güldene Griff_ and elsewhere Weigel works out a very
+interesting theory of knowledge, which fits well with the inwardness of
+his religious views. He holds that in sense perception the percipient
+brings forth his real _knowledge_ from within. The external "object,"
+or the outward stimulus, is the soliciting occasion, or suggestion, or
+the sign for the experience, but what we see is determined from within
+rather than from without. All real knowledge is in the knower. Both
+external world and written scriptures are in themselves _shadows_ until
+the inward spirit interprets them, and through them comes to the Word
+of God which they suggest and symbolize.
+
+Weigel plainly arrived at his ground ideas under the formative
+influence of Schwenckfeld and Franck, but he also reveals, especially
+in his conception of the deeper inner world and of the microcosmic
+character of man, the influence of Paracelsus and of the nature mystics
+of his time. He was himself, in turn, a most important influence in
+the development of the religious ideas of Jacob Boehme, and he is
+historically one of the most significant men of the entire spiritual
+group before the great Silesian mystic.[30]
+
+This chapter cannot come to a proper close without some consideration
+of a Weigelean book which was translated into English in 1649, under
+the title, "_Astrologie Theologized_: That the Inward man by the Light
+of Grace, through possession and practice of a holy life, is to be
+acknowledged and live in us: which is the only means to keep the true
+Sabbath in inward holinesse." {149} The anonymous translator ascribes
+the book to Weigel. It is, in fact. Part Two of [Greek] _Gnôthi
+Seauton_, but it is uncertain whether it was written by Weigel himself.
+But whether written by Weigel or later by one of his school, it is a
+good illustration of the way in which mystically inclined Christians of
+that period endeavoured to make spiritual conquest of the prevailing
+Astrology and, through its help, to discover the nature of the inner,
+hidden universe. Astrology, this little book declares, is "conversant
+with the secrets of God which are hidden in the natural things of
+creation." It is the science of reading the unseen through the seen,
+for, according to the teaching of this book, everything visible is an
+unveiling of something invisible. Man--who is a centre of the whole
+universe, who has in himself elements of all the worlds, inner and
+outer--"is created to be a visible Paradise, Garden, Tabernacle,
+Mansion, House, Temple and Jerusalem of God." All the wisdom, power,
+virtue, and glory of God are hidden and are slumbering in man. There
+is nothing so near to man as God is--"He is nearer to us than we are to
+ourselves"[31]--and the only reason we do not find Him and know Him and
+open out our life _interiorly_, so that the true Sabbath comes to the
+soul, is due to our "vagabond and unquiet ways of keeping busy with our
+own will, outside our internal country." If I could desist from the
+things with which I vex and worry myself, and study to be at rest in my
+God who dwells with me; if I could accustom my mind to spiritual
+tranquillity and cease to wander in a maze of thoughts, cares, and
+affections; if I could be at leisure from the external things and
+creatures of this world, and chiefly from myself; if, in short, I might
+"come into a plenary dereliction of myself," I should at once "begin to
+see and know of the most present habitation of God in me and so I
+should eat of the Tree of Life in the midst of the Paradise, _which
+Paradise I myself am_, and be a Guest of God."[32] Adam, who was "the
+Protoplast" and begetter of all men, and who, like everything else in
+the universe, was "double," {150} allowed himself to live toward the
+outward instead of toward the inward, permitted the seed of the serpent
+to grow in him instead of the divine seed, and so came under the
+dominance of the natural, elemental world, with its "lesser light" of
+knowledge and with its "tree of death." But the Paradise, with its
+greater Light of Wisdom and with its Tree of Life, is always near to
+man and can be repossessed and regained by him. The outer elements,
+and the astral world with its visible stars, _rule_ no one, determine
+no one. Each man's "star" is in his own breast. It lies in his own
+power to "theologize his astrologie," to turn his universe into
+spiritual forces. By "a new nativity," initiated by obedient response
+to the inward Light--the spiritual Star, not of earth and not of the
+astral universe, but of God the indwelling Spirit--he may put on the
+new man, created after the likeness of God, and become the recipient of
+heavenly Wisdom springing up within him from the Life of the Spirit.[33]
+
+There can be no question in the mind of any one who is familiar with
+the literature and religious thought of seventeenth-century England,
+that the ideas set forth in this chapter exerted a wide and profound
+influence, and were a part of the psychological climate of the middle
+decades of that century. The channel here indicated was only one of
+the ways through which these ideas came in. In due time we shall
+discover other channels of this spiritual message.
+
+
+
+[1] Ficino is dealt with at greater length in Chapter XIII.
+
+[2] The Cabala was, as I have tried to make clear, only one of the
+influences which produced this new intellectual climate. The
+rediscovered "Hermes Trismegistus," the mystically coloured Platonism,
+as it came from Italy, the awakened interest in Nature and in man, and
+the powerful message of the German Mystics all played an important part
+toward the formation of the new _Weltanschauung_.
+
+[3] _Three Books of Occult Philosophy_, translated by J. F. (London,
+1651).
+
+[4] Stoddart's Life of Paracelsus (London, 1911), p. 76.
+
+[5] Browning, _Paracelsus_, B. i. This passage fairly represents
+Paracelsus' general position. "There is," he says in his
+_Philosophia sagax_, "a Light in the spirit of man which illuminates
+everything. . . . The quality of each thing created by God, whether
+it be visible or invisible to the senses, may be perceived and
+known. If man knows the essence of things, their attributes, their
+attractions, and the elements of which they consist, he will be a
+Master of nature, of the elements, and of the spirits."
+
+[6] _Christliches Gespräch_, chap. iii.
+
+[7] There is an excellent critical study of Weigel's writings by A.
+Israel, entitled, _Weigels Leben und Schriften nach den Quellen
+dargestellt_ (Zschopau, 1888).
+
+[8] "Of the Life of Christ, That is, Of True Faith which is the Rule,
+Square, Levell or Measuring Line of the Holy City of God and of the
+Inhabitants thereof here on Earth. Written in the German Language by
+Valentine Weigelus." (London, Giles Calvert, 1648.)
+
+[9] Quoted from Israel, _op. cit._ p. 107.
+
+[10] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. ii.
+
+[11] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. iii.
+
+[12] _Ibid._ part i. chap. viii.
+
+[13] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. ix.
+
+[14] _Ibid._ part ii. chap. ix.; part i. chap. x.; part ii. chap. x.;
+and part. i. chap. xiv.
+
+[15] _Ibid._ part ii. chaps. iii. and iv.
+
+[16] This is the view set forth in his [Greek] _Gnôthi Seauton_ [Know
+Thyself].
+
+[17] _On the Life of Christ_, part ii. chaps. v. and vii.
+
+[18] _Ibid._ part i. chap. viii.
+
+[19] _Vom himmlischen Jerusalem in uns_, chap. viii.
+
+[20] Weigel enjoins his readers to read Franck's book on "the Tree of
+the Knowledge of Good and Evil." See _On the Life of Christ_, part ii.
+p. 57.
+
+[21] "Faith," he says, "cannot be forced into any person by gallows or
+pillory." _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. xv.
+
+[22] _Ibid._ part ii. chap. xiv. This is built on a passage in
+Franck's _Apologia_.
+
+[23] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chaps. iv. and v.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ part i. chap. vi.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ part i. chaps. xii. and xiii.
+
+[26] Quoted from Tauler by Weigel, _ibid._ chap. vii. See also part
+iii. chap. i.
+
+[27] _Ibid._ part ii. chap. ii.
+
+[28] _Op. cit._ chap. xx.
+
+[29] _Christ. Gespräch_, chap. ii.
+
+[30] In his _Der güldene Griff_, he tells of a personal spiritual
+"opening" which is very similar to the one which occurred later in the
+life of Boehme. He found himself astray in "a wilderness of darkness"
+and he cried to God for Light to enlighten his soul. "_Suddenly,_" he
+says, "_the Light came and my eyes were opened so that I saw more
+clearly than all the teachers in all the world with all their books
+could teach me._" Chap. xxiv.
+
+[31] _Astrologie Theologized_, p. 8.
+
+[32] _Ibid._ pp. 16-17.
+
+[33] This little book refers with much appreciation to Theophrastus
+Paracelsus. It uses his theory of "first matter" and his doctrine of
+"the seven governours of the world," which we shall meet in a new form
+in Boehme. Another book which carried astrological ideas into
+religious thought in a much cruder way was Andreas Tentzel's _De
+ratione naturali arboris vitae et scientiae boni et mali_, etc., which
+was Pars Secunda of his _Medicinii diastatica_ (Jena, 1629). It was
+translated into English in 1657 by N. Turner with the title: "The
+Mumial Treatise of Tentzelius, being a natural account of the Tree of
+Life and of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a mystical
+interpretation of that great Secret, to wit, the Cabalistical
+Concordance of the Tree of Life and Death, of Christ and Adam." Tentzel
+was a famous doctor and disciple of Paracelsus and "flourished" in
+Germany during the first half of the seventeenth century.
+
+
+
+
+{151}
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+JACOB BOEHME: HIS LIFE AND SPIRIT[1]
+
+Few men have ever made greater claim to be the bearer of a new
+revelation than did the humble shoemaker-prophet of Silesia, Jacob
+Boehme. "I am," he wrote in his earliest book, "only a very little
+spark of God's Light, but He is now pleased in this last time to reveal
+through me what has been partly concealed from the beginning of the
+World,"[2] and he admonished the reader, if he would understand what is
+written, to let go opinion {152} and conceit and heathenish wisdom, and
+read with the Light and Power of the Holy Spirit, "for this book comes
+not forth from Reason, but by the impulse of the Spirit."[3] "I have
+not dared," he wrote to a friend in 1620, "to write otherwise than was
+given and indited to me. I have continually written as the Spirit
+dictated and have not given place to Reason."[4] Again and again he
+warns the reader to let his book alone unless he is ready for a new
+dawning of divine Truth, for a fresh Light to break: "If thou art not a
+spiritual overcomer, then let my book alone. Do not meddle with it,
+but _stick to thy old matters_!"[5]
+
+Before the Spirit came upon him, he felt himself to be a "little
+stammering child," and he always declared that without this Spirit he
+could not comprehend even his own writings--"when He parteth from me, I
+know nothing but the elementary and earthly things of this
+world"[6]--but with this divine Spirit unfolding within him "the
+profoundest depth" of mysteries, he believed, though with much
+simplicity and generally with humility, that the true ground of things
+had "not been so fully revealed to any man from the beginning of the
+world"--"but," he adds, "seeing God will have it so, I submit to His
+will."[7] Nobody before him, he declares, no matter how learned he
+was, "has had the ax by the handle," but, with a sudden change of
+figure, he proclaims that now the Morning Glow is breaking and the Day
+Dawn is rising.[8] In his _Epistles_ he says: "I am only a layman, I
+have not studied, yet I bring to light things which all the High
+Schools and Universities have been unable to do. . . . The language of
+Nature is made known to me so that I can understand the greatest
+mysteries, in my own mother-tongue. Though I cannot say I have
+_learned_ or _comprehended_ these things, yet so long as the hand of
+God stayeth upon me I understand."[9]
+
+We shall be able to estimate the value of these lofty {153} claims
+after we have gathered up the substance of his teaching, but it may be
+well to say at the opening of this Study of Boehme that in my opinion
+no more remarkable religious message has come in modern centuries from
+an untrained and undisciplined mind than that which lies scattered
+through the voluminous and somewhat chaotic writings of this
+seventeenth-century prophet of the common people.[19]
+
+He frequently speaks of himself as "unlearned," and in the technical
+sense of the word he was unlearned. He had only a simple schooling,
+but he possessed extraordinary native capacity and he was well and
+widely read in the books which fitted the frame and temper of his mind,
+and he had very unusual powers of meditation and recollection so that
+he thought over and over again in his quiet hours of labour the ideas
+which he seized upon in the books he read.
+
+There are many strands of thought woven together in his writings, and
+everything he dealt with is given a {154} new aspect through the vivid
+insights which he always brings into play, the amazing visual power
+which he displays, and his profoundly penetrating moral and
+intellectual grasp. But, nevertheless, he plainly belongs in the
+direct line of these spiritual reformers whom we have been studying.
+He was deeply influenced, first of all, by Luther, especially in two
+directions. He got primarily from the great reformer his transforming
+insight of the immense importance of personal faith for salvation, and
+secondly he was impressed--almost overwhelmingly impressed in his early
+years--with the awful reality and range of the principle of positive
+evil in the universe, upon which Luther had insisted with intensity of
+emphasis. His feet, however, were set upon the track which seemed to
+him to lead to light by the help which he got from the other line of
+reformers. Schwenckfeld made him feel the impossibility of any scheme
+of salvation that rested on transactions and operations external to the
+human soul itself, and through that same noble Silesian reformer he
+discovered the central significance of the new birth through a creative
+work of Grace within. Sebastian Franck was clearly one of his
+spiritual masters. From him, directly or indirectly, he learned that
+the spirit must be freed from the letter, that external revelations are
+symbols which remain dead and inert until they are vivified and
+vitalized by the inwardly illuminated spirit. He was still more
+directly influenced by Valentine Weigel, the pastor of Zschopau, who
+united the spiritual-mystical views of Schwenckfeld, Franck, and the
+other teachers of his type with a nature mysticism or theosophy which
+had become, as we have seen, a powerful interest in the sixteenth
+century when a real science was struggling to be born, but had not yet
+seen the light. This nature mysticism came to him also in a crude and
+indigestible form through the writings of Paracelsus. Through him
+Boehme acquired a vocabulary of alchemistical terms which he was always
+labouring to turn to spiritual meaning, but which always baffled him.
+It has been customary to treat Boehme as a mystic, and he has not {155}
+usually been brought into this line of spiritual development where I am
+placing him, but his entire outlook and body of ideas are different
+from those of the great Roman Catholic mystics. He has read neither
+the classical nor the scholastic interpreters of mysticism. In so far
+as he knows of historical mysticism he knows it through Franck and
+Weigel and others, where it is profoundly transformed and subordinated
+to other aspects of religion and thought. Unlike the great mystics, he
+does not treat the visible and the finite as unreal and to be negated.
+The world is a positive reality and a divine revelation. Nor, again,
+are sin and evil negative in character for him. Evil is tremendously
+real and positive, in grim conflict with the good and to be conquered
+only through stern battle. A mystic, an illuminate, he undoubtedly was
+in his first-hand experience, but his message of salvation and his
+interpretation of life are of the wider, distinctively "spiritual" type.
+
+Jacob Boehme[11] was born in November 1575 in the little market-town of
+Alt Seidenberg, a few miles from Görlitz. His father's name was Jacob
+and his mother's Ursula, both persons of good old German peasant stock,
+possessed of a strong strain of simple piety. The family religion was
+Lutheran, and Jacob the son was brought up both at home and at church
+in the Lutheran faith as it had shaped itself into definite form at the
+end of the sixteenth century. His early education was very limited,
+but he was possessed of unusual fundamental capacity and always
+exhibited a native mental power of very high order. He was always a
+keen observer; he looked through things, and whether he was in the
+fields, where much of his early life was spent as a watcher of cattle,
+or reading the Bible, which he knew as few persons have known it, he
+saw everything with a vivid and quickened imagination. He plainly
+began, while still very young, to revolt from the orthodox theology of
+his time, and his {156} years of reading and of silent meditation and
+reflection were the actual preparation for what seemed finally to come
+to him like a sudden revelation or, to use his own common figure, as "a
+flash."[12]
+
+His external appearance has been quaintly portrayed by his admiring
+friend and biographer, Abraham von Franckenberg, who, like a good
+portrait-painter, strives to let the body reveal the soul. "The
+external form of Jacob's body," he says, "was worn and very plain; his
+stature was small, his forehead low, his temples broad and prominent,
+his nose somewhat crooked, his eyes grey and rather of an azure-cast,
+lighting up like the windows of Solomon's Temple; his beard was short
+and thin; his voice was feeble, yet his conversation was mild and
+pleasant. He was gentle in manner, modest in his words, humble in
+conduct, patient in suffering and meek of heart. His spirit was highly
+illuminated of God beyond anything Nature could produce."[13]
+
+This youth, with "azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of
+Solomon's Temple," was from his childhood possessed of a most acutely
+sensitive and suggestible psychical disposition. He always felt that
+the real world was deeper than the one which he saw with his senses,
+and he was frequently swept from within by mighty currents which he
+could not trace to any well-mapped region of the domain of Nature. His
+vivid and pictorial imagination, his consciousness of inrushes from the
+unplumbed deeps within, and his inclination to solitude and meditation
+are well in evidence at an early age, and we have no difficulty at all
+in seeing that his psychological equilibrium was unstable, and that he
+was capable of sudden shifts of inward level.
+
+The first sign of his psychical peculiarity comes to light in an
+incident of his early childhood. While he was tending cattle in the
+fields one day he climbed alone a neighbouring {157} mountain-peak, and
+on the summit he espied among the great red sandstones a kind of
+aperture overgrown with bushes. Boy-like he entered the opening, and
+there within, in a strange vault, he descried a large portable vessel
+full of money. The sight of it made him shudder, and, without touching
+the treasure, he made his way out to the world again. To his surprise
+he was never able to find the aperture again, though, in company with
+the other less imaginative cowboys, he often hunted for it. His
+friend, von Franckenberg, who relates the story and says that he had it
+from Boehme's mouth, thinks that the experience was "a sort of
+emblematic omen or presage of his future spiritual admission to the
+sight of the hidden treasury of the wisdom and mysteries of God and
+Nature,"[14] but we are more interested in it as a revelation of the
+extraordinary psychical nature of the boy, with his tendency to
+hallucination.
+
+When he was in his fourteenth year he was apprenticed to a shoemaker in
+Seidenberg, and devoted himself diligently to the mastery of his trade.
+It was during this period of apprenticeship, which lasted three years,
+that there was granted to him "a kind of secret tinder and glimmer" of
+coming fame. One day a stranger, plain and mean in dress, but
+otherwise of good presence, came to the shop and asked to buy a pair of
+shoes. As the master shoemaker was absent, the uninitiated
+prentice-boy did not feel competent to sell the shoes, but the buyer
+would not be put off. Thereupon young Jacob set an enormous price upon
+them, hoping to stave off the trade. The man, however, without any
+demur paid the price, took the shoes, and went out. Just outside the
+door the stranger stopped, and in a serious tone called out, "Jacob,
+come hither to me!" The man, with shining eyes looking him full in the
+face, took his hand and said, "Jacob, thou art little but thou shalt
+become great--a man very different from the common cast, so that thou
+shalt be a wonder to the world. Be a good lad; fear God and reverence
+His Word." With a little more counsel, the {158} stranger pressed his
+hand and went his way, leaving the boy amazed.[15]
+
+He had, his intimate biographer tells us, lived from his very youth up
+in the fear of God, in all humility and simplicity, and had taken
+peculiar pleasure in hearing sermons, but from the opening of his
+apprenticeship he began to revolt from the endless controversies and
+"scholastic wranglings about religion," and he withdrew into himself,
+fervently and incessantly praying and seeking and knocking, until one
+day "he was translated into the holy Sabbath and glorious Day of Rest
+to the soul," and, according to his own words, was "enwrapt with the
+Divine Light for the space of seven days and stood possessed of the
+highest beatific wisdom of God, in the ecstatic joy of the
+Kingdom."[16] Boehme looked upon this "Sabbatic" experience as his
+spiritual call, and from this time on he increased his endeavours to
+live a pure life of godliness and virtue, refusing to listen to
+frivolous talk, reproving his fellows and even his shopmaster when they
+indulged in light and wanton conversation, until finally the master
+discharged him with the remark that he did not care to keep "a
+house-prophet" any longer.[17] Hereupon he went forth as a travelling
+cobbler, spending some years in his wanderings, discovering more and
+more, as he passed from place to place, how religion was being lost in
+the Babel of theological wrangling, and seeing, with those penetrating
+eyes of his, deeper into the meaning of life and the world. Near the
+end of the century--probably about 1599--he gave up his wanderings,
+married Catherine Kunchman, "a young woman of virtuous disposition,"
+and opened a shoemaker's shop for himself in the town of Görlitz, where
+he soon established a reputation for honest, faithful work, and where
+he modestly prospered and was able to buy a home of his own, and where
+he reared the four sons and two daughters who came to the happy home.
+
+{159}
+
+The supreme experience of his life--and one of the most remarkable
+instances of "illumination" in the large literature of mystical
+experiences--occurred when Boehme was twenty-five years of age, some
+time in the year 1600. His eye fell by chance upon the surface of a
+polished pewter dish which reflected the bright sunlight, when suddenly
+he felt himself environed and penetrated by the Light of God, and
+admitted into the innermost ground and centre of the universe. His
+experience, instead of waning as he came back to normal consciousness,
+on the contrary deepened. He went to the public green in Görlitz, near
+his house, and there it seemed to him that he could see into the very
+heart and secret of Nature, and that he could behold the innermost
+properties of things.[18] In his own account of his experience, Boehme
+plainly indicates that he had been going through a long and earnest
+travail of soul as a Seeker,[19] "striving to find the heart of Jesus
+Christ and to be freed and delivered from everything that turned him
+away from Christ." At last, he says, he resolved to "put his life to
+the utmost hazard" rather than miss his life-quest, when suddenly the
+"gate was opened." He continues his account as follows: "In one
+quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years
+together in a University. . . . I saw and knew the Being of Beings,
+the Byss and Abyss, the eternal generation of the Trinity, the origin
+and descent of this world, and of all creatures through Divine Wisdom.
+I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds--(1) the Divine,
+Angelical, or Paradisaical World; (2) the dark world, the origin of
+fire; and (3) the external, visible world as an outbreathing or
+expression of the internal and spiritual worlds. I saw, too, the
+essential nature of evil and of good, and how the {160} pregnant
+Mother--the eternal genetrix--brought them forth."[20]
+
+He has also vividly told his experience in the _Aurora_: "While I was
+in affliction and trouble, I elevated my spirit, and earnestly raised
+it up unto God, as with a great stress and onset, lifting up my whole
+heart and mind and will and resolution to wrestle with the love and
+mercy of God and not to give over unless He blessed me--then the Spirit
+did break through. When in my resolved zeal I made such an assault,
+storm, and onset upon God, as if I had more reserves of virtue and
+power ready, with a resolution to hazard my life upon it, suddenly my
+spirit did break through the Gate, not without the assistance of the
+Holy Spirit, and I reached to the innermost Birth of the Deity and
+there I was embraced with love as a bridegroom embraces his bride. My
+triumphing can be compared to nothing but the experience in which life
+is generated in the midst of death or like the resurrection from the
+dead. In this Light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in all
+created things, even in herbs and grass, I knew God--who He is, how He
+is, and what His will is--and suddenly in that Light my will was set
+upon by a mighty impulse to describe the being of God."[21]
+
+This experience was the momentous watershed of his life. He is
+constantly referring to it either directly or indirectly. "I teach,
+write, and speak," is his frequent testimony, "of what has been wrought
+in me. I have not scraped my teaching together out of histories and so
+made _opinions_. I have by God's grace obtained eyes of my own."[22]
+"There come moments," he writes, "when the soul sees God as in a flash
+of lightning,"[23] and he tells his readers that "when the Gate is
+opened" to them, they also "will understand."[24] "In my own
+faculties," he writes again, "I am as blind a man as {161} ever was,
+but in the Spirit of God my spirit sees through all."[25]
+
+During the ten quiet years which followed "the opening of the Gate" to
+him, Boehme meditated on what he had seen, and, though he does not say
+so, he almost certainly read much in the works of "the great masters,"
+as he calls them, who were trying to tell, often in confused language,
+the central secret of the universe. Instead of fading out, his "flash"
+of insight grew steadily clearer to him as he read and pondered, and
+little by little, as one comes to see in the dark, certain great ideas
+became defined. With his third "flash,"[26] which came to him in 1610,
+when he felt once more "overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and touched by
+God,"[27] he was moved to write down for his own use what he had seen.
+"It was," he says, "powerfully borne in upon my mind to write down
+these things for a memorial, however difficult they might be of
+apprehension to my outer self [intellect] and of expression through my
+pen. I felt compelled to begin at once, like a child going to school,
+to work upon this very great Mystery. Inwardly [in spirit] I saw it
+all well enough, as in a great depth; for I looked through as into a
+chaos where all things lie [undifferentiated] but the unravelling
+thereof seemed impossible. From time to time an opening took place
+within me, _as of a growth_.[28] I kept this to myself for twelve
+years [1600-12], being full of it and I experienced a vehement impulse
+before I could bring it out into expression; but at last it overwhelmed
+me like a cloud-burst which hits whatever it lights upon. And so it
+went with me: whatsoever I could grasp sufficiently to bring it out,
+that I wrote down."[29]
+
+This first book which thus grew out of his spiritual travails and
+"openings" Boehme called _Morning Glow_, to which later, through the
+suggestion of a friend, he gave {162} the title _Aurora_. It is a
+strange _mélange_ of chaos where all things lie undifferentiated and of
+insight; dreary wastes of words that elude comprehension, with
+beautiful patches of spiritual oasis. He himself always felt that the
+book was dictated to him, and that he only passively held the pen which
+wrote it. "Art," he says, speaking of his writing, "has not written
+here, neither was there any time to consider how to set it down
+punctually, according to the understanding of the letters, but all was
+ordered according to the direction of the Spirit, which often went in
+haste, so that in many words letters may be wanting, and in some places
+a capital letter for a word; so that _the Penman's hand_, by reason
+that he was not accustomed to it, did often shake. And though I could
+have wrote in a more accurate, fair, and plain manner, yet the reason
+was this, that the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and
+the hand and pen must hasten directly after it; for it goes and comes
+like a sudden shower."[30] This is obviously an inside account of the
+production of inspirational script, amounting almost to automatic
+impulsion. Throughout his voluminous writings he often speaks of "this
+hand," or "this pen" as though they were owned and moved by a will far
+deeper than his own individual consciousness,[31] and his writings
+themselves frequently bear the marks of automatisms.
+
+His manuscript copy of _Morning Glow_ was freely lent to readers and
+circulated widely. Boehme himself kept no copy by him, but he tells us
+that during its wanderings the manuscript was copied out in full four
+times by strangers and brought to him.[32] One of the copies fell into
+the hands of Gregorius Richter, pastor primarius of Görlitz, a violent
+guardian of orthodoxy and a man extremely jealous of any infringement
+of the dignity of his official position. He proceeded at
+once--"without sufficient examination or knowledge"--to {163} "vilify
+and condemn" the writing, and in a sermon on "False Prophets" he
+vigorously attacked the local prophet of Görlitz, who meekly sat in
+Church and listened to the "fulminations" against him.[33] After the
+sermon, Boehme modestly asked the preacher to show him what was wrong
+with his teaching, but the only answer he received was that if he did
+not instantly leave the town the pastor would have him arrested; and
+the following day Richter had Boehme summoned before the magistrates,
+and succeeded by his influence and authority in overawing them so that
+they ordered the harmless prophet to leave the town forthwith without
+any time given him to see his family or to close up his affairs.
+Boehme quietly replied, "Yes, dear Sirs, it shall be done; since it
+cannot be otherwise I am content." The next day, however, the
+magistrates of Görlitz held a meeting and recalled the banished prophet
+and offered him the privilege of remaining in his home and occupation
+on condition that he would cease from writing on theological matters.
+On this latter point we have Boehme's own testimony, though he does not
+refer the condition to the magistrates. "When I appeared before him"
+[Pastor Richter], Boehme says, "to defend myself and indicate my
+standpoint, the Rev. Primarius [Richter] exacted from me a promise to
+give up writing and to this I assented, since I did not then see
+clearly the divine way, nor did I understand what God would later do
+with me. . . . By his order I gave up for many years [1613-18] all
+writing or speaking about my knowledge of divine things, hoping vainly
+that the evil reports would at last come to an end, instead of which
+they only grew worse and more malignant."[34]
+
+Boehme's friend, Doctor Cornelius Weissner, in his account, which is
+none too accurate, endeavours to find an explanation of Richter's
+persistent hate and persecution {164} of the shoemaker-prophet in a
+gentle reproof which the latter administered to the former for having
+meanly treated a poor kinsman of Boehme in a small commercial
+transaction, but it is by no means necessary to bring up incidents of
+this sort to discover an adequate ground for Richter's fury. The
+_Aurora_ itself furnishes plenty of passages which would, if read,
+throw a jealous guardian of orthodoxy into fierce activity. One
+passage in which Boehme boldly attacks the popular doctrine of
+predestination and asserts that the writers and scribes who teach it
+are "masterbuilders of Lies" will be sufficient illustration of the
+theological provocation: "This present world doth dare to say that God
+hath decreed or concluded it so in His predestinate purpose and counsel
+that some men should be saved and some should be damned, as if hell and
+malice and evil had been from eternity and that it was in God's
+predestinate purpose that men should be and must be therein. Such
+persons pull and hale the Scriptures to prove it, though, indeed, they
+neither have the knowledge of the true God nor the understanding of
+Scripture. These justifiers and disputers assist the Devil steadfastly
+and pervert God's truth and change it into lies."[35] He closed his
+book with these daring words: "Should Peter or Paul seem to have
+written otherwise, then look to the essence, look to the heart [_i.e._
+to interior meaning]. If you lay hold of the heart of God you have
+ground enough."[36] His entire conception of salvation was, too, as we
+shall see, vastly different from the prevailing orthodox conception,
+and furthermore he was only a layman, innocent of the schools, and yet
+he was claiming to speak as an almost infallible instrument of a fresh
+revelation of God. Theologians of the type of the Primarius Richter
+need no other provocation to account for their relentless pursuit of
+local prophets that appear in the domain of their authority.
+
+Meantime Boehme's fame was slowly spreading, and he was drawing into
+sympathetic fellowship with himself a number of high-minded and serious
+men who were {165} dissatisfied with the current orthodox teaching. In
+this group of friends who found comfort in the fresh message of Boehme
+were Dr. Balthazar Walther, director of the Chemical Laboratory of
+Dresden, Dr. Tobias Kober, physician at Görlitz, a disciple of
+Paracelsus, Abraham von Franckenberg, who calls Jacob "our God-taught
+man," Doctor Cornelius Weissner, who became intimate with him in 1618,
+and the nobleman Carl von Endern, who copied out the entire manuscript
+of the _Aurora_. These friends frequently encouraged Boehme to break
+his enforced silence, and he himself was restless and melancholy,
+feeling that he was "entrusted with a talent which he ought to put to
+usury and not return to God singly and without improvement, like the
+lazy servant." "It was with me," he writes, describing his years of
+silence, "as when a seed is hidden in the earth. It grows up in storm
+and rough weather, against all reason. In winter time, all is dead,
+and reason says: 'It is all over with it.' But the precious seed
+within me sprouted and grew green, oblivious of all storms, and amid
+disgrace and ridicule it has blossomed forth into a lily!"[37]
+
+Under the pressure, from without and from within, he resolved after
+five years of repression to break the seal of silence and give the
+world his message. Writing to a dear friend, whom he called "a plant
+of God," he says: "My very dear brother in the life of God, you are
+more acceptable to me in that it was you who awaked me out of my sleep,
+that I might go on to bring forth fruit in the life of God--and I want
+you to know that after I was awakened _a strong smell was given to me
+in the life of God_."[38] During the next six years (1618-24) he wrote
+almost incessantly, producing, from 1620 on, book after book in rapid
+succession.[39] In 1622, he informs a friend that he {166} has "laid
+aside his trade to serve God and his brothers,"[40] and in 1623, he
+says that he has written without ceasing during the autumn and winter.
+He felt throughout his life that the "illumination," which broke upon
+him in the year 1600, steadily increased with the years, and he came to
+look upon his first book as only the crude attempt of a child as
+compared with his later works. "The Day," he writes in 1620, "has now
+overtaken the _Aurora_ [the morning glow]; it has grown full daylight
+and the morning is extinguished."[41] He says, with artlessness, that
+when he wrote the _Aurora_, he was not yet accustomed to the Spirit.
+The heavenly joy, indeed, met him and he followed the Spirit's
+guidance, but much of his own wild and untamed nature still remained to
+mar his work. Each successive book marks a growth of "the spiritual
+lily" in him, he thinks: "Each book from the first is ten times
+deeper!"[42]
+
+Once again, the zeal of a friend brought Boehme into the storm-centre
+of persecution. Until 1623, his works circulated only in manuscript
+and were kept from the eye of his ecclesiastical enemy, but toward the
+end of that year, an admirer, Sigismund von Schweinitz, printed three
+of his little books--_True Repentance_; _True Resignation_; and _The
+Supersensual Life_--in one volume under the title _The Way to Christ_.
+Richter was immediately aroused and poured forth his feelings in some
+desperately bad verses:
+
+ Quot continentur lineae, blasphemiae
+ Tot continentur in libro sutorio,
+ Qui nil nisi picem redolet sutoriam,
+
+{167}
+
+ Atrum et colorem, quern vocant sutorium.
+ Pfuy! pfuy! teter sit fetor a nobis procul![43]
+
+
+But the Primarius was not content with this harmless weapon of
+ridicule. He stirred up the neighbouring clergymen to join him in the
+attack, and a complaint was lodged in Town Council against Boehme as a
+"rabid enthusiast," and he was warned to leave the town. Boehme was as
+sweet and gentle in spirit now as he had been ten years before. He
+wrote in 1624: "I pray for those who have reviled and condemned me.
+They curse me and I bless. I am standing the test ["Proba"] and have
+the mark of Christ on my forehead."[44] But he thought that it did not
+befit him as an instrument of God's revelation to let the false charges
+against him go unanswered. He accordingly replied to the accusations
+in an _Apology_, in which the whole depth and beauty of his spiritual
+nature breathes forth. His appeal was in vain and he was forced to
+leave Görlitz. He went forth, however, in no discouraged mood. He saw
+that his message was "being sounded through Europe," and he predicts
+that "the nations will take up what his own native town is casting
+away. Already, he hears, his book has been read with interest in the
+Court of the Elector of Saxony, and he writes, March 15, 1624: "I am
+invited there to a conference with high people and I have consented to
+go at the end of the Leipzig fair. Soon the revelation of Jesus Christ
+shall break forth and destroy the works of the Devil."[45] The real
+trouble with the world, he thinks, is that the Christians in it are
+titular and verbal,"--they are only "opinion-peddlers,"[46] and that is
+why a man who insists upon a reproduction of the life of Christ is
+persecuted. The visit to the Elector's Court in Dresden came off well
+for the simple shoemaker. He spent two months in the home of the court
+physician, Dr. Hinkelmann, where many of the nobility and clergy came
+to see {168} him and to talk with him. Three professors of theology
+and other learned doctors were asked by the Elector to examine him.
+They reported that they did not yet quite succeed in understanding him,
+and that therefore they could not pronounce judgment. They hoped "His
+Highness would please to have patience and allow the man sufficient
+time to expound his ideas"--which were, in fact, already "expounded" in
+more than a score of volumes! One of the professors is reported to
+have said: "I would not for the world be a party to this man's
+condemnation," and another declared: "Nor would I, for who knows what
+lies at the bottom of it all!"[47]
+
+The end of the good man's life, however, was near. He was taken ill in
+November 1624, while staying with his old friend, von Schweinitz, and
+he hurried home to Görlitz, where his family had remained during his
+absence, to die in the quiet of his own house. The night before he
+died, he spoke of hearing beautiful music, and asked to have the door
+opened that he might hear it better. In the morning--as the _Aurora_
+appeared--he bade farewell to his wife and children, committed his soul
+to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ, arranged a few simple matters, and,
+with a smile on his face, said, "Now I go to Paradise."
+
+His old enemy, Richter, had died a few months before him, but the new
+pastor was of the same temper and refused to preach his funeral sermon.
+The second pastor of the city was finally ordered by the Governor of
+Lausitz to preach the sermon, which he began with the words, "I had
+rather have walked a hundred and twenty miles than preach this
+sermon!"[48] The common people, however,--the shoemakers, tanners and
+a "great concourse of us his fast friends," as one of them
+writes,--were at the funeral, and a band of young shoemakers carried
+his body to its last resting-place, where a block of porphyry now
+informs the visitor that "Jacob Boehme, _philosophus Teutonicus_"
+sleeps beneath.
+
+Grützmacher holds that Boehme is an "isolated thinker," having little,
+if any, historical connection with {169} the past.[49] I do not agree
+with this view. I find in him rather the ripe fulfilment of the
+powerful protest against the dead letter, against a formal religion,
+and equally a fulfilment of a Christianity of inward life, which was
+voiced so vigorously in the writings of Denck, Bünderlin, Entfelder,
+Franck, and Weigel, neglecting for the moment another side of Boehme
+and another set of influences which appeared in him. The central note
+of his life-long prophet-cry was against a form of religion built upon
+the letter of Scripture and consisting of external ceremonies and
+practices, and this is the ground of Richter's bitter hostility and
+stubborn opposition.[50]
+
+The Church of his day seems to him a veritable Babel--"full of pride
+and wrangling, and jangling, and snarling about the letter of the
+written Word," lacking in true, real, effectual knowledge and power; a
+pitiably poor "substitute for the Temple of the holy Spirit where God's
+living Word is taught."[51] Through each of his books we hear of
+"verbal Christendom"; of "titular Christians"; of "historical feigned
+faith"; of "history religion"; of "an external forgiveness of sins"; of
+"the work of outward letters." "The builders of Babel," he says,
+"cannot endure that one should teach that Christ Himself must be the
+teacher in the human heart"--"they jangle instead about the mere husk,
+about the written word and letter while they miss the living Word."[52]
+
+The divisions of Christendom are due to the fact that its
+"master-builders" are of the Babel-type. They always follow the line
+of _opinion_; their basis is "the letter"; their method of approach is
+_external_. They build "stone houses in which they read the writings
+which the Apostles left behind them," while they themselves dispute and
+contend about "mental idols and {170} opinions."[53] The true Church
+of Christ, on the contrary, is the living Temple of the Spirit. It is
+built up of men made wholly new by the inward power of the Divine
+Spirit and made _one_ by an inward unity of heart and life with
+Christ--as "a living Twig of our Life-Tree Jesus Christ." Nobody can
+belong to this Church unless "he puts on the shirt of a little child,"
+dies to selfishness and hypocrisy, rises again in a new will and
+obedience, and forms his life in its inmost ground according to Christ,
+the Life.[54] "The wise world," he declares, "will not believe in the
+true inward work of Christ in the heart; it will have only an external
+washing away of sins in Grace," but the ABC of true religion is far
+different.[55] He only is a Christian in fact in whom Christ dwelleth,
+liveth and hath His being, in whom Christ hath arisen as the eternal
+ground of the soul. He only is a Christian who has this high title in
+himself, and has entered with mind and soul into that Eternal Word
+which has manifested itself as the life of our humanity.[56] He wrote
+near the end of his life to Balthazar Tilken: "If I had no other book
+except the book which I myself am, I should have books enough. The
+entire Bible lies in me if I have Christ's Spirit in me. What do I
+need of more books? Shall I quarrel over what is outside me before I
+have learned what is within me?"[57] "What would it profit me if I
+were continually quoting the Bible and knew the whole book by heart but
+did not know the Spirit that inspired the holy men who wrote that book,
+nor the source from which they received their knowledge? How can I
+expect to understand them in truth, if I have not the same Spirit they
+had?"[58]
+
+This insistence on personal, first-hand experience and practice of the
+Christ-Life, as the ground of true religion, {171} is the fundamental
+feature of Boehme's Christianity. He travels, as we shall see, through
+immense heights and deeps. Like Dante, who immeasurably surpasses him
+in power of expression, but not in prophetic power of vision, he saw
+the eternal realities of heaven and hell and the world between, and he
+told as well as he could what he _saw_, but his practical message which
+runs like a thread through all his writings is always simple--almost
+childlike in its simplicity--"Thou must thyself be the way. The
+spiritual understanding must be born in thee."[59] "A Christian is a
+new creature in the ground of the heart."[60] "The Kingdom of God is
+not from without, but it is a new man, who lives in love, in patience,
+in hope, in faith and in the Cross of Jesus Christ."[61]
+
+And this simple shoemaker of Görlitz, with his amazing range of thought
+and depth of experience, practised and embodied the way of life which
+he recommended. He was a good man, and his life touches us even now
+with a kind of awe. "Life," he once said, "is a strange bath of thorns
+and thistles,"[62] and he himself experienced that "bath," but he went
+through the world hearing everywhere a divine music and "having a joy
+in his heart which made his whole being tremble and his soul triumph as
+if it were in God."[63]
+
+
+
+[1] I have used as primary source the German edition of Boehme's
+Works--_Theosophia revelata_--published in 1730 in 8 vols. All my
+references are to the English translations made by Sparrow, Ellistone,
+and Blunden, 1647-61. These translations were republished, 1764, in 4
+vols. in an edition which has incorrectly been called William Law's
+edition. Four volumes have been republished by John M. Watkins of
+London, as follows: _The Threefold Life of Man_, 1909; _The Three
+Principles_, 1910; _The Forty Questions_ and _The Clavis_, 1911; and
+_The Way to Christ_, 1911. The _Signatura rerum_, in English, has been
+published in "Everyman's Library." A valuable volume of selections
+from "Jacob Behmen's Theosophic Philosophy" was made by Edward Taylor,
+London, 1691. Many volumes of selections have been published in recent
+years. The books on Boehme which I have found most suggestive and
+helpful are the following: Franz von Baader's "Vorlesungen und
+Erläuterungen über J. Böhme's Lehre," _Werke_ (Leipzig, 1852), vol.
+iii. [edition of 1855, vol. xiii.]; Émile Boutroux, _Le Philosophe
+allemand_ (Paris, 1888): translated into English by Rothwell in
+Boutroux's _Historical Studies in Philosophy_ (London, 1912), pp.
+169-233; Hans Lassen Martensen's _Jacob Boehme_ (translated from the
+Danish by T. Rhys Evans, London, 1885); Franz Hartmann's _Life and
+Doctrine of Jacob Boehme_ (London, 1891); Von Harless' _Jacob Boehme
+und die Alchymisten_ (Leipzig, 1882); Ederheimer's _Jakob Boehme und
+die Romantiker_ (Heidelberg, 1901); Paul Deussen's _Jacob Boehme_--an
+Address delivered at Kiel, May 8, 1897--translated from the German by
+Mrs. D. S. Hehner and printed as Introduction to Watkin's edition of
+_The Three Principles_ (1910); Christopher Walton's _Notes and
+Materials for a Biography of William Law_ (London, 1854)--a volume of
+great value to the student of Boehme; Rudolph Steiner's _Mystics of the
+Renaissance_ (translated, London, 1911), pp. 223-245; A. J. Penny's
+_Studies in Jacob Boehme_ (London, 1912), uncritical and written from
+the theosophical point of view; Hegel's _History of philosophy_
+(translated by Haldane and Simson, London, 1895), iii. pp. 188-216.
+
+[2] Aurora, John Sparrow's translation (London, 1656), ii. 79-80.
+
+[3] _Aurora_, iii. 1-3.
+
+[4] _Third Epistle_, 15.
+
+[5] _Aurora_, xiii. 27.
+
+[6] _Ibid._ viii. 19.
+
+[7] _Ibid._ ix 90.
+
+[8] _Ibid._ xiii. 2-4.
+
+[9] _Third Epistle_, 22.
+
+[10] Many thinkers of prominent rank have borne testimony to the
+greatness of Boehme's genius. I shall mention only a few of these
+estimates:
+
+"I would recommend you to procure the writings of Boehme and diligently
+read them. For though I have studied philosophy and theology from my
+youth . . . yet I must acknowledge that the above writings have been to
+me of more service for the understanding of the Bible than all my
+University learning."--"J. G. Gictell, 1698.
+
+"Jacob Boehme, as a religious and philosophical genius, has not often
+had his equal in the world's history."--"Jacob Boehme: His Life and
+Philosophy." An Address by Dr. Paul Deussen.
+
+"Jacob Boehme est le seul, au moins dont on ait eu les écrits jusqu'à
+lui, auquel Dieu ait découvert le fond de la nature, tant des choses
+spirituelles, que des corporelles."--Peter Poiret, in a note at the end
+of his _Théologie germanique_, 1700.
+
+"As a chosen servant of God, Jacob Boehme must be placed among those
+who have received the highest measures of light, wisdom, and knowledge
+from above. . . . All that lay in religion and nature as a mystery
+unsearchable was in its deepest ground opened to this instrument of
+God."--William Law, _Works_ (ed. 1893), vi. p. 205.
+
+"To Jacob Boehme belongs the merit of having taught more profoundly
+than any one else before or after him the truth that back of and behind
+all that has come to appear of good and evil there is an immaterial
+World which is the essence and reality of all that is."--Franz von
+Baader, _Werke_ (Leipzig, 1852), iii. p. 382.
+
+Novalis wrote in a letter to Ludwig Tieck in 1800: "Man sieht durchaus
+in ihm [Jakob Böhme] den gewaltigen Frühling mit seinen quellenden,
+treibenden, bildenden, und mischenden Kräften, die von innen heraus die
+Welt gebären. Ein echtes Chaos voll dunkler Begier und wunderbarem
+Leben--einen wahren auseinandergehenden Mikrokosmos."--Quoted from
+Edgar Ederheimer's _Jakob Boehme und die Romantiker_ (1904), p. 57.
+
+[11] His English translators in the seventeenth century variously
+spelled his name Behm, Behme, and Behmen. This latter spelling was
+adopted in the so-called Law Edition of 1764, and has thus come into
+common use in England and America.
+
+[12] Boehme refers frequently to "the writings of high masters," whom
+he says he read (_Aurora_, x. 45), and he often names Schwenckfeld and
+Weigel in particular. See especially _The Second Epistle_, sec. 54-62
+
+[13] _Memoirs of the Life, Death and Burial, and Wonderful Writings of
+Jacob Behmen_, translated by Francis Okeley (1780), p. 22.
+
+[14] _Memoirs_, p. 2.
+
+[15] _Memoirs_, p. 6. Von Franckenberg says that Boehme himself told
+him this incident.
+
+[16] Ibid. pp. 4-5. The reader will have noted the long history of
+this phrase, "Sabbath of the soul."
+
+[17] _Ibid._ p. 7.
+
+[18] _Memoirs_, p. 8. Paracelsus taught that the inner nature of
+things might be seen by one who has become an organ of the Universal
+Mind. He says: "Hidden things which cannot be perceived by the
+physical senses may be found through the sidereal body, through whose
+organism we may look into nature in the same way as the sun shines
+through a glass. The inner nature of everything may be known through
+Magic [The Divine Magia] and the power of inner sight."--Hartmann's
+_Life of Paracelsus_ (1896), p. 53.
+
+[19] He uses this word _Seeker_ hundreds of times in his writings.
+
+[20] _Second Epistle_, sec. 6-8.
+
+[21] _Aurora_, xix. 10-13. He goes on in the following sections to
+describe how for twelve years this insight "grew in his soul like a
+young tree before the exact understanding of it all" was arrived at.
+
+[22] _The Fifth Epistle_, 50.
+
+[23] _Aurora_, xi. 146.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ xi. 6.
+
+[25] Aurora, xxii. 47.
+
+[26] In the _Aurora_ Boehme speaks of the Flash as an experience: "As
+the lightning flash appears and disappears again in a moment, so it is
+also with the soul. In its battle the soul suddenly penetrates through
+the clouds and sees God like a flash of Light."--Ibid. xi. 76.
+
+[27] _Memoirs_, p. 8.
+
+[28] Evidently the "flash" of the year 1610 was not the last one. In
+fact, he seems to have had frequent ecstasies.
+
+[29] _The Second Epistle_, 9-10.
+
+[30] _Third Epistle_, 35.
+
+[31] See especially _Signatura rerum_, ix. 63, and _Forty Questions_,
+xxvi. 2-3 and xxx. 3 and 5.
+
+[32] _Third Epistle_, 32. The _Memoirs_ describe how it was copied by
+"a Gentleman of some rank" [Carl von Endern].
+
+[33] _Memoirs_, p. 9.
+
+[34] Preserved in the Diary of Bartholomew Scultetus, then Mayor of
+Görlitz (Ueberfeld's edition, 1730). This Diary does not record any
+actual banishment of Boehme. The data for our knowledge of the
+persecutions of Boehme are found in a personal narrative written by his
+friend Cornelius Weissner, M.D.--_Memoirs_, pp. 39-50.
+
+[35] _Aurora_, xiii. 7-10.
+
+[36] _Ibid._ xxxvi. 152.
+
+[37] _Third Epistle_, 7.
+
+[38] _Fifteenth Epistle_, 18.
+ This "new smell in the life of God" often occurs in
+Boehme's writings. Compare George Fox's testimony, "The whole creation
+had a new smell." For further comparisons see pp. 221-227.
+
+[39] The following is a complete list of his writings:
+
+1612. _The Aurora_.
+
+1619. _The Three Principles of the Divine Essence_.
+
+1620. _The Threefold Life of Man; Forty Questions; The Incarnation of
+Jesus Christ; The Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Christ; The Tree
+of Faith; Six Points; Heavenly and Earthly Mysterium; The Last Times_.
+
+1621. _De signatura rerum; The Four Complexions; Apology to Balthazar
+Tilken_ in 2 parts; _Consideration on Esaias Stiefel's Book_.
+
+1622. Sec. _Apology to Stiefel; Repentance; Resignation; Regeneration_.
+
+1623. _Predestination and Election of God; A Short Compendium of
+Repentance; The Mysterium magnum_.
+
+1624. _The Clavis; The Supersensual Life; Divine Contemplation;
+Baptism and the Supper; A Dialogue Between the Enlightened and
+Unenlightened Soul; An Apology on the Book of Repentance; 177
+Theosophic Questions; An Epitome of the Mysterium magnum; The Holy
+Week; An Exposition of the Threefold World_.
+
+Undated. _An Apology to Esaias Stiefel; The Last Judgment; Epistles_.
+
+[40] _Thirty-first Epistle_, 10.
+
+[41] _The Third Epistle_, 30.
+
+[42] _Ibid._ 29.
+
+[43] There are as many blasphemies in the shoemaker's book as there are
+lines. It smells of shoemaker's wax and filthy blacking. May this
+intolerable stench be far from us.
+
+[44] _Thirty-fourth Epistle_, 5.
+
+[45] _Thirty-third Epistle_.
+
+[46] _Thirty-fourth Epistle_, 16 and 21.
+
+[47] Weissner's Narrative, _Memoirs_, p. 49.
+
+[48] _Ibid._ p. 58.
+
+[49] _Wort und Geist_, p. 196 _seq._
+
+[50] What could be a bolder criticism of the existing Church of his day
+than this: "In place of the wolf [the Roman Church] there has grown up
+the fox [the Lutheran Church] another anti-Christ, never a whit better
+than the first. If he should come to be old enough how he would devour
+the poor people's hens!"--_The Three Principles of the Divine Essence_,
+xviii. 102.
+
+[51] _Mysterium magnum_, xxvii. 47.
+
+[52] _Ibid._ xxviii. 49-51.
+
+[53] _Mysterium magnum_, xxxvi. 34; xl. 98.
+
+[54] _Ibid._ lxiii. 47-51; _Twenty-first Epistle_, 1.
+
+[55] _Myst. mag._ xxv. 13.
+
+[56] _The First Epistle_, 3-5.
+
+[57] _Apology to Tilken_, ii. 298.
+
+[58] _Ibid._ 72. Compare George Fox's testimony: "All must come to
+that Spirit, if they would know God or Christ or the Scriptures aright,
+which they that gave them forth were led and taught by."--_Journal_
+(ed. 1901), i. 35 and _passim_.
+
+[59] _Sig. re._ xiv. i.
+
+[60] _Myst. mag._ lxx. 40.
+
+[61] _Fourth Epistle_, 27 and 32.
+
+[62] _The Three Princ._ xxii. 2.
+
+[63] _Aurora_, iii. 39.
+
+
+
+
+{172}
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+BOEHME'S UNIVERSE
+
+"If thou wilt be a philosopher or naturalist and search into God's
+being in Nature and discern how it all came to pass, then pray to God
+for the Holy Spirit to enlighten thee. In thy flesh and blood thou art
+not able to apprehend it, but dost read it as if a mist were before thy
+eyes. In the Holy Spirit alone, and in the whole Nature out of which
+all things were made, canst thou search into Nature."--_Aurora_, ii.
+15-17.
+
+
+One idea underlies everything which Boehme has written, namely, that
+nobody can successfully "search into visible Nature," or can say
+anything true about Man or about the problem of good and evil, until he
+has "apprehended _the whole Nature out of which all things were made_."
+It will not do, he thinks, to make the easy assumption that in the
+beginning the world was made out of nothing. "If God made all things
+out of nothing," he says, "then the visible world would be no
+revelation of Him, for it would have nothing of Him in it. He would
+still be off beyond and outside, and would not be known in this world.
+Persons however learned they may be, who hold such 'opinions' have
+never opened the Gates of God."[1]
+
+Behind the visible universe and in it there is an invisible universe;
+behind the material universe and in it there is an immaterial universe;
+behind the temporal universe and in it there is an eternal universe,
+and the first business of the philosopher or naturalist, as Boehme
+conceives it, is to discover the essential Nature of this invisible,
+immaterial, eternal universe out of which this fragment of a visible
+world has come forth.
+
+{173}
+
+ Need have we,
+ Sore need, of stars that set not in mid storm,
+ Lights that outlast the lightnings.[2]
+
+The visible fragment is never self-explanatory; all attempts to account
+for what occurs in it drive the serious observer deeper for his answer,
+and with a breathless boldness this meditative shoemaker of Görlitz
+undertakes to tell of the nature of this deeper World within the world.
+As a boy he saw a vast treasury of wealth hidden in the inside of a
+mountain, though he could never make anybody else see it. As a man he
+believed that he saw an immeasurable wealth of reality hidden within
+the world of sense, and he tried, often with poor enough success, to
+make others see the inside world which he found. We must now endeavour
+to grasp what it was that he saw. There is no doubt at all that this
+inside world which he discovered within and behind visible Nature,
+within and behind man, is really there, nor is there any doubt in my
+mind that he, Jacob Boehme, got an insight into its nature and
+significance which is of real worth to the modern world, but he is
+seriously hampered by the poverty of his categories, by the
+difficulties of his symbolism and by his literary limitations, when he
+comes to the almost insuperable task of expressing what he has seen.
+He is himself perfectly conscious of his limitations. He is constantly
+amazed that God uses such "a mean instrument," he regrets again and
+again that he is "so difficult to be understood," and he often wishes
+that he could "impart his own soul" to his readers that they "might
+grasp his meaning,"[3] for he never for a moment doubts that "by God's
+grace he has eyes of his own."[4] He lived in an unscientific age,
+before our present exact terminology was coined. He was the inheritor
+of the vocabulary and symbolism of alchemy and astrology, and he was
+obliged to force his spiritual insight into a language which for us has
+become largely an antique rubbish heap.[5] If he {174} had possessed
+the marvellous power that Dante had to compel words to express what his
+soul saw, he might have fused these artificial symbolisms with the fire
+of his spirit, and given them an eternal value as the Florentine did
+with the equally dry and stubborn terminology of scholasticism, but
+that gift he did not have.[6] We must not blame him too much for his
+obscurities and for his large regions of rubbish and confusion, but be
+thankful for the luminous patches, and try to seize the meaning and the
+message where it breaks through and gets revealed.
+
+The outward, visible, temporal world, he declares, is "a spiration, or
+outbreathing, or egress" of an eternal spiritual World and this inner,
+spiritual World "couches within" our visible world and is its ground
+and mother, and the outward world is from husk to core a parable or
+figure of the inward and eternal World. "The whole outward visible
+world, with all its being, is a 'signature' or figure of the inward,
+spiritual World, and everything has a character that fits an internal
+reality and process, and the internal is in the external."[7] As he
+expresses the same idea in another book: "The visible world is a
+manifestation of the inward spiritual World, and it is an image or
+figure of eternity, whereby eternity has made itself visible."[8]
+
+But there is a still deeper Source of things than this inward spiritual
+World, which is after all a manifested and organized World, and Boehme
+begins his account with That which is before beginnings--the
+unoriginated Mother of all Worlds and of All that is, visible and
+invisible. This infinite Mother of all births, this eternal Matrix, he
+calls the _Ungrund_, "Abyss," or the "Great {175} Mystery,"[9] or the
+"Eternal Stillness." Here we are beyond beginnings, beyond time,
+beyond "nature," and we can say nothing in the language of reason that
+is true or adequate. The eternal divine Abyss is its own origin and
+explanation; it presupposes nothing but itself; there is nothing beyond
+it, nothing outside it--there is, in fact, no "beyond" and
+"outside"--it is "neither near nor far off."[10] It is an absolute
+Peace, an indivisible Unity, an undifferentiated One--an Abysmal Deep,
+which no Name can adequately name and which can be described in no
+words of time and space, of here and now.
+
+But we must not make the common blunder of supposing that Boehme means
+that _before_ God expressed Himself and unfolded Himself in the
+infinite processes of revelation and creation, He existed apart, as
+this undifferentiated One, this unknowable Abyss, this incomprehensible
+Matrix. There is no "before." Creation, revelation, manifestation is
+a dateless and eternal fact. God to be a personal God must go out of
+Himself and find Himself in something that mirrors Him. He must have a
+Son. He must pour His Life and Love through a universe. What Boehme
+means, then, is that no manifestation, no created universe, no
+expression, is the ultimate Reality itself. The manifested universe
+has come out of More than itself. The Abyss is more than anything, or
+all, that comes out of it, or can come out of it, and it lies with its
+infinite depth beneath everything which appears, as a man's entire
+life, conscious and unconscious, is in and yet lies behind every act of
+will, though we can "talk about" only what is voiced or expressed.
+
+Even within this Abysmal Depth, that underlies all that comes to being,
+there is eternal process--eternal movement toward Personality and
+Character: "God is the eternal Seeker and Finder of Himself."[11] "In
+the {176} Stillness an eternal Will arises, a longing desire for
+manifestation, the eye of eternity turns upon itself and discovers
+itself"[12]--in a word there is within the infinite Divine Deep an
+eternal process of self-consciousness and personality, which Boehme
+expresses in the words, "The Father eternally generates the Son." "God
+hath no beginning and there is nothing sooner than He, but His Word
+hath a bottomless, unfathomable origin in Him and an eternal end: which
+is not rightly called _end_, but Person, _i.e._ the Heart of the
+Father, for it is generated in the eternal Centre."[13] This inner
+process toward Personality is often called by Boehme "the eternal
+Virgin" who brings to birth God as Person, or sometimes "the Mirror,"
+in which God sees Himself revealed as will and wisdom and goodness.
+
+In the greatest artistic creation of the modern world--"The Sistine
+Madonna"--Raphael has with almost infinite pictorial power of genius
+tried to express in visible form this Birth of God. Behind curtains
+which hang suspended from nowhere and stretch across the universe,
+dividing the visible from the invisible, the world of Nature from the
+world of holy mystery, the infinite, immeasurable and abysmal God is
+pictured as defined and personal in the face and figure of a little
+Child, in which the artist suggests in symbolism the infinite depth and
+joy and potency of Divinity breaking forth out of mystery into form.
+It is precisely this birth of God into visibility that Boehme is
+endeavouring to tell. "The Son," however, Boehme says, "is not divided
+or sundered from the Father, as two persons side by side--there are not
+two Gods. The Son is the heart of the Father--God as Person--the
+outspringing Joy of the total triumphing Reality,[14] and through this
+eternal movement toward self-consciousness and Personality, God becomes
+Spirit, an out-going energy of purpose, a dynamic activity, bursting
+forth into infinite manifestation and differentiation--a forth-breathed
+or expressed Word.[15] Through {177} this eternal process of
+self-differentiation and outgoing activity, the inner spiritual
+universe comes into being--as an intermediate Nature or world, between
+the ineffable Abyss of God on the one hand, and our world of material,
+visible things on the other hand." "The process of the whole
+creation," he says, "is nothing else but a manifestation of the deep
+and unsearchable God, and yet creation is not God but rather like an
+apple which springs from the power of the tree and grows upon the tree,
+and yet is not the tree--even so all things have sprung forth out of
+the central divine Desire."[16]
+
+This entire manifested or out-breathed universe is, he says, the
+expression of the divine desire for holy sport and play. The Heart of
+God enjoys this myriad play of created beings, all tuned as the
+infinite strings of a harp for contributing to one mighty harmony, and
+all together uttering and voicing the infinite variety of the divine
+purpose. Each differentiated spirit or light or property or atom of
+creation has a part to play in the infinite sport or game or harmony,
+"so that in God there might be a holy play through the universe as a
+child plays with his mother, and that so the joy in the Heart of God
+might be increased,"[17] or again, "so that each being may be a true
+sounding string in God's harmonious concert."[18]
+
+This eternal, interior World--the Mirror in which the Spirit manifests
+Himself--is a double world of darkness and light, for there can be no
+manifestation except through opposites.[19] There must be yes and no.
+In order to have a play there must be opposing players. In order to
+have life and reality there must be conflict and conquest. As soon as
+the forth-going Word of God is differentiated into many concrete
+expressions and the fundamental Unity of the Abyss is broken up into
+particular desires and wills, there is bound to be a clash of
+opposites--will and contra-will, strain and tension, light and joy and
+beauty, and over against them pain and sorrow and evil. Evil must
+appear as soon as there is {178} process of separation,
+differentiation, variety, specialization and particularity.[20]
+Darkness appears as soon as there is a contraction or narrowing into
+concrete desire and will.
+
+Both worlds--the light world and the dark world--are made by desire and
+will. Narrowing desires for individual and particular aims, which
+sever a being from the total whole of divine goodness, make the kingdom
+of darkness, while death to self-will and a yearning desire and will
+for all that is expressed in the Heart and Light of God, in the Person
+of His Son, make the kingdom of Light. Lucifer--the awful example of
+the dark World--fell because he stood in pride and despised the Birth
+of the Heart of God and its gentle, universalizing love-spirit; and so
+his light went out into darkness. His climbing up into a severed will
+was his fall. The more he climbed toward the sundered aim of his own
+will and turned away from the Heart of God, the greater was his fall,
+for to turn away from the Heart of God is always to fall.[21] There is
+no darkness, no evil, in angel or devil or man, except the nature of
+that particular being's own will and desire--both darkness and light
+are born of desire. The origin of the fall of any creature, therefore,
+is not outside that creature, but within it.[22]
+
+The evil in the world is only a possible good spoiled. Beings created
+for a holy sport and play, for an ordered harmony, as infinite
+harp-strings for a celestial music, set their wilful desires upon
+sundered ends, broke the intended harmony, or "temperature," as Boehme
+calls it, introduced strife--the _turba magna_--and darkness, and so
+spoiled the actual material out of which the kingdoms of nature are
+made, for the attitude of will moulds the permanent structure of the
+being. Through the whole universe, visible and invisible, as a result,
+the dark lines run, and the drama of the whole process of the universe
+is the mighty issue between light and darkness, good and evil: Two
+universal qualities persist from {179} beginning to end and produce two
+kingdoms arrayed against each other--each within the other--one love,
+the other wrath; one light, the other darkness; one heavenly, the other
+hellish.[23]
+
+Now out of this inner spiritual universe--a double universe of light
+and darkness--this temporal, visible, more or less material, world has
+come forth, as an outer sheath of an inner world, and, like its Mother,
+it, too, is a double world of good and evil. "There is not," as
+William Law, interpreting Boehme, once said, "the smallest thing or the
+smallest quality of a thing in this world, but is a quality of heaven
+or hell discovered [_i.e._ revealed] under a temporal form. Every
+thing that is disagreeable to taste, to the sight, to our hearing,
+smelling or feeling has its root and ground and cause in and from hell
+[the dark kingdom], and is as surely in its degree the working and
+manifestation of hell in this world, as the most diabolical malice and
+wickedness is; the stink of weeds, of mire, of all poisonous, corrupted
+things; shrieks, horrible sounds; wrathful fire, rage of tempests and
+thick darkness, are all of them things that had no possibility of
+existence, till the fallen angels disordered their kingdom [_i.e._
+until the inner universe was spoiled by narrow, sundered desires].
+Therefore everything that is disagreeable and horrible in this life,
+everything that can afflict and terrify our senses, all the kinds of
+natural and moral evil, are only so much of the nature, effects and
+manifestation of hell, for hell and evil are only two words for one and
+the same thing. . . . On the other hand, all that is sweet, delightful
+and amiable in the world, in the serenity of air, the fineness of
+seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colours,
+the fragrance of smells, the splendour of precious stones, is nothing
+else but heaven breaking through the veil of this world, manifesting
+itself in such a degree and darting forth in such variety so much of
+its own nature."[24]
+
+I have spoken so far as though Boehme traced the {180} source of every
+thing to _will and desire_, as though, in fact, the visible universe
+were the manifold outer expression of some deep-lying personal will,
+and in the last analysis that is true, but his more usual form of
+interpretation is that of the working of great structural _tendencies_,
+or _energies_, or "_qualities_," as he calls them, which are common
+both to the inner and the outer universe. There are, he declares again
+and again with painful reiteration, but with little advance of
+lucidity, seven of these fundamental laws or energies or qualities,
+like the sevenfold colour-band of the rainbow, though they can never be
+untangled or sundered or thought of as standing side by side, for
+together in their unity and interprocesses they form the universe, with
+its warp and woof of light and darkness.[25]
+
+The first "quality" is a contracting, compacting tendency which runs
+through the entire universe, outer and inner. It is in its inmost
+essence _desire_, the egoistic tendency, the focusing of will upon a
+definite aim so that consciousness contracts from its universal and
+absolute possibilities to a definite, limited, concrete _something in
+particular_, and thus negates everything else. Desire always disturbs
+the "Quiet" and brings contraction, negation and darkness. In the
+outer world it appears as the property of cohesion which makes the
+particles of a particular thing hold and cling together and form one
+self-contained and separate thing. It is the individualizing tendency
+which permeates the universe and which may be expressed either as a
+material law in the outer world, or as personal will-tendency in the
+inner world.
+
+The second "quality" is the attractive, gravitating tendency which
+binds whole with whole as an organizing, universalizing energy. This,
+again, is both spiritual and physical--it has an outer and an inner
+aspect. It is a fundamental love-principle in the inner world--the
+{181} foundation, as Boehme says, of sweetness and warmth and
+mercy[26]--and at the same time is a structural, organizing law of
+nature, which tends out of many parts to make one universe.[27]
+
+These two diverse tendencies at work eternally in the same world
+produce strain and tension and _anguish_. The tension occasioned by
+these opposite forces gives rise to the third "quality," which is a
+tendency toward movement, oscillation, rotation--what Boehme often
+calls _the wheel of nature_, or the wheel of motion, or the wheel of
+life.[28] This, too, is both outer and inner; a law of the physical
+world and a tendency of spirit. There is nothing in nature that is not
+ceaselessly moved, and there is no life without its restlessness and
+anguish, its inward strain and stress, its tension and its problem, its
+dizzy wheel of life--the perpetual pursuit of a goal which ends at the
+starting-point as an endless circular process.
+
+The fourth "quality" is the _flash_, or ignition, due to collision
+between nature and spirit, in which a new principle of activity breaks
+through what before was mere play of _forces_, and reveals something
+that has activity in itself, the kindling, burning power of fire,
+though not yet fire which gives _light_. In the outer world it is the
+bursting forth of the elemental, fusing, consuming powers of Nature
+which may either construct or destroy. In the inner world it is the
+birth of self-consciousness on its lower levels, the awaking of the
+soul, the kindling of passion, and desire, and purpose. Any one of
+these four lower "qualities" may stay at its own level, remain in
+itself, out of "temperature" or balance with the rest, and so be only a
+"dark principle"; or it may go on and fulfil itself in one of the
+higher "qualities" next to be described, and so become a part of the
+triumphing "light principle." Fire may be only a "fire of anguish" or
+it may go up into a "fire of love"; it may be a harsh, {182}
+self-tormenting fire, or it may be a soft, light-bringing, purifying
+fire. Suffering may harden the spirit, or it may be the condition of
+joy. Crucifixion may be mere torture, or it may be the way of
+salvation. It is then here at the _great divide_ between the
+"qualities" that the universe reveals its differentiation into two
+kingdoms--"the dark" and "the light."
+
+The fifth "quality" is Light, springing out of the "flash" of fire and
+rising to the level of illumination and the revelation of beauty. It
+is at this stage of Light that the lower force-forms and fire-forms
+first stand revealed in their full meaning and come to their real
+fulfilment. On its inner or spiritual side this Light-quality is an
+"amiable and blessed Love." It is the dawn and beginning of the
+triumphing spirit of freedom which wills to draw all things back to one
+centre, one harmony, one unity, in which wild will and selfish passion
+and isolating pride, and all that springs from the dark fire-root are
+quenched, and instead the central principle of the spiritual
+world--Love--comes into play.
+
+Boehme calls his sixth "quality" voice or sound, but he means by it the
+entire range of intelligent expression through tone and melody, music
+and speech, everything in the world, in fact, that gives joy and beauty
+through purposeful utterance. He even widens his category of "sound"
+to include colours and smells and tastes, in short, all the
+sense-qualities by which the world gets revealed in its richness of
+beauty and harmony to our perception. He widens it, too, to include
+deeper and subtler tones than those of our earth-born sense--the
+heavenly sports and melodies and harmonies which the rightly attuned
+spirit may hear with a finer organ than the ear.
+
+The seventh, and final, "quality" is body or figure, by which he means
+the fundamental tendency or energy toward expression in actuality and
+concrete form. The final goal of intelligent purpose is the
+realization of wisdom, of idea, in actual Nature-forms and
+life-forms--the _incarnation of the spirit_. There is nothing real in
+the {183} universe but has its form, its "signature," its figure, its
+body-aspect: "There is not anything but has its soul and its body, and
+each soul is as it were an inner kernel, or seed, to a visible and
+comprehensible body,"[29] and, as we shall see, the supreme achievement
+of the universe is the visible appearance of the Word of God, the
+eternal Son, in flesh like ours--a visible realization in time of the
+eternal Heart of God. The glory of God appears in a kingdom of God, a
+visible vesture of the Spirit.
+
+All these seven qualities, or "fountain-spirits," or fundamental
+tendencies, are in every part and parcel of the universe, and each
+particular thing or being finds his true place in the vast drama or
+play of the universe, according to which "quality" is prepotent, and
+marks the thing or being with its "signature." They constitute in
+their eternal nature what Boehme calls _The Three Principles_ that
+underlie all reality of every order. The first principle is the
+substratum or essence of these first three "qualities," the
+nature-tendencies at the level of forces, which he generally calls the
+_fire-principle_, _i.e._ the dark fire, before the "flash" has come.
+The second principle is the substratum or essence of the last three
+"qualities"--the tendencies toward unity, harmony, order, love, which
+he calls the _light-principle_. The third principle produces the union
+or synthesis of the other two--the principle of realization in body and
+form, the triumph over opposition of these two opposing principles in
+the exhibition of the real, the actual, the living, the conscious,
+where dark and light are both joined, but are dominated by another
+irreducible principle. To these three fundamental principles
+correspond the three supreme divine aspects: Father, Son, and Holy
+Ghost.[30]
+
+We are here, of course, far from a scientific account of the processes
+and evolution of the universe. Boehme {184} is no scientific genius
+and he did not dream that every item and event of the world of
+phenomena could be causally explained, without reference to any deeper
+abysmal world of Spirit. His mission is rather that of the prophet who
+"has eyes of his own." He is endeavouring to tell us, often no doubt
+in very laborious fashion, sometimes as "one who is tunnelling through
+long tracts of darkness," that this outside world which we see and
+describe is a parable, a pictorial drama, suggesting, hinting,
+revealing an inside world of Spirit and Will; that every slightest
+fragment of the seen is big with significance as a revelation of an
+unseen realm, which again is an egress from the unimaginable Splendour
+of God. He believes, like Paracelsus, that everything in
+Nature--plants, metals, and stars--"can be fundamentally searched out
+and comprehended" by the inward way of approach, can be read like an
+open book by the children of the Spirit who have caught the secret clue
+that leads in, and who have the key that unlocks the inner realm.[31]
+
+Obviously his "inner way of approach" works more successfully when
+applied to _man_ than when applied to plants and metals and stars--and
+when he writes of man, whether in the first or in the third person, he
+does often seem to have "eyes of his own," and to "hold the key that
+unlocks."
+
+It is an elemental idea with him that man is "a little world"--a
+microcosm--and expresses in himself all the properties of the great
+world--the macrocosm.[32] "As you find man to be," he writes, "just so
+is eternity. Consider man in body and soul, in good and evil, in light
+and darkness, in joy and sorrow, in power and weakness, in life and
+death--all is in man, both heaven and earth, stars and elements.
+Nothing can be named that is not man."[33] Every man's life is
+inwardly bottomless and opens from within into all the immeasurable
+depth of God. Eternity springs through time and reveals itself in
+every person, for the foundation property of the soul {185} of every
+man is essentially eternal, spiritual, and abysmal--it is a little drop
+out of the Fountain of the Life of God, it is a little sparkle of the
+Divine Splendour.[34] God is spoken of again and again as "man's
+native country," his true "origin and home"--"The soul of man is always
+seeking after its native country, out of which it has wandered, seeking
+to return home again to its rest in God."[25] "The soul of man," he
+says again, "has come out from the eternal Father, out from the Divine
+Centre, but this soul--with this high origin and this noble
+mark--stands always at the opening of two gates."[36] Two worlds, two
+mighty cosmic principles, make their appeal to his will. Two kingdoms
+wrestle in him, two natures strive for the mastery in his life, and he
+makes his world, his nature, his life, his eternal destiny by his
+choices: "Whatsoever thou buildest and sowest here in thy spirit, be it
+words, works, or thought, that will be thy eternal house."[37] "The
+good or evil that men do, by acts of will, enters into and forms the
+soul and so moulds its permanent habitation."[38] Adam once, and every
+man after him also once, has belonged, in the centre of the soul, to
+God, and whether it be Adam or some far-off descendant of him, each is
+the creator of his own real world, and settles for himself the
+atmosphere in which he shall live and the inner "tincture" of his
+abiding nature. "Adam fell"--and any man's name can here be
+substituted for "Adam"--"because, though he was a spark of God's
+eternal essence, he broke himself off and sundered himself from the
+universal Will--by contraction--and withdrew into self-seeking, and
+centred himself in selfishness. He broke the perfect temperature--or
+harmonious balance of qualities--and turned his will toward the dark
+world and the light in him grew dim."[39] To follow the dark world is
+to be Lucifer or fallen Adam, to follow the light world completely is
+to be Christ[40]--and before every soul the two {186} gates stand
+open.[41] In a powerful and penetrating passage he says: "We should
+take heed and beget that which is good out of ourselves. If we make an
+angel of ourselves we are that; if we make a devil of ourselves, we are
+that."[42]
+
+This last sentence is a good introduction to Boehme's conception of
+"the next world"--"the great beyond." He was as completely free of the
+crude idea that heaven is a shining locality in the sky, and hell a
+yawning pit of fire below the earth, as the most exact scientific
+scholar of the modern world is likely to be. He had grasped the
+essential and enduring character of man's spiritual nature so firmly
+that he ceased to have any further interest in the mythological aspects
+in which vivid and pictorial imagination has invested the unseen world.
+"God's presence itself," he says, "is heaven, and if God did but put
+away the veiling shadows, which now curtain thy sight, thou wouldst
+see, even where thou now art, the Face of God and the heavenly gate.
+God is so near that at any moment a holy Birth [a Birth into the Life
+of God] may be accomplished in thy heart,"[43] and, again, in the same
+book he writes: "If man's eyes were opened he would see God everywhere,
+for heaven is everywhere for those who are in the innermost Birth.
+When Stephen saw heaven opened and Jesus at the right hand of God, his
+spirit did not swing itself aloft into some heaven in the sky, but it
+rather penetrated into the innermost Birth where heaven always is.
+Thou must not think that God is a Being who is off in an upper heaven,
+or that when the soul departs it goes many hundred thousands of miles
+aloft. It does not need to do that, for as soon as it has entered the
+innermost Birth it is in heaven already with God--_near and far in God
+is one thing_."[44]
+
+The "next world"--"the beyond"--therefore, must not be thought of in
+terms of space and time, of here and there, of now and then, as a place
+to which we shall journey at the momentous moment of death: "the soul
+{187} needeth no going forth."[45] As soon as the external veil of
+flesh dissolves, each person is in his own country and has all the time
+been in it. There is nothing nearer to you than heaven and hell. To
+whichever of them you _incline_ and toward whichever of them you
+tend--that is most near you, and every man has in himself the key.[46]
+Heaven and hell are everywhere throughout the whole world. You need
+not seek them far off.
+
+It is always the nature of "Anti-Christ" and "Babel" and
+"opinion-peddlers" to seek God and heaven and hell above the stars or
+under the deep. There is only one "place" to look for God and that is
+in one's own soul, there is only one "region" in which to find heaven
+or hell, and that is in the nature and character of the person's own
+desire and will: "Even though the devil should go many millions of
+miles, desiring to see heaven and enter into it, yet he would still be
+in hell and could not see heaven at all."[47] The soul, Boehme says in
+substance, hath heaven or hell in itself. Heaven is the turning of the
+will into God's love; hell is the turning of the will into hate. Now
+when the body falls away the heavenly soul is thoroughly penetrated
+with the Love and Light of God, even as fire penetrates and enlightens
+white-hot iron, whereby it loses its darkness--this is heaven and this
+is the right hand of God. The soul that dwells in falsehood, lust,
+pride, envy, and anger carries hell in itself and cannot reach the
+Light and Love of God. Though it should go a thousand miles or a
+thousand times ten thousand miles--even climb beyond the spaces of the
+stars and the bounds of the universe--it would still remain in the same
+property and source of darkness as before.[48] The "next world"--"the
+world beyond"--is {188} just _this_ world, as it is in each one of us,
+with its essential spirit and nature and character clearly revealed and
+fulfilled. God creates and maintains no hell of ever-lasting torture;
+He builds and supports no heaven of endless glory. They are both
+formed out of the soul's own substance as it turns toward light or
+darkness, toward love or hate--in short, as "it keeps house," to use
+one of his vivid words, with the eternal nature of things.
+
+Something like this, then, was the universe which Boehme--with those
+"azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of Solomon's
+Temple"--saw there in Görlitz, as he pegged his shoes. "Open your
+eyes," he once said, "and the whole world is full of God."[49] But he
+is not a pantheist, in the usual sense of that word, blurring away the
+lines between good and evil, or the boundaries which mark off self from
+self, and self from God. There is forever, to be sure, a hidden
+essence or substance in the soul which is from God, and which remains
+to the end unlost and unspoiled--something to which God can speak and
+to which His Light and Grace can make appeal; but I am indestructibly a
+real I, and God is in His true nature no vague Abyss--He eternally
+utters Himself as Person: "The first Abysmal God without beginning
+begets a comprehensible will which is Son. Thus the Abyss which in
+itself is an indescribable Nothing [nothing in particular] forms itself
+into Something [definite] through the Birth of a Son, and so is
+Spirit."[50] In God Himself there is only Good, only triumphing
+eternal Joy,[51] but as soon as finite processes appear, as soon as
+anything is differentiated into actuality, the potentialities of
+darkness and light appear, the possibilities of good and evil are
+there: "_All things consist in Yes or No. In order to have anything
+definite made manifest there must be a contrary therein--a Yes and a
+No._"[52] The universe, therefore, though it came forth out of the
+eternal Mother and remains still, in its deepest origin and being,
+rooted in the substance of God, is a {189} battleground of strife, an
+endless Armageddon. Both within and without the world is woven of
+mixed strands, a warp of darkness and a woof of light, and all beings
+possessed of will are thus actors in a mighty drama of eternal
+significance, with exits, not only at the end of the Fifth Act but
+throughout the play, through two gates into two worlds which are both
+all the time present here and now.
+
+
+
+[1] _Aurora_, xxi. 60-62.
+
+[2] Swinburne, _Erechtheus_.
+
+[3] See _Fifteenth Epistle_, 25.
+
+[4] _Fifth Epistle_, 50.
+
+[5] Like Paracelsus, he uses "sulphur" in a symbolic way to represent
+an active energy of the universe and a form of will in man. In a
+similar way, "mercury" stands for intelligence and spirit, and "salt"
+is the symbol for substance. No one could find in a chemist's shop the
+salt or sulphur that Boehme talks about!
+
+[6] There is a fine saying about Dante in the Ottimo Commento: "I, the
+writer, heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other
+than he would, but that many a time and oft he had made words say for
+him what they were not wont to say for other poets."
+
+[7] _Sig. re._ ix. 1-3. Paracelsus said, "Everything is the product of
+one creative effort," and, "There is nothing corporeal that does not
+possess a soul."
+
+[8] _The Supersensual Life_, p. 44.
+
+[9] Paracelsus and others used the term _Mysterium magnum_ to denote
+the original, but unoriginated, matter out of which all things were
+made. "Mysterium" is anything out of which something germinally
+contained in it can be developed.
+
+[10] _Mysterium magnum_, xxix. 1-2.
+
+[11] _Forty Questions_, i. 57.
+
+[12] _Sig. re._ ii. 4-15, and iii. 1-10.
+
+[13] _The Threefold Life of Man_, iii. 2.
+
+[14] _Aurora_, iii. 35-39.
+
+[15] _Ibid._ vi. 6-8; _Clavis_, 18-29.
+
+[16] _Sig. re._ xvi. i.
+
+[17] _Aurora_, xiii. 48-57; _Myst. mag._ viii. 31; _The Three
+Principles_, iv. 66.
+
+[18] _Sig. re._ xv. 38.
+
+[19] _Myst. mag._ viii. 27.
+
+[20] _Myst. mag._ xxix. 1-10.
+
+[21] _The Three Principles_, iv. 68-74; _The Threefold Life_, iv. 33.
+
+[22] _Myst. mag._ ix. 3-8.
+
+[23] _Aurora_, Preface 84.
+
+[24] Christopher Walton, _Notes and Materials for a Biography of Wm.
+Law_ (London, 1854), 55.
+
+[25] The great passages in which Boehme expounds the seven qualities
+are found in the _Aurora_, chaps. viii.-xi.; _Sig. re._ chap. xiv.;
+_The Clavis_, 54-132; though they are more or less definitely stated or
+implied in nearly everything he wrote. Seven "qualities" or
+"principles" or "sources" appear and reappear in ever shifting forms
+throughout the entire literature of Gnosticism, alchemy, and
+nature-mysticism.
+
+[26] _Aurora_, viii. 32-35.
+
+[27] Some of Boehme's enthusiastic friends insist that Sir Isaac
+Newton, who was an admirer of Boehme, "ploughed with Boehme's heifer,"
+_i.e._ got his suggestion of the law of universal gravitation from the
+philosopher of Görlitz. See Walton, _Notes_, p. 46 and _passim_.
+
+[28] _Sig. re._ iv. _passim_.
+
+[29] _Sig. re._ xiii.
+
+[30] For fuller treatment of this point see Boutroux, _Historical
+Studies in Philosophy_, chapter on "Jacob Boehme, the German
+Philosopher," pp. 199-201.
+
+[31] _Third Epistle_, 33.
+
+[32] _Twenty-fourth Epistle_, 7; _Sig. re._ i.
+
+[33] _The Threefold Life_, vi. 47.
+
+[34] _The Three Princ._ xiv. 89; _First Epistle_, 42.
+
+[35] _The Three Princ._ x. 26; xvi. 50.
+
+[36] _Ibid._ x. 13.
+
+[37] _Aurora_, xviii. 49.
+
+[38] _Myst. mag._ xxii. 41.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ xviii. 31-43, given in substance.
+
+[40] _Ibid._ xxvi. 19. The place of Christ in Boehme's system will be
+given in the next chapter.
+
+[41] _Myst. mag._ xxvi. 5.
+
+[42] _Incarnation_, part ii. ix. 12-14.
+
+[43] _Aurora_, x. 100-103.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ xix. 56-59.
+
+[45] _The Supersensual Life_, 36.
+
+[46] _The Three Princ._ ix. 25-27 and xix. 33.
+
+[47] _Myst. mag._ viii. 28.
+
+[48] _The Supersensual Life_, 38. Every reader will naturally be
+reminded of Milton's great lines:
+
+ "The mind is its own place, and in itself
+ Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
+
+There were no doubt many _sources_ in Milton's time for such a
+conception, but the poet surely would read the translations of Boehme
+which were coming from the press all through the period of his literary
+activity.
+
+[49] _The Threefold Life_, xi. 106.
+
+[50] _Election_, i. 10-17.
+
+[51] _Aurora_, ii. 63.
+
+[52] _Theosoph. Quest._ iii. 2-4.
+
+
+
+
+{190}
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+JACOB BOEHME'S "WAY OF SALVATION"
+
+"I will write a Process or Way which I myself have gone."[1] Most
+writers who have treated of Boehme have mainly dealt with his
+_Weltanschauung_--his theosophical view of the Abyss and the worlds of
+time and eternity,--or they have devoted themselves to descriptions of
+his type of mysticism.[2] His important permanent contribution to
+Christianity is, however, to be found in his interpretation of the way,
+or, as he calls it, the process of salvation. Very much that he wrote
+about the procession of the universe is capricious and subjective. His
+interpretations of Genesis, and of Old Testament Scripture in general,
+are thoroughly uncritical and of value only as they reveal his own mind
+and his occasional flashes of insight. But his accounts of his own
+_experience_ and his message of the way to God possess an elemental and
+universal value, and belong among the precious words of the prophets of
+the race. His Way of Salvation is in direct line with the central
+ideas of Denck, Bünderlin, Entfelder, Franck, Schwenckfeld, and Weigel;
+that is, his emphasis is always, as was theirs, upon the native divine
+possibilities of the soul, upon the fact of a spiritual environment in
+immediate correspondence and co-operation with the soul, and upon the
+necessity of personal and inward experience as the key to every gate of
+life; but he puts more stress even than Schwenckfeld did {191} upon the
+epoch-making new birth, and he sees more in the Person of Christ as the
+way of salvation than any of the spiritual Reformers of the sixteenth
+century had seen, while his own personal experience was so unique and
+illuminating, so profound and transforming, that he was able to speak
+on divine things with a grasp and insight and with a spiritual
+authority beyond that attained by any of the reformers in this group.
+He has given, I think, as profound and as simple, and at the same time
+as vital an interpretation of salvation through Christ as the
+Reformation movement produced before the nineteenth century, and much
+that he said touches the very core of what seems to us to-day to be the
+heart of the Gospel, the central fact of mature religion.[3]
+
+As we have seen, Boehme does not in the least blink the tragic depth of
+sin, while he goes as far as anybody in holding that "the centre of
+man's soul came out of eternity,"[4] that "as a mother bringeth forth a
+child out of her own substance and nourisheth it therewith, so doth God
+with man his child,"[5] and that the inward ground and centre of the
+soul, with its divine capacity of response to Grace and Light, is an
+inalienable possession of every man.[6] Yet, at the same time, he
+insists that there is in every soul "both a yes and a no," a vision of
+the good and a _contrarium_, a hunger for the universal will of God and
+a hunger for the particular will of self.[7] The form of hunger, the
+inclination of desire, the attitude of will shapes the destiny, forms
+the fundamental disposition, and builds the life of every man into
+heaven or into hell--"a man puts on a garment of light or a garment of
+wrath as he puts on clothes."[8] To consent to false desire, to turn
+toward objects that feed only the particular selfish will, to live in
+the lower "qualities" of dark-fire is to {192} form a soul _tinctured_
+with darkness and sundered from the eternal root of Life. Lucifer went
+the whole way in his consent to false and evil desire. He said, "Evil
+be thou my good!" and formed his entire nature out of the
+dark-principle, and "his Light went out." Adam and his offspring after
+him, however, only dimmed the native Light and deadened the original
+power that belongs to one who comes from God, to live in heavenly
+harmony and joy. Man has fallen indeed, but he is not hopelessly lost,
+he is "forever seeking his native country," and he forever bears within
+himself an immortal seed which may burst into Life--into a
+"Lily-blossom."[9] The way of salvation for Boehme is the _process_ by
+which this original Light and power, dimmed and deadened by sin, are
+restored to the soul.
+
+He never tires of insisting that the restoration can come only by a
+_process of Life_, not by a "scheme" of theology. Like the early
+prophets of Israel, in their sweeping attacks on the ritual and
+sacrificial systems that were being substituted for moral and spiritual
+life, Boehme flings himself with holy passion against the substitution
+of doctrines of salvation for a real life-process of salvation,
+personally experienced in the soul. "Cain" and "Babel" are his two
+favourite types of the prevailing substitute-religion which he calls
+"verbal," or "historical," or "titular" Christianity.[10] "Whatever
+Babel teaches," he says, "of external imputed righteousness, or of
+external assumed adoption is without foundation or footing."[11] He is
+still only a follower of "Cain" who tries to cover his old, evil,
+unchanged self "with the purple mantle of Christ's death."[12] The
+"opinion" that the old man of evil-will can be "covered" with Christ's
+merit, the "faith" that His death pays off for us the debt of our sin
+is only "a supposed religion."[13] "Christianity," he says again,
+"does not consist in the mere knowing of history and applying the
+history-knowledge to ourselves, {193} saying: 'Christ died for us; He
+hath paid the ransom for us, so that we need do nothing but comfort
+ourselves therewith and steadfastly believe that it is so.'"[14] The
+"doctors" and "the wise world" and "the makers of opinion" will have it
+that Christ has suffered on the Cross for all our sins, and that we can
+be justified and acquitted of all our transgressions by what He did for
+us, but it is no true, safe way for the soul. To stake faith upon a
+history that once was, to look for "satisfaction" through the
+sufferings which Christ endured before we were born is to be "the child
+of an assumed grace," is to possess a mere external and historical
+faith that leaves the dim, weak soul where it was before. All such
+"invented works" and "supposed schemes" are of Anti-Christ, they "avail
+nothing" whatever toward the real process of salvation.[15]
+
+The gravamen of his charge is not that the "opinions" are false, or
+that the "history" is unimportant, but that "opinions" and "history"
+are taken as substitutes for religion itself, which is and must always
+be an actual inward process constructing a new and victorious life in
+the person himself. "All fictions, I say, and devices which men
+contrive to come to God by are lost labour and vain endeavour _without
+a new mind_. Verbal forgiveness and outward imputation of
+righteousness are false and vain comforts--soft cushions for the evil
+soul--without the creation of a will wholly new, which loveth and
+willeth evil no more."[16] The whole problem, then, is the problem of
+the formation of a new vision, a new desire, a new will, and Boehme
+finds the solution of this deepest human problem in Christ. Christ is
+the Light-revelation of God--the shining forth of the Light and Love
+nature of the Eternal God. It must not be supposed for a moment that
+once--before satisfaction was made to Him--God was an angry God who had
+to be "reconciled" by a transaction, or that there was _a time in
+history_ when God began to reveal His Heart in a Christ-revelation, or
+{194} that when Christ became man, Deity divided itself into sundered
+Persons.[17] "No. You ought not to have such thoughts," Boehme says.
+The Heart and Light and Love of God are from eternity. Christ has
+never sundered or broken Himself away from God; they are not two but
+forever One. All the Light and Love and Joy of God have blossomed into
+the Christ-manifestation and become revealed in Him. Like everything
+else in the universe, Christ is both outward and inward. He belongs in
+the eternal inward world and He also has had His temporal manifestation
+in the visible world. The Heart of God became a human soul, brought
+the fulness of the Deity into humanity, and slew the spirit of the
+world.[18] The inward penetrated the outward and illuminated it with
+Light.[19] Christ entered into humanity and tinctured it with
+Deity.[20] In Him the Heart of God became man, and in the power of the
+heavenly Light He wrestled with our wild human nature and conquered
+it.[21] Eternity and time are united in Him.[22] He is the wedding
+chamber of God and man.[23] He is God and man in one undivided
+Person.[24] He is actual God; He is essential man--the God-man, the
+man-God, in whom the arms of everlasting Love are outstretched and
+through whom humanity is brought into the power of the Eternal God.[25]
+It was in this "dear Emmanuel," as he often calls Christ, that "Love
+became man and put on our human flesh and our human soul,"[26] and the
+full power of Eternal Love stood revealed in time, for "One who is Love
+itself was born of our own very birth."[27] The Cross was not a
+transaction. It was the culmination of this mighty Love, for "here on
+the cross hung God and man"--God's Love springing forth in a soul
+strong enough to show it in its full scope.[28]
+
+But let no person think that he can "cover himself with the purple
+mantle of Christ's sufferings and death," {195} and so win his
+salvation: "Thou thyself," he says, "must go through Christ's whole
+journey, and enter wholly into His process."[29] "We become children
+of God in Christ," he wrote in one of his Epistles, "not by an outward,
+adventitious show of appropriating Grace, not through some merit of
+Grace appropriated from without, or received in an historical
+apprehension of being justified by another, but through an inward,
+resident Grace, which regenerates us into childlikeness, so that Christ
+the conqueror of death arises in us and becomes a dominating operation
+in us."[30] This is the heart of his entire message. Every step must
+be experimental. Salvation is an inward process, and Christ is
+efficacious and effective because _He lives and operates in us_. "The
+suffering and death of Christ," he says, "avail only for those who die
+to their own will in and with Christ, and are buried with Him to a new
+will and obedience, and hate sin; who put on Christ in His suffering,
+reproach, and persecution, take His cross upon them and follow Him
+under His red banner; to those who put on Christ in His process and now
+become in the inward spiritual man Christ's members and the Temple of
+God who dwells in us. No one has a right to comfort himself with
+Christ's merits unless he desires wholly to put on Christ in himself.
+He is not a Christian until he has put Him on by true repentance and
+conversion to Him with absolute resignation and self-denial, so that
+Christ espouseth and betrotheth Himself with him. . . . For a
+Christian must be born of Christ and must die to the will of Adam. He
+must have Christ in him and be a member of His Life according to the
+spiritual man."[31]
+
+Faith, which is always the key-word in any person's interpretation of
+Christianity, is for Boehme a dynamic process of appropriating Christ,
+and of re-living Him. "Faith," he writes in his treatise on _The
+Incarnation_, {196} "is not historical knowledge for a man to make
+articles of it and to depend on them, but faith is one spirit with God,
+it is the activity of God; it is free, but only for the right and for
+pure Love, in which it draws the breath of its power and strength. It
+is, finally, itself the substance."[32] Faith is, thus, not knowledge,
+it is not believing facts of history, it is not accepting metaphysical
+dogma. It is, as he is never weary of saying, "strong earnestness of
+spirit," the earnest will to live in the inward and eternal, passionate
+hunger and thirst for God, and finally the act of receiving Christ into
+the soul as a present power and spirit to live by. "I must die," he
+wrote, "with my outward man [the man of self-centred will] in Christ's
+death and arise and live anew in Him. Therefore I live now by the will
+of faith in the spirit of Christ and receive Christ with His humanity
+into my will. He makes through me a manifestation of the spiritual
+world and introduces the true Love-sound into the harp-strings of my
+life. He became that which I am, and now He has made me that which He
+is!"[33]
+
+Another word for this efficacious and dynamic Faith is "Birth" or
+"innermost Birth," by which Boehme means the act of discovering the
+Gate to the Heart and Love and Light of God, and of entering it. "The
+Son of God, the Eternal Word of the Father, the Glance and Brightness
+and Power of Eternal Light must become man and _be born in you_;
+otherwise you are in the dark stable and go about groping."[34] "If
+thou art born of God, then within the circle of thy own life is the
+whole undivided Heart of God."[35] It is a transforming event by which
+one swings over from life in the outer to life in the inner world, from
+life in the dark world to life in the light world, and is born into the
+kingdom, or principle, which Christ revealed in His triumphant
+spiritual Life. The human spirit, by this innermost Birth, reaches the
+principle of Life by which Christ lived, and the gate into heaven is
+opened and paradise is in the soul. In a {197} beautiful passage he
+says: "This birth must be wrought within you. The Heart, or the Son of
+God must arise in the birth of your life, and then you are in Christ
+and He is in you, and all that He and the Father have is yours; and as
+the Son is one with the Father, so also the new man is one with the
+Father and with the Son, one virtue, one power, one light, one life,
+one eternal paradise, one enduring substance, one Father, Son, and Holy
+Ghost, and thou His child!"[36] God is no longer conceived as far
+away. He is now with His Love and Light as near as the soul is to
+itself, and the joy of being born in Christ is like the joy of parents
+when a little child is born to them.[37] God's will now becomes the
+man's will, he turns back into the unity from which he broke away, he
+sees now in one moment what all the doctors in the schools, on the mere
+level of reason, have never seen, and his inward eye is so opened that
+he knows God as soon as his eye turns toward Him.[38]
+
+This Faith-process, or innermost life-birth, is not the act of a moment
+that is over and done with. It means the progressive formation of a
+new man within the man, so that the real Christian becomes a living
+branch in a mighty Christ-Tree. Just as Adam was the trunk of a great
+race-tree of fallen humanity, Christ is to be the Eternal Life-Tree of
+the universe in whom all the new-born souls of men shall live as
+springing, flowering branches or twigs: God created only one Man; all
+other men are twigs of the One Stem.[39] "In Christ," he says, "we are
+all only one, as a tree in many boughs and branches," and, with a
+return to autobiography, Boehme adds, "His Life has been brought into
+mine, so that I am atoned with Him in His Love. The will of Christ has
+entered into humanity again in me, and now my will in me enters into
+His humanity."[40] He writes to one of his Silesian friends: "You are
+a growing branch in the Life-Tree of God in Christ, in whom all the
+children of God are also branches," and he adds that there is "no other
+faith {198} which saves except Christ in us," the Life of our
+lives.[41] Sometimes he calls this triumphant experience the birth of
+a new branch in Christ's Life-Tree, sometimes the birth of the Lily in
+Christ's garden of flowers, sometimes it is the birth of the immortal
+seed. Sometimes it is uniting in life and spirit with Him who is "the
+Treader on the Serpent," sometimes it is finding the noble Virgin,
+sometimes it is discovering the Philosopher's Stone, sometimes it is
+winning the precious Diadem, sometimes it is possessing the key which
+unlocks the Door, sometimes it is arriving at the Sabbath Quiet of the
+soul. These are only a variety of ways, many of them forgotten
+inheritances from alchemy and astrology, of saying that the soul finds
+its goal in an experience which binds it into one common corporate life
+with Christ and so into an elemental Love-Unity with God: whoever is
+born of Christ liveth and walketh in Him, puts Him on in His suffering,
+death, and resurrection, becomes a member of Christ's body, is
+"tinctured" with His spirit, and has his own human life rooted in the
+Love of God.[42] Here, then, in the creation and formation of this
+organic Life-Tree the universe attains its ultimate goal. It is wholly
+an achievement of free will, of holy choice. The dark Principle is not
+annihilated, is not suppressed, but the Heart of God moves ever on in a
+steadily growing triumph, binding soul after soul into the divine
+Igdrasil Tree of the Light Universe, in a unity that is not now the
+unity of negation and undifferentiation--an Abyss that swallows up all
+that is in it,--but a unity of many wills united in a spirit of concord
+and love, many persons formed by holy desire into one unbroken symphony
+as harps of God.
+
+With the change of _centre_ in the inner man corresponds also the outer
+life of word and deed, for the outer, here as everywhere, is only the
+"signature" of an inner which fits it: "A man must show the root of the
+tree out of which spirit and flesh have their origin."[43] When the
+will becomes new-born and the soul unites itself as a twig {199} in
+Christ's Life-Tree, then it ceases to love sin and will it. When God
+brings His will into birth in us, He gives us virtue and power to will
+what He wills, and to leave our sins behind.[44] The attitude of hate,
+the spirit of war are marks of the old unchanged nature, and are
+heathenish and not Christian. When Christ is formed in the inner
+ground of the soul, a man leaves the sword in the sheath and lives in
+the virtue and power of peace and love. "What will Christ say," he
+asks the ministers of the Church of his day, "when He sees your
+apostolic hearts covered with armor? When He gave you the sword of the
+Spirit, did He command you to fight and make war, or to instigate kings
+and princes to put on the sword and kill?"[45]
+
+Like the prophets of Israel, he feels intensely the sufferings of the
+poor and the oppressed, and he breaks out frequently into a biting
+satire on a kind of Christianity which not only neglects the true
+_cure_ of soul and body, but "consumes the sweat and blood of the
+needy," and feeds upon "the sighs and groans and tears of the
+poor."[46] The true idea of a _real_ Christianity is "fraternity in
+the Life of Christ"--"thy brother's soul," he says, "is a fellow-member
+with thy soul,"[47] and he insists, as though it were the mighty burden
+of his spirit, that all possessions, goods, and talents shall
+contribute to the common life of humanity and to the benefit of the
+social group.[48] It is much better for parents to labour to form good
+souls in their children than to strive to gather and to leave behind
+for them great riches and abundance of goods![49] Self-desire is a
+ground not only of personal disquiet but also of social disturbance,
+and Boehme feels that the way to spread peace and joy through the world
+is to cultivate the Love-spirit of Christ and to practice it in
+fellowship with men.
+
+Like his German predecessor, Sebastian Franck, he is {200} primarily
+concerned with the invisible Church, and he holds lightly to the
+empirical Church as he knows it. The Church to which his spirit is
+dedicated is the organic Life-Tree of which Christ is the living Stem.
+The holy Zion is not from without, he says, it is built up of those who
+are joined to Christ and who all live together in one city which is
+Christ in us.[50] A Christian in the life belongs to no sect, he
+ceases to wrangle over opinions and words, he dwells in the midst of
+sects and Babel-churches, but he keeps above the controversies and
+contentions, and "puts his knowing and willing into the Life of
+Christ," and works quietly on toward the formation and triumph of the
+one true Christian Church,[51] which will be, when its glory is
+complete, the visible expression of the Divine Life-Tree.
+
+He dislikes, as much as did the English Quaker, George Fox, the custom
+of calling "stone houses" churches, and he will not admit that a
+building is anything but a building: "Stone houses, called churches,
+have no greater holiness than other houses, for they are built of stone
+and other such material, as other houses are, and God is no more
+powerful in them than He is in other houses, but the Church [_i.e._ the
+Congregation] which meets there, if the members of it bind themselves
+by prayer into one body in Christ, is a holy Temple of Jesus
+Christ."[52]
+
+His attitude toward outward sacraments consistently fits in with all
+his central teachings. The outward, for Boehme, is never unimportant.
+It is always significant and can always be used as a parable or symbol
+of something inner and eternal. But the outward is at best only
+temporal, only symbolic, and it becomes a hindrance if it is taken for
+the real substance of which it is only the outward "signature": "The
+form shall be destroyed and shall cease with time, but the spirit
+remains forever."[53] The sacraments, he declares, do not take away
+sin, for men go to church all their lives and receive the sacraments
+{201} and remain as wicked and beastly as ever--while a holy man always
+has a Church within himself and an inward ministry.[54] Blessedness,
+therefore, lies not in the outward, but in the life and power of the
+inward spirit, and it is only a Babel-Church that claims the right to
+cast out those who have the real substance and neglect only the outward
+form.[55] In his _Treatise on the Holy Supper_, he wrote: "It is not
+enough for a man to hear sermons preached, and to be baptised in the
+name of Christ, and to go to the Supper. This maketh no Christian.
+For that, there must be _earnestness_. No person is a Christian unless
+Christ live and work in him."[56]
+
+The pith and heart of Christianity, the consummate goal of the way of
+Salvation, for Boehme is, as we have seen, not "history" and not any
+kind of outward "form" or "letter"--_buchstäbliches Wort_,--it is an
+experience in which the soul finds itself "at the top of Jacob's
+ladder," and feels its life in God and God's Life in it in an ineffable
+Love-union. He has himself given a very simple and penetrating account
+of this type of experience drawn from what he calls his own book of
+life: "Finding within myself a powerful _contrarium_, namely, the
+desires that belong to flesh and blood, I began to fight a hard battle
+against my corrupted nature, and with the aid of God I made up my mind
+to overcome the inherited evil will, to break it, and to enter wholly
+into the Love of God. . . . This, however, was not possible for me to
+accomplish, but I stood firmly by my _earnest resolution_, and fought a
+hard battle with myself. Now while I was wrestling and battling, being
+aided by God, a wonderful light arose within my soul. It was a light
+entirely foreign to my unruly nature, but in it I recognized the true
+nature of God and man, and the relation existing between them, a thing
+which heretofore I had never understood."[57] In one of his other
+autobiographical passages, he says that after much earnest seeking and
+desire and many a hard repulse, "the Gate was opened!" These are {202}
+characteristic accounts of a profound mystical experience. There had
+been long stress and inward battle, the tension of a divided self, and
+then a great ground swell of earnest will--a resolve, he says, to put
+my life in hazard rather than give over, when "a wonderful light arose
+within the soul" and "the Gate was opened." And "when this mighty
+light fell upon me, I saw," he says, in still another description, "in
+an effectual peculiar manner, and I knew in the spirit."[58]
+
+The central aspect of his experience was plainly an overmastering
+_conviction_ of contact with, an immersion into, a deeper world of
+spirit and of inner unity of life and spirit with this deeper world.
+His own personal spirit united, as he once put it, "with the innermost
+Birth in God and stood in the Light."[59] He discovered that "God goes
+clean another way to work" than by the way of reasoning or of sense
+experience[60]--instead of waiting for man to climb up to Him, He
+climbs up into man's soul.[61] By a new and inner way, to change the
+figure, the tides of the shoreless Divine Sea break in upon the life of
+a man and bathe his entire being. It seems to Boehme, at one time,
+like the rising of a mid-noon Sun, with illuminating rays, and he
+describes the experience in terms of Light and enlarged Vision, or,
+again, it appears like the bursting open of a secret door into a world
+of new dimensions, and he calls it the opening of the Gate, or now
+again he feels as though the elemental creative power of God had burst
+into operation within him and that a mighty birth-process had lifted
+him to a new kingdom, or to a new order of nature, or, finally, hushed
+and soothed and healed as though he had suddenly found the breast of an
+infinite Mother, he describes his state as "the innermost Quiet"--the
+return to "the soul's eternal native country and abiding Home."
+Descriptions here all fail and are only "stammering words of a child,"
+as Boehme himself says. But, as a matter of fact, descriptions fail
+and fall short in the case of all genuine life-experiences, {203} even
+those that are most universal and common to the race. How one feels
+when after nights of agony from watching over a child that is hovering
+between life and death, and seemingly certain to slip away from human
+reach, the doctor says, "He has passed the crisis and the danger is
+over!" one cannot describe. Whenever it is a matter that concerns the
+inner _quick_ of the soul, all words are the stammerings of a child.
+
+The true mystical experience is not primarily a knowledge-experience,
+it is not the apprehension of one more describable fact to be added to
+our total stock of information--what Boehme so often calls "opinions"
+and "history,"--it is a sudden plunge or immersion into the stream of
+Life itself, it is an interior appreciation of the higher meaning of
+life by the discovery of a way of entering the Life-process, or,
+better, of letting the Life-process enter you, on a higher level than
+is usual. Life always advances by a kind of leap, an _élan_, which
+would not have been predicted or anticipated, but which, now it is here
+revealed in a being with a novel function and a higher capacity of
+survival, will lift the whole scale of life henceforth to a new level.
+So, in some way which must for the present at least remain mysterious,
+the eternal Source of Life, when it finds a human door ready for its
+entrance, breaks in--or shall we say that the _earnest will_ climbs up
+and pushes open the door into new regions in this eternal Life
+Source?--and it seems then, as Boehme says, as though "the true nature
+of God and man and the true relation between God and man" had been
+found. The mystical experience is, thus, one way, perhaps the highest
+we have yet discovered, of entering the Life-process itself and of
+gaining an interior appreciation of Reality by living in the central
+stream and flow of it, so that the Spirit can "break through" and can
+"see into the Depth of Deity."
+
+Boehme appears to hold two inconsistent and seemingly contradictory
+views about the human attitude which is the psychological pre-condition
+for this epoch-making experience. In his own autobiographical {204}
+accounts, he always refers to the part that _earnest resolution_ has
+played in bringing success to his momentous quest. No great mystic
+since St. Augustine has made more of the will in spiritual matters than
+he does. We have seen how the doors to both world-kingdoms stand
+before the soul, and how "free-will," "earnest purpose," "decisive
+endeavour" settle for each soul which door shall open and which shall
+shut, and so determine its eternal destiny. "Election" is, for Boehme,
+a fiction of the false imagination, a "Babel-opinion," a perverse
+invention of "the Church of Cain." Christ never says "thou couldst
+not," but rather "thou wouldst not."[62]
+
+Not only does he, in a general way, thus make the will the decisive
+element in human destiny, he also implies that the creative "flash" of
+spiritual insight, "the innermost birth" which brings the soul into
+living union with its source is due, on the human side, to
+"resolution," to "earnestness," to "valiant wrestling," to a brave
+venture of faith that risks everything. It requires "mighty
+endurance," "hard labour," "stoutness of spirit," and "a great storm,
+assault, and onset" to open the Gate. In a word, the key to any
+important spiritual experience is _intention_, inward pre-perception,
+that holds the mind intently focussed in expectation, without which the
+"flash" of spiritual vision is not likely to come.
+
+But on the other hand Boehme is a powerful exponent of the idea that
+desire and will must utterly, absolutely die before God can come to
+birth in the soul--"Christ is born and lives in our Nothingness."[63] A
+man, he says, must die wholly to self-hood, forsake it and enter again
+into the original Nothing,--the eternal Unity in which nothing is
+willed in particular,--before God can have His way with him; all sin
+arises from self-hood, from desire.[64] "How," asks a disciple in one
+of Boehme's imaginary dialogues, "shall I come to the hidden centre
+where God dwelleth and not man? Tell me plainly, loving sir, how it is
+to be found and entered into?"
+
+{205}
+
+_The Master_: "There where the soul hath slain its own will and willeth
+no more anything of itself." . . .
+
+_The Disciple_: "But how shall I comprehend it?"
+
+_The Master_: "If thou goest about to comprehend in thy own will, it
+flieth from thee, but if thou dost surrender thyself wholly, then thou
+art dead to thy own will, and Love will be the Life of thy nature."[65]
+He seems to go as far in this direction toward the annihilation of
+desire, negation of the finite, and loss of self-hood as any of the
+pantheistic mystics. This sample passage will indicate his teaching:
+"When thou art wholly gone forth from the creature and become nothing
+to all that is nature and creature, then thou art in that Eternal One
+which is God Himself, and then thou shalt experience the supreme virtue
+of Love."[66]
+
+These two diverse statements are, however, not as inconsistent as they
+at first seem. The _will_, the _intention_ that is a psychological
+preparation for this mystical experience is a will washed and purged of
+selfish impulse and self-seeking aims. It is an _intention_ that
+cannot be described in terms of any finite "content." It is the
+intense heave of the whole undivided being toward God with no
+reservation, no calculation of return profits, no thought even of
+isolated and independent personality. A true account of consciousness,
+preceding the moment of bursting through the Gate, might emphasize with
+equal accuracy either the "earnest resolution," "the storm and onset of
+will," or "the annihilation of particular desire," "the surrender of
+individualistic self-hood," "death to own will in the Life and Virtue
+of Love."
+
+The effects of such an experience as that which came to Boehme, if we
+may take his case as typical, are (1) The birth of an inner conviction
+of God's immediate and environing Presence amounting to axiomatic
+certainty--faith through experience has become "the substance," and "is
+now one spirit with God"; (2) The radiation of the whole being with "a
+joy like that which parents have at the birth of their first-born
+child"--the joy now of the {206} soul crying, "Abba"; (3) A vastly
+heightened perception of what is involved in the eternal nature of the
+religious life and in the spiritual relation between the soul and God,
+_i.e._ increased ability to see what promotes and furthers the soul's
+health and development; (4) A unification, co-ordination, and
+centralizing of the inner faculties, so that there is an increment of
+power revealed in the entire personality; and (5) An increase of
+clarity and a sharpening of focus in the perception of moral
+distinctions together with a distinctly heightened moral and social
+passion.
+
+Boehme himself always believed, further, that his entire system of
+ideas, his philosophy of the universe, and his way of salvation were a
+"revelation" of the Spirit to him,--in a word, that his wisdom was
+"theosophy," a God-communicated knowledge. I have no desire to mark
+off dogmatically the scope and possible limits of "revelation," nor is
+it necessary here to discuss the abstract question whether "ideas" are
+ever "communicated" to a mind _ab extra_, and without the mediation of
+subjective processes, or not. In the concrete case of Jacob Boehme, I
+do not find any compelling evidence of the unmediated communication of
+ideas. He was a man of unusual native capacity, and, though untrained,
+his mind possessed a high order of range and quality, and swept, as he
+was, by a mighty transforming experience, he _found himself_ in novel
+fashion, and was the recipient of inspirations, which fired and fused
+his soul, gave him heightened insight into the significance of things
+old and new, and often enabled him to build better than he knew. He
+is, however, obviously using the stock of ideas which his generation
+and those early and late before it, had made "part of the necessary air
+men breathed." His terminology and symbolism were as old as mythology,
+and were the warp and woof of the nature philosophies and the alchemy
+of his day. His impressive and spiritual interpretation of
+Christianity is always deep and vital, and freighted with the weight of
+his own inward direct appreciation of God's revelation of Himself in
+Christ, {207} but even here he is walking on a road which many brave
+souls before him had helped to build, and we cannot with truth say that
+he supplies us with a new gospel which had been privately
+"communicated" to him. In fact, the portions of his voluminous
+writings which bear the mark of having been written as automatic
+script--by "this hand," as he often says--are the chaotic and confused
+portions, full of monotonous repetitions, of undigested and
+indigestible phrases and the dreary re-shufflings of sub-conscious
+wreckage. Boehme used to say that "in the time of the lily" his
+writings would be "much sought after." But I doubt if, even "in the
+time of the lily," most persons will have the patience to read this
+shoemaker-prophet's books in their present form, that is, if "in the
+time of the lily" men still enjoy and prize intelligence and lucidity;
+but there already is enough of "the lily-spirit" in the world to
+appreciate and to give thanks for the experience, the flashes of
+insight, the simple wisdom, the brave sincerity, the inner certainty of
+the true World within the world we see, and the spiritual message of
+"the way to the soul's native Country," which he has given us.
+
+
+
+[1] _True Repentance_, i.
+
+[2] I have given his _Weltanschauung_ in the previous chapter, and I
+shall discuss his mysticism at the end of this chapter.
+
+[3] Hegel says that Boehme's piety is "in the highest degree deep and
+inward."--_History of Philos._ iii. p. 216.
+
+[4] _True Resignation_, iii. 20.
+
+[5] _The Three Princ._, Preface, 4.
+
+[6] "There is in every man an incorporate ground of Grace, an inner
+Temple of Christ, the soul's immortal Dowry. No man can sell or pawn
+this ground of Grace, this habitation and dwelling-place of Christ. It
+remains unlost as the possession of God--an inward Ground and spiritual
+substance."--_Myst. mag._ lxxiv. 20-33, freely rendered.
+
+[7] _Sig. re._ xv. 45.
+
+[8] _Aurora_, xviii. 43.
+
+[9] _The Three Princ._, xiv. 3 and 12; also _ibid._ 85 and 88.
+
+[10] _Myst. mag._ xxvii. 41.
+
+[11] _Ninth Epistle_, 16.
+
+[12] _Myst. mag._ xxvii. _passim_; also _Seventh Epistle_, 11-14.
+
+[13] _Tenth Epistle_, 13-14.
+
+[14] _Regeneration_, 6.
+
+[15] For a sample passage see _Sig. re._ xv. 22-47.
+
+[16] _True Resignation_, 30-41. Freely rendered.
+
+[17] _The Three Princ._ xxxiii. 8-17.
+
+[18] _Ibid._ xix. 6.
+
+[19] _Sig. re._ ix. 67.
+
+[20] _Ibid._ xi. 88.
+
+[21] _Aurora_, Preface, 27.
+
+[22] _Sig. re._ xi. 80.
+
+[23] Prayer in _True Repentance_.
+
+[24] _Three Princ._ xxii. 81.
+
+[25] _Myst. mag._ lxx. 7-10; _Three Princ._ xviii. 80; and
+_Supersensual Life_, 27.
+
+[26] _Three. Princ._ xxv. 43.
+
+[27] _Ibid._ xxv. 6.
+
+[28] Read _Ibid._ xxv. 7-41.
+
+[29] _True Repentance_.
+
+[30] _First Epistle_, 6. Hegel well says of Boehme: "What marks him
+out and makes him noteworthy is the Protestant principle of placing the
+intellectual world within one's own mind and heart, and of experiencing
+and knowing and feeling in one's own self-consciousness all that was
+formerly conceived as a Beyond."--_History of Philos._ iii. p. 191.
+
+[31] _Tenth Epistle_, 16-19.
+
+[32] _Incarnation_, part iii. chap. i. 5-15.
+
+[33] _Sig. re._ xii. 10-13.
+
+[34] _The Threefold Life_, iii. 31.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ vi. 71.
+
+[36] _The Three Princ._ iv. 9.
+
+[37] _Aurora_, xix. 52-66.
+
+[38] _Myst. mag._ lxxii. 7-10.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ xxiv. 17.
+
+[40] _Sig. re._ ix. 63.
+
+[41] _Seventh Epistle_, 1.
+
+[42] _Ibid._, 6 and 12.
+
+[43] _Apology to Stiefel_, 23.
+
+[44] _True Resignation_, iii. 21.
+
+[45] _Myst. mag._ lxii. 25.
+
+[46] _The Three Principles_, xix. 47; xxi. 32.; _Sig. re._ viii. 27.
+
+[47] _Forty Questions_, xii. 39.
+
+[48] For an example of it, see _Myst. mag._ lxxiv. 46.
+
+[49] _Forty Questions_, x. 9.
+
+[50] _Fourth Epistle_, 32, and _True Repentance_.
+
+[51] _Regeneration_, 161-162.
+
+[52] _Myst. mag._ lxiii. 47. This theme constantly reappears.
+
+[53] _Sig. re._ xv. 37.
+
+[54] _Resignation_, vi. 134-151.
+
+[55] _Forty Questions_, xiv. 17-19.
+
+[56] _Op. cit._ iv. 16.
+
+[57] Von Hartmann's _Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme_, p. 50.
+
+[58] _Twenty-fifth Epistle_, 2.
+
+[59] _Aurora_, xix. 95.
+
+[60] _Twenty-sixth Epistle_, 7.
+
+[61] _Aurora_, xviii. 9.
+
+[62] _Sig. re._ xvi. 38.
+
+[63] _Ibid._ ix. 65.
+
+[64] _Ibid._ xiii. 27 and xv. 9.
+
+[65] _The Supersensual Life_, 29 and 30.
+
+[66] _Ibid._ 27.
+
+
+
+
+{208}
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+JACOB BOEHME'S INFLUENCE IN ENGLAND
+
+The first appearance in English of any of the writings of Jacob Boehme
+was in 1645, when a tiny volume was issued with the title: _Two
+Theosophical Epistles, Englished_.
+
+There had appeared a year earlier (1644) a seven-page biography of
+Boehme which was the first presentation of him to the English reader.
+This brief sketch contains the well-known incidents which became the
+stock material for the later accounts of his life.[1] It also contained
+the following quaint description of Boehme which was the model for all
+the portraits of the Teutonic philosopher in the English biographies of
+him: "The stature of his outward body was almost of no Personage; his
+person was little and leane, with browes somewhat inbowed; high
+Temples, somewhat hauk-nosed: His eyes were gray and somewhat heaven
+blew, and otherwise as the Windows in Solomon's Temple: He had a thin
+Beard; a small low Voyce. His Speech was lovely. He was modest in his
+Behaviour, humble in his conversation and meeke in his heart. His
+spirit was highly enlightened by God, as is to be seen and discerned in
+the Divine Light out of his writings."
+
+The slender volume of _Theosophical Epistles_ was followed by another
+little book issued a year later (1646), {209} consisting of a Discourse
+delivered in Latin in the Schools at Cambridge by Charles Hotham,
+Rector of Wigan. This Discourse was translated into English by the
+author's brother, Justice Durant Hotham, and was published under the
+title: _Introduction to Teutonic Philosophy, or A Determination
+concerning the Original of the Soul_, Englished by D. F. [Durant
+Frater], 1650. This interesting little volume, full of quaint phrase
+and strange speculation, reflects throughout its pages the profound
+influence of Boehme on these two brothers. The Preface to the
+Englished edition written by Justice Hotham not only shows specific
+marks of Boehme's influence upon a high-minded and scholarly man, but
+it also reveals in an impressive way a type of thought that was very
+prevalent in England at this period of commotion. "There are," Justice
+Hotham says, "two islands of exceeding danger, yet built upon and
+inhabited and defended as part of the main continent of Truth. The
+first is called: 'I believe as the Church believeth.' Happy man whom
+so easie labour hath set on the shore of wisdom! The other island is
+called: 'whatsoever the Church believes that will I not believe.'"
+Both these "islands" seem to him "exceeding dangerous." To adopt as
+truth what the Church has believed, solely because the Church has
+believed it, to forego the personal quest and to arrive at "the shores
+of wisdom" without the venturous voyage, is "too easie labour" for the
+soul. But, nevertheless, he feels that the opposite danger--the danger
+of negating a truth merely because the Church affirms it--is even more
+serious. It is wise to maintain an attitude of "much reverence" toward
+the "unanimous consent of good and pious men in sacred matters." He
+suggests that the way of wisdom consists in making the "I believe" of
+the Church "neither a fetter nor a scandel." "May I be," he says, "in
+the bed-route of those Seekers that, distrusting the known and
+experienced deceits of their own Reason, walk unfettered in the quest
+of truth, . . . not hunting those poor soules with Dogge and speare
+whose dimme sight hath led them into desert and unbeated {210} paths."
+This was in all probability the Justice Hotham of whom George Fox
+wrote: "He was a pretty tender man yt had had some experiences of God's
+workeinge in his hearte: & after yt I had some discourse with him off
+ye things of God hee tooke mee Into his Closett & saide _hee had knowne
+yt principle_ [of the Light] _this 10 yeere_: & hee was glad yt ye
+Lorde did now publish it abroade to ye people."[2]
+
+Like his Teutonic master, Justice Hotham distrusts Reason and Sense as
+spiritual guides. They are at best, he says, "but guides of the night,
+dim lights set up, far distant from Truth's stately mansion, to lead
+poor groping souls in this world's affairs." The surer Guide is within
+the soul itself, for the soul of man, he insists, has "a noble descent
+from eternal essences" and "our nobel Genealogy should mind us of our
+Father's House and make us weary of tutelage under hairy Faunes and
+cloven-footed Satyres."[3] He shows that he has lost all interest in
+theological speculations that assume a God remote in time and space, a
+God who once created a world and left it to go to ruin. He reminds his
+readers that the God in whom he believes is "yet alive and still
+speaks."[4] In the light of this Preface, in which he declares that he
+has "suckt in truth from divinest philosophy" from his childhood, it is
+not strange that he welcomed Fox, when the latter appeared in Yorkshire
+in 1651, proclaiming an inward Light and a present God near at hand,
+nor is it surprising that Hotham said to the young prophet of the
+inward Guide: "If God had not raised uppe this principle of light and
+life, ye nation had beene overspread with rantism . . . but this
+principle of truth overthrew ye roote & grounde of there [_i.e._ the
+Ranters'] principle."[5]
+
+The enthusiasm of Justice Hotham for his Teutonic master gets fervid
+expression at the end of his Preface as follows: "Whatever the thrice
+great Hermes [Hermes Trismegistus] delivered as oracles from his
+prophetical tripos, or Pythagoras spake by authority or {211} Socrates
+debated or Aristotle affirmed; yea, whatever divine Plato prophesied or
+Plotinus proved: this and all this, or a far higher and profounder
+philosophy is (I think) contained in the Teutonick's writings. And if
+there be any friendly medium which can possibly reconcile these ancient
+differences between the nobler wisdom which hath fixt her Palace in
+Holy Writ and her stubborn handmaid, Naturall Reason: this happy
+marriage of the Spirit and Soul, this wonderful consent of discords in
+one harmony, we owe in great measure to Teutonicus his skill!"
+
+The central problem of the _Discourse_, written by the brother, Charles
+Hotham, is the origin of the soul. After the manner of his German
+teacher, the English disciple finds the origin of man's soul in "the
+bottomless, immeasurable Abyss of the Godhead," in "the great deep of
+the perpetually eternal God." Man is an epitome of the universe. He
+unites in himself all the contrary principles of the worlds visible and
+invisible, he is a unity of body and soul, a centre of light and
+darkness, and in him is a "supreme region," or "Divine Principle," "by
+the mediation of which man has direct fellowship with God." In man,
+who thus epitomizes all the spheres and principles of the universe,
+"God, as in a glasse, hath a lively and delightful prospect of His own
+lovely visage and incomprehensible Beauty." Finally, again, the
+disciple reflects the constant teaching of Boehme that everything in
+the visible world is a symbol of a fundamental and eternal World.
+
+Durant Hotham showed the full measure of his devotion to his German
+master in the _Life of Jacob Behmen_ which he wrote in 1653.[6] It is,
+however, much more important for the insight which it gives of the
+inner life of the Yorkshire Justice than for any biographical
+information it furnishes of Boehme himself. Hotham thinks that in
+Boehme he has discovered a new type of Christian Saint--"one who led a
+saint-like life in much sweet communion {212} with God," while he
+declares that many of those who "get admission into the Calendar by the
+synodical jurisdiction of those who claim also to hold the bunch of
+keys to the bigger Heaven" are hardly ripe for canonization--"As for
+many who in these last ages have termed themselves saints--what shift
+God may make of them in heaven, I know not (He can do much)--but if I
+may speak unfeignedly, they are so unmortified and untrue of word and
+deed that they are found untoward members for a true Commonwealth and
+civil Society here on Earth."[7]
+
+The type of saint the Justice admires is one who refuses utterly to
+choose the path of least resistance, one who will not be "a messenger
+of eternal happiness at a cheap rate," but rather one who comes to
+challenge the easy world, to fight evil customs and entrenched systems
+and to win "the Land which the Devil holds in possession"; and, with
+the name of Jacob Boehme, he thinks he can "begin a new roll of Civil
+Saints," hoping, he says, that in these last generations "much company"
+may be added to the bead roll thus happily started.
+
+Two points stand out clearly as central ideas of Justice Hotham's
+Christianity. The first one is that religion is an inward affair.
+"God," he declares, "hath sent this last Generation a plain, uncouth
+Message, bidding man to fight, telling him that he shall have a Heaven,
+a Joy, a Paradise, a Land, a Territory, a Kingship--but that _all this
+is in himself, the Land to be won is himself_."[8] The second one is
+that religion is a progressive movement, an unfolding revelation of
+life. "What a height of Presumption is it," he says, "to believe that
+the Wisdom and fullness of God can ever be pent up in a Synodical
+Canon? How overweening are we to limit the successive manifestations
+of God to a present rule and light, persecuting all that comes not
+forth in its height and breadth!" It is through this "unnatural
+desire" to keep Christians in "a perpetual infancy" that "our dry
+nurses" in the Church have "brought us to such a dwarfish stature,"
+{213} and he prays that the merciful God may teach at least one nation
+a better way than that of "muzzling" the bringer of fresh light.
+
+Much more important, however, for the dissemination of Boehme's ideas
+in England was the patient and faithful work of John Sparrow who, in
+collaboration with his kinsman, John Ellistone, translated into English
+the entire body of Boehme's writings, between the years 1647 and
+1661.[9] Sparrow was born at Stambourne in Essex in 1615. He was
+admitted to the Inner Court in 1633 and subsequently called to the Bar.
+He was probably the author of a widely-read book, published in 1649,
+under the title of _Mercurius Teutonicus_, consisting of a series of
+"propheticall passages" from Boehme.[10] His outer life was
+uneventful; his inner life is revealed in his Introductions to the
+Boehme Translations. He begins his long series of Translations with
+the testimony that the writings of this author have "so very much
+satisfied" his own soul that he wants others to be partakers of the
+same source of light, though he warns his readers that their own souls
+must come by experience into the condition Boehme himself was in before
+they can fully understand him.[11] He is profoundly impressed, {214}
+as his great contemporary, Milton, was, with the strange birth of new
+sects "now sprung up in England," but he hopes that "goodness will get
+the upper hand and that the fruits of the spirit will prevail," and his
+mind "is led to think" that through Boehme's message, which has been
+very beneficial in other nations, "our troubled, doubting souls in
+England may receive much Comfort, leading to that inward Peace which
+passeth all understanding, and that all disturbing sects and
+heresies . . . will be made to vanish and cease."[12]
+
+Sparrow was deeply impressed with two of Boehme's central ideas, and he
+gives expression to them, in his own quaint and peculiar way, in almost
+every one of his Introductions--(1) the idea that the visible is a
+parable of the Invisible, and (2) the idea that God manifests Himself
+within men. In the very first of the Introductions both of these ideas
+appear: "This outward world," he says, "is the best outward
+looking-glasse to see whatever hath been, is, or shall be in Eternity,
+and our own minds are the best inward looking-glasse to see Eternity
+exactly in";[13] and he expresses the belief that any one who learns to
+read all the work of God in the world without, and in the mind of man
+within, will learn to know Him truly, will see Eternity manifested in
+time, will discover that the mind of man is a centre of all mysteries,
+and that heaven and hell are potentially in us, and he will be
+convinced that God is in all things and all things are in God; that we
+live in Him and that He lives in us.[14]
+
+This second idea--that God can be found in the depth of man's soul--is
+strongly emphasized in Sparrow's next Introduction, written in
+1648--"_The Ground of what hath ever been lieth in man_."[15] All that
+is in the Scriptures has come out of man's experience and therefore can
+now be grasped by us. All that was in Adam lies in the ground and
+depth of any man. When the Apostle John wrote that there is an unction
+which teacheth all things and leadeth into all truth, he did not
+confine this possibility {215} to apostles, but intended to include all
+men in the class of those who may be anointed, and all who know "what
+is in man" realize that it is possible to attain to this inward and
+apostolic guidance.[16] In a passage of great boldness Sparrow goes in
+his venturous faith in the inner Spirit as far as the young
+Leicestershire preacher did who was starting out, the very year this
+Introduction was written, to proclaim the message of the inward Light.
+"The ground," he says, "of all that was in Adam is in us; for whatever
+Ground lay in God, the same lieth in Christ and through Him it lieth in
+us, for He is in us all. And he that knoweth God in himself . . . may
+well be able to speak the word of God infallibly as the holy men that
+penned the Scriptures. And he that can understand these things in
+himself may well know who speaketh by the Spirit of God and who
+speaketh his own fancies and delusions."[17]
+
+In the Introduction to the _Mysterium magnum_, Sparrow returns to this
+idea of inward illumination, though he balances it better than he did
+in the former Introduction, with his estimation of "the antient Holy
+Scriptures," and he does not again suggest that present-day men speak
+"infallibly." He thinks that the same God who so eminently taught
+Moses by His Spirit that he could describe the processes of creation,
+must have also prepared the people by the instruction of the same
+Spirit, so that they could understand what was written, and so that the
+Spirit in one man could verify itself in the experience of many men.
+He declares that when the Scriptures instruct and perfect the man of
+God, they are effective, "not as a meer relation of things done," but
+as the medium of the living Word which reaches the inward Man, the
+hidden Man of the heart, the Christ in us, so that we pass beyond "the
+history of Christ" and rise to "the experience that Christ is born
+within us."[18]
+
+No other book, he says, but the Scriptures, teaches {216} man "with
+assured knowledge of all the things which concern the soule, the
+eternal part of man," for other writers have written from the
+observation of their outward senses, but these writers had "inward
+senses--their eyes saw, their ears heard, their hands handled the Word
+of Life." And yet for those in these days who can "look through the
+vayle or shell within which the Eternal Spirit works its Wonders," the
+visible things of the world prove to be "a glasse wherein the
+similitude of spirituall things are represented" and "the Minde of man
+is a most clear and undeceiving glasse wherein we may perceive the
+motions and activities of that Work-Master, the Spirit who hath created
+everything in the world."[12] In the most satisfactory of all his
+Introductions, the one to the _Aurora_ in 1656, he undertakes to show
+that "the Light within" which has now arisen in England is not a
+substitute for the Christ of history. On the contrary, he insists that
+the Christ within and the Christ of history is one and the same Person
+who is not divided. He was once manifested in the likeness of sinful
+flesh, suffering, dying, rising, ascending in glory, and now, in an
+inward and spiritual manner, He is actually present within men so that
+they may become conformable in soul and spirit to Him and share in His
+life, sufferings, death, resurrection and glory, or they may, by their
+own choice, crucify Him afresh within themselves.[20] The Word of Life
+calls loudly within every man, urging the soul to forsake that which it
+perceives to be evil and to embrace that which it perceives to be good
+and holy and divine. This, he says, is the Eternal Gospel, and it
+brings to all men everywhere the good news that we live and move and
+have our being in God, and that the soul that gropes in sincerity after
+God will find Him, for He is very nigh, even in the heart of the
+seeker.[21] He deals in an interesting way with the important
+contemporary problem--raised by the prevalence of the emphasis on an
+inward Divine Presence--whether human Perfection is possible in this
+life. His {217} conclusion is that the tendency to sin remains so long
+as "the mortal body" lasts. No person will ever reach a stage of
+earthly life in which the spur of the flesh is eradicated, and so no
+person can be infallibly certain that he is beyond sin, but when Christ
+is inwardly united to the soul and His Spirit dwells in us and reigns
+in us and we are risen in soul, spirit, and mind with Him, then we live
+no longer after the flesh, or according to its thrust and push, but
+share His life and partake of the conquering power of His Spirit; and
+thus, though "sown in imperfection we are raised in perfection."[22]
+The important matter, however, is not that one call himself a
+"Perfectist," but that he actually live "in this earthly pilgrimage and
+in this vale of sinfull flesh" in the power of Eternity and by the
+Light of Christ, whose fulness may be revealed in himself.[23]
+
+John Ellistone, Sparrow's kinsman and able helper in the work of
+bringing Boehme into English thought, holds the same fundamental ideas
+as his co-labourer, though he has his own peculiar style and his own
+unique way of uttering himself. The stress of his emphasis is always
+on first-hand experience--what he calls "an effectual, living,
+essential knowledge and real spiritual being of it in one's own
+soul";[24] and the brunt of his attack is {218} always against a
+religion of "notions"--what he calls "verball, high-flowne, contrived
+knowledge and vapouring Notions," constructed from "the mental idolls
+of approved masters."[25] Religion, he maintains, can no more consist
+of "the letter" or of "a talkative historicall account" than music can
+consist of a row of written notes. These things are only signs for the
+direction of the skilful musician who must himself _make_ the sounds on
+his instrument before there is any music. So, too, if there is to be
+any real religion in the world, we Christians must do more than read
+and approve "the deciphered writings of illuminated men," we must act
+by the same Spirit that inspired those men, we must be "practitioners
+of the Divine Light," we must give "living expression to Divine love
+and righteousness," we must "practice the way of regeneration in the
+Spirit of Christ and _divinitize our knowledge into an effectual
+working love and attaine the experimental and essential reality of it
+in our owne soules!_"[26] The way out of "the tedious Maze and
+wearisome laborinth of discussions and opinions concerning God, Christ,
+Faith, Election, the Ordinances and the Way of Worship" is "to know the
+Word of Life, Light and Love experimentally," to have "the fire of His
+love so enkindled in our own hearts that it may breake forth in our
+practice and conversation to the destroying of all Thornes and tearing
+Bryars of vaine contentions!"[27]
+
+Like his kinsman, he has endless faith in the possibility of man; he
+thinks that the entire Scripture directs us to the Word within us, and
+that the Book of all mysteries is within ourselves. "In our owne
+Book," he says, "which is the Image of God in us, Time and Eternity and
+all Mysteries are couched and contained, and they may be read in our
+owne soules by the illumination of the Divine Spirit. Our Minde is a
+true mysticall Mirror and Looking-glasse of Divine and Naturall
+Mysteries, and we shall receive more real knowledge from one effectuall
+innate essentiall beame or ray of Light arising from the New Birth
+within us than in reading many {219} hundreds of authors whereby we
+frame a Babel of knowledge in the Nation."[28]
+
+He goes so far with his faith in the soul's possibility to return into
+"the Original Centre of all Reality" that he declares that a man may
+sink deep enough into this Original Principle that binds his own soul
+into union with God so that he can penetrate by an inner Light and
+experience into the secret qualities and virtues hid in all visible and
+corporeal things, and may learn to discover the healing and curative
+powers of metals and plants, and may thus, by inward knowledge, advance
+all Arts and Sciences.[29]
+
+Ellistone returns to this inner way of arriving at a knowledge of
+outward things in his Preface to _Signatura rerum_ in 1651. Man, he
+declares, is a microcosm, or abridgment, of the whole universe, he is
+the emblem and hieroglyphic of Time and Eternity, and he who will take
+pains to push in beyond Solomon's Porch, or the Outer Court of sense
+and natural reason, to the Inner Court and Holy Place, where the
+immortal Seed abides and where man can become one again with that which
+he was in God before he became a creature, then he will have the key
+that opens all mysteries both inner and outer. Nature will be an open
+Book of Parables in which he can read the truth of Eternity, the world
+will be a clear mirror in which he can see the things of the Spirit and
+he will know what will cure both soul and body. The "Depth of God
+within the Soul," the Inner Light, is the precious Pearl, the
+never-failing Comfort, the Panacea for all diseases, the sure Antidote
+even against death itself, the unfailing Guide and Way of all
+Wisdom.[30]
+
+Here, then, were two very enthusiastic disciples of Boehme who took
+their master's teaching very seriously, who on the whole grasped its
+essential meaning, were possessed and penetrated by the _idea_ of a
+deeper eternal world manifesting itself in the temporal, and who gave
+their lives to the difficult task of making Boehme's message {220}
+available to their own people and to their own perplexed age. They
+were not "occultists." They did not run into enthusiastic vapourings,
+nor did they strain after psychic experiences which would relieve them
+of the stress and strain of achieving the goal of life through the
+formation of balanced character and the practice of social virtues,
+though, as we shall see, some of the readers of their translations took
+the risky course, and ended in the fog rather than in the clear light.
+
+The question has naturally been raised whether Boehme exercised any
+direct influence upon the early Quaker movement.[31] There is at
+present no way of proving that George Fox, the chief exponent of the
+movement, had actually read the writings of the Teutonic philosopher or
+had consciously absorbed the views of the latter, but there are so many
+marks of influence apparent in the _Journal_ that no careful student of
+both writers can doubt that there was some sort of influence, direct or
+indirect, conscious or unconscious. The works of Boehme were, as we
+have seen, all available in English, during the great formative period
+of Fox's life, from 1647 to 1661. There can be no question that they
+were read by the serious _Seekers_ in the period of the Commonwealth.
+Thomas Taylor, who was one of the finest fruits of the Seeker movement,
+bears in 1659 a positive testimony to the spiritual value of Jacob
+Bewman's (Behmen) writings. Taylor received a letter from Justice
+William Thornton of Hipswell in Yorkshire, warning him to beware of
+"the confused Notions and great words of Jacob Bewman and such like
+frothy scriblers." Taylor replies: "For thy light expressions of Jacob
+Bewman, I know in most things he speaks a Parable to thee yet, and so
+his writings may well be lightly esteemed of by thee; but there is that
+in his Writings which, if ever thy eye be opened, will appear to be a
+sweet unfolding of the Mystery of God and of Christ, in divers
+particulars, according to his Gift. And therefore beware of speaking
+Evil of that which thou {221} know'st not."[32] We have also seen how
+Boehme appealed to such noble Seekers as Charles and Durant Hotham,
+John Sparrow, and John Ellistone.[33] One Quaker of some importance,
+Francis Ellington, not only read the writings of Boehme, but regarded
+"that Faithful Servant Jacob Behme" as "a Prophet of the Lord."[34] He
+quotes from his German "Prophet" the words: "A Lilly blossometh to you
+ye Northern Countries; if you destroy it not with sectarian contention
+of the learned, then it will become a great Tree among you, but if you
+shall rather contend than to know the true God, then the Ray passeth by
+and hitteth only some; and then afterwards you shall be forced to draw
+water for the thirst of your souls among strange nations." Ellington
+regards Boehme as a genuine "prophet," and the "Lilly" that was to
+blossom in the North seems to Ellington plainly to be George Fox and
+his Quaker Society, which the learned have tried in vain to overthrow.
+He cites many passages from the Teutonic Prophet of the Lord to show
+the parallelism between the prophesied type of spiritual religion and
+the Children of the Light who have exactly fulfilled it.[35]
+
+It would be natural to expect that the young Quaker seeker, eager for
+any light on his dark path, would read the _Forty Questions_ and _The
+Three Principles of the Divine Essence_, or at least that he would hear
+them discussed by the people among whom he moved in these intense and
+eventful years. In any case there are ideas expressed and experiences
+described in the _Journal_ which look strangely like memories,
+conscious or subconscious, of ideas and experiences to be found in the
+Boehme writings. The most striking single passage is one which
+describes an experience which occurred to Fox in 1648. It is as
+follows: "Now was I come up in Spirit through the flaming sword into
+the paradise of God. All things were {222} 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 into the image of God by Jesus Christ, to the state of Adam
+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. I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practise
+physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtue of things
+were so opened to me by the Lord. . . . The admirable works of
+creation and the virtues thereof may be known through the openings of
+that divine Word of Wisdom and power by which they were made."[36]
+
+Jacob Boehme had, as we have seen, a similar experience of having "the
+nature and virtues of things opened" to him in the year 1600. The
+following account of it was given in Sparrow's Introduction to _Forty
+Questions_, printed in 1647: "He went forth into the fields and there
+perceived the wonderful or wonder works of the Creator in the
+signatures, shapes, figures, and qualities or properties of all created
+things very clearly and plainly laid open. Whereupon he was filled
+with exceeding joy." The same incident is told in a slightly different
+way in Justice Hotham's _Life of Behmen_: "Going abroad into the
+Fields, to a Green before Neys-Gate, at Gorlitts, he there sate down,
+and viewing the Herbs and Grass of the Field, in his Inward Light he
+saw into their essences, use and properties." It was, further, a
+fundamental idea of Boehme's that the outward and visible world is a
+parable and symbol of the spiritual world within, and that by a
+spiritual experience which carries the soul down to the inner, hidden,
+abysmal Centre, the secrets and mysteries of the outward creation may
+become revealed. Hotham says that Boehme, by his divine Light, "beheld
+the whole of creation, and from that Fountain of Revelation wrote his
+book _De signatura rerum_."[37] Ellistone, in the Introduction to
+Boehme's _Epistles_, printed in 1649, predicts {223} that an
+experience, like this one which Fox claimed, will come to those who
+receive the inner Divine Light. "This knowledge," he says, "must
+advance all Arts and Sciences and conduce to the attainment of the
+Universal Tincture and Signature, whereby the different secret
+qualities and vertues that are hid in all visible and corporeall
+things, as Metals, Minerals, Plants and Herbes, may be drawne forth and
+applied to their right naturall use _for the curing and healing_ of
+corrupt and decayed nature."[38]
+
+It was also a feature of Boehme's teaching that man must enter again
+into Paradise and return to the condition of the unfallen Adam. "The
+Noble Virgin" [_i.e._ Sophia or Spiritual Wisdom], Boehme writes,
+"showeth us the Gate and how we must enter again into Paradise through
+the sharpness of the sword," which, in a few lines previous, he calls
+"the flaming sword which God set to keep the Tree of Life."[39] Fox's
+experience of the "new smell" of creation is an even more striking
+parallel. Mystic awakenings and spiritual openings generally impress
+the recipient of them with a sense of new and fresh penetration into
+the meaning of things and leave them with a feeling of heightened
+powers, but cases in which the experience results in a new sense of
+_smell_ are fairly rare. Two persons might, no doubt, have such an
+experience quite independently, but one who has become familiar with
+the range of _suggestion_ in experiences of this type will note with
+interest the large place which "new Smells and Odours" occupy in
+Boehme's writings. For example, he says, in the _Signatura rerum_,
+where he describes the coming of the Paradise-experience: "When
+Paradise springs up, the paradisaical joy puts itself forth with a
+lovely smell,"[40] and in one of his Epistles he speaks of a spiritual
+awakening in his own life that was marked by a new smell--"A very
+strong Odour was given to me in the life of God."[41]
+
+There is another passage in Fox's _Journal_, a few lines {224} beyond
+this famous account of his Paradise-experience, that also bears the
+mark of Boehme's influence. In fact, it is difficult to believe that
+Fox could have got his phraseology anywhere else than from Boehme. The
+passage reads: "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_."[42] Everywhere in Boehme it is "Sophia,
+the Word of Wisdom," that "opens all things," and the goal of all
+spiritual experience and of all divine illumination for him consists in
+coming to "the hidden Unity in the Eternal Being, or the Eternal
+Essence." That is not a Biblical phrase, and it is not one which the
+Drayton youth would have heard from native English sources. It came to
+England with the Boehme literature. Further revelations along this
+same line of "opening" follow in the _Journal_. In the Vale of Beavor
+the Lord "opened" things to Fox, relating to "the three great
+professions in the world, physic, divinity and law." "He showed me,"
+Fox says, "that the physicians were out of the Wisdom of God by which
+the creatures were made, and so knew not their virtue because they were
+_out of the Word of Wisdom_." He saw that the priests were actuated by
+_the dark power_--a very suspicious phrase to one who knows what a
+place the "Dark Principle" holds in Boehme's writings--and he saw that
+the lawyers were out of the Wisdom of God. But it was opened to him
+that all these three professions might be "reformed" and "brought into
+the Wisdom of God by which all things were created," and "have a right
+understanding of the virtues of things through the Word of Wisdom"; for
+"in the Light all things may be seen both visible and invisible."[43]
+The extraordinary use of Old Testament figures, by which Fox
+illustrates the condition of the Church, in the section of the
+_Journal_ following the passages above quoted, is no less significant.
+The figures of Cain and Esau, of Korah and Balaam, and the types of
+Adam and Moses are given {225} quite in the style of _The Three
+Principles_, or of the _Mysterium magnum_.[44] One parallel is
+especially interesting. Fox says: "I saw plainly that none could read
+Moses aright without Moses' spirit, by which Moses saw how man was in
+the Image of God in Paradise, and how he fell and how death came over
+him, and how all men have been under this death."[45] The Preface to
+_Mysterium magnum_ says: "I cannot but think that the same God that
+taught Moses so eminently by His Spirit had so fitted the people for
+whom he wrote that they were capable to receive instruction by his
+words."[46] This idea, so frequently expressed in the writings of Fox,
+that no one can understand the Scriptures except by the Spirit that
+gave forth the Scriptures,[47] is equally a fundamental idea of Boehme
+and his English interpreters. In many passages of the _Mysterium
+magnum_ Boehme declares that the written word is only a witness to the
+living Word, which latter Word can be understood only by those who are
+in the Spirit that spoke in the Prophets and Apostles.[48] Sparrow, in
+his Introduction to the _Aurora_, declares that no person can
+understand the spiritual mystery of redemption, "though he reade of it
+in the Scriptures," unless the Holy Spirit in himself, the true Divine
+Light, enlighten him, and give him the word of faith in his heart;
+"neither," he adds, "can any understand the Holy Scriptures but by the
+same Gifts of the Holy Spirit in the Soul."[49]
+
+On one occasion the Lord showed Fox the nature of things that are in
+the human heart--"as the nature of dogs, swine, vipers, etc."[50] So,
+too, Boehme saw that there are many kinds of wild beast in man's
+nature--the lion, the wolf, the dog, the fox, and the serpent.[51] Fox
+frequently speaks of the two "seeds"--the Seed of God or the Seed of
+Christ and the seed of the serpent--and the victory of life in the
+Spirit consists in having the Seed of God conquer the seed of the
+serpent, or, as Fox {226} often expresses it, having "the Seed of God
+bruise the serpent's head," or having "the Seed of God atop of the
+devil and all his works"; or having "the Seed reign."[52] This
+phraseology runs throughout Boehme's writings. The two "seeds" are
+everywhere in evidence, and "the Treader on the serpent" is the
+frequent name for Christ and for the victorious soul. God showed Adam,
+Boehme says, how "the Treader on the serpent" should once again be
+brought with virtue and power up into the Paradise of God, and live
+anew by the Word of God.[53]
+
+Fox, in the account of his first great transforming opening in 1647,
+says: "I knew God by revelation as one who hath the key doth open."[54]
+This is a frequent figure in Boehme for a first-hand experience.
+"Where is Paradise to be found?" he asks. "Is it far away or is it
+near? One person cannot lend the key to another. Every one must
+unlock it with his own key or else he cannot enter,"[55] and again he
+describes that "surpassing joy of the new regeneration," when the soul
+"gets the keys of the kingdom of heaven and may open for itself."[56]
+
+Fox's "openings" about university-trained ministers and his references
+to "stone churches," or "churches of stone and mortar," have many
+parallels in Boehme. Dinah of the Old Testament, for example, is
+"nothing else but a figure of our stone churches and our colleges with
+their ministers!" and Jacob's concubine, again, "signifieth nothing
+else but the stone churches in which God's word and testament are
+handled."[57]
+
+Finally, Fox's great vision of an ocean of Darkness and an ocean of
+Light, while no doubt a real experience and expressed in his own words,
+is profoundly like Boehme's fundamental insight that there are two
+world-principles of Light and Darkness, and that Light is, in the end,
+victorious over Darkness.[58]
+
+No attempt has been made to gather an exhaustive set {227} of parallels
+between the experiences and ideas of these two religious teachers.
+Enough, however, is presented to show that this spiritual leader in
+England was distinctly a debtor to the Teutonic seer who died the same
+year in which the former was born. Fox himself never mentions Boehme
+by name, nor does he ever refer to the little sect of "Behmenists,"
+which, springing into existence contemporaneously with the birth of the
+Quaker movement, had an interesting, though short-lived, history; but a
+number of the followers of Fox went aggressively into the lists against
+their puny rival.
+
+The so-called "sect of Behmenists" is thus described by Richard Baxter:
+"The fifth sect are the Behmenists whose opinions go much toward the
+way of the former [the Quakers] for the sufficiency of the Light of
+Nature, Inward Light, the salvation of the Heathen as well as
+Christians, and a dependence on 'revelations.' But they are fewer in
+number, and seem to have attained to greater Meekness and conquest of
+passions than any of the rest. Their doctrines are to be seen in Jacob
+Behmen's Books, by him that hath nothing else to do, than to bestow a
+great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily
+understood!"[59]
+
+"The chiefest" of this "sect of Behmenists," Baxter says, was Dr. John
+Pordage. Pordage was born in 1607; was curate in 1644 of St.
+Lawrence's in Reading; was made rector of the Church in Bradfield late
+in 1646; was charged in 1651 with heresies, comprised in nine articles,
+consisting apparently of a sort of mystical pantheism. He was at first
+acquitted, but was later charged again with heresies on these nine
+counts, with fifty-six more, and was deprived of his rectory in 1655.
+He valiantly defended himself in a book with the title, _Truth
+appearing through the Clouds of Undeserved Scandel_, and in other
+publications, and after the Restoration he was reinstated. As the
+Behmenists were definitely attacked by the Quaker, John Anderdon, in
+1661, it is to be inferred that they existed as a society at least as
+early as the {228} Restoration, though the movement became much more
+prominent in the 'seventies, when Pordage discovered a remarkable woman
+named Jane Leade, and they "agreed to wait together in prayer and pure
+dedication." Jane Leade, whose maiden name was Jane Ward, was born of
+a good English family in 1623. She was a psychopathic child, and as a
+young girl "heard miraculous voices" which led her to devote herself to
+religion. She became profoundly impressed with the writings of Boehme,
+as Pordage had been still earlier, and under the _suggestion_ of
+Boehme's experiences she received many "prophetic visions," which are
+recorded in her spiritual Diary, _A Fountain of Gardens_.[60] A few
+instances of her experiences in the early stages will be of some value
+to the reader. She was visiting, she says, in April 1670, in a quiet,
+retired place, and was "contemplating the happy state of the angelical
+world, much exercised upon Solomon's choice, which was to find out the
+Noble Stone of Wisdom." "There came upon me an overshadowing bright
+cloud, and in the midst of it the Figure of a woman, most richly
+adorned with transparent gold, her hair hanging down, and her face as
+terrible as chrystal for brightness, but her countenance was sweet and
+mild. At which sight I was somewhat amazed, and immediately this Voice
+came, saying, Behold, I am God's Eternal Virgin, Wisdom, whom thou hast
+been enquiring after. I am to unseal the Treasures of God's deep
+Wisdom unto thee. . . . Wisdom shall be born in the inward parts of
+thy soul." Three days later, "the same Figure in greater Glory did
+appear, with a crown upon her head, full of majesty, saying, Behold me
+as thy Mother and know thou art to enter into covenant, to obey the
+New-Creation laws that shall be revealed unto thee."[61] In her
+account of the following extraordinary experience there are many marks
+of Boehme's influence: "I retained no strength, my Sun of Reason and
+the Moon of my outward sense were folded up and withdrew. I knew
+nothing by myself, as {229} to those working properties from Nature and
+Creature, and the wheel of the Motion standing still, another
+[influence] moved from a central Fire, so that I felt myself transmuted
+into one pure flame. Then came that Word to me, 'This is no other than
+the Gate to my Eternal Deep.'"[62]
+
+Pordage's main contribution to the exposition of "Behmenism" was a book
+published in 1683 and entitled, _Theologia Mystica, or the Mystic
+Divinitie of the Eternal Invisibles_. It is the work of a confused
+mind, and its spiritual penetration, as also its mastery of the English
+language, are of a low order. The marks of Boehme's influence appear
+everywhere in the book, though Pordage is quite incapable of
+comprehending the more profound and robust features of Boehme's
+philosophy. What he relates professes to be what he himself has _seen_
+in visions, or what he has heard from celestial visitants. It has, he
+says, been his privilege to taste much of that Tree of Life which grows
+in the midst of the Paradise of God; to smell the difference between
+heaven and hell; to have seen through the veil of nature into the
+spiritual glory of eternity, to have felt "the distillations of
+heavenly dew and secret touches of the Holy Ghost." Unlike his
+Teutonic master, he taught (and it was also the view of Jane Leade)
+that in the end Divine Love transmutes evil into good and even hell
+into Paradise. One passage in his book, written in his best style,
+will be sufficient to illustrate his glowing optimism: "Love is of a
+transmuting and transforming Nature. The great effect of Love is to
+turn all things into its own Nature, which is all goodness, sweetness,
+and perfection. This is that Divine Power which turns Water into Wine,
+Sorrow and Hellish Anguish into exulting and triumphing Joy; Curse into
+Blessing; where it meets with a barren heathy Desart it transmutes it
+into a Paradise of delights; yea, it changeth evil to good and all
+imperfection into perfection. It restores that which is fallen and
+degenerated to its primary Beauty, Excellence and Perfection. It is
+{230} the Divine Stone, the White Stone with a Name written on it,
+which none knows but him that hath it . . . the Divine Elixir whose
+transforming power and efficacy nothing can withstand."[63]
+
+His greater disciple, Jane Leade, "the enamoured woman-devotee of
+Pordage," the main exponent of the Behmenist movement of this period,
+was a far too voluminous writer.[64] She was a sincere, pure-minded
+woman, of intense devotion, but she was a strongly emotional type of
+person, and lived in a kind of permanent borderland of visions and
+revelations. Her language, like that also of Pordage, is
+ungrammatical, of involved style, and full of overwrought and fanciful
+imagination. Christopher Walton, who in many ways respected her, calls
+her writings "a huge mass of parabolicalism and idiocratic
+deformity!"[64] In her _Message to the Philadelphian Society_ she
+reports a curious vision from heaven which assures her that the Quakers
+are not God's chosen people. There pass in review before her
+illuminated sight the various claimants to the lofty title of the true
+Church, the real Bride of Christ. There are Anabaptists, Fifth
+Monarchy Men, and many others. "Then," she says, "did I see a body
+greater than any of these come up with great boldness, as deeming
+themselves to have arrived to Perfection and so visibly distinguishing
+themselves from all the rest, and I said, Now surely the anointed of
+the Lord is before Him. But a Voice said, Neither are these they; for
+the Lord seeth not as man seeth."[66]
+
+A third and intellectually far greater member of this group of
+"Behmenists" was Francis Lee, a Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, a
+student in Leyden University, and a man of splendid parts. He became
+acquainted with the movement while in Holland, and on his return home
+sought out Jane Leade, became her adopted son, and, later, on the
+strength of a "revelation" made to his {231} spiritual mother, he
+married her daughter. Until the time of Jane Leade's death in 1704, he
+was her devoted disciple, writing for her in the period of her
+blindness, and editing and publishing many of her books. He was the
+moving spirit in the formation of "the Philadelphian Society" for the
+propagation of the mystical ideas of the followers of Boehme--a Society
+which existed from 1697 to 1703, and which had a far-reaching influence
+not only in England but still more on the Continent of Europe.[67]
+
+John Anderdon, an interesting Quaker pamphleteer, born in 1624,
+convinced of the Truth of the Quaker Message by the preaching of
+Francis Howgil in 1658, and for many years a prisoner for his faith,
+for which he finally died in prison, furnishes in his attack on the
+"Behmenists" in 1661 the earliest data available for an estimate of
+their views and practices.[68] The writer has evidently read the works
+of Jacob Boehme, or at least some of them, and he contends that the
+"Behmenists" whom he is attacking have failed to understand the
+writings of their master and have never fathomed "the tendencie of his
+spirit": "The Conclusion which you have drawn to yourselves from his
+Writings will not profit you; neither doth it make you any jot the more
+excellent, that ye can talk much of him and his Books and Writings,
+being not come to the right Spirit in which is life, which brings men
+out of dead Forms."[69]
+
+His main criticism of the little sect is that its members make use of
+"Mediums and borrowed Instruments for the conveyance of God's Grace and
+Virtue into the Soul,"[70] and that they have "not come to the Light
+which gives {232} a true understanding of the things of God," though he
+admits that there "was sometime" in them "a hungering and thirsting
+after Righteousness."[71] These "Mediums" are evidently the Water of
+Baptism and the Bread and Wine of the Supper--"Ordinances," he says,
+"as you call them."[72] It would seem from this Quaker Pamphlet that
+the "Behmenists" under review were much like the followers of Fox,
+except only that they continued to use the sacraments. This use of
+"Mediums" seemed to him indicate that they were "out of the Light" and
+"trying to _cover_ the serpent's head," instead of stamping on it, but
+Anderdon would not have written his _Blow at Babel_ if he had not been
+impressed with the general marks of likeness in other respects between
+the "Behmenists" and his own people.
+
+Another interesting Quaker document furnishes a glimpse of the
+"Behmenists" a dozen years later--at about the period when John Pordage
+and Jane Leade were beginning to "wait together in prayer and pure
+meditation." It is a Minute adopted by the London "Morning Meeting" of
+Friends, "the 21st of ye 7th Month 1674." The occasion for action was
+the reception of "an Epistle to the Behminists," written by Ralph
+Frettwell of Barbadoes, at an earlier period "one of the Chief Judges
+of the Court of Common-pleas" in the island. He had been stirred to
+write for the same reason that impelled Anderdon, and his "Epistle"
+called these partly spiritualized people, as he believed, to the fuller
+Light, and warned them against the use of Baptism, and Bread and Wine,
+and "the Pater Noster." The Minute of the Morning Meeting, which opens
+with the words: "Deare freind R. F. in the Truth that never changeth
+but changeth all who believe and obey it," records the decision of the
+Meeting not to publish the Epistle, "wee haveing well weighed it in the
+feare of God and in tender Care of Truth." The reason given in the
+Minutes for not publishing the "Epistle" is, first, that "the writings
+of J. B. reveal {233} a great mixture of light and darkness," and
+indicate that he lived sometimes in the power of one and sometimes in
+the power of the other, that God Himself has tried and judged the
+Spirit of darkness, and that the Spirit of Light has already "come to
+its own Centre and flows forth again purely"--presumably in the Quaker
+movement.[73] As the Lord Himself has given judgment and has given
+victory to the Principle of the Light, the publication of the "Epistle"
+is unnecessary.
+
+And, secondly, Frettwell, in calling the "Behmenists" from "the use of
+Mediums," admits that at an earlier period of his life, before he
+received the full Light, he "received light and peace" through these
+external things. This seemed to the Meeting "too much giveing them
+encouragement" to dwell in things which give "only drynesse and
+barrenness," and they fear that "the ffoxes among them would take
+advantage" of this aid and comfort.[74] It would appear that the
+gravamen of the Quaker attack on the little sect was the failure of its
+members to dispense with sacraments. At a later period, when the
+"Philadelphian Society" was in full flower, an old-time pillar Quaker,
+George Keith, then become a Churchman and "an apostate" in the eyes of
+Friends, attacked the writings of Jane Leade on the ground that "she
+wrote derogatory to the Humanity of Christ," _i.e._ the historical
+Christ. Francis Lee took up vigorously the defence, and told George
+Keith that he himself had taught again and again the same principle of
+inward Light and inward Religion, that he had never yet publicly
+renounced these early ideas of his, and that he of all men ought to
+understand the meaning of a Christ within and of a "Still Eternity."[75]
+
+Traces of Boehme's influence appear in the terms and {234} ideas of
+many English writers during the period under consideration, besides
+those specifically mentioned. Sir Isaac Newton read Boehme's books
+with great appreciation and meditated upon those strange accounts of
+the invisible universe which underlies and is in the visible world, but
+we need not take too seriously the claim of the "Behmenists" that "he
+was ploughing with Behmen's heifer" when he discovered the law of
+universal gravitation![76] Milton, without any doubt, had read the
+German mystic's account of the eternal war between the Light Principle
+and the Dark Principle, of the fall of Lucifer, of the loss of
+Paradise, and of the return of man in Christ to Paradise, and there are
+many passages in the great poet which look decidedly like germinations
+from the seed which Boehme sowed, but we must observe caution in
+tracing the origin of verses written by a poet of Milton's genius and
+originality and range of knowledge. One great Englishman of a later
+period, William Law, unmistakably owed to Jacob Boehme the main
+influences which transformed his life, and through the pure and lucid
+style of this noble English mystic of the eighteenth century, Boehme's
+insights found a new interpretation and a clearer expression than he
+himself or any other interpreter had been able to give them.[77]
+
+
+
+[1] "The Life of one Jacob Boehmen, who although he was a meane man,
+yet wrote the most wonderful deepe knowledge in Naturall and Divine
+Things, that any hath been known to doe since the Apostles' Times, and
+yet never read them or learned them from any other man, as may be scene
+in that which followeth."--London, 1644, printed by L. N. for Richard
+Whitaker.
+
+[2] _Journal of George Fox_ (Cambridge edition, 1911), i. p. 18.
+
+[3] Preface, A. 4.
+
+[4] _Ibid._
+
+[5] _Journ._ i. p. 29.
+
+[6] _The Life of Jacob Behmen_, written by Durant Hotham, Esquire,
+November 7, 1653. Printed for H. Blunden, and sold at the Castle in
+Corn Hill, 1654.
+
+[7] _Life of Jacob Behmen_, B. 2.
+
+[8] _Op. cit._ B. 2.
+
+[9] The writings were translated in the following order: In 1647,
+_Forty Questions_ by Sparrow; _The Clavis_, by Sparrow. In 1648, _The
+Three Principles_, by Sparrow; _The Way to Christ_ (including the
+Treatises, _On True Repentance_; _On True Resignation_; _On
+Regeneration_; _The Supersensual Life_; and _On Illumination_), by
+Sparrow. In 1649, _Of the Last Times_, by Sparrow; _Epistles of Jacob
+Behmen_, by Ellistone. In 1650, _The Three-fold Life_, by Sparrow. In
+1651, _De signatura rerum_, by Ellistone. In 1652, _Christ's
+Testaments_--Baptism and Supper,--by Sparrow. In 1654, _The Mysterium
+magnum_, by Ellistone and Sparrow; _A Table of the Divine
+Manifestation_, by H. Blunden and Sparrow; _A Table of the Three
+Principles_, H. Blunden and Sparrow; _An Epitome of the Three
+Principles_, by Sparrow. In 1655, _On Predestination_, by Sparrow; _A
+Short Compendium on Repentance_, by Sparrow. In 1656, _The Aurora_, by
+Sparrow. In 1659, _The Treatise on the Incarnation_, by Sparrow. In
+1661, _The Great Six Points_; _The Earthly and Heavenly Mystery_; _The
+Four Complexions_; _Two Apologies to Tylcken_; _Considerations
+concerning Stiefel's Threefold State of Man_; _An Apology concerning
+Perfection_; _On Divine Contemplation_; _An Apology for the Books on
+True Repentance and True Resignation_; _177 Theosophic Questions_; _The
+Holy Week_; _25 Epistles_, by Sparrow.
+
+[10] Sparrow refers to this book in his Introduction to _The Three
+Principles_ as follows: "For a taste of the Spirit of prophecy which
+the author [Boehme] had, there is a little treatise of some prophecies
+concerning these latter times, collected out of his writings by a lover
+of the Teutonic philosophy and entitled Mercurius Teutonicus."
+
+[11] Introd. to _Forty Questions_.
+
+[12] Introd. to _Forty Questions_.
+
+[13] Ibid.
+
+[14] Ibid.
+
+[15] Introd. to _The Three Princ._
+
+[16] Introd. to _The Three Princ._
+
+[17] Ibid.
+
+[18] "To the Reader" in _Myst. mag._
+
+[19] "To the Reader" in _Myst. mag._
+
+[20] Preface to the Reader in _Aurora_.
+
+[21] Preface for the _Aurora_.
+
+[22] Preface for the _Aurora_.
+
+[23] A contemporary of Sparrow, probably Samuel Pordage, wrote an
+Encomium on Sparrow in the Introduction to a long Behmenite Poem called
+_Mundorum explicatio_ (London, 1661). The passage is as follows:
+
+ "And learned Sparrow we thy praises too
+ Will Sing; rewards too small for what is due,
+ The Gifts of Glory and of Praise we owe:
+ The English Behmen doth Thy Trophies show.
+ Whilst Englishmen that great saint's praise declare,
+ Thy Name shall join'd with his receive a share.
+ The Time shall come when his great Name shall rise,
+ Thy Glory also shall ascend the skies.
+ Thou mad'st him English speak, or else what Good
+ Had his works done us if not understood?
+ To Germany they beneficial prove
+ Alone: till we enjoyed them by thy Love.
+ Their German Robes thou took'st from them, that we
+ Their Beauties might in English Garments see.
+ Thus has thy Love a vast rich Treasure showen,
+ And made what was exotic now our own."
+
+[24] Preface to Boehme's _Epistles_ (1649).
+
+[25] Preface to Boehme's _Epistles_.
+
+[26] _Ibid._
+
+[27] _Ibid._
+
+[28] Preface to _Epistles_.
+
+[29] _Ibid._
+
+[30] Preface to _Sig. re._
+
+[31] This question was raised by Barclay in his _Inner Life of the
+Religious Societies of the Commonwealth_ (London, 1879), pp. 214-215.
+
+[32] Thomas Taylor's _Works_ (London, 1697), p. 86.
+
+[33] The writings themselves constantly use the word "Seeker," and the
+Introductions emphasize the Seeking attitude.
+
+[34] _Christian Information Concerning these Last Times_, by F. E.
+(London, 1664), pp. 10-11.
+
+[35] _Op. cit._ pp. 11-12.
+
+[36] _Journal_ (ed. 1901), 28. Unfortunately the Cambridge Journal
+does not contain any biographical incidents prior to 1652.
+
+[37] Hotham's _Life_, D. 4.
+
+[38] Preface to _Epistles_, p. 10.
+
+[39] The _Three Princ._, trans. 1648, xx. 40-41.
+
+[40] _Sig. re._ viii. 23.
+
+[41] _Ep._ xv. 18. For another passage on "the new smell," see _The
+Three Princ._ iv. 27.
+
+[42] _Journal_, i. p. 29.
+
+[43] _Ibid._ i. pp. 29-30.
+
+[44] See _Journal_, i. pp. 31-34.
+
+[45] _Ibid._ i. p. 33.
+
+[46] _Op. cit._ A.
+
+[47] See, for specimen passages, _Journal_, i. pp. 36 and 124.
+
+[48] See especially _Myst. mag._ xxxviii. sections 52-59.
+
+[49] Preface to _Aurora_, B.
+
+[50] _Journal_, i. p. 19.
+
+[51] _Three Princ._ xvi. 31-37.
+
+[52] See _Journal_, i. p. 13; pp. 190-191 and _passim_.
+
+[53] _Three Princ._ iv. 5. See also _ibid._ xv. 24; xvi. 42; and
+xviii. 24.
+
+[54] _Journal_, i. p. 12.
+
+[55] _Three Princ._ ix. 25-26.
+
+[56] _Ibid._ xix. 33.
+
+[57] _Myst. mag._ lxii. 17 and lxiii. 36.
+
+[58] See Fox's _Journal_, i. p. 19.
+
+[59] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_ (London, 1715), i. 77.
+
+[60] _A Fountain of Gardens_, 4 vols., London, 1696-1701.
+
+[61] _Op. cit._ i. pp. 17-19.
+
+[62] _A Fountain of Gardens_, p. 25.
+
+[63] _Theologia mystica_, p. 81.
+
+[64] Christopher Walton, in his _Notes and Materials_ (1854), gives a
+list of eighteen of her books.
+
+[65] _Ibid._ p. 238.
+
+[66] _Op. cit._ p. 9. Pordage disliked the Quakers and speaks
+slightingly of them in _Theologia mystica_. He also wrote a Treatise
+against them. See Walton, p. 203.
+
+[67] Important material on this subject may be found in Walton's _Notes
+and Materials_, especially pp. 188-258.
+
+[68] The full title-page of Anderdon's book is as follows: _One Blow at
+Babel_. In those of the Pepole called Behemnites, whose Foundation is
+not upon that of the Prophets and Apostles, which shall stand sure and
+firm forever; but upon their own carnal conceptions, begotten in their
+Imaginations upon Jacob Behmen's writings: They not knowing the better
+part, the Teachings of that Spirit that sometime opened some Mysteries
+of God's Kingdom in Jacob, have chosen the worser part in Esau,
+according to the predominancy of that Spirit which ruled in them when
+they made choice of their Religion, as it doth in others the hearts of
+the children of disobedience.--By John Anderdon. (London, printed in
+the year 1662, written in 1661).
+
+[69] _One Blow at Babel_, p. 3.
+
+[70] _Ibid._ pp. 1 and 6.
+
+[71] _One Blow at Babel_, pp. 1-2.
+
+[72] Jane Leade's writings give great importance to the outward
+sacraments.
+
+[73] The use of the phrase "its own Centre," which became an important
+Quaker term, is an interesting relic of Boehme's influence.
+
+[74] _Minutes of the Morning Meeting_, i. George Fox apparently asked
+to see Frattwell's MS., for in a Letter under date of eighth mo. 1st,
+1674, Alexander Parker writes to George Fox: "I likewise spoke to Edw.
+Man [Edward Mann] to send down Ralph ffrettwells Book, I suppose he
+intends to see thee shortly and if he can find ye Book to bring itt
+with him."--_Journal_ (Cambridge edition), ii. p. 305.
+
+[75] Walton's _Notes and Materials_, pp. 227 and 231.
+
+[76] See Walton's _Notes and Materials_, pp. 3, 46, 72, and 404.
+
+[77] William Law lies beyond the period to which this volume is
+devoted. It is customary to call the edition of Behmen's _Works_,
+published 1764-1781, "William Law's Edition." This is quite incorrect.
+This edition is in the main a reprint of the earlier Translations by
+Sparrow and Ellistone. It was edited by George Ward, assisted by
+Thomas Langcake, and printed at the expense of Mrs. Hutcheson, an
+intimate friend of William Law.
+
+
+
+
+{235}
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+EARLY ENGLISH INTERPRETERS OF SPIRITUAL RELIGION:
+ JOHN EVERARD, GILES RANDALL, AND OTHERS
+
+I
+
+The ideas developed by spiritual Reformers on the Continent were
+brought into England by a great variety of carriers and over many
+routes. Some of the routes were devious and are difficult to trace,
+but some of them, on the other hand, are obvious and easily found. One
+of the potent and pervasive intellectual influences for the formation
+of the "spiritual" type of thought in England was the Platonic
+influence which came to England through the Humanists. This strand of
+thought, inherited from the remote past, is woven into the inner
+structure of all these interpreters of the divine Life. The English
+revival of Greek philosophy is closely connected with the work of the
+early Italian Humanists, especially with that of the Florentine
+scholar, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), who was selected and educated by
+Cosimo de Medici to be the head of the new Academy in Florence. It was
+a fixed idea of Ficino that Philosophy and Religion are identical, and
+therefore that Religion, if it is true Religion, is rooted and grounded
+in Reason, since God is the source of all Truth and all that is
+rational. Plato, in Ficino's eyes, is Philosophy. He was the divine
+forerunner of Christ in the realm of intellect as John the Baptist was
+in the realm of the law. In his mind Plato's Philosophy is the
+greatest possible preparation for an adequate understanding of the
+world of Truth which Christ has unveiled and of the way {236} of Life
+which He has revealed. Ficino translated Plato's Dialogues into Latin,
+and gave his own interpretation of the great philosopher in a Treatise
+on _Plato's Doctrine of Immortality of Souls_. He also translated
+Plotinus and the writings falsely attributed to Dionysius the
+Areopagite, and put them anew into spiritual circulation.
+
+Ficino, though living in an age of corruption and debauchery, and
+though closely associated with Humanists who had hardly a thin veneer
+of Christianity, and who were bent on reviving paganism, yet himself
+maintained a positive Christian faith and a pure and simple life. He
+found it possible to be a priest in the Christian Church and at the
+same time to be a high-priest in the temple of Plato, because he found
+faith and reason to be indivisible and indissoluble. His influence was
+marked upon the early English Humanists, Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, and
+More, and he was a vital influence in the new revival, which occurred
+in the seventeenth century, of Plato and Plotinus as contributors to a
+virile religion based upon an inherent divine and human relationship.
+
+Still another influence, of a very different sort, came to England by
+way of Italy--the intense interpretation of Faith as the way of
+salvation, expressed in the writings of the Spanish reformer, Juan de
+Valdès, and in the powerful sermons of his two Italian disciples,
+Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564) and Pietro Martire Vermigli (1500-1562),
+generally known as Peter Martyr. Juan de Valdès, twin brother of the
+Humanist, Alfonso de Valdès, the friend of the Emperor Charles V., was
+born of a distinguished Castilian family toward the end of the
+fifteenth century. He was splendidly prepared in his youth, both
+mentally and religiously, for the great work of his life, which was to
+be a spiritual mover of other souls. As his views of the needed
+transformation of Christianity broadened and intensified he concluded
+that he would be safer in Italy than in Spain, and he thus took up his
+residence in Naples in 1529. Here he became the centre of a remarkable
+circle of spiritual men and women who were dedicating themselves to the
+reform of the Church and to the {237} propagation of a more vital
+religion. Ochino, the most powerful Italian preacher of the age; the
+fervent scholar, Vermigli; the papal secretary, Carnesecchi, later a
+martyr to the new faith; Vittoria Colonna, the friend of Michael Angelo
+Buonarotti, and the beautiful Giulia Gonzaga, were among those who
+kindled their torches from his burning flame. For the instruction of
+his friends--especially for Giulia Gonzaga--de Valdès translated St.
+Paul's Epistles to the Romans and Galatians and wrote commentaries on
+them, and contributed the penetrating original works, _The Christian
+Alphabet_ and _The Hundred and Ten Divine Considerations_.[1]
+
+These writings present in vivid and powerful style the way of salvation
+through Faith. The primary insight is Lutheran, but it is everywhere
+coloured and tempered by the author's Humanistic outlook. He insists,
+in all his interpretations of salvation, upon the vital interior work
+of the Holy Spirit and upon the necessity of re-living the Christ-life
+in all its heights and depths. All the truths of religion, he
+constantly urges, must be known and verified in experience, and those
+who are to be effective ministers of the Gospel in any age must know
+that they are divinely sent and must be taught by the inward Word of
+God rather than by human science. The attractive power of the Cross is
+rediscovered in his profound experience and makes itself felt as the
+dynamic principle of his entire moral activity.
+
+The _Divine Considerations_ was put into English by Nicholas Ferrar
+(1592-1637) of Little Gidding, and published at Oxford in 1638,
+together with the Introduction to the _Commentary on Romans_, under the
+name of "John Valdesso." The English translation was submitted by
+Ferrar to his friend, George Herbert, who wrote some interesting
+critical notes which were printed with the original edition. George
+Herbert expresses his great love for "Valdesso," whose eyes, he says,
+God has opened, even in the midst of Popery, "to understand and
+expresse so clearly {238} and excellently the intent of the Gospell in
+the acceptation of Christ's righteousness," but he "likes not" his
+slighting of Scripture and his use of the Word of God for inward
+revelation. He believed, though wrongly, that de Valdès was a
+"mystic," and that he was advocating a religion of "private enthusiasms
+and revelations." The fact was rather that de Valdès was presenting or
+was aiming to present a religion of universal validity, brought to
+birth by the discovery of God in Christ as revealed in the Gospel, and
+made continuously effective anew by personal experience of the same
+Christ as Divine Revealer in the lives of men.
+
+There is no question of the far-reaching influence of Ferrar's
+translation of this vital message of de Valdès, especially among
+scholars and literary men. It must also have had a popular influence,
+for Samuel Rutherford in 1648 declared it to be one of the "poysonable"
+sources of "Familisme, Antinomianisme, and Enthusiasme."[2] He charges
+that "Waldesso," as he calls him, teaches men that the Scriptures have
+been supplanted by the inner Light, in fact that "Scripture shines only
+as a light in a dark place until the Day-star arises in the heart, and
+that then man hath no more need to seeke that of the holy Scripture
+which departs of it selfe, as the light of a candle departs when the
+Sunne-beames enter, even as Moses departed at the presence of Christ
+and the Law at the presence of the Gospel."[3]
+
+Ochino and Vermigli spent six important years in England from 1547 to
+1553, when persecution under Mary forced them to flee. They were far
+more under the influence of Calvin at this period than under that of
+their former friend de Valdès, but they both with the fire and
+intensity of their Italian nature--especially Ochino in his
+sermons--drove home to the hearts and consciences of their hearers the
+way of salvation by faith and the absolute necessity of inner
+experience and interior religion.
+
+{239}
+
+II. JOHN EVERARD
+
+Dr. John Everard of Clare College, Cambridge, was clearly one of the
+earliest and one of the most interesting carriers of these ideas, and
+in his case it is not difficult to discover the influences which shaped
+the course of his thought and suggested the general lines of his
+message. He was born about 1575--the birth year of Jacob
+Boehme--though all early biographical details are lacking. He had a
+long student period at Clare College, receiving his degree of B.A. in
+1600, M.A. in 1607, and D.D. in 1619. He was deeply versed in the
+great mystics, and always reveals in his sermons the influence of
+Plotinus and Dionysius the Areopagite, and no less the influence of
+Eckhart, Tauler, and the _Theologia Germanica_. But at some period of
+his life he tapped a new source and came into possession of a fresh
+group of live and suggestive ideas which influenced all the thinking of
+his later stage. His translations, some of which are in MS. and some
+in printed form, furnish a clue to the main sources of his ideas, which
+present a striking parallelism with those held by the continental
+spiritual Reformers of the sixteenth century. He was possessed of
+original power and of penetrating insight, with "eyes of his own," but
+no one can fail to see that he had read and pondered the writings of
+these submerged Reformers, and that in a country remote from theirs he
+has become a reincarnation of their ideas and a new voice for their
+message.
+
+His public career, in the England of the first two Stuarts, was a
+stormy one. He was Rector of St. Martin-in-the-Field. In the early
+stage of his preaching he felt called upon to oppose the "Spanish
+Marriage" as "the great sin of matching with idolaters," and he
+underwent a series of imprisonments for his attacks upon this precious
+scheme of King James, who wittily suggested changing his name from Dr.
+Everard ["Ever-out"] to "Dr. Never-out." Some time before his fiftieth
+year--the date cannot be exactly fixed--he reached {240} his new and
+deeper insight, and henceforth became the bearer of a message which
+seemed to him and to his friends like the reopening of the treasury of
+the Gospels, and in this new light he felt ashamed of the barren period
+of his life when he walked in "the ignorance of litteral knowledge,"
+when he was "a bare, literal, University preacher," as he himself says,
+and had not found "the marrow and the true Word of God."[4] The great
+change which cleaves his public career into two well-defined parts is
+impressively indicated by his friend and disciple, Rapha Harford, in
+his "Dedicatory Epistle" to the Sermons and in his preface "to the
+Reader," though he nowhere gives any light upon the events and
+influences which initiated the transformation. "In a special and
+extraordinary manner God appeared to him in his latter days," Harford
+says, "and after that, he desired nothing more than to bring others to
+see what he saw and to enjoy what he enjoyed."[5] He was, we are told,
+"a man of presence and of princely behaviour" and was known "as a good
+philosopher, few or none exceeding him," "endowed with skill and depth
+of learning," but after his new experience, when he "came to know
+himself," and to "know Jesus Christ and the Scriptures _experimentally_
+rather than grammatically, literally or academically," he came to
+esteem lightly "notions and speculation," "letter-learning" and
+"University-knowledge," and he "_centred his spirit_ on union and
+communion with God" and turned his supreme interest from "forms,
+externals and generals" to the cultivation of "the inner man," and to
+"acting more than talking."[6]
+
+His new way of preaching--vivid, concrete, touched with subtle humour,
+grounded in experience and filling old texts with new meaning--appealed
+powerfully to the common people and to an elect few of the more highly
+privileged who had won a large enough freedom of spirit to go with him
+into new paths.[7] Like his Master, he loved {241} the common people,
+"thinking it no disparagement to accompany with the lowest of men,"
+"tinkers, coblers, weavers and poor beggarly fellows who came running"
+to hear him, and he poured out the best he had in his treasury to any,
+even the simplest and most ordinary, who cared to hear of this
+"spiritual, practical experiment of life." His preaching naturally
+brought him suffering and persecution. He was "often fetched into the
+High Commission," was forced to give "attendance from Court to Court
+and from Term to Term," was on one occasion fined a thousand pounds for
+his "heresies," and had many interviews with Archbishop Laud, but he
+always held that "Truth is strongest," and he declared that God had
+called him to be "a Sampson against Philistines and a David against the
+huge and mighty Goliath of his times,"[8] and he was ready to pay the
+cost of obedience to the Light. His friend, Harford, who had "much
+ado" to keep the manuscript of his sermons "out of the Bishop's
+fingers," declares that though Everard clearly "distinguished the
+outward and killing letter from the Life and Spirit of the Holy Word,"
+he was not an antinomian or in sympathy with ranterism. "Our author,"
+the Dedicatory Epistle says, and says truly, "missed both rocks against
+which many have split their vessels. He carries Truth amain with
+Topsail set. He cuts his way clear between the meer Rationalist who
+will square out God according to his Reason, and the Familist who lives
+above all ordinances and by degrees hath turned licencious Ranter."
+Thomas Brooks added to Harford's Testimony a brief "Approbation" to the
+Volume, on Behalf of the Publishers, recommending all readers to
+receive its "heaven-born truths" into their homes and into their
+hearts, assuring them that as they read and open their inner eyes they
+will find their own hearts in the book and the book in their own
+hearts, _i.e._ the book will "find them."
+
+Before turning to Everard's message, as it finds expression in the rare
+volume of his sermons--_The Gospel Treasures Opened_--we must consider
+the Translations {242} which he left unpublished. They are preserved
+in clearly written manuscripts in Cambridge University Library, under
+the title "Three Bookes Translated out of their Originall."[9] The
+first "Book" bears the following title-page: "The Tree of Knowledge of
+Good and Evil, And the Tree of Life in the Midst of the Paradise of
+God: Taken out of a Book called The Letter and the Life, or The Flesh
+and the Spirit. Translated by Dr. Everard." An interesting article on
+Dr. Everard in _Notes and Queries_[10] concludes that this first "Book"
+of Everard's is a free translation of the Second Part of Tentzel's
+_Medicina diastica_. This guess, however, proves to be incorrect,
+though there is a slight likeness between Tentzel's book and the
+English MS. Everard's book is, in reality, a translation of Sebastian
+Franck's _Von dem Baum des Wissens Gutes und Böses_ ("Of the Tree of
+Knowledge of Good and Evil"). The translation is made from a Latin
+edition of Franck's little book, which was published in 1561. The
+entire message of this treatise, written by the wandering chronicler
+and spiritual prophet of Germany, and here reproduced in English, is
+the _inwardness_ of everything that concerns the religious life. The
+Tree of Life was in Adam's heart, and in that same inner region of the
+soul was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The story of
+Paradise is a graphic parable of the soul's experience. "That Tree
+which tested Adam was and is nothing else in truth but the Nature,
+Will, Knowledge, and Life of Adam, and every man is as much forbidden
+to eat of this Tree as Adam was." Franck's significant book contained
+passages from Hans Denck's _Widerruf_ ("Confession"), and Everard
+translated them as an appendix to his first manuscript book.[11] They
+hold the very heart of Denck's message and deal, with Denck's usual
+sincerity and boldness, with the fundamental nature of spiritual
+religion. He here declares the primacy of the Word of God in the soul
+over everything else that ministers to man's life: "I prefer the Holy
+Scriptures before all Humane {243} Treasure; yet I do not so much
+esteem them as I do the Word of God which is living, potent, and
+eternal, and which is free from all elements of this world: For that is
+God Himself, Spirit and no letter, written without pen or ink, so that
+it can never be obliterated. True Salvation is in the Word of God; it
+is not tied up to the Scriptures. They alone cannot make a bad heart
+good, though they may supply it with information. But a heart
+illumined with the Light of God is made better by everything." Franck
+declares, in comment on Denck's words: "I myself know at least twenty
+Christian Religions all of which claim to rest on the Holy Scriptures
+which they apply to themselves by far-fetched expositions and
+allegories, or from the dead letter of the text. . . . They can be
+understood rightly, however, only by the divine new-man, who is
+God-born, and who brings to them the Light of the Holy Spirit." There
+can be no doubt, I think, that Dr. Everard found in the writings of
+these two sixteenth-century prophets the body and filling of his own
+new conceptions of Christianity, and it was through his vigorous
+interpretations that this stream of thought first flowed into England.
+
+It will not be necessary to make extended comment on Everard's other
+translations. The second one was "The Golden Book of German
+Divinitie," rendered into English in 1628 from the Latin edition of
+"John Theophilus," who is Sebastian Castellio, and the third is a
+translation of Nicholas of Cusa's _De visione Dei_ ("The Vision of
+God"), which is a profound and impressive piece of mystical literature
+and deserves to be much better known than it is. Everard, further,
+translated the "Mystical Divinity" of Dionysius the Areopagite,
+selections from John Tauler and Meister Eckhart, and "The Divine
+Pymander [Poemander] of Hermes Trismegistus"--a book which nearly all
+the spiritual Humanists ranked in the very first list of religious
+literature.[12]
+
+We must now turn to Everard's message as it is {244} presented in his
+Sermons, and endeavour to discover what he told the throngs of people
+who came gladly to hear him in the Kensington Meetings and the
+gatherings at Islington. The central emphasis in every sermon is on
+personal experience, or, as we should phrase it to-day, on a religion
+of life and reality. He has had his own "scholastic" period, but he
+looks back on it as a passage across an arid desert, and he feels a
+mission laid upon him to call men everywhere away from a religion of
+"notions and words"[13] to a religion of first-hand experience and
+inwardly felt realities. Unless we know Christ, he says,
+experimentally so that "He lives within us spiritually, and so that all
+which is known of Him in the Letter and Historically is truly done and
+acted in our own souls--until we experimentally verify all we read of
+Him--the Gospel is a meer tale to us." It is not saving knowledge to
+know that Christ was born in Bethlehem but to know that He is born in
+us. It is vastly more important to know experimentally that we are
+crucified with Christ than to know historically that He died in
+Jerusalem many years ago, and to feel Jesus Christ risen again within
+you is far more operative than to have "a notional knowledge" that He
+rose on the third day. "When thou begins to finde and know not merely
+that He was conceived in the womb of a virgin, but that _thou_ art that
+virgin and that He is more truly and spiritually, and yet as really,
+conceived in thy heart so that thou feelest the Babe beginning to be
+conceived in thee by the power of the Holy Ghost and the Most High
+overshadowing thee; when thou feelest Jesus Christ stirring to be born
+and brought forth in thee; when thou beginnest to see and feel all
+those mighty, powerful actions done in thee which thou readest that He
+did in the flesh--here is a Christ indeed, a real Christ who will do
+thee some good."[14]
+
+{245}
+
+To have Christ born in the soul means also to "do the deeds of Christ,"
+to grow and increase toward perfection as His life is more fully
+manifested in us, to be able to say as we read of divine events, "This
+day is this Scripture fulfilled in me," and to see Christ work all His
+miracles before our eyes to-day. It is the "key of experience" which
+unlocks all the drawers and cabinets and hidden and secret doors of
+Scripture.[15] We can discover, as we read, that there are whole
+armies of Philistines in us to be overcome, that there are Goliaths to
+be slain, and that there are Promised Lands to be won.[16] "When thou
+hast seen God and found Him for thyself; then thou mayest say: Now I
+believe, not only because it is written in Genesis, but because I have
+felt it and seen it written and fulfilled in mine own soul."[17] "Men
+should not so much trouble themselves," he says to those who are
+expecting a "Fifth Monarchy," "about a personal reign of Christ here
+upon earth, if they saw that the chief and real fulfilling of the
+Scriptures were _in them_; and that, whatever is externally done in the
+world or expressed in the Scriptures, is but typical and
+representative, and points out a more spiritual _saving_, and a more
+divine fulfilling of them."[18]
+
+In almost the same figures used by Sebastian Franck he contrasts the
+letter and the Spirit, the outward and the inward, the word of the
+written Book and the living Word of God. This contrast is carefully
+worked out in four sermons, preached at Kensington, on "The Dead and
+Killing Letter, and the Spirit and the Life." Here he insists, often
+in quaint and curious phrases, that the Old Testament, "from the first
+of Genesis to the last of the Prophets," is an allegory, "woven like a
+beautiful tapestry" to picture forth to the eye a history whose real
+meaning is to be found within the soul; if you dwell upon it only as
+picture, only as history, it is a letter that kills; if you see your
+own selves in it and by it, then it gives life.[19] You may learn the
+whole Bible by heart and speak to any point in divinity according to
+text and letter, and yet know {246} nothing of God or of spiritual
+life.[20] "If you be always handling the letter of the Word, always
+licking the letter, always chewing upon that, what great thing do you?
+No marvel you are such starvelings!"[21] The letter is the husk; the
+Word, the Spirit, is the kernel; the letter is the earthen jar, the
+Spirit is the hidden manna; the letter is the outer court, the Spirit
+is the inner sanctuary; the letter is the shadow, the Spirit is the
+substance; the letter is the sheath, the Spirit is the sharp two-edged
+sword; the letter is the hard encasing bone that must be broken, the
+Spirit is inward marrow which nourishes the soul; the letter is
+temporal, the Word is eternal[22]--"if ye once know the truth
+experimentally after the Spirit ye will no longer make such a stir
+about Forms, Disciplines, and Externals as if that were the great and
+only Reformation!"[23] The real difficulty, the true cause of
+spiritual dryness, is that "men strive and contend so much for the
+letter and the external part of God's worship, that they neglect the
+inward and internal altogether; for where is the man who is so zealous
+and hot for the internal as he is for the external. If we press men to
+the inward before the outward, or do as I do, lift up that; either how
+cold and heartless they are, or else how quarrelsome and malicious they
+are!"[24] When once the inward core of things has been grasped and the
+transforming experience has occurred, making a new man--freed,
+illuminated, sin-delivered, with "God the Life of the life and the Soul
+of the soul"[25]--the outward forms and the external things will fall
+into the right perspective and will receive their proper emphasis.
+Imitating St. Augustine's great saying: "Love God absolutely and then
+you may do as you please," Everard says, "Turn the man loose who has
+found the living Guide within him, and then let him neglect the outward
+if he can; just as you would say to a man who loves his wife with all
+tenderness, 'you may beat her, hurt her or kill her, if you want
+to!'"[26]
+
+The conception of God which forms the foreground of {247} all Everard's
+teaching is one perfectly familiar to those that have studied the great
+mystics who have formed their ideas under the direct or indirect
+influence of Plotinus. The conception is, of course, not necessarily
+mystical--it is rather a recurring type of metaphysics--but it has
+peculiarly suited the mystical mind and is often regarded by Christian
+historians as synonymous with mysticism. God, for Everard as for
+Dionysius and for Eckhart, Tauler, and Franck, is unknowable,
+unspeakable, unnamable, abstracted from all that is created and
+visible, an absolute One, alone of all beings in the universe able to
+say "I am," since He alone is Perfect Reality; but just for that reason
+He is unrevealable in His inmost nature to finite beings and incapable
+of manifestation through anything that is finite.[27]
+
+He is a permanent and unchanging Substance; all things that are visible
+are but shadow and appearance, are like bubbles in the water which are
+now here and now gone.[28] Every created and finite thing,
+however--from a grain of sand to a radiant sun and from a blade of
+grass to the Seraph that is nearest God--is a beam or a ray or
+expression of that eternal Reality, is an angel or messenger that in
+some minute, or in some glorious fashion, reveals God in space and
+time; and all created things together, from the lowest to the highest,
+from the treble of the heavenly beings to the base of earthly things,
+form "one mighty sweet-tuned instrument," sending forth one harmonious
+hallelujah to the Creator and revealing a single organic universe,
+"acted and guided by one Spirit"--the Soul of all that is.[29] "Ask
+the craggy mountains what part they sing, and they will tell you that
+they sing the praise of the immutableness and unchangeableness of God;
+ask the flowers of the field what part they sing, and they will tell
+you they sing the wisdom and liberality of God who cloathes them beyond
+Solomon in all his glory; ask the sun, moon and stars what part they
+sing, and they will say the constancy of God's promises, that they hold
+their course and do not alter it; ask the poor received sinner {248}
+what part he sings, and he will tell you he sings the infinite free
+mercy of a most gracious Father; and ask the wicked, obstinate sinner
+what part he sings, and he will tell you he sings the praise of the
+patience and justice of God."[30]
+
+In a very striking passage, Everard points out how the beings nearest
+in order to God are most free of matter and imperfection, while those
+lower in hierarchical scale are increasingly more material: "God is a
+pure Spirit, only Form without any manner of matter; and all the
+Creatures, the further off from Him, the more matter [they have] and
+the nearer the less. For example, Angels are pictured with complete
+_bodies_; yet to show they are further off from matter than men,
+therefore they have always wings. And Arch-angels, they being nearer
+the Nature of God than Angels, are pictured _with bodies cut off by the
+middle with wings_. But Cherubims, having less matter and nearer God
+Himself than either, are pictured _only with heads and wings, without
+bodies_. But Seraphims, being farthest off from man and nearest of all
+to God, _have no bodies nor heads nor wings at all_ but [are] only
+represented _by a certain yellowish or fiery Colour_."[31]
+
+We ourselves, we men, are both finite and infinite. We have come from
+an infinite source, and even in our apparent finiteness and
+independence we still remain inwardly joined to that central Reality.
+
+He tells this in his parable of the water-drops: "Suppose two
+water-drops reasoning together, and one says to the other,
+
+'Whence are we? Canst thou conceive whence we are? Dost thou know
+either whence we come or to whom we belong, or whither we shall go?
+Something we are, but what will in a short time become of us, canst
+thou tell?' And the other drop might answer, 'Alas, poor fellow-drop,
+be assured we are nothing, for the sun may arise and draw us up and
+scatter us and so bring us to nothing.' Says the other again, 'Suppose
+it do, for all that, yet we are, we have a being, we are something.'
+
+'Why, what are we?' saith the other.
+
+{249}
+
+'Why, brother drop, dost thou not know? We, even we, as small and as
+contemptible as we are in ourselves, yet we are members of the Sea;
+poor drops though we be, yet let us not be discouraged: _We belong to
+the vast Ocean_.'"[32]
+
+The way back to this infinite Ocean from which we have come and in
+which we belong is through the tiny rivulet, the narrow inlet, of our
+own souls, for "the Sea flows into all the creeks and crannies of the
+World."[33] But to find Him--this original Ground and Reality--we must
+"leave the outcoasts" and go back into "the Abysse." Most of us are
+busy "playing with cockel-shells and pebble-stones that lie on the
+outcoasts of the Kingdom," and we do not put back to the infinite Sea
+itself, where we become united and made one with His Life.[34]
+
+The process of return is a process of denial and subtraction. The
+"cockel-shells and pebble-stones" must be left, and one finite thing
+after another must be dropped, and finally "all that thou callest I,
+all that self ness, all that propriety that thou hast taken to thyself,
+whatsoever creates in us Iness and selfness, must be brought to
+nothing."[35] If we would hear God, we must still the noises within
+ourselves. "All the Artillery in the World, were they all discharged
+together at one clap, could not more deaf the ears of our bodies than
+the clamorings of desires in the soul deaf its ears, so you see a man
+must go into silence or else he cannot hear God speak."[36] All "the
+minstrels" that are singing of self and self interests "must be cast
+out." If "the creature" is to be loved and used at all, it must be
+loved and used rightly and in balance, which is hard to do. "Thou must
+love it and use it as if thou loved it not and used it not, not
+appropriating it to thyself, and always being ready to leave it
+willingly and freely; so that thou sufferest no rending, no tearing in
+thy soul to part with it, and so thou usest it for God and in God and
+to ends appointed by God."[37]
+
+The result of this junction of finite and infinite in us is {250} that
+a Christian life is bound to be a strenuous contest: "you must expect
+to fight a great battel." "You are," Everard says again, "bidden to
+fight with your own selves, with your own desires, with your own
+affections, with your own reason, with your own will; and therefore if
+you will finde your enemies, never look without. If you will finde out
+the Devil and what he is and what his nature is, look within you.
+_There_ you may see him in his colours, in his nature, in his power, in
+his effects and in his working."[38]
+
+In a word, the way to God is the way of the Cross. Christ Himself is
+the pattern and His way of Life is the typical way for all who would
+find God--"Christ Jesus is He that all visions tend to; He is the
+substance of all the types, shadows, and sacrifices. He is the
+_business_ that the whole Word was ever about, and only is, and shall
+be about; He hath been, is, and shall be the business of all ages, in
+one kinde or other."[39] "The Book of God," he says in another sermon,
+"is a great Book, and many words are in it, and many large volumes have
+been drawn out of it, but Jesus Christ is the body of it; He is the
+Mark all these words shoot at."[40] It henceforth becomes our business
+to find Christ's life and Christ's death in us, to see that all His
+deeds are done in us. Christ's will must become our will, Christ's
+peace our peace, Christ's sufferings our sufferings, Christ's cross our
+cross, and then we may know "the eternal Sabbath," and keep "quiet,
+even if the whole fabrick of heaven and earth crack and the mountains
+tumble down."[41]
+
+Everard was always on the watch for those things which prevent the
+growth, progress, and advance of the soul into the deeper significance
+of religion. The true Christian continually "grows taller in Christ,"
+he does not stop at "the child's stature," his growth is "not stinted
+like a Dwarf."[42] He discovers one of the prevailing {251} causes of
+arrested development, the "stinting" of the soul, to lie in the wrong
+use of externals, in the subtle tendency to "rest" in the elements or
+beginnings of religion, as he calls them, in "the lowest things in
+Christianity." This is "to cover oneself with fig-leaves as Adam
+did."[43] Men "turn shadows into substance," and instead of using
+ordinances and sacraments, "as means, schoolmasters and tutors," "as
+steps and guides to Christ who is the Truth and Substance," they so use
+them that they stop the soul mid-way and hinder it from going on to
+Christ.[44] He cites the way in which St. Paul "burst out into a holy
+defiance" of everything which did not directly minister to the
+formation of a new creation within the person, whether it were Moses
+and the law or even Christ after the flesh, or any "outward Priviledges
+and Ordinances" whatever. Those who make these things "the top and
+quintessence of religion" miss the Apostle's "more excellent way."
+Those who "stick in externals" and "rest upon them as Crutches and
+Go-bies" [_i.e._ become arrested there] prevent growth in religion,
+"turn the ordinance into an Idol" and occasion disputes and
+differences, "like children who quarrel about triffles."[45] But
+Everard is, nevertheless, very cautious not to go too far in this
+direction and he always shows poise and balance. So long as the
+outward, whether letter or sacrament, is kept in its place and is used
+as means or medium for the attainment of a spiritual goal--the
+formation of Christ within--he approves of its use and warns against a
+too sudden transcendence of the outward helps to the soul.[46]
+
+Here in England, then, during the tumultuous years from 1625 to 1650 a
+solid scholar and a great preacher was teaching the people the same
+views which the spiritual Reformers of Germany had taught a century
+earlier. Like them, Everard taught that the book of the Bible, in so
+far as it consists of words, syllables, and letters, is not the Word of
+God, for God's Word is not ink and paper, but Life and Spirit, quick
+and powerful, illuminating the {252} soul immediately, and
+demonstrating itself by its creative work upon the inward man until he
+becomes like the Spirit that works within him.[47] Like them, he
+insisted that Christ becomes Saviour only as He becomes the Life of our
+lives and repeats in us in a spiritual way the events of His outward
+and historical life. Like them, too, he had discovered that God is not
+a being of wrath and anger, needing to be appeased. On the contrary he
+says: "Beloved, were you once to come to a true sight of God, you would
+see Him glorious and amiable, full of love and mercy and
+tenderness--all wrath and frowns blown clean away. We should see in
+Him not so much as any shadow of anger."[48] Like them, he found
+heaven not far away but in the redeemed soul: "Heaven is nothing but
+Grace perfected, 'tis of the same nature of that you enjoy here when
+you are united by faith to Christ."[49] "I remember," he once said,
+"how I was taught as a child, either by my nurse, or my mother, or my
+schoolmaster, that God was above in heaven, above the sun, moon and
+stars, and there, I thought, was His Court, and His Chamber of
+presence, and I thought it a great height to come to this knowledge;
+but I assure you I had more to do to unlearn this principle than ever I
+had to learn it."[50] He tries to call his hearers away from "the
+childish apprehensions" that heaven is a place of "visible and ocular
+glories," or that "it shall be only hereafter," or that its glory
+"consists in Thrones, and Crowns, and Scepters, in Music, Harps and
+Vyols, and such like carnal and poor things."[51]
+
+He was a man of beautiful spirit, of saintly life, "courageous and
+discerning," "concerned not so much over self-sufferings as that truth
+should not in any way be obstructed through him," and he belongs in the
+list of those who saw through the veil of the outward, through the
+parable of the letter, and found the inward and eternal Reality.[52]
+
+{253}
+
+III. GILES RANDALL AND HIS TRANSLATIONS
+
+Another seventeenth-century interpreter of religion as direct and
+immediate experience of God was Giles Randall, who, like John Everard,
+was a scholar, a translator of religious books, and a powerful popular
+preacher. If one knew him only through the accounts of the
+heresy-hunters of the period, one would suppose him to have been a
+disseminator of the most "virulent poyson" for the soul; but a careful
+examination of all the material available convinces me that he was a
+high-minded, sincere, and fearless bearer of the message of the
+present, living, inwardly-experienced Christ, as Eternal Spirit, Divine
+Light, and Word of God.
+
+It is extremely difficult, from the fragmentary details at hand, to
+construct a biographical account of Randall, but the following sketch
+of him seems fairly well supported by facts:
+
+He was the son of Edward Randall of Chipping Wycombe, Bucks, and
+received his B.A. from Lincoln College, Oxford, February 13,
+1625-6.[53] He was probably the nephew of John Randall, B.D.
+(1570-1622), an eminent Puritan divine, a man of good scholarship and
+of large means, who bequeathed by will his house and garden to his
+"loveing Nephewe Gyles Randall."[54] He seems to have been for some
+years a minister in good odour and repute, and to have given no
+occasion of complaint against his doctrine before 1643. He probably
+was the Giles Randall who was arrested in 1637 and tried in the Star
+Chamber for {254} preaching against "ship-money" as unjust and an
+offence against God, since it was, he declared in his sermon, "a way of
+taking burdens off rich men's shoulders and laying them on the necks of
+poor men."[55] He was again before the Star Chamber--this time it is
+certainly our Giles Randall--in 1643 charged with preaching
+"anabaptism," "familism," and "antinomianism," according to the usual
+labels of the time. He had been for some years preaching peaceably at
+"the Spital" in London with great multitudes of people nocking to hear
+him.[56] The charge of heresy was brought against Randall for a sermon
+which he was said to have preached in St. Martin Orgar's, a soundly
+orthodox church, in Candlewick ward, London--the charge being that he
+preached against "the mandatory and obligatory nature of the law as a
+Christian rule to walk by," and asserted that a child of God can live
+as sinless a life as Christ's was.[57] He was "removed" from the
+ministry "for his anabaptism" in the autumn of 1644, though he
+continued to preach after being "removed."[58] The famous drag-nets of
+heresy give us a few more details of Randall's "poysonous" doctrine.
+Edwards says that Randall taught that "our common food, ordinary eating
+and drinking, is a sacrament of Christ's death," and that "all
+creatures [_i.e._ everything in the visible creation] held forth God in
+Christ."[59] Samuel Rutherford charges him with teaching a possible
+perfection in this life: "Randall, the antinomian and Familist says,
+those persons are ever learning and never coming to knowledge who say
+that perfection is not attainable in this life."[60] He further
+charges that Randall in a sermon said that "Christ's Parables, from
+Sowing, a Draw-net, Leaven, etc., did prove that to expound the
+Scriptures by allegories was lawfull and that all the things of this
+life, as Seeds, the Wayside, a Rocke, the Sea, a {255} Net, the Leaven,
+etc., were sacraments of Christ . . . and that a spiritual minde might
+see the mysteries of the Gospel in all the things of nature and of this
+life. This man who preacheth most abomnable Familisme is suffered in
+and about London publickly, twise on the Lord's Day, to draw hundreds
+of Godly people after him!"[61]
+
+John Etherington throws a little more light upon the nature of this
+"abomnable Familism," which so many godly people liked. He says that
+Randall taught in his sermons that when a person is baptized with the
+Holy Ghost he knows all things, and has entered into the deep mystery
+which is "like the great ocean where there is no casting anchor nor
+sounding the bottome"; that perfection and the resurrection are
+attainable in the present time; that "those who have the Spirit have
+nothing to doe with the law nor with the baptism of repentance which
+John preached"; "he presumes to turn the holy writings of Moses, the
+Prophets, of Christ and His Apostles into Allegories," and gives "a
+spiritual meaning" to the same.[62] It is clear from the comments of
+these crumb-pickers of pernicious doctrine that Giles Randall, as a
+preacher, was teaching the views now quite familiar to us. He was
+teaching that the whole world is a revelation of God, that Christ is
+God fully revealed; that the Divine Spirit, incarnate in Him, comes
+upon men still and brings them into the bottomless, unsoundable deeps
+of Life with God, and makes it possible for them to attain a perfect
+life; that the Scriptures as outward and legal must be transcended, and
+that they must be spiritually discerned and experienced.
+
+Nearly everything connected with Randall's name presents an historical
+puzzle to us. His biography, as we have seen, lies hid in obscurity
+and his books present baffling problems. There are three translations
+of religious classics which bear his name on the title-page, and which
+are introduced to the reader in Prefaces written by him, but it is far
+from certain that he actually made the {256} translations. In 1646 he
+published a little book called the _Single Eye, or the Vision of God
+wherein is unfolded the Mystery of the Divine Presence_. Randall says
+that the book was written by "that learned Doctor Cusanus." It is in
+fact a translation of the _De visione Dei_ of Nicholas of Cusa, and it
+is word for word a printed copy of the Cambridge MS. ascribed to John
+Everard. The other book, published in 1648, is an English edition of
+_Theologia Germanica_, the translation being made from the Latin of
+"John Theophilus," that is, Sebastian Castellio. It is called "a
+Little Golden Manuall briefly discovering the mysteries, sublimity,
+perfection and simplicity of Christianity in Belief and Practice."
+Everard, it will be remembered, also translated this "little golden
+book," but in this case there are very great variations between
+Randall's printed copy and the Cambridge MS., and they probably did not
+come from the same hand.[63] The English translation was evidently
+made some time before the appearance of this edition of 1648, for
+Randall says in his Introduction that "This little Book was long veiled
+and obscured (by its unknown tongue) from the eye of the illiterate and
+inexpert, until some years since, through the desires and industries of
+some of our own countrymen, lovers of Truth, it was translated and made
+to speak to thee in thine own dialect and language. But the time of
+its Nativity being under the late wise and wary Hierarchic who had
+monopolized and engrossed the discovery of others . . . it walked up
+and down the city in MSS. at deer rates from hand to hand of some
+well-wishers to truth, in clandestine and private manner; like Moses in
+his Arke, or the little {257} Child fled and hid from Herod, never
+daring to crowd into the Presse, fearing the rude usuage of those then
+in authority."[64]
+
+Both Robert Baillie and Benjamin Bourne had seen the treatise before
+their respective books against heresy appeared in 1646, and they were
+deeply stirred against Randall for sowing what to their minds seemed
+such dangerous doctrines and such regard for "Popish writings."[65]
+His critics further connect Randall with other books. Baillie speaks
+of two books: "the one by a Dutch Frier [evidently the Theologia] and
+the other by an English Capuchine." Bourne writes against those
+dangerous books _Theologia Germanica, The Bright Star, Divinity and
+Philosophy Dissected_, and Edwards couples with _the Vision of God_
+(the treatise by Nicholas of Cusa) "the third part of the Rule of
+Perfection by a Cappuchian Friar."[66]
+
+John Goodwin, vicar of St. Stephen's in Coleman St., commenting on
+Edward's _Gangraena_, humorously says: "I marvaile how Mr. Edwards
+having (it seems) an authorized power to make errors and heresies at
+what rate and of what materialles he pleaseth, and hopes to live upon
+the trade, could stay his pen at so small a number as 180, and did not
+advance to that angelicall quotient in the Apocalypse, which is _ten
+thousand times ten thousand_," and he adds that if Edwards had
+consulted with a book "printed within the compasse of his foure years,
+intitled _Divinity and Philosophy Dissected, set out by a mad man_,
+with some few others . . . He shall be able to increase his roll of
+errors from 180 to 280, if not to 500."[67] Samuel {258} Rutherford
+says: "So hath _Randel_ the _Familist_ prefixed an Epistle to two
+Popish Tractates, furnishing to us excellent priviledges of Familisme,
+the one called _Theologia Germanica_, and the other _Bright Starre_,
+which both advance perfect Saints above Law, and Gospel". . .[68]
+
+This treatise, called _A Bright Starre_ (London, 1646), which so deeply
+disturbed the seventeenth-century guardians of orthodoxy, is a
+translation of "The Third Part of the Rule of Perfection," written by
+an English Capuchin Friar, and "faithfully done into the English
+tongue," apparently by Randall, "for the common good."[69] It is a
+profoundly mystical book, characterized by interior depth and insight.
+Its central aim is the exposition of a stage of spiritual life which
+transcends both "the active life" and "the contemplative life," a stage
+which the writer calls "the Life Supereminent." In this highest stage
+"the essential will of God is practiced," without strain or effort,
+because God Himself has now become the inner Life and Being of the
+person, the spring and power of the new-formed will.
+
+Randall's preface, or "Epistle to the Reader," as he calls it, is a
+further revelation of his religious views, and his Christian spirit.
+He pleads for freedom and for variety in religious life and thought.
+God does not want one fixed and unvarying Christian form or doctrine;
+He wants variety in the spiritual life as He has arranged for variety
+in the external world of nature: "As in the world all men are not of an
+equall height and stature of body, but some taller, some shorter; some
+weaker, some stronger: so neither are all of one just and even
+proportion in spiritual light and strength of faith in the kingdome of
+Christ, some are dwarfs of Zacheus his pitch, some {259} againe of
+Saul's port, taller by his head and shoulders than his brethren; so, in
+the kingdome of Christ, some are babes, some are young men, some are
+fathers, every one according to the measure of the gift of Christ."
+God has something in His kingdom that fits each spiritual stature,
+something suited to each intellectual capacity. He does not want one
+and the same note struck by all--"harping blindly on one string." He
+does not want men to be "tyed to one forme and kept forever to one
+lesson, unable to top up their work"--He wants men to "go from strength
+to strength, from faith to faith and from height to height."
+
+Randall declares that he has observed with deep sorrow "the
+_non-proficiency_ of many ingenuous spirits who through the policie of
+others and the too too much modesty and timerity of themselves" have
+failed to progress "to the top and pitch" of their possible
+perfection--"poore soules after many years travelling being found in
+the same place and going the same pace!" He hopes that this book on
+Perfection which he is now giving "common vulgar people in their own
+mother tongue," though it is a way that is "high and hard and almost
+unheard of amongst us," may help men to grow up into their full stature
+and to come to "the uttermost steps of Jacob's Ladder which reacheth
+into the heavens." The lower stages of the religious life consist (1)
+of external practices and exercises in conformity to the law of God,
+and (2) interior contemplation and meditation of a God thought of as
+outside and beyond the soul's real possession. But the true spiritual
+life, and "Sabbath rest of the soul," is reached only when God becomes
+the inner Life of our lives, when Christ is formed within and we see
+Light and have our wisdom through His divine anointing. At the highest
+stage of spiritual life man finds himself by ceasing to be himself.
+God can now reveal His beauty and glory through such a person and act
+and work in him and through him. This teaching, Randall admits, is
+only for "experienced Christians," but he believes that this book will
+have "good successe amongst _the Children of {260} the Light_, who are
+taught of God and who run and read the hidden and deepe things of
+God."[70]
+
+If we may judge Randall from his extant Prefaces he was a beautiful
+spirit and was, in fact, what he calls himself, "a lover of the Truth
+in the Truth."[71] He says that "Nothing is or ever was endeavored by
+most men, with more industry and less success than the true knowledge
+of God," but this perennial failure is due, he thinks, to the false
+ways which have been taken, especially to "the negative process of
+abstraction" by which men have tried in vain to find God. The only
+true way to Him is "the new and living way" through the concrete
+revelation of Him. "The sound and unerring knowledge of God standeth
+in your knowledge of your man Christ Jesus, and whoever hath seen Him
+hath seen the Father also, for He is not a dead image of Him, but a
+living Image of the invisible God, yea, the fulgor or brightness of His
+glory and character of His person. . . . He is an Immanuel, God with
+us, God in us. . . . But there is no true knowledge of God within us
+till He be in us formed in the face of Jesus Christ."[72] He declares
+that since "understanding" must be helped by "sense" and "sense is not
+available till it live in the light of the understanding," we must
+learn to find the infinite in the finite, the invisible in the visible,
+and thus in Christ we have God "finitely infinite and infinitely
+finite"--"He cloathes Himself with flesh, reason, sense and the form
+and nature of a servant, who yet is above all and Lord over all." "He
+that is infinitely above thee makes himselfe be to thee [visibly] what
+He is in thee."[73] Christ is the universal revealer of God to all who
+see Him, just as the portrait of a human face seems to fix and follow
+the beholder from any position in the room, while at the same time it
+does the same to all other beholders from whatever angle they may
+look.[75]
+
+_The Vision of God_, whether Englished by Randall or {261} by Everard,
+or by both working together, is translated into beautiful, often
+poetical and rhythmical English, and contains many vivid passages, such
+as the following: "Thou, O God, canst never forsake me so long as I am
+_capable of Thee_."[75] "I love my life exceedingly because Thou art
+the sweetness of my life."[76] "No man can turn to Thee except Thou be
+present, for except Thou wert present and diddest solicit me I should
+not know Thee at all."[77] "Restless is my heart, O Lord, because Thy
+love hath enflamed it with such a desire that it cannot rest but in
+Thee alone."[78] "In the Son of Man I see the Son of God, because Thou
+art so the Son of Man that Thou art the Son of God and in the finite
+attracted nature I see the Infinite Attracting Nature." "I see all
+things in thy human nature which I see in thy divine nature."[79] "To
+come to God is Paradise; to see God is to be in Paradise."[80] "The
+Word of God illuminateth the understanding as the light of the sun doth
+the world. I see the fountain of Light in the Word of God. . . .
+Christ is the Word of God humanified and man deified."[81] "What is
+more easie than to believe God, what is more sweet than to love
+Him. . . . Thy Spirit, O God, comes into the intellectual spirit of
+good men, and by the heat of divine love concocts the virtuall power
+which may be perfected in us. . . . All Scriptures labour for nothing
+but to show Thee, all intellectual spirits have no other exercise but
+to seek Thee and to reveal Thee. Above all things Thou hast given me
+Jesus for a Master, the Way of Life, and Truth, so that there might be
+nothing at all wanting to me."[82]
+
+The literary style of _Divinity and Philosophy Dissected_ is unlike
+that of Randall's known writings, and yet it is not impossible for him
+to have written it.[83] The ideas which fill the little book are quite
+similar to those which {262} Randall held and are in full accord with
+those which prevailed in this general group of Christian thinkers. The
+writer of the treatise, whoever he was, is fond of allegory and
+symbolic interpretation. He turns Adam into a figure and makes the
+Garden of Eden an allegory in quite modern fashion. "Doe you thinke,"
+he writes, "that there was a materiall garden or a tree whereon did
+grow the fruit of good and evill, or that the serpent did goe up in the
+same to speake to the woman? Sure it cannot stand with reason that it
+could be so, for it is said that all the creatures did come to Adam,
+and he gave them names according to their natures: now it is contrary
+to the Serpent's nature to speake after the manner of men, unlesse you
+will alleadge that she understood the language of the beasts, and
+thought them wiser than God, and resolved to be ruled by them, which to
+me seems altogether against reason, that the woman should be so
+ignorant and unrationall, who was created rationall after the image of
+God to be ruler of all creatures: for at this day if a Serpent went up
+into a tree, and did speake from thence to men and women, it would make
+them afraid in so much that they would not doe what he bid them: or
+dost thou thinke that in Mesopotamia (a great way off beyond the seas)
+that there is a materiall garden wherein standeth the tree of life, and
+the tree of knowledge of good and ill, both in one place, and an
+angell, standing with a flickering sword to keep the tree of life from
+the man!"[84]
+
+The book contains a very striking confession of Faith quite unlike that
+which Rutherford or Baillie or Edwards would have allowed as "sound,"
+but yet serious, honest, and marked with a clear note of experience.
+God is, for the writer, above everything a living God, a Spirit, "a
+perfect clear Light that reveals to man the Truth." God is, he says,
+Light, Life, and Love, and He is all these things to man. He instructs
+and convinces his conscience; He disciplines and corrects him; He
+raises condemnation in us for our sins, and "His Light persuades our
+hearts to have true sorrow and real repentance for our sins, with a
+{263} broken and contrite heart and sorrowful spirit, and so we begin
+to hate ourselves and our sins, and doe really forsake them."[85]
+"There is," he maintains, in words that sound strangely like the yet
+unborn Quakers, "an infallible Spirit, Jesus Christ, the power of God
+in us, which directs, corrects, instructs, perswades, and makes us wise
+unto salvation; for He is the holy Word of life unto us . . . and
+discovers all mysteries unto us, . . . if so be we are obedient unto
+Him; but if we are not obedient unto Him, this infallible Spirit, Jesus
+Christ in us, then we shall know nothing of God or of the Scriptures,
+but it shall be a _sealed book, a dead letter, a seeming contradiction_
+unto us."[86]
+
+Samuel Rutherford declares the little treatise to be "a rude, foolish
+and unlearned Pamphlet of late penned and changing, as Familists and
+Antinomians doe, Scripture and God and Christ into metaphores and vaine
+Allegories."[87] The comment of this good man is honest and sincere,
+but of value only as revealing the mental attitude of himself. Here
+the representative of the old system was speaking out of the past and
+condemning a dawning movement which with his apperceiving material he
+could not understand, but which was in a few years to have
+extraordinary expansion and which, when it should in time become
+defecated through discipline and spiritual travail, was destined to
+speak to the condition of many minds to whom Rutherford's "notions"
+have become only empty words.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A beautiful little anonymous book of this period, containing a similar
+conception of Christianity to that set forth in the writings of Everard
+and Randall, must be briefly considered here: _The Life and Light of a
+Man in Christ Jesus_ (London, 1646). The writer, who was a scholarly
+man, shows the profound influence of the _Theologia Germanica_, that
+universal book of religion which {264} fed so many souls in the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he has evidently found, either
+at home or abroad, spiritual guides who have brought him to the
+Day-star in his own heart.
+
+Religion, he says, is wholly a matter of the "operative manifestation
+of Christ in a man--the divine Spirit living in a man."[88] To miss
+that experience and to lack that inner life in God is to miss the very
+heart of religion. "There be many and diverse Religions and Baptisms
+among many and diverse peoples of the habitable world, but to be
+baptized as a man in Christ--that is to be baptized into the living,
+active God, so that the man has his salvation and eternal well-being
+wrought in him by the Spirit and life of his God--is the only
+best."[89] Those who lack "this real spiritual business" never attain
+"the true Sabbath-rest of the soul." They go to meeting on "Sunday,
+Sabbath or First day [_sic_] merely to hear such or such a rare divine
+preach or discourse, or to participate in such or such Ordinances."[90]
+They have "an artificiall, historicall Divinity [Theology] which they
+have attained by the eye, that is by reading books, or by the ears,
+that is, by hearing this or that man, or by gathering up
+expressions"--their religion rests on "knowledge" and not on Christ
+experienced within.[91] This external religion is not so much wrong as
+it is inadequate and immature. "It is," he says, "like unto young
+children, who with shells and little stones imitate a real
+building!"[92] The religion which carries a man beyond shadows to true
+realities and from the cockle-shell house to a permanent and eternal
+temple for the Spirit is the religion which finds Christ within as the
+Day-star in the man's own heart.[93]
+
+There is throughout this simple little book a noble appreciation of
+love as the "supream good" for the soul. "The God of infinite goodness
+and eternal love" is a kind of refrain which bursts forth in these
+pages again {265} and again. Love in _us_ is, he thinks, "a sparkle of
+that immense and infinite Love of the King and Lord of Love."[94]
+Salvation and eternal well-being consist for him in the formation of a
+life "consecrated and united unto the true Light and Love of Christ."
+The man who has this Life within him will always be willing and glad
+when the time comes "to returne againe into the bosome of his heavenly
+Father-God."[95] And not only is the man who has the Life of Christ in
+him harmonized in love upwardly toward God; he is also harmonized
+outwardly towards his fellows. "He is a member with all other men,
+with the good as a lowly-minded disciple to them; with those that are
+not in Christ, as a deare, sympathizing helper, doing his utmost to do
+them good."[96] He has written his "little Treatise," he says, "as a
+love-token from the Father" to help lead men out of the "darke pits of
+the world's darkness" into the full Light of the soul's day-dawn.
+
+The book lacks the robustness and depth that are so clearly in evidence
+in most of the writings that have been dealt with in this volume, but
+there is a beauty, a simplicity, a sweetness, a sincerity born of
+experience, which give this book an unusual flavour and perfume. The
+writer says that there is "an endless battle between the Seed of the
+woman and the seed of the serpent," but one feels that he has fought
+the battle through and won. He says that "a man should be unto God
+what a house is to a man," _i.e._ a man should be a habitation of the
+living God, and the reader feels that this man has made himself a
+habitation for the divine presence within. He says if you want
+spiritual help you must go to a "man who has skill in God," and one
+lays down his slender book feeling assured that, out of the experience
+of Christ in his own soul, he did have "skill in God," so that he could
+speak to the condition of others. There was at least one man in
+England in 1646 who knew that the true source and basis of religion was
+to be found in the experience of Christ within and not in theological
+notions of Him.
+
+
+
+[1] The Italian titles of these two books are _Alfabeto Christiana_
+(1546) and _Le Cento et dieci divine Considerationi_ (1550).
+
+[2] _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_ (1648), p. 164.
+
+[3] _Ibid._ p. 319.
+
+[4] Epistle Dedicatory to _Some Gospel Treasures Opened_ (London, 1653).
+
+[5] _Gospel Treas._, "To the Reader."
+
+[6] _Ibid._
+
+[7] Sometimes "Divers Earls and Lords and other great ones" were in his
+audience.
+
+[8] _Gospel Treas._, "To the Reader."
+
+[9] _Sig. Dd._ xii. p. 68.
+
+[10] Fourth series, i. p. 597.
+
+[11] Denck's name is used in its Latin form John Denqui, and he is
+called _magnus theologus_.
+
+[12] _Hermes Trismegistus_ was published in Everard's lifetime. Large
+extracts from his manuscript translations are given in the _Gospel
+Treasures Opened_ (1653). _The Vision of God_ was edited and published
+in full by Giles Randall in 1646, and it is very probable that Everard
+and Randall did this work together.
+
+[13] _Gospel Treasures Opened_, p. 393.
+
+[14] Sermon on "The Starre in the East," _Gospel Treas._ pp. 52-54.
+See also pp. 586-587. Compare the famous lines of Angelus Silesius:
+
+ "Had Christ a thousand times
+ Been born in Bethlehem
+ But not in thee, thy sin
+ Would still thy soul condemn."
+
+_Angelus Silesius_, edited by Paul Carus (Chicago, 1909), p. 103.
+
+[15] _Gospel Treas._ pp. 59, 72, and 98.
+
+[16] _Ibid._ pp. 270-271.
+
+[17] _Ibid._ p. 282.
+
+[18] _Ibid._ p. 92.
+
+[19] _Ibid._ p. 280
+
+[20] _Gospel Treas._ pp. 310-311.
+
+[21] _Ibid._ p. 286.
+
+[22] _Ibid._ p. 468.
+
+[23] _Ibid._ p. 343.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ p. 344.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ p. 341.
+
+[27] _Ibid._ p. 344.
+
+[27] _Gospel Treas._ p. 81.
+
+[28] _Ibid._ p. 630.
+
+[29] _Ibid._ pp. 637 and 658.
+
+[30] _Gospel Treas._ p. 411.
+
+[31] _Ibid._ 2nd ed. ii. p. 345.
+
+[32] _Gospel Treas._ p. 753.
+
+[33] _Ibid._ p. 418.
+
+[34] _Ibid._ pp. 423-425.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ p. 230.
+
+[36] _Ibid._ p. 600.
+
+[37] _Ibid._ p. 308.
+
+[38] _Gospel Treas._ p. 142.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ p. 648.
+
+[40] _Ibid._ p. 642.
+
+[41] _Ibid._ pp. 99 and 250. Everard's greater contemporary, Pascal,
+also held the view that what happened to Christ should take place in
+every Christian. He wrote to his sister, Madame Perier, Oct. 17, 1651,
+on the death of their father: "We know that what has been accomplished
+in Jesus Christ should be accomplished also in all His members."
+
+[42] _Ibid._ pp. 555-556.
+
+[43] _Gospel Treas._ p. 315.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ p. 558.
+
+[45] _Ibid._ pp. 561-562.
+
+[46] _Ibid._ pp. 563-565.
+
+[47] _Gospel Treas._ pp. 310-315.
+
+[48] _Ibid._ p. 361.
+
+[49] _Ibid._ p. 365.
+
+[50] _Ibid._ p. 736.
+
+[51] _Ibid._ p. 552.
+
+[52] It is not possible to tell whether the sermons of John Everard
+were generally known to the early Quakers or not. He held similar
+views to theirs on many points, and he reiterates, with as much vigour
+as does Fox, the inadequacy of University learning as a preparation for
+spiritual ministry. One Quaker at least of the early time read Everard
+and appreciated him. That was John Bellers. In his "Epistle to the
+Quarterly Meeting of London and Middlesex," written in 1718, Bellers
+quotes "the substance of an excellent Discourse of a poor man in
+Germany, above 300 years ago, then writ by John Taulerus, and since
+printed in John Everard's Works, who was a religious dissenter in King
+James the First's time." He thereupon gives the "Dialogue between a
+Learned Divine and a Beggar" (which Everard ascribed to Tauler) to add
+force to his own presentation of "the duty of propagating piety,
+charity, and industry among men."
+
+[53] Foster's _Alumni Oxonienses_ (1500-1714), vol. iii. Early Series,
+p. 1231.
+
+[54] 57, Savile, Probate Court of Canterbury, Somerset House.
+
+[55] Calendar of State Papers, Dom. Ser. Charles I.
+
+[56] Robert Baillie's _Anabaptisme, the true Fountains of Independency_
+(1646), p. 102,
+
+[57] Thomas Gataker's _God's Eye on His Israel_ (1645), Preface.
+
+[58] _Journal of Commons_, August 9, 1644, pp. 584-585.
+
+[59] _Gangraena_ (1646), part iii. p. 25.
+
+[60] _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_ (1647), chap. xi. p. 143.
+
+[61] _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_, chap. lxxvi. pp. 162-163.
+
+[62] _A Brief Discovery_, etc. (1645), pp. 1-5.
+
+[63] Contemporary writers held that the Giles Randall who preached in
+"the Spital" was the translator. Robert Baillie, Principal of Glasgow
+University, in his work on _Anabaptisme_, pp. 102-103, speaks of
+Randall who preached in "the Spital," and refers to his increasing
+temerity as shown by the fact that "he hath lately printed two very
+dangerous books and set his Preface before each of them, composed as he
+professes long ago by Popish Priests, the one by a Dutch Frier and the
+other by an English Capuchine." Baillie further refers to the "deadly
+poison" of these books as shown in Benjamin Bourne's _Description and
+Confutation of Mysticall Antichrist, the Familists_ (1646), where "the
+dangerous books" are named, as _Theologia Germanica, the Bright Star,
+Divinity and Philosophy Dissected_. Edward's _Gangraena_ also
+identifies Randall the preacher with the translator of "Popish Books
+written by Priests and Friers," citing as an example "The Vision of God
+by Cardinall Cusanus," _op. cit._ (1646), part iii.
+
+[64] Preface.
+
+[65] Bourne's _Description and Confutation_ and Baillie's
+_Anabaptisme_. It seems likely that there was an earlier edition of
+the Theologia than this of 1648, as the chapters and pages quoted by
+Bourne do not correspond with those of the 1648 edition, whose
+title-page has this clause: "Also a Treatise of the Soul and other
+additions not _before_ printed."
+
+[66] _Gangraena_, part iii.
+
+[67] Goodwin's _Cretensis_ (1646). The book, entitled _Divinity and
+Philosophy Dissected_, and attributed by implication to Randall, was
+published in Amsterdam in 1644, with the following title-page:
+
+ "Divinity & Philosophy Dissected, & set forth by a mad man.
+ "The first Book divided into 3 Chapters.
+ "Chap. I. The description of the World in man's heart with the
+ Articles of the Christian Faith.
+ "Chap. II. A description of one Spirit acting in all, which some
+ affirme is God.
+ "Chap. III. A description of the Scripture according to the
+ history and mystery thereof.
+ "Amsterdam, 1644."
+
+[68] _Survey_, etc., part ii. chap. xlvii. p. 53.
+
+[69] The only copy of Randall's _Bright Starre_ which I have been able
+to locate is in the Lambeth Palace Library. A copy of it formerly
+belonged to the learned Quaker, Benjamin Furly, and was sold with his
+remarkable collection of books in 1714.
+
+[70] This term, "Children of the Light," was the name by which Friends,
+or Quakers, first called themselves. It was plainly a term current at
+the time for a Christian who put the emphasis on inward life and
+personal experience.
+
+[71] Preface to _Theologia_.
+
+[72] Preface to _The Vision of God_.
+
+[73] _Ibid._
+
+[74] Nicholas' Preface to _De visione Dei_.
+
+[75] _The Vision of God_, p. 11.
+
+[76] _Ibid._ p. 13.
+
+[77] _Ibid._ p. 19. Compare this passage with Pascal's saying: "Thou
+wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not already found me."
+
+[78] _Ibid._ p. 37.
+
+[79] _Ibid._ p. 130.
+
+[80] _Ibid._ p. 138.
+
+[81] _Ibid._ pp. 151-152.
+
+[82] _Ibid._ pp. 170-176.
+
+[83] There is no author's name or initial in the book, only the
+statement that it is "put forth" by a "mad man," who "desires to be in
+my wits and right minde to God, although a fool and madman to the
+world."
+
+[84] _Divinity and Philosophy Dissected_, pp. 39-40.
+
+[85] _Divinity and Philosophy Dissected_, p. 17.
+
+[86] _Ibid._ p. 62.
+
+[87] _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_, chap. xiv. p. 163.
+
+[88] _Life and Light_, p. 3.
+
+[89] _Ibid._ pp. 99 and 101 quoted freely.
+
+[90] _Ibid._ p. 19. It should be noted that this use of "First-day"
+for Sunday antedates the Quaker practice.
+
+[91] _Ibid._ pp. 26-27.
+
+[92] _Ibid._ p. 35.
+
+[93] See _ibid._ p. 36.
+
+[94] _Life and Light_, p. 11.
+
+[95] _Ibid._ p. 38.
+
+[96] _Ibid._ p. 34.
+
+
+
+
+{266}
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HIGH PLACES--ROUS, VANE, AND STERRY
+
+The spiritual struggles which culminated in the great upheaval of the
+English Commonwealth were the normal fruit of the Reformation spirit,
+when once it had penetrated the life of the English _people_ and kindled
+the fire of personal conviction in their hearts. Beginning as it did
+with the simple substitution of royal for papal authority in the
+government of the Church, the English Reformation lacked at its inception
+the inward depth, the prophetic vision, the creative power, the vigorous
+articulation of newly awakened personal conscience, which formed such a
+commanding feature of the Reformation movement on the Continent. It took
+another hundred years in England to cultivate individual conscience, to
+ripen religious experience, to produce the body of dynamic _ideas_, and
+to create the necessary prophetic vision before an intense and popular
+spirit of Reform could find its voice and marching power. The contact of
+English exiles and chance visitors with the stream of thought in Germany,
+in Switzerland, and in Holland, and the filtering in of literature from
+the Continent, together with the occasional coming of living exponents,
+sowed the seeds that slowly ripened into that strange and interesting
+variety of religious thought and practice which forms the inner life of
+the Commonwealth. The policy of the throne had always opposed this
+steadily increasing tide of thought which refused to run in the well-worn
+channels, but, as usual, the opposition and hindrances only served to
+{267} deepen personal conviction, to sharpen the edge of conscience, to
+nourish great and daring spirits, to formulate the battle-ideas and to
+win popular support. The inner life and the varied tendencies of the
+Commonwealth are too rich and complicated to be adequately treated
+here.[1] The purpose of this chapter is to show how the type of inward
+and spiritual religion, which the Reformation in its kindling power
+everywhere produced, finds expression in the writings of three men who
+came to large public prominence in the period of the Commonwealth,
+Francis Rous, Sir Harry Vane, and Peter Sterry.
+
+
+
+I
+
+Francis Rous was born in Cornwall in 1579. He graduated B.A. at Oxford
+in 1597 and at the University of Leyden in 1599. He entered the Middle
+Temple in 1601, with the prospect of a legal and public career before
+him, but soon withdrew and retired to Cornwall, where in a quiet country
+retreat he became absorbed in theological studies. His later writings
+show an intimate acquaintance with the great Church Fathers, especially
+with St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and the
+two Gregorys, and with the mystics, especially with the writings of
+Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bernard, Thomas à Kempis, and John Tauler.
+He was intensely Puritan in temper and sympathies in his earlier period
+of life, and much of his writing at this stage was for the purpose of
+promoting the increase of a deeper and more adequate reform in the
+Church. He translated the Psalms into "English Meeter," and his version
+was approved by the Westminster Assembly, authorized for use by
+Parliament, and adopted by the estates in Scotland, "whose Psalms,"
+Carlyle says, "the Northern Kirks still sing."[2]
+
+He was a member of Charles I.'s first and second Parliaments, and again
+of the Short Parliament and of {268} the Long Parliament. He was also a
+member of the Little Parliament, often called "Barebones Parliament," of
+which he was Speaker, and of the Parliaments of 1654 and of 1656, and he
+was, too, a member of Oliver's Council of State. He was one of many
+thoughtful men of the time who passed with the rapid development of
+affairs from the Presbyterian position to Independency, and he served on
+the Committee for the propagation of the Gospel which framed a
+congregational plan for Church government. He was a voluminous writer,
+but his type of Christianity can be seen sufficiently in his three little
+books: _Mystical Marriage_ (1635), _The Heavenly Academy_ (1638), and
+_The Great Oracle_ (1641).[3]
+
+He, again, like so many before him, influenced by Plato as well as by the
+New Testament and Christian writers, made the discovery that there is
+something divine in the soul of man, and that this "something divine" in
+man is always within hail of an inner world of divine splendour. "I was
+first breathed forth from heaven," he says, "and came from God in my
+creation. I am divine and heavenly in my original, in my essence, in my
+character. . . . I am a spirit, though a low one, and God is a Spirit,
+even the highest one, and God is the fountaine of this spirit [of
+mine]."[4]
+
+The possession of this divine "original," unlost even in the mist and
+mystery of a world of time and sense, enables man, he holds, to live in
+that higher world even while he sojourns in this lower world. Human
+reason, _i.e._ reasoning, is sufficient to guide in the affairs of this
+life, but it is blind to the world of the Spirit from which we came.
+"The soule has two eyes--one human reason, the other far excelling that,
+a divine and spiritual Light. . . . By it the soule doth see spiritual
+things as truly as the corporall eye doth corporal things."[5] "Human
+reason acknowledges the sovereignty of this spiritual Light as a candle
+acknowledges the greater light of the sun," and, {269} by its in-shining,
+the soul passes "beyond a speculative and discoursing holiness, even
+beyond a forme of godliness and advances to _the power of it_."[6] But
+this inward Light does not make outward helps unnecessary. "The light of
+the outward word [the Scriptures] and the Light in our soules are twinnes
+and agree together like brothers,"[7] and again he says, "It is an
+invaluable [inestimable] Loss that men do so much divide the outward
+Teacher from the Inward," though he insists that the ministry of the
+Spirit is above any ministry of the letter.[8]
+
+This eye of the soul which is a part of its original structure and is
+responsive to the Light of the spiritual world, so that "soule and Light
+become knit together into one," is also called by Rous, as by his
+predecessors, "Seed" or "Word." Sometimes this divine Seed is thought of
+as an original part of the soul, and sometimes, under the assumption that
+"man has grown wild by the fall of Adam" and is "run to weeds," it is
+conceived, as by Schwenckfeld, as a saving remedy supernaturally supplied
+to the soul--"Christ entering into our spirits lays in them an immortal
+seed."[9] In any case, whether the Seed be original, as is often implied
+and stated, or whether it be a supernatural gift of divine Grace in
+Christ, as is sometimes implied, it is, in Rous' conception, essential
+for the attainment of a religious experience or a Christian life: "A
+Christian man hath as much need of Christ's Spirit [called in other
+passages Seed or Word] to be a Christian and to live eternally, as a
+natural man hath of a spirit [principle of intelligence] to be a man and
+to live temporally, so Christ's Spirit and a man together are a
+Christian, which is a holy, eternal and happy thing."[10] He shows, as
+do so many of those who emphasize the inner experience of Christ as a
+living presence, an exalted appreciation of the historical revelation in
+Christ. Christ is, he says, both God and man, and thus being the perfect
+union of divinity and humanity {270} can be our Saviour.[11] Here in the
+full light of His Life and Love we may discover the true nature of God,
+who was "great with love before we loved Him."[12] The outer word
+answers to the inner Light as deep calls unto deep, and the two are "knit
+together" not to be sundered. The eye must be on Christ the Light, and
+the wise soul "must watch the winde and tide of the Spirit, as the seaman
+watcheth the naturall winde and tide. When the tide of the Spirit
+floweth then put thy hand to the oar, for then if thou row strongly thou
+maiest advance mightily."[13]
+
+He quaintly says that he has written about these spiritual things, about
+the world of divine splendour and the "soule's inner eye," because he
+wants to exhibit "some bunches of grapes brought from the land of promise
+to show that this land is not a meere imagination, but some have seene it
+and have brought away parcels, pledges and ernests of it. In these
+appears a world above the world, a love that passeth human love, a peace
+that passeth naturall understanding, a joy unspeakable and glorious, a
+taste of the chiefe and soveraigne good." He has, further, written
+because he wanted to "provoke others of this nation to bring forth more
+boxes of this precious ointment."[14]
+
+His little books are saturated with a devotional spirit rising into words
+like these: "Let my love rest in nothing short of thee, O God!" "Kindle
+and enflame and enlarge my love. Enlarge the arteries and conduit pipes
+by which Thou the head and fountaine of love flows in thy members, that
+being abundantly quickened and watered with the Spirit I may abundantly
+love Thee."[15] They contain bursts of intense prayer--"Put thy owne
+image and beauty more and more on my soule." He went through all the
+Parliamentary storms of that great epoch; he was Provost of Eton College;
+he was Cromwell's friend; but his main ambition seems to have been to be
+"knit to God by a personal union," to have "the {271} dayspring in his
+own heart," and to be taught in "the heavenly Academy--the High School of
+Experience."[16]
+
+
+
+II
+
+The story of Sir Harry Vane's life, adequately told, would involve the
+entire history of the great epoch of the Commonwealth. Next to Cromwell,
+he was the most influential shaper of events from the time of the meeting
+of the Long Parliament in 1640 until his "retirement" on the occasion of
+the expulsion of the members of Parliament in 1653. In his views of
+constitutional government and of human liberty he was one of the most
+original and one of the most modern men of the seventeenth century.
+Richard Baxter, who had no love for Vane, is only stating an actual fact
+when he says: "To most of our changes he was that within the House that
+Cromwell was without."[17] Clarendon, who loved him still less, said of
+him: "He was indeed a man of extraordinary parts, a pleasant wit, a great
+understanding which pierced into and discerned the purposes of men with
+wonderful sagacity."[18] What Milton thought of him he has told in one
+of the noblest sonnets that a poet ever wrote on a great statesman:
+
+ Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old,
+ Than whom a better senator ne'er held
+ The helm of Rome, when gowns not arms repelled
+ The fierce Epirot and the African bold:
+ Whether to settle peace, or to unfold
+ The drift of hollow states hard to be spelled,
+ Then to advise how war may best upheld
+ Move by her two main nerves, iron and gold,
+ In all her equipage; besides to know
+ Both spiritual power and civil, what each means,
+ What severs each, thou hast learned, which few have done:
+ The bounds of either sword to thee we owe;
+ Therefore on thy firm hand religion leans
+ In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son.[19]
+
+
+{272}
+
+Vane was quite naturally selected at the Restoration as one of the actors
+in the historical drama who could not be allowed to live any longer. The
+day after Vane's trial began, Charles II. wrote to Clarendon: "He is too
+dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the
+way."[20] His death brought out the loftiest traits of his character,
+and gave him a touch of beauty and glory of character which for posterity
+has done much to cover the flaws and defects which were not lacking in
+him. "In all things," writes Pepys, who saw everything in those days,
+"he appeared the most resolved man that ever died in that manner."[21]
+
+It is, however, not Vane the statesman, the maker of covenants with
+Scotch armies, the creator of sinews of war for the battles of Marston
+Moor and Naseby, the organizer of a conquering navy, the man who dared
+withstand his old friend Cromwell in the day of the great soldier's
+power, that concerns us in this chapter; it is Vane, the religious
+Independent, the exponent of inward religion; the man whom Milton calls
+"religion's eldest son." Even in his early youth he passed through a
+decisive experience which altered his entire after-life. "About the
+fourteenth or fifteenth year of my age," he said in his dying speech,
+"God was pleased to lay the foundation or ground-work of repentance in
+me, for the bringing me home to Himself, by His wonderful rich and free
+grace, revealing His Son in me, that by the knowledge of the only true
+God and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent, I might, even whilst here in
+the body, be made a partaker of eternal life, in the first fruits of
+it. . . . Since that foundation of repentance was laid in me, through
+grace I have been kept steadfast, desiring to walk in all good
+conscience toward God and toward men, according to the best light and
+understanding God gave me." From this early period on through his life,
+he always emphasized the importance of first-hand experience, of inward
+revelation, and of Christ's reign in the kingdom of the {273} human soul.
+He was still a very young man, when, under the impelling guidance of his
+conscience, he felt himself called to intermit, as Schwenckfeld and
+others had done, the practice of the sacraments of the Church. His
+attitude toward the sacraments at this time, and, apparently ever
+afterwards, was that of the "Seekers." He had reached the insight that
+religion is a spiritual relationship with a spiritual God, and on the
+basis of this position he questioned the divine "commission" of those who
+administered the external ceremonies of the Church. It is, however,
+perfectly clear that these views were not "original" with him, but that
+he had come under the influence of the teachings of the men whom I am
+calling "spiritual Reformers."
+
+How inward and mystical his type of Christianity really was, may be
+gathered from a short passage of an _Epistle_ which he wrote in 1661:
+"The Kingdom of God is within you and is the dominion of God in the
+conscience and spirit of the mind. . . . This Kingdom of Christ is
+capable of subsisting and being managed inwardly in the minds of His
+people, in a hidden state concealed from the world. By the power
+thereof, the inward senses, or eyes of the mind are opened and awakened
+to the drawing of them up to a heavenly converse, catching and carrying
+up the soul to the throne of God and to the knowledge of the life that is
+hid with Christ in God. Those that are in this Kingdom, and in whom the
+power of it is, _are fitted to fly with the Church into the wilderness,
+and to continue in such a solitary, dispersed, desolate condition till
+God call them out of it. They have wells and springs opened to them in
+this wilderness, whence they draw the waters of salvation, without being
+in bondage to the life of sense_."[22]
+
+He was only twenty-two years of age when, "for conscience' sake" and "in
+the sweete peace of God," he left England and threw in his lot with the
+young colony in Massachusetts Bay. At twenty-three he was {274} Governor
+of the Colony and found himself plunged into a maelstrom of politics,
+Indian wars, and ecclesiastical quarrels which would have tried even a
+veteran like John Winthrop. It was here in Massachusetts that the lines
+of his religious thought first come clearly into view, if any of Vane's
+religious ideas can ever properly be called "clear." The controversy in
+the Massachusetts Colony (1636-1638) was initiated and led by Anne
+Hutchinson, and was, in the phraseology of that period, an issue between
+"a Covenant of Works" and "a Covenant of Grace," which was a
+seventeenth-century way of stating the contrast between a religion
+historically revealed and completely expressed in an infallible Book on
+the one hand, and, on the other, a religion primarily based on the
+eternal nature of God and man, and on the fact of immediate revelation
+and communication between the God of Grace and the needy soul.[23]
+Governor Vane aligned himself with the Hutchinson party and was in
+sympathy with this second type of religion, the religion of inward
+experience, the immediate conscious realization of God, which, in the
+terminology of the times, was called "the Covenant of Grace."[24]
+Absorbed as he was for the next fifteen years after his return from
+America in momentous public affairs, he had no opportunity to give
+expression to the religious ideas which were forming in his mind. During
+his "retirement" after his break with Cromwell, he wrote two books which
+give us the best light we can hope to get on his religious views--_The
+Retired Man's Meditations_ (1655), and _A Pilgrimage into the Land of
+Promise_ (1664), written in prison in 1662.
+
+Baxter complained that his Doctrines were "so clowdily formed and
+expressed that few could understand them,"[25] and the modern reader,
+however much time and patience he bestows upon Vane's books, is forced to
+agree with Baxter. Vane acknowledges himself that his {275} thought is
+"knotty and abstruce." In religious matters his mind was always
+labouring, without success, to find a clear guiding clue through a maze
+and confusion of ideas, which fascinated him, and he allowed his mind to
+get lost in what Sir Thomas Browne calls "wingy mysteries." He had no
+sound principle of Scripture interpretation, but allowed his untrained
+and unformed imagination to run wild. Texts in profusion from Genesis to
+Revelation lie in undigested masses in his books. He had evidently read
+Jacob Boehme, but, if so, he had only become more "dowdy" by the reading,
+for he has not seized and appreciated Boehme's constructive thoughts,
+and, at least in his later period and in his last book, he is floundering
+under the heavy weight of millenarian ideas, which do not harmonize well
+with his occasional spiritual insights of an ever-growing revelation to
+man through the eternal Word who in all ages voices Himself within the
+soul. He was an extraordinary complex of vague mysticism and astute
+statesmanship.
+
+In one matter he was throughout his life both consistent and clear,
+namely, in the advocacy of freedom of conscience in religion. He put
+himself squarely on a platform of toleration in his early controversy
+with Winthrop.[26] His friend Roger Williams in later life heard him
+make "a heavenly speech" in Parliament in which he said: "Why should the
+labours of any be suppressed, if sober, though never so different? We
+now profess to seek God, we desire to see light!"[27] Throughout his
+parliamentary career he stood side by side with Cromwell in the difficult
+effort, which only partly succeeded, to secure scope for all honest
+religious opinion. Finally, in _The Retired Man's Meditations_, he
+wrote: "We are bound to understand by this terme [the Rule of Magistracy]
+the proper sphere, bounds and limits of that office _which is not to
+intrude itself into the office and proper concerns of Christ's inward
+government and rule in the {276} conscience_." After defining the
+magistrate's proper functions in the affairs of the external life, he
+then adds: "The more illuminated the Magistrate's conscience and judgment
+is, as to natural justice and right, by the knowledge of God and
+communications of Light from Christ, the better qualified he is to
+execute his office."[28]
+
+The central idea of his religious thought--though it never completely
+penetrated the fringes of his mind--was the reality of the living Word of
+God, the self-revealing character of God, who is an immediate, inward
+Teacher, who is His own evidence and demonstration, and who has, Vane
+testifies, "experimentally obtained a large entrance and reception in my
+heart as a seed there sown."[29] This living Word is not to be confused
+with the Scriptures, which are an outward testimony to the inner Word--an
+external way to the "unveiled and naked beauty of the Word itself," who
+is Spirit and Life.[30] In the long process of self-revelation through
+the living Word a temporal universe has been created by emanations in
+time, a universe double in its nature, first a deeper, invisible universe
+of light, of angels and exalted spirits, then a visible and material and
+"animalish" world, a shadow of the invisible world.[31] At the top of
+the order, man was created, uniting both the visible and the invisible
+worlds in one being. Man thus in himself is in miniature a double world,
+a world of light and spirit and a world of shadow. Two seeds, as Boehme
+had already taught, are always working in man, and his native free-will
+determines the course of his destiny. In his first test, man fell,
+though "the tree of life," which was a visible type of Christ, was before
+his eyes in Paradise, but this event was only the beginning of the long
+human drama, and the real history of the race is the story of the stages
+and dispensations of the living Word of God, educating, regenerating, and
+spiritualizing man, and bringing him to the height of his spiritual
+possibilities.
+
+{277}
+
+In the first stage of this divine pedagogy, man has the Word of God
+within himself "as a lampe or light in his mind, manifesting itself to
+inward senses, assisted by the ministry of angels." This is the period
+of "conditional covenant," under which man's spiritual life depends on
+"obedience to the inward operations of this Word," and those that obey
+are made "Children of the Light," and attain a forward-looking
+apprehension of the coming Son.[32]
+
+The second degree of glory--"a more excellent and near approach to the
+sight of the Son Himself"--is the training stage under the written word,
+which makes wise unto salvation. This is a dispensation of discipline,
+reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness, and it culminates in
+the manifestation of Grace in Jesus Christ, who is the Root of a new
+race. There are two ways of using the ministry of Grace in Jesus
+Christ--on the lower level as mere "restoration-work" and on the higher
+level as "re-creation into new life." Those who apprehend Christ on the
+lower level, as simply a new law-giver, do not get beyond the spirit of
+bondage and do not succeed in attaining an immutable and incorruptible
+nature. Those, however, who are born from within by the immortal and
+incorruptible Seed of God are "changed from their wavering unstable
+power" into an inward likeness to God, into a love that binds man's
+spirit into union with God's Spirit, into "steadfast and unmoveable
+delight in goodness" and "fixed and unshaken averseness to sin and
+evil."[33]
+
+The third and final stage of glory, the full dispensation of the
+Spirit--when "the whole creation will be restored to its primitive purity
+and to the glorious liberty of sons of God"--will be the thousand years'
+reign of Christ to which, Vane believed, both the outward and inward Word
+testify.[34]
+
+It is not easy to see how a man of Vane's mental and moral calibre, who
+had himself, as he tells us in his scaffold speech, been "brought home to
+himself by {278} God's wonderful, rich and free Grace, revealing His Son
+in me that I might be a partaker of eternal life," and who had all his
+life held that there is an eternal Word and Seed of God working both
+without and within to bring men to their complete spiritual stature,
+should be unwilling to trust the operation of this divine Word to finish
+what He had begun, and should resort to a cataclysmic event of a new
+order for the final stage. We of this later and more scientific age
+must, however, speak with some caution of the idealistic dreams and
+visions and glowing expectations of men, who in their deepest souls
+believed that God was a living, acting God who, in ways past finding out,
+intervened in the affairs of men and fulfilled His purposes of good.
+"God is almighty," Vane said once in a Parliamentary speech. "Will you
+not trust Him with the consequences? He that has unsettled a monarchy of
+so many descents, in peaceable times, and brought you to the top of your
+liberties, though He drive you for a while into the wilderness, He will
+bring you back. He is a wiser workman than to reject His work."
+
+George Fox, in 1657, was "moved of ye Lord to speake to him of ye true
+Light," having heard that "Henery Vane has much enquired after mee." Fox
+told him, in his usual fashion, "howe yt Christ had promised to his
+disciples to sende ym ye holy ghoast, ye spiritt of truth which shoulde
+leade ym into all truth which wee [Friends] witnessed and howe yt ye
+grace of God which brought salvation had appeared unto all men and was ye
+saintes teacher in ye Apostles days & soe it was nowe." Vane's comment
+on the Quaker's message was: "None of all this doth reach to my
+experiens," and Fox, in his plain straightforward manner, said: "Thou
+hast knowne somethinge formerly; but now there is a mountaine of earth &
+imaginations uppe in thee & from that rises a smoake which has darkened
+thy braine: & thou art not ye man as thou wert formerly. . . . I was
+moved of ye Lord to sett ye Seede Christ Jesus over his heade!"[35]
+
+{279}
+
+Clarendon was more charitable toward Vane than was Fox, who never deals
+gently with persons who approach his point of view and yet miss it. The
+former, declaring that Vane's writings lack "his usual clearness and
+ratiocination," and that "in a crowd of very easy words the sense was too
+hard to find out," yet concludes to give the furnace-tried statesman the
+benefit of the doubt: "I was of opinion that the subject was of so
+delicate a nature that it required another kind of preparation of mind,
+and perhaps another kind of diet, than men are ordinarily supplied
+with!"[36]
+
+There can, at any rate, be no doubt of Vane's honesty or of his loyalty
+to the Light within him. Standing face to face with death, he told his
+strange audience that he had put everything that he prized in the world
+to hazard for the sake of obeying the best Light which God had granted
+him, and he added these impressive words: "I do earnestly persuade all
+people rather to suffer the highest contradiction from men, than disobey
+God by contradicting the Light of God in their own conscience."
+
+
+
+III
+
+Peter Sterry was born in Surrey, early in the seventeenth century, and
+entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1629, graduating B.A. in 1633 and
+M.A. in 1637. Emmanuel College had been founded during Elizabeth's reign
+(1584) by one of her statesmen, Sir Walter Mildmay, for the especial
+encouragement of Calvinistic theology, and it was the most important
+intellectual nursery of the great Puritan movement in England. During
+Sterry's University period there was a remarkable group of tutors and
+fellows gathered in Emmanuel College. Foremost among them was Tuckney,
+who was tutor to Benjamin Whichcote the founder of the school of
+Cambridge Platonists, or "Latitude-Men," and Whichcote himself was at
+Emmanuel College {280} throughout Sterry's period, graduating M.A. the
+same year that Sterry graduated B.A.
+
+Sterry was a thorough-going Platonist in his type of thought and had much
+in common with Henry More, whose writings were "divinely pleasant" to him
+and whom he calls "a prophet" of the spiritual unity of the universe, and
+with Ralph Cudworth, the spiritual philosopher, though he finds "somewhat
+to regret" in the work of both these contemporary Cambridge
+Platonists.[37] Sterry is not usually reckoned among the Cambridge
+Platonists, but there is no reason why he should not be included in that
+group. He was trained in the University which was the natural home of
+the movement, he read the authors most approved by the members of this
+school, and his own message is penetrated with the spirit and ideals of
+these seventeenth-century Platonists. His writings abound with
+references to Plato and Plotinus, with occasional references to Proclus
+and Dionysius the Areopagite; and the world-conceptions of this composite
+school of philosophers, as they were revived by the Renaissance, are
+fundamental to his thought. He was thoroughly acquainted with the
+writings of Ficino, and quotes him among his approved masters. He had
+also profoundly studied the great mystics and was admirably equipped
+intellectually to be the interpreter of a far different type of
+Christianity from that of the current theologies.
+
+He became intimate in his public career with Sir Harry Vane, and there
+are signs of mutual influence in their writings, which gave occasion for
+Richard Baxter's pun on their names: "Vanity and sterility were never
+more happily conjoined."[38] Upon the execution of Charles I., Sterry
+was voted a preacher to the Council of State with a salary of one hundred
+pounds a year, which was soon after doubled and lodgings at Whitehall
+added. He generally preached before Cromwell on Sundays, and on every
+other Thursday at Whitehall, frequently before {281} the Lords and
+Commons. A number of his sermons were printed "by Order of the House,"
+and enjoyed a wide popularity, though their great length would make them
+impossible sermons to-day. Cromwell evidently appreciated his preaching
+very highly and felt no objection to the mystical strain that runs
+through all his sermons. He had many points of contact with Milton, and
+may have been for a period his assistant as Latin Secretary.[39] He was
+devotedly fond of music, art, and poetry, and he held similar views to
+Milton regarding the Presbyterian system. He naturally fell out of
+public notice after the Restoration, and quietly occupied himself with
+literary work, until his death in 1672. The main material for a study of
+his "message" will be found in his three posthumous Books: _A Discourse
+of the Freedom of the Will_ (1675); _Rise, Race and Royalty of the
+Kingdom of God in the Soul of Man_ (1683), and _Appearance of God to Man
+in the Gospel_ (1710).[40] His prose style is lofty and often marked
+with singular beauty, though he is almost always too prolix for our
+generation, and too prone to divide his discourse into heads and
+sub-heads, and sub-divisions of sub-heads. Here is a specimen passage of
+his dealing with a topic which Plato and the great poets have often
+handled: "Imagine this Life as an Island, surrounded by a Sea of
+Darkness, beyond which lies the main Land of Eternity. Blessed is he who
+can raise himself to such a Pitch as to look off this Island, beyond that
+Darkness to the utmost bound of things. He thus sees his way before and
+behind him. What shall trouble him on his Twig of Life, on which he is
+like a bird but now alighted, from a far Region, from whence again he
+shall immediately take his flight. Thou cam'st through a Darkness hither
+but yesterday when thou wert born. Why then shouldst thou not readily
+and cheerfully return through the same Darkness back again to those
+everlasting Hills?"[41] I will give one more {282} specimen passage
+touching the divine origin and return of the soul: "At our Birth, which
+is the morning of life, our Soul and Body are joined to this fleshly
+Image as Horses are put into a Waggon, to which they are fastened by
+their Harnes and Traces.[42] The Body is as the forehorse, but the Soul
+is the filly which draws most and bears the chief weight. All the day
+long of this life we draw this Waggon heavy laden with all sorts of
+temptations and troubles thorow deep ways of mire and sand. This only is
+our comfort that the Divine Will, which is Love itself in its perfection,
+as a Hand put forth from Heaven thorow a Cloud, at our Birth put us into
+this Waggon and governs us all the day. In the evening of our life, at
+the end of the day, Death is the same Divine Will as a naked Hand of pure
+Love, shining forth from an open Heaven of clear light and glory, taking
+our Soul and Body out of the Waggon and Traces of this fleshly Image and
+leading them immediately into their Inn."[43]
+
+Everything in the universe, he believes, is double. The things that are
+seen are copies--often faint and shadowy--of That which is. Every
+particular thing "below" corresponds to an eternal reality "above." Even
+those things which appear thin and shallow possess an infinite depth, or
+we may just as well say an infinite height. "Didst thou ever descry," he
+asks, "a glorious eternity in a winged moment of Time? Didst thou ever
+see a bright Infinite in the narrow point of an Object? Then thou
+knowest what Spirit means--that spire-top whither all things ascend
+harmoniously, where they meet and sit connected in an unfathomed Depth of
+Life."[44] And the immense congeries of things and events, even "the
+jarring and tumultuous contrarieties," "through the whole world, through
+the whole compass of time, through both the bright and the black Regions
+of Life and Death," consent and melodize in one celestial music {283} and
+perfect harmony of Divine purpose.[45] "The stops and shakes make music
+as well as the stroaks and sounds," even Death and Hell "are bound by a
+gold chain with shining links of Love" to the throne of God.[46]
+
+He outdoes even the "pillar" Quakers, his contemporaries in later life,
+in his proclamation of a Divine Root and Seed in the soul of man. In
+words almost precisely like those which Barclay used later in his
+_Apology_, he says: "There is a spiritual man that lies hid under the
+natural man as seed under the ground,"[47] or, again, "go into thyself
+beyond thy natural man, and thou shalt meet the Spirit of God."[48]
+There is "something eternal," "a seminal infiniteness," in the soul, its
+native Root and Bottom, consubstantial with it and inseparable from it.
+"It lasts on through all forms, wearing them out, casting them off for
+new forms, through which it manifests itself, until it finally brings us
+back into Itself and becomes our only clothing."[49] But though
+"native," it is not a part or function of the natural, psychical man, it
+is not of the "finite creature." It is from above, a transcendent
+Reality; it belongs to the eternal world and yet it is a Root of God
+within, a point in the soul's abyss (or apex) unsevered from God, so that
+one who knew the soul to its depths would know God.[50] Beneath all the
+wreck and ruin and havoc of sin it is still there, with its "glimpses of
+immortal Beauty." The prodigal who would return "home" must first return
+to himself, to that divine Seed, "hid deep beneath the soil and dung,
+beneath the darkness, deformity and deadness of its Winter-Season and
+rise up in its proper Spring into pleasant flowers and fruits, as a
+Garden of God."[51] There is thus "a golden thread" which is always
+there to guide the soul back home, through all the mazes of the world,
+or, to use another of his figures, "Thou hast but to follow the stream of
+Love, the Fountain of the Soul, if thou {284} wouldst be led to that Sea
+which is the confluence of all the waters of Life, of all Truth, of all
+Goodness, of all Joy, of all Beauty and Blessedness."[52]
+
+The _Fullness_ of the juncture of God and Man is seen only in Christ. In
+Him, "God and Man are one, one Love, one Life, one Likeness."[53] He is
+the Pattern, the unspoiled Image, the Eternal Word, and He is, too, the
+Head of our race. In Him the Divine Spirit and the human spirit "are
+twined into one." "If you want to see God, then see Christ."[54] If you
+want to see what the Seed in us can blossom into when it is unhampered by
+sin, again, see Christ.[55] He is a Life-giving Spirit who can penetrate
+other spirits, who broods over the soul as the creative Spirit brooded
+over the waters, and who, when received, makes us radiant with _Love,
+which is the only truth of religion_.
+
+Sin is the mark and brand of our failure--it is our aberration from the
+normal type as it is fully revealed in Christ. "Nothing is so unnatural
+as sin,"[56] nothing is so irrational, nothing so abnormal--it is always
+a break from the unity of the divine Life, a movement towards isolation
+and self-solitariness, a pursuit of narrowing desires, a missing of the
+potential beauty and harmony of the Soul.[57] But in every case, whether
+it be Adam's or that of the last man who sinned, it is always an act of
+free-will--"even in its most haggish shapes sin is the act of free-will."
+Some strange contrary principle in us, something from a root alien to the
+divine Root, makes civil war within us,[58] and though the Word of God's
+eternal Love is ringing in our ears and though the gleams of divine
+Beauty are shining in our eyes, we still walk away into "the barren
+dessert of the world and forsake our proper habitation in the paradise of
+God."[59] There is no way back from the "barren dessert," without a
+complete reversal of direction, a conversion: "He that will pass {285}
+from the dismal depths of sin to the heights of strength and holiness
+must make his first motion a conversion, a change from a descent to an
+ascent, from going outward toward the circle to go inward towards the
+centre"; there must be an _awakening_ so that the soul comes to see all
+things in the light of their first Principle; a Birth through the Spirit
+and a newness of life through the bubbling of the eternal Spring.[60]
+
+The mighty event of re-birth is described by Sterry very much after the
+manner of Schwenckfeld. The new Seed, Christ Jesus, the divine Life
+itself, comes into operation within the man, and the new-made man, raised
+with Christ, is joined in Spirit with Him and lives henceforth not after
+Adam but after Christ the Head of the spiritual Race.[61] The shift of
+direction, the complete reversal, however, does not mean "parting with
+delights," or "putting on a sad and sour conversation"--on the contrary,
+it means enlargement of soul and "a gainful addition of joy," the
+discovery within of another world and a new kingdom.[62]
+
+Like all this group of thinkers to whom he is kindred, Sterry makes a
+sharp contrast between the Spirit and the letter, between what happens
+within the soul and what is external to it. The early stage of religion
+is characterized by externals, and only after long processes of tutorship
+and discipline does the soul learn how to live by the Seed of life and
+Light of truth within. The early stage is legalistic, during which the
+person is "hedged about" with promises and threats, "walled in" with laws
+and ordinances, "living in a perpetual alarm of fears," "shut up to
+rules, retirements and forms"--but it is far better to serve God from
+fear and by outward rules than not to serve Him at all. The true way of
+progress is to move up from fear and law to love and freedom, and from
+outward rules to the discovery of a central Light of God, a Heavenly
+Image, in the deeps of {286} one's own spirit--"real knowledge comes when
+the Day Star rises in the heart."[63] We pass from "notions" and "words"
+to an inward power and a bubbling joy. He calls the period of law and
+letter a "baby-stage," "when we see truth as blear-eyed beholders."
+Legal religion compared with the religion of the Spirit is "like a spark
+struck from flint at midnight" compared with the sun; it is like "drawing
+the waters of Grace, a bucketful at a time," when we might have "the
+Spirit gushing as a living and perpetual Fountain."[64] But God is so
+good that He speaks to us in a variety of ways, and He lets us "spell His
+name" with the alphabet, until we learn to know His own Voice. Nature,
+in the elements of visible creation, tells us of Him; Reason compels us
+to recognize One who is First and Best, the All in all; the written word
+cries in our ears that God is Love; but above these voices there is a
+Principle within our own souls by which "God propagates His Life" in us,
+and he who, in this love-way, has become a son knows God as
+_Abba-Father_.[65] We pray now with power, when this new Life of the
+Spirit has come into us, and we pour our spirits out in
+self-forgetfulness, "as a River pours itself into the sea, where it
+loseth its own name and is known only as the waters of the Sea."[66]
+
+He is always gentle in his account of other religions and other stages of
+faith, and he sees good in all types, if only they help the soul to
+hunger for the Eternal and do not cramp it. "O that I had a hundred
+mouths," he writes, "an hundred tongues, a Voice like the Voice of God
+that rends Rocks, to cry to all sorts of Persons and Spirits in this Land
+and in all the Christian World through the whole creation: 'Let all that
+differ in Principles, Professions, Opinions and Forms, see the good there
+is in each other'!"[67]
+
+The world, busy with action and choosing for its historical study the men
+who did things, has allowed {287} Peter Sterry to drop into oblivion and
+his books to gather dust and cobwebs, but there was, I think, a Seed of
+God in him, and he had a message for his age. He sincerely endeavoured
+to hand on the torch which in his youth at Cambridge had been kindled in
+him by some other flame. "When one candle is lighted," he beautifully
+says, "we light many by it, and when God hath kindled the Life of His
+glory in one man's Heart he often enkindles many by the flame of
+that."[68]
+
+
+
+[1] I have studied the "Familists," the "Anabaptists," the "Seekers," and
+"Ranters," and some of the interesting religious characters, such as John
+Saltmarsh, William Dell, and Gerard Winstanley, in my _Studies in
+Mystical Religion_ (London, 1908).
+
+[2] Oliver Cromwell's _Letters and Speeches_ (New York, 1900), i. p. 103.
+
+[3] These three books were issued together in Latin under the title,
+_Interiora Regni Dei_, in 1655 and in 1674, and in an English Collection
+of Rous' Works under the title, _Treatises and Meditations_ (1657).
+
+[4] _Mystical Marriage_, pp. 1-2.
+
+[5] _Treatises and Meditations_, pp. 230-231.
+
+[6] _Treatises and Meditations_, pp. 240 and 258.
+
+[7] _Ibid._ p. 235.
+
+[8] _The Heavenly Academy_, pp. 110-111.
+
+[9] _Mystical Marriage_, p. 10.
+
+[10] _Treatises and Meditations_, p. 496.
+
+[11] _Mystical Marriage_, p. 10.
+
+[12] _Ibid._ p. 16.
+
+[13] _Ibid._ p. 193.
+
+[14] Preface to _Mystical Marriage_.
+
+[15] _Mystical Marriage_, p. 322.
+
+[16] _The Heavenly Academy_, Preface, and _ibid._ p. 57.
+
+[17] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_, i. p. 75.
+
+[18] Clarendon, _History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars_ (Oxford, 1827),
+p. 1581.
+
+[19] Milton's sonnet _To Sir Henry Vane the Younger_.
+
+[20] Burnet, _History of his Own Times_ (Airy ed.), i. p. 286.
+
+[21] Pepys, _Diary_ (ed. by H. B. Wheatley, London, 1893), ii. p. 242.
+
+[22] An Epistle to the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth. The lines which
+I have put in italics in the text clearly show the "seeker"-attitude.
+
+[23] See my _Quakers in the American Colonies_ (1911), pp. 1-25.
+
+[24] In his _Retired Man's Meditations_ he speaks of "Christ's rule in
+the legal conscience" and "Christ's rule in the evangelical conscience,"
+by which he means to contrast a religion founded on external performances
+or historical events, and a religion founded on _events transacted in the
+soul of the man himself_.
+
+[25] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_, i. p. 75.
+
+[26] See Vane's _A Brief Answer to a certain Declaration made of the
+Intent and Equity of the Order of Court_, etc., in Hutchinson's
+Collection of Original Papers.
+
+[27] Preface to Williams' _Bloudy Tenet_.
+
+[28] _The Retired Man's Meditations_, p. 388. Italics mine.
+
+[29] _Ibid._ Preface
+
+[30] _Ibid._ chap. ii.
+
+[31] _Ibid._ ii. chaps. iii. and iv. See also _A Pilgrimage into the
+Land of Promise_, pp. 1-3.
+
+[32] _A Pilgrimage into the Land of Promise_, pp. 51-52.
+
+[33] _Ibid._ pp. 55-56.
+
+[34] _Retired Man's Meditations_, chap. xxvi.
+
+[35] _Journal of George Fox_ (Cambridge ed.), i. pp. 313-314.
+
+[36] _Animadversions on Cressy's Answer to Stillingfleet_ (1673), p. 59.
+
+[37] See _A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will_ (1675), pp. 31-32.
+
+[38] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_, i. p. 75.
+
+[39] A Mr. Sterry was appointed Sept. 8, 1657, to assist Milton as Latin
+Secretary (_Nat. Dict. of Biog. Art._ "Sterry").
+
+[40] Besides the above named I have also used his Sermons on _The Clouds
+in which Christ Comes_ (1648) and _The Spirits' Conviction of Sinne_
+(1645).
+
+[41] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 8.
+
+[42] There is, he thinks, an inner "body" which is as immortal as the
+soul and which together with the soul is united to the body of
+flesh--"the fleshly Image."
+
+[43] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 435.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ p. 24. See also _ibid._ p. 5, and _Discourse_, p. 55.
+
+[45] _Discourse_, pp. 30-35. Also p. 161.
+
+[46] _Ibid_. Preface, p. c 8, and _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 164.
+
+[47] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 126.
+
+[48] _Ibid._ p. 96.
+
+[49] _Ibid._ pp. 4, 5, 6, 18-19.
+
+[50] _Discourse_, pp. 67 and 77.
+
+[51] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, Preface, p. b 2. See also pp. 362 and
+512-513.
+
+[52] _Discourse_, Preface, pp. a and c 6, and _Rise, Race and Royalty_,
+p. 101.
+
+[53] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 78.
+
+[54] _Ibid._ p. 68.
+
+[55] _Ibid._ pp. 95 and 184. Also _Appearance of God_, pp. 239 and 251.
+
+[56] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 73.
+
+[57] _Ibid._ pp. 16-18 and 141, and _Discourse_, pp. 141-142.
+
+[58] _Appearance of God_, p. 91.
+
+[59] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 359.
+
+[60] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, pp. 2, 23, and 466.
+
+[61] See especially _Appearance of God_, pp. 74-75 and 480.
+
+[62] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, pp. 107-109.
+
+[63] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, pp. 46-47 and 467.
+
+[64] _Ibid._ pp. 56-60.
+
+[65] _Ibid._ pp. 63-67.
+
+[66] _Appearance of God_, pp. 130-131.
+
+[67] _Discourse_, Preface, p. a 6.
+
+[68] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 39.
+
+
+
+
+{288}
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, THE FIRST OF THE "LATITUDE-MEN"[1]
+
+The type of Christianity which I have been calling "spiritual religion,"
+that is, religion grounded in the nature of Reason, finds, at least in
+England, its noblest expression in the group of men, sometimes called
+"Cambridge Platonists," and sometimes "Latitude-Men," or simply
+"Latitudinarians." These labels were all given them by their critics and
+opponents, and were used to give the impression that the members of this
+group or school were introducing and advancing a type of Christianity too
+broad and humanistic to be safe, and one grounded on Greek philosophy
+rather than on Scripture and historical Revelation.[2]
+
+They were, however, undertaking to do in their generation precisely what
+the long line of spiritual interpreters had for more than a century been
+endeavouring, through pain and suffering, misunderstanding and fierce
+persecution, to work out for humanity--a religion of life and reality, a
+religion rooted in the eternal nature of the Spirit of God and the spirit
+of man, a religion as authoritative and unescapable "as mathematical
+demonstration."[3]
+
+It is not possible to establish direct connection between the leaders of
+this school and the writings of the successive {289} spiritual Reformers
+on the Continent whom we have been studying in this volume, though the
+parallelism of ideas and of spirit is very striking. Both groups were
+powerfully influenced by the humanistic movement, both groups drew upon
+that profound searching of the soul which they found in the works of
+Plato and Plotinus, and both groups read the same mystical writers.
+These things would partly account for the similarities, but there was
+almost certainly a closer and more direct connection, though we cannot
+trace it in the case of Whichcote as we can in that of John Everard of
+Clare College. There has been a tendency to explain Whichcote's views
+through the influence of Arminius and Arminians; but he himself denied
+that he had been influenced by Arminius,[4] while his disciple, Nathaniel
+Culverwel, speaks disapprovingly of Arminianism.[5] There are no
+distinct allusions in Whichcote to Jacob Boehme, and the former's
+conception of the Universe is vastly different from the latter's, but
+their vital and ethical view of the way of salvation is almost exactly
+the same, and the constant insistence of Whichcote and his disciples that
+Heaven and Hell are primarily conditions of life in the person himself
+has, as we know, a perfect parallel in Boehme.
+
+The Cambridge scholars were much better equipped for their task than any
+of the men whom we have so far studied, their gravest difficulty being an
+overweighting of learning which they sometimes failed to fuse with their
+spiritual vision and to transmute into power. But with all their
+propension to learning and their love of philosophy, they were primarily
+and fundamentally _religious_--they were disciples of Christ rather than
+disciples of Plato and Plotinus. Bishop Burnet's testimony to the
+positive spiritual contribution of this movement, now under
+consideration, and to the genuineness of the religious life of these men
+is well worth quoting. After describing the arid condition of his time,
+the prevailing tendency of ministers to seek pomp and luxury, and the
+apparent thinness of the preaching of the day, he adds: "Some {290} few
+exceptions are to be made; but so few, that if _a new set of men had not
+appeared of another stamp_, the Church had quite lost her esteem over the
+nation." He then designates this group of Cambridge scholars. Speaking
+particularly of Whichcote, he says: "Being disgusted with the dry
+systematical way of those times, he studied to raise those who conversed
+with him to a nobler set of thoughts, and to consider religion as _a seed
+of a deiform nature_ (to use one of his own phrases). In order to this,
+he set young students much on reading the ancient philosophers, chiefly
+Plato, Tully and Plotin, and on considering the Christian religion as a
+doctrine sent from God, both to elevate and sweeten human nature, in
+which he was a great example, as well as a wise and kind instructor.
+Cudworth carried this on with a great strength of genius and a vast
+compass of learning."[6]
+
+These "Latitude-Men" were Puritan in temper and in intensity of
+conviction; they were all trained in the great nursery of Puritan faith,
+Emmanuel College, and they were on intimate terms with many of the men
+who were the creators of the outer and inner life of the Commonwealth,
+but in their intellectual sympathies they went neither with the sectaries
+of the time--"the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles," as S. P.
+puts it--nor with the prevailing Puritan theology. They read Calvin and
+Beza with diligence, at least Whichcote did, but their thought did not
+move along the track which the great Genevan had constructed. They
+discovered another way of approach which made the old way and the old
+battles seem to them futile. Instead of beginning with the eternal
+mysteries of the inscrutable divine Will, they began with the fundamental
+nature of man, always deep and difficult to fathom, but for ever the
+ground and basis of all that can be known in the field of religion.
+Their interest was thus psychological rather than theological. It is
+their constant assertion that nothing is more intrinsically rational than
+religion, and they focus all their energies to make this point clear and
+evident.
+
+{291}
+
+They came to their intellectual development in the period when Hobbes was
+formulating one of the most powerful and subtle types of materialism that
+has ever been presented. They were, too, contemporaries of Descartes,
+and they followed with intense interest the attempt of the great
+Frenchman to put philosophy in possession of a method as adequate for its
+problems as the method of geometry was for the mathematical sciences.
+None of the "Platonists" was possessed of the same rare quality of genius
+as either of these two great philosophers, but they saw with clear
+insight the full bearing of both systems. They heartily disapproved of
+Hobbes' materialism and shuddered at its nakedness. They were too much
+committed to the ideals of Humanism to be positive opponents of
+Descartes' rational formulation of all things outer and inner, but they
+never felt at home with the vast clock-like mechanism to which his system
+reduced the universe, and they set themselves, in contrast, to produce a
+religious philosophy which would guarantee freedom, would give wider
+scope for the inner life, would show the kinship of God and man and put
+morality and religion--to their mind for ever one and inseparable--on a
+foundation as immovable as the pillars of the universe.
+
+The first of this group, the pathbreaker of the movement, was Benjamin
+Whichcote, though it must not be forgotten that he had noble forerunners
+in John Hales, William Chillingworth, and Jeremy Taylor. The
+biographical details which have survived him are very limited. A great
+teacher's life is so largely interior and so devoid of outward events
+that there is usually not much to record.[7] He was descended from "an
+ancient and honourable family," and was born at Whichcote-Hall, in the
+parish of Stoke, the 11th of March, 1609. He was admitted in 1626 to
+Emmanuel College--"which was looked on from its first foundation as a
+Seminary of Puritans"--and was there under the tutorship of two great
+Puritan teachers. Dr. Anthony Tuckney and Thomas Hill, {292} both of
+whom were for a time associated with John Cotton, afterwards the famous
+preacher of colonial Boston. He was ordained both deacon and priest in
+1636, was made Provost of King's College, Cambridge, in 1644, "went-out"
+Doctor of Divinity in 1649, and for twenty years gave the afternoon
+Lecture on Sundays at Trinity Church, Cambridge. At the Restoration he
+was deprived of the Provostship by order of the King, which brought his
+university career to an end. He was made curate of St. Anne's,
+Blackfriars, in 1662, and later received from the Crown the vicarage of
+St. Laurence Jewry, where he preached twice each week until his death in
+1683.
+
+He once said in one of his sermons: "Had we a man among us, that we could
+produce, that did live an exact Gospel life; had we a man that was really
+gospelized; were the Gospel a life, a soul, and a spirit to him . . . he
+would be the most lovely and useful person under heaven. Christianity
+would be recommended to the world by his spirit and conversation."[8]
+Dr. Whichcote himself was, as far as one can judge from the impression
+which he made on his contemporaries, such a "gospelized" man. He
+"recommended religion," as Dr. Salter says, by his life and writings, and
+showed it "in its fairest and truest light as the highest perfection of
+human nature."[9] He seemed to be "emancipated" when he came back to
+Cambridge as Provost of King's College, and he devoted himself to
+"spreading and propagating a more generous sett of opinions" than those
+which were generally proclaimed in the sermons of the time, and "the
+young Masters of Arts soon cordially embraced" his message.[10]
+
+This "new sett of opinions," proclaimed in Trinity Church with vision and
+power, soon disturbed those who were of the older and sterner schools of
+thought. "My heart hath bin much exercised about you," his old friend
+and tutor, Dr. Tuckney, wrote to him in 1651, "especially since your
+being Vice-Chancellour, I have seldom heard you preach, but that
+something hath bin delivered {293} by you, and that so authoritatively
+and with big words, sometimes of 'divinest reason' and sometimes of 'more
+than mathematical demonstration,' that hath much grieved me."[11] The
+novelty of Dr. Whichcote's "opinions" comes more clearly into view as the
+letter proceeds: "Your Discourse about Reconciliation that 'it doth not
+operate on God, but on us' is Divinity [theology] that my heart riseth
+against. . . . To say that the ground of God's reconciliation is from
+anything in us; and not from His free grace, freely justifying the
+ungodly, is to deny one of the fundamental truths of the Gospel that
+derives from heaven."[12]
+
+The correspondence which followed this frank letter supplies us with the
+clearest light we possess, or can possess, upon Whichcote's inner life
+and type of religion. He replied to his old friend, whom he had always
+held "in love, reverence and esteem," that he had noticed of late that
+"our hearts have not seemed to be together when our persons have
+bin,"[13] "but," he adds, "your letter meets with no guilt in my
+conscience." "My head hath bin possessed with this truth [which I am
+preaching] these manie years--I am not late nor newe in this
+persuasion."[14] He then proceeds to quote from his notes exactly what
+he had said on the subject of reconciliation in his recent Discourse. It
+was as follows: "Christ doth not save us by onely doing for us _without_
+us [_i.e._ historically]: yea, we come at that which Christ hath done for
+us with God, by what He hath done for us _within_ us. . . . With God
+there cannot be reconciliation without our becoming God-like. . . . They
+deceeve and flatter themselves extreamly; who think of reconciliation
+with God by means of a Saviour acting upon God in their behalfe and _not
+also working in or upon them to make them God-like_," and he says that he
+added in the spoken sermon, what was not in his notes, that a theology
+which taught a salvation without inward moral transformation was
+"Divinity minted in Hell."[15]
+
+{294}
+
+Dr. Tuckney in his second letter becomes still more specific. He admits
+that Whichcote's "persuasion of truth" is not "late or newe"; he
+remembers, on the latter's first coming to Cambridge, "I thought you then
+somwhat cloudie and obscure in your expressions." What he now notices
+with regret is the tendency in his old pupil to "cry-up reason rather
+than faith"; to be "too much immersed in Philosophy and Metaphysics"; to
+be devoted to "other authours more than Scripture, and Plato and his
+schollars above others"; to be producing "a kinde of moral Divinitie,
+onlie with a little tincture of Christ added"; to put "inherent
+righteousness above imputed righteousness" and "love above faith," and to
+use "some broad expressions as though in this life wee may be above
+ordinances"; and finally he notices that since Whichcote has "cast his
+sermons in this mould," they have become "less edifying" and "less
+affecting the heart."[16] He thinks, too, that he has discovered the
+foreign source of the infection: "Sir, those whose footsteppes I have
+observed [in your sermons] were the Socinians and Arminians; the latter
+whereof, I conceive, you have bin everie where reading in their workes
+and most largely in their Apologie."[17]
+
+"In a thousand guesses," Whichcote answers this last charge, in his
+second letter, "you could not have bin farther off from the truth of the
+thing." "What is added of Socinians and Arminians, in respect of mee, is
+groundless. I may as well be called a Papist, or Mahometan; Pagan or
+Atheist. And trulie, Sir, you are wholly mistaken in the whole course of
+my studies. You say you find me largelie in their _Apologia_; to my
+knowledge I never saw or heard of the book before! . . . I have not read
+manie bookes; but I have studied a fewe: meditation and invention hath
+bin my life rather than reading; and trulie I have more read Calvine and
+Perkins and Beza than all the bookes, authors and names you mention. _I
+have alwaies expected reason for what men say_, less valuing persons and
+authorities in the stating and {295} resolving of truth, therefore have
+read them most where I have found itt. I have not looked at anie thing
+as more than an opinion which hath not bin underpropt by convincing
+reason or plaine and satisfactorie Scripture."[18]
+
+As to the charge that he has become immersed in philosophy, Whichcote
+modestly replies: "I find the Philosophers that I read good as farre as
+they go: and it makes me secretlie blush before God when I find eyther my
+head, heart or life challenged by them, which I must confess, I often
+find." To the criticism that he "cries-up reason," he answers that he
+has always found in his own experience that "that preaching has most
+commanded my heart which has most illuminated my head." "Everie
+Christian," he insists, "must think and believe as he finds cause. Shall
+he speak in religion otherwise than he thinks? Truth is truth, whoever
+hath spoken itt or howsoever itt hath bin abused. If this libertie be
+not allowed to the Universitie wherefore do wee study? We have nothing
+to do butt to get good memories and to learn by heart."[19] Finally, to
+the impression expressed by Dr. Tuckney that his sermons are less
+edifying and heart-searching, he replies with dignity and evidently with
+truth: "I am sure I have bin all along well understood by persons of
+honest heartes, but of mean place and education: and I have had the
+blessing of the soules of such at their departure out of this world. I
+thanke God, my conscience tells me, that I have not herein affected
+worldlie shewe, but the real service of truth."[20]
+
+We need not follow further this voluminous correspondence in which two
+high-minded and absolutely honest men reveal the two diverging lines of
+their religious faith. To the man whose mind found its spiritual footing
+alone on the solid ground of Calvin's unmodified system, the new
+"persuasion" was sure to seem "cloudie and obscure"; and no number of
+letters could convince him that the new message presented a safe way of
+faith and life. And no amount of criticism or advice could change the
+other man who found it necessary for him to have {296} reasonable cause
+for what he was to believe and live by. Whichcote closes the friendly
+debate with some very positive announcements that for him religion must
+be, and must remain, something which guarantees its reality in the soul
+itself: "Christ must be inwardlie felt as a principle of divine life
+within us."[21] "What is there in man," again he says, "more
+considerable than that which declares God's law to him, pleads for the
+observation of it, accuseth for the breach and excuseth upon the
+performance of it?"[22] And finally he informs his friend that each of
+them must be left free to follow his own light: "If we differ there is no
+help for it: Wee must forbear one another. . . . If you conceeve
+otherwise of me than as a lover and pursuer after truth, you think
+amisse. . . . Wherein I fall short of your expectation, I fail for
+truth's sake."[23]
+
+The central idea in Whichcote's teaching, which runs like a gulf-stream
+through all his writings, is his absolute certainty that there is
+something in the "very make of man"[24] which links the human spirit to
+the Divine Spirit and which thus makes it as natural for man to be
+religious as it is for him to seek food for his body. There is a
+"seminal principle," "a seed of God," "something that comes immediately
+from God," in the very structure of man's inner nature,[25] and this
+structural possession makes it as natural and proper for man's mind to
+tend toward God, "the centre of immortal souls," as it is for heavy
+things to tend toward their centre.[26] "God," he elsewhere says, "is
+more inward to us than our own souls," and we are more closely "related
+to God than to anything in the world."[27] The soul is to God as the
+flower is to the sun, which opens when the sun is there and shuts when
+the sun is absent,[28] though this figure breaks down, because, in
+Whichcote's view, God never withdraws and is never absent. This idea
+that the spiritual life is absolutely rational--a normal function {297}
+of man's truest nature--receives manifold expression in Whichcote's
+_Aphorisms_, which constitute a sort of seventeenth-century Book of
+Proverbs, or collection of Wisdom-sayings. He had absorbed one great
+saying from the original Book of Proverbs, which he uses again and again,
+and which became the sacred text for all the members of the school--"the
+spirit of man is a candle of the Lord."[29] This Proverb is for
+Whichcote a key that fits every door of life, and the truth which it
+expresses is for him the basal truth of religion, as the following
+Aphorisms will sufficiently illustrate:
+
+"Were it not for light we should not know we had such a sense as sight:
+Were it not for God we should not know the Powers of our souls which have
+an appropriation to God."[30]
+
+"God's image is in us and we belong to Him."[31]
+
+"There is a capacity in man's soul, larger than can be answered by
+anything of his own, or of any fellow-creature."[32]
+
+"There is nothing so intrinsically rational as Religion is."[33]
+
+"The Truths of God are connatural to the soul of man, and the soul of man
+makes no more resistance to them than the air does to light."[34]
+
+"Religion makes us live like men."[35]
+
+"We worship God best when we resemble Him most."[36]
+
+"Religion is intelligible, rational and accountable: It is not our burden
+but our privilege."[37]
+
+Something is always wrong, he thinks, if Religion becomes a burden: "It
+is imperfection in Religion to _drudge_ in it, and every man drudges in
+Religion if he takes it up as a task and carries it as a burden."[38]
+The moment we follow "the divine frame and temper" of our inmost nature
+we find our freedom, our health, our power, and our joy; as one of the
+Aphorisms puts it: {298} "When we make nearer approaches to God, we have
+more use of ourselves."[39]
+
+This view is beautifully expressed in Whichcote's Prayer printed at the
+end of the _Aphorisms_: "Most Blessed God, the Creator and Governor of
+the World; the only true God, and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We
+thy Creatures were made to seek and find, to know and reverence, to serve
+and obey, to honour and glorify, to imitate and enjoy Thee; who art the
+Original of our Beings, and the Centre of our Rest. Our Reasonable
+Nature hath a peculiar Reservation for Thee; and our Happiness consists
+in our Assimilation to, and Employment about, Thee. The nearer we
+approach unto Thee, the more free we are from Error, Sin, and Misery; and
+the farther off we are from Thee, the farther off we are from Truth,
+Holiness, and Felicity. Without Thee, we are sure of nothing; we are not
+sure of ourselves: but through Thee, there is Self-Enjoyment in the mind,
+when there is nothing but Confusion, and no Enjoyment of the World."
+
+Religion is thus thought of as the normal way of life, as the true
+fulfilment of human nature and as complete inward health. "Holiness," he
+says, "is our right constitution and temper, our inward health and
+strength."[40] Sin and selfishness carry a man below the noble Creation
+which God made in him, and Religion is the return to the true nature and
+capacity of God's Creation in man: "The Gospel, inwardly received, dyes
+and colours the soul, settles the Temper and Constitution of it and is
+restorative of our Nature. . . . It is the restitution of us to the
+state of our Creation, to the use of our Principles, to our healthful
+Constitution and to Acts that are connatural to us."[41]
+
+As soon as man returns to "his own healthful Constitution" and to "the
+state of his Creation," he finds that Religion has its evidence and
+assurance in itself. God made man for moral truths, "before He declared
+{299} them on Sinai," or "writ them in the Bible,"[42] and so soon as the
+soul comes into "conformity to its original,"[43] that is "into
+conformity to God according to its inward measure and capacity,"[44] and
+lives a kind of life that is "self-same with its own Reason,"[45] the
+Divine Life manifests itself in that man and kindles his spirit into a
+blazing candle of the Lord. Those who are spiritual "find and feel
+within themselves Divine Suggestions, Motions and Inspirations; . . . a
+light comes into the Mind, a still Voice."[46]
+
+This direct and inward revelation is, however, for Whichcote never "a
+revelation of new matter," never a way to the discovery of truths of a
+private nature. The revelations which the guidance of the Divine Spirit
+breathes forth within our souls are always truths of universal
+significance, truths that are already implicitly revealed in the Bible,
+truths that carry their own self-evidence to any rational mind. But
+these revelations, these discoveries of what God means and what life may
+become, are possible only to those who prepare themselves for inward
+converse and who centre down to the deeper Roots of their being: "Unless
+a man takes himself sometimes out of the world, by retirement and
+self-reflection, he will be in danger of losing _himself_ in the
+world."[47] Where God is not discovered, something is always at fault
+with man. "As soon as he is abstracted from the noise of the world,
+withdrawn from the call of the Body, having the doors of the senses shut,
+the Divine Life readily enters and reveals Itself to the inward Eye that
+is prepared for it."[48] "Things that are connatural in the way of
+Religion," he once said, "the Illapses and Breakings in of God upon us,
+require a mind that is not subject to Passion but is in a serene and
+quiet Posture, where there is no tumult of Imagination. . . . There is
+no genuine and proper effect of Religion where the Mind is not composed,
+sedate and calm."[49]
+
+{300}
+
+There is no tendency in Whichcote to undervalue Scripture. Inward
+revelations are for him not a substitute for the Bible nor an appendix to
+it. Through the Divine Light in the soul and through Scripture, Divine
+communications are imparted to men. These he calls respectively "truth
+of first inscription" and "truth of after-revelation,"[50] and they no
+more conflict than two luminaries in the physical world conflict.
+"Morals," he says, "are inforced by Scripture, but they were before
+Scripture: they were according to the nature of God,"[51] and, as he
+always claims, according to the deiform nature in man's reason.[52] As
+soon as a person interprets the Light within him--the candle of the Lord
+in his own heart--by the Light of revelation his inward illumination
+becomes clearer; and contrariwise, as soon as one brings an enlightened
+spirit to the Bible its message becomes clarified--"the Spirit within
+leads to a right apprehension of those things which God hath
+declared."[53] But Truth is always vastly more than "Notions," or
+conceptual formulation of doctrine. "Religion," as he says in his
+wisdom-proverbs, "is not a System of Doctrine, an observance of Modes or
+a Form of Words"--it is "a frame and temper of mind; it shows itself in a
+Life and Action conformable to the Divine Will"; it is "our resemblance
+to God."[54] Bare knowledge does not sanctify any man; "Men of holy
+Hearts and Lives best understand holy Doctrines."[55] We always deceive
+ourselves if we do not get beyond even such high-sounding words as
+conversion, regeneration, divine illumination, and mortification; if we
+do not get beyond names and notions of every sort, into a real holiness
+of life that is a conformity of nature to our original. His most
+important passage on this point is one which is found in his Sermon on
+the text: "Of this man's seed hath God, according to His promise, raised
+up unto {301} Israel a Saviour, Jesus" (Acts xiii. 23). "Religion," he
+says in this passage, "is not satisfied in Notions; but doth, in deed and
+in reality, come to nothing unless it be in us not only matter of
+Knowledge and Speculation, but doth establish in us a Frame and Temper of
+Mind and is productive of a holy and vertuous Life. Therefore let these
+things take effect in us; in our Spirituality and Heavenly-mindedness; in
+our Conformity to the Divine Nature and _Nativity from above_. For
+whoever professes that he believes the Truth of these things and wants
+the Operation of them upon his Spirit and Life doth, in fact, make void
+and frustrate what he doth declare as his Belief. He doth receive the
+Grace of God in vain unless this Principle and Belief doth descend in his
+Heart and establish a good Frame and Temper of Mind and govern in all
+Actions of his Life and Conversation."[56] This translation of Light and
+Truth and Insight into the flesh and blood of action is a necessary law
+of the spiritual life: "Good men spiritualize their bodies; bad men
+incarnate their souls";[57] or, as he expresses it in one of his Sermons:
+"To be [spiritually] well and unactive do not consist together. No man
+is well without action."[58]
+
+Religion is, thus, with him always a dynamic principle of Life, working
+itself out in the frame and temper of the man and producing its
+characteristic effects in his actions. It does not operate "like a charm
+or spell"--it operates only as a vital principle[59] and we become
+eternally the self which we ourselves form. "We naturalize ourselves,"
+to use his striking phrase, "to the employment of eternity."[60] We are
+lost, not by Adam's sin, but by our own; and we are saved, not by
+Christ's historical death, but by our own obedience to the law of the
+Spirit of Life revealed in Him and by our own death to sin;[61] and the
+beginning of Heaven is one with the beginning of conformity to the will
+of God and to our nativity from above. "Heaven is a temper of spirit,
+before it is a place."[62] {302} There is a Heaven this side of Heaven
+and there is as certainly a Hell this side of Hell. The most impressive
+expression of this truth is given in one of his Sermons: "All misery
+arises out of _ourselves_. It is a most gross mistake, and men are of
+dull and stupid spirits who think that the state which we call Hell is an
+incommodious place only; and that God by His sovereignty throws men
+therein. Hell ariseth out of a man's self. And Hell's fewel is the
+guilt of a man's conscience. It is impossible that any should be so
+miserable as Hell makes a man and as there a man is miserable by his own
+condemning of himself: And on the other side, when they think that Heaven
+arises from any place, or any nearness to God or Angels, that is not
+principally so; but Heaven lies in a refined Temper, in an inward
+Reconciliation to the Nature of God. So that both Hell and Heaven have
+their Foundation within Men."[63] The evil and punishment which follow
+sin are "consequential" and inseparable from sin, and so, too, eternal
+life is nothing but spiritual life fulfilling itself in ways that are
+consequential and necessary in the deepest nature of things: "That which
+is our best employment here will be our only employment in eternity."[64]
+
+The good old Puritan, Tuckney, suspected that Whichcote was promulgating
+a type of Christianity which could dispense with ordinances--"as though
+in this life wee may be above ordinances,"--and it must be confessed that
+there was some ground for this suspicion. He was no "enthusiast" and he
+in no way shared the radical anti-sacramentarian spirit of the small
+sects of the Commonwealth, but it belonged to the very essence of this
+type of religion, as we have seen in every varied instance of it, to hold
+lightly to externals. "The Spirit," as Whichcote once said, "makes men
+consider the Inwards of things,"[65] and almost of necessity the grasp
+slackens on outward {303} forms, as the vision focusses more intently
+upon inward and eternal realities. It is one of his foundation
+principles that "we worship God best when we resemble Him most,"[66] and
+if that is true, then the whole energy of one's being should concentrate
+upon the cultivation of "the deiform nature," "the nativity from Above."
+The real matters of religion, as he keeps insisting, are matters of life
+and inner being, the formation of disposition and the right set of will.
+But these vital things have been notoriously slighted, and "men's zeal is
+employed in usages, modes and rites of parties"; in matters that are
+divisive and controversial rather than in "things that are lovely in the
+eyes of all who have the Principles of Reason for their rule."[67] The
+great differences in religion have never been over necessary and
+indispensable Truth; on the contrary the disturbing differences have
+always been and still are "either over Points of curious and nice
+Speculation, or about arbitrary modes of worship."[68] Just as fast as
+men see that religion is a way to fullness of life, a method of attaining
+likeness to God, and just as soon as they realize that God can be truly
+worshipped only by acts and attitudes that are moral and spiritual,
+_i.e._ acts and attitudes that attach to the deliberate consent of the
+inner spirit, Whichcote thinks that "rites and types and ceremonies,
+which are all veils," will drop away and religion will become one with a
+rich and intelligent life.[69]
+
+We can well understand how this presentation of Christianity as "a
+culture and discipline of the whole man--an education and consecration of
+all his higher activities"[70]--would seem, to those accustomed to
+dualistic theologies, "clowdie and obscure." It was, however, "no newe
+persuasion." In all essential particulars it is four-square with the
+type of religion with which the spiritual Reformers of Germany and
+Holland had for more than a century made the world acquainted. But,
+{304} in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, somewhat adapted: "all
+these, having had the witness borne to them through their faith, received
+not the promise in full, God having provided some better, _i.e._ fuller,
+thing, that they should not be made complete, apart from those who
+succeeded them and fulfilled their hopes."
+
+
+
+[1] This interesting phrase occurs in _A Brief Account of the New Sect of
+Latitude-Men_, by S. P. (probably Simon Patrick), 1662.
+
+[2] S. P. in his _Sect of Latitude-Men_ says: "A Latitude-Man is an image
+of Clouts [a man of straw] that men set up to encounter with, for want of
+a real enemy; it is a convenient name to reproach a man that you owe a
+spite to."
+
+[3] Letters of Tuckney and Whichcote in the Appendix to Whichcote's
+_Aphorisms_ (London, 1753), p. 2.
+
+[4] _Aphorisms_, Appendix, p. 53.
+
+[5] Culverwel, _Elegant Discourses_ (1654), p. 6.
+
+[6] Burnet, _History of His Own Times_ (London, 1850), p. 127.
+
+[7] We are dependent, for the few facts which we possess concerning
+Whichcote's life, on the Sketch of him written by Dr. Samuel Salter, as a
+Preface to his edition of Whichcote's _Aphorisms_, published in 1753.
+
+[8] _Select Sermons_ (1698), p. 30.
+
+[9] Salter's Preface, pp. xxii-xxiii.
+
+[10] _Ibid._ p. xx.
+
+[11] Appendix to _Aphorisms_ (1753), p. 2.
+
+[12] Ibid. p. 4.
+
+[13] Ibid. p. 7.
+
+[14] Ibid. pp. 8 and 13.
+
+[15] Ibid. pp. 13 and 14.
+
+[16] Appendix to _Aphorisms_, pp. 37-38.
+
+[17] _Ibid._ p. 27.
+
+[18] Appendix to _Aphorisms_, pp. 53-54.
+
+[19] _Ibid._ p. 57.
+
+[20] _Ibid._ p. 60.
+
+[21] Appendix to _Aphorisms_, p. 125.
+
+[22] _Ibid._ p. 127.
+
+[23] _Ibid._ pp. 133-134.
+
+[24] _Select Sermons_ (1698), p. 149.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ pp. 131-133.
+
+[26] _Ibid._ p. 88.
+
+[27] _Ibid._ p. 109.
+
+[28] _Ibid._ p. 74.
+
+[29] Proverbs xx. 27.
+
+[30] _Aphorism_ 861.
+
+[31] _Aphorism_ 934.
+
+[32] _Aphorism_ 847.
+
+[33] _Aphorism_ 457.
+
+[34] _Aphorism_ 444.
+
+[35] _Aphorism_ 87.
+
+[36] _Aphorism_ 248.
+
+[37] _Aphorism_ 220.
+
+[38] _Several Discourses_ (1707), iv. p. 259.
+
+[39] _Aphorism_ 709.
+
+[40] _Several Discourses_, iv. p. 192.
+
+[41] _Select Sermons_, pp. 55 and 62
+
+[42] _Select Sermons_, p. 7.
+
+[43] _Discourses_, iv. p. 191.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ p. 171.
+
+[45] _Ibid._ p. 259.
+
+[46] _Select Sermons_, p. in
+
+[47] _Aphorism_ 302.
+
+[48] Quoted almost literally from _Select Sermons_, p. 72.
+
+[49] _Ibid._ pp. 32-33.
+
+[50] _Select Sermons_, p. 6. He also says in Aphorism No. 109, "God hath
+set up two Lights to enlighten us in our Way: the Light of Reason, which
+is the Light of His Creation; and the Light of Scripture which is
+After-Revelation from Him."
+
+[51] _Aphorism_ 587.
+
+[52] See _Several Discourses_, iv. p. 173.
+
+[53] _Ibid._ ii. p. 275.
+
+[54] _Aphorisms_ 1127, 853, and 1028.
+
+[55] _Select Sermons_, p. 79; and _Aphorism_ 285.
+
+[56] _Select Sermons_, p. 350.
+
+[57] _Aphorism_ 367.
+
+[58] _Select Sermons_, p. 71.
+
+[59] _Aphorisms_ 243 and 625.
+
+[60] _Aphorism_ 290.
+
+[61] _Aphorisms_ 525, 612.
+
+[62] _Aphorism_ 464.
+
+[63] _Select Sermons_, p. 86. This will be recognized as in perfect
+parallelism with Jacob Boehme's teaching, and the parallel is even more
+striking in the passage where Whichcote says that "Religion must inform
+the Judgment with Truth and reform the Heart and Life by the _Tincture_
+of it." (_Select Sermons_, p. 157).
+
+[64] _Aphorism_ 51.
+
+[65] _Select Sermons_, p. 42.
+
+[66] _Aphorism_ 248.
+
+[67] _Select Sermons_, p. 153.
+
+[68] _Ibid._ p. 21.
+
+[69] _Several Discourses_, ii. p. 329.
+
+[70] John Tulloch's _Rational Theology in the Seventeenth Century_, ii.
+p. 115.
+
+
+
+
+{305}
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+JOHN SMITH, PLATONIST--"AN INTERPRETER OF THE SPIRIT"[1]
+
+Principal Tulloch, in his admirable study of the Cambridge Platonists,
+declares that John Smith was "the richest and most beautiful mind and
+certainly by far the best writer of them all."[2]
+
+There can be no doubt, in the thought of any one who has come into
+close contact with him, of the richness and beauty of his spirit. He
+leaves the impression, even after the lapse of more than two hundred
+and fifty years, of having been a saint of a rare type. Those who were
+nearest to him in fellowship called him "a good man," "a Godlike man,"
+"a servant and friend of God," "a serious practicer of the Sermon on
+the Mount"; and we who know him only afar off and at second hand feel
+sure nevertheless that these lofty words were rightly given to him.
+His scholarship was wide--he had "a vastness of learning," as Patrick
+says; but his main contribution was not to philosophy nor to theology,
+it consisted rather of an exhibition of religion wrought out in the
+attractive form of a beautiful spiritual life: "He was an Exemplar of
+true Christian Vertue of so poized and even a life that by his Wisdom
+and Conscience one might live almost at a venture, walking blindfold
+through the world."[3]
+
+The details of his life are very meagre. We are in the {306} main
+dependent on the literary portraits of him drawn by two of his
+affectionate friends--John Worthington who edited his Discourses, and
+Simon Patrick who delivered the remarkable sermon on the occasion of
+his funeral.[4] From these sources we learn that John Smith was born
+at Achurch near Oundle about the year 1618, "of parents who had long
+been childless and were grown aged." It appears incidentally that his
+parents were poor, and that Benjamin Whichcote, who was Smith's college
+Tutor, made "provision for his support and maintenance" in his early
+student days.[5] He entered Emmanuel College in 1636, and here he came
+under the profound religious and intellectual influence of Whichcote,
+for whom "he did ever express a great and singular regard." He became
+a Master of Arts in 1644, and that same year was elected Fellow of
+Queens' College. It was about this time that Whichcote returned to
+Cambridge, "spreading and propagating a nobler, freer and more generous
+sett of opinions," which "the young Masters of Arts soon cordially
+embraced." Among those who formed this group of awakened and kindled
+students Smith was an enthusiastic member, and he himself soon became a
+powerful exponent in the Chapel of Queens' College of a similar
+message, which, a contemporary writer says, "contributed to raise new
+thoughts and a sublime style in the members of the University." He was
+smitten, while still young, with a painful lingering illness, which he
+bore "without murmuring or complaining," "resting quietly satisfied in
+the Infinite, Unbounded Goodness and Tenderness of his Father," hoping
+only that he might "learn that for which God sent the suffering,"[6]
+and he died August 7, 1652, "after God had lent him to the world for
+about five and thirty years."[7] "I was desirous," his friend Patrick
+says at the opening of his funeral sermon, "that I might have stai'd
+the wheels of that Triumphant Chariot wherein he seemed to be carried;
+that we might have {307} kept him a little longer in this world, till
+by his holy breathing into our souls, and the Grace of God, we had been
+made meet to have some share in that inheritance of the saints in
+light"; but now, he adds, "we are orphans, left without a father."[8]
+Patrick adapts to his own departed teacher the beautiful words which
+Gregory Thaumaturgus used of his great instructor, Origen: "He hath
+entangled and bound up my soul in such fetters of love, he hath so tyed
+and knit me to him, that if I would be disengaged, I cannot quit
+myself. No, though I depart out of the world, our love cannot die, for
+I love him even as my own soul, and so my affection must remain
+forever."[9] The whole sermon throbs with intense love, and while it
+is somewhat overweighted with quotations and learned allusions, it yet
+expresses in an impressive way the sincere affection of a disciple for
+a noble master who has "begot another shape in his scholar and has made
+another man of him."[10] "Such men," he says, "God hath alwaies in the
+world, men of greater height and stature than others, whom He sets up
+as torches on an hill to give light to all the regions round
+about."[11] Such men "are the guard and defense of the towns where
+they reside, yea of the country whereof they are members; they are the
+keepers and life-guards of the world; the walls and bulwarks of the
+Nation,"[12] and when they leave the world everybody soon feels that a
+glory has departed--"when Elijah goes away you shall have fifty men go
+three days to seek him!"[13]
+
+This disciple, who declared that whatever "heavenly life" there was in
+himself had been "hatched" by the fostering care, the nurturing love
+and the brave conduct of his teacher, has left a few very clear traits
+for the creation of a true portrait of this saintly interpreter of the
+Spirit: He was a Fountain running over, Worthington says, "an ever
+bountifull and bubbling Fountain."[14] Love was bubbling and springing
+up in his soul and flowing out to all. He would have emptied his soul
+into others. He {308} was dipped into Justice as it were over head and
+ears; he had not a slight tincture but was dyed and coloured quite
+through with it. He cared only for those substantial and solid things
+of a Divine and Immortal Nature, which he might carry out of the world
+with him. He was a living library, a walking study, a whole college in
+himself, that carried his learning about with him; a man of great
+industry, indefatigable pains, and herculean labours. His learning was
+so concocted that it lay not in notions in his head, but was wrought
+out and formed in his very soul so that a man came away always better
+after converse with him. His faith did not busy itself about fine
+notions, subtilties, and curiosities, but it was firmly set and fixed
+in an experience of the mercy and goodness of God, seen in Jesus
+Christ. He lived in a continuous enjoyment of God and perpetually drew
+nearer to the Centre of his soul's rest and always stayed God's time of
+advancement. His spirit was absorbed in the business and employment of
+becoming perfect in his art and profession--which was the art _of being
+a good man_.[15] The devoted scholar's highest wish, as he closes his
+glowing account of his beloved master, who "enshrined so much Divinity
+that everything about him had a kind of sacredness," was that those who
+had enjoyed his presence and inspiration and had formed their lives
+under his instruction might "so express his life" in theirs, that men
+would say as they saw these disciples of his, "There walks at least a
+shadow of Mr. Smith!"[16]
+
+It would be difficult to find any one, in the long list of those who
+have interpreted Christianity, who has been more insistent than was
+John Smith that religion is the normal function of the soul and the
+surest evidence of its health and sanity. But religion of this normal
+and spiritual type must be sharply differentiated both from
+superstition and from legalistic religion. The mark of superstition in
+his mind is the apprehension of God as capricious, a hard Master, and
+of such a character that his {309} favour can be gained only by servile
+flattery or bribery or by spells of magic. Superstition is "a brat of
+darkness" born in a heart of fear and consternation. It produces
+invariably "a forced and jejune devotion"; it makes "forms of worship
+which are grievous and burdensome" to the life; it chills or destroys
+all free and joyous converse with God; it kills out love and inward
+peace, and instead of inspiring, heightening, and purifying man's soul,
+it bends all its energies in the vain attempt to alter the capricious
+attitude of the superior Being who scares and terrifies men. It is,
+however, a very subtle spirit and one hard to eradicate. It invades
+our religion even when we are least aware of it: "it enters into our
+chambers, creeps into our clothes, twines about our secret devotions,
+and actuates our forms of belief and orthodox opinions."[17]
+
+Legalistic religion, or the "covenant of works," is much of a piece
+with superstition. It, again, is always a burden to be borne. Its
+mark is "drudgery and servility." It is a "lean and lifeless form of
+external performances." Its "law" is always something outside the soul
+itself. It is a way of acquiring "merit," of getting reckoned among
+"heaven's darlings," but it is not a way of life or expansion or power
+or joy.[18]
+
+This "dead" legalistic form of religion is, however, not merely a thing
+of antiquity, of some early "dispensation" in the long stretch of years
+called "B.C." Like superstition, legalistic religion also has "crept
+into our clothes" and "twined about our secret devotions." The
+"gospel" can be made, and has often enough been made, "as legal as ever
+the religion of the Jews was." The gospel becomes legal, in Smith's
+sense, wherever it is treated "as something onely without us," "as a
+meer historical story or account," or as a collection of book-facts, or
+"as _credenda_ propounded for us to believe," or when we attempt to
+"make Christ's righteousness serve onely as our outward
+_covering_."[19] "Some of our {310} _Dogmata_," he thinks, "and
+Notions of Justification puff us up in far higher and goodlier conceits
+of ourselves than God hath of us; and we _profanely_ make the unspotted
+righteousness of Christ serve only as a _covering_ to wrap up our foul
+deformities and filthy vices in."[20] This tendency, wherever it
+appears, is but legal religion. Men adopt it because it does not
+"pinch their sins." It gives them a "sluggish and drowsie Belief, a
+lazy Lethargy to hugg their supposed acceptation with God"; it enables
+them "to grow big and swell with a mighty bulk with airy fancies and
+presumptions of being in favour with Heaven," and it fans up "a
+pertinacious Imagination that their Names are enrolled in the Book of
+Life, or crossed off in the Debt-Book of Heaven." But it is all "a
+meer Conceit or Opinion," for such men are "never the better in reality
+in themselves and God judges all things as they are." "While men
+continue in their wickedness, they do but vainly dream of a device to
+tie the hands of Almighty Vengeance."[21]
+
+True religion, on the other hand, is absolutely another thing, sundered
+by the width of the sky from either superstition or legalistic
+religion. It is a reception and assimilation of the Life of God within
+the soul of man which is predisposed by its fundamental nature to the
+influx and formative influence of the Spirit of God, who is the
+environing Life and inner atmosphere of all human spirits: "_Spiritual
+Life comes from God's breath within us and from the formation of Christ
+within the soul_."[22]
+
+Like all of his kind, Smith begins with what to him is an axiomatic
+fact, that the human soul has a "royal pedigree and noble extraction,"
+that, "as the best philosophers have alwaies taught, we must enquire
+for God within ourselves," that "Principles of Divine Truth have been
+engraven on man's Heart by the finger of God," that we can find "a
+clear impression of some Eternal Nature and Perfect Being stamped upon
+our own souls," that there are "Radical Principles of Divine Knowledge"
+{311} and "Seeds of Divine Nature" hidden within us and that a Divine
+Spirit blows and breathes upon men's hearts, assisting the soul to
+participate in the Life of God.[23] In one of his bold sayings this
+position is summed up as follows: "Religion is a Heaven-born thing, the
+Seed of God in the spirits of men, whereby they are formed to a
+similitude and likeness of Himself. A true Christian is every way of a
+most noble extraction, of an heavenly and divine pedigree."[24]
+
+He finds the mark of man's excelling dignity in the inexhaustible depth
+of his nature and in his noble discontent with every finite and mutable
+thing. The soul of man is "too big for earthly designs and interests."
+There is forever a restless appetite within man for some infinite Good
+without which he can never be satisfied. Everything which he attains
+or achieves still leaves him in "pinching penury," unsatiated with
+"the thin and spare diet which he finds in his finite home." His
+soul, "like the daughters of the Horseleach is always crying: 'Give,
+give.'" No happiness worth having ever arises, nor through a whole
+eternity could arise, for any soul sequestered like a hermit in
+the narrow confines of its own private cell, sundered from "the
+Fountain-Goodness," for which it was created. The immortal Principle
+within forever drives it to seek its Original, and it lives only when
+it "lives above itself," and follows "its own proper motion upward."[25]
+
+The real Gospel in contrast to the "legal gospel," is "the formation of
+a Christlike Nature in a man's soul by the mighty power of the Divine
+Spirit."[26] It is no new set of opinions; no body of Notions about
+Truth; "no system of saving Divinity, cast in a Pedagogical mould"; it
+is, from its Alpha to its Omega, Spirit and Life, or, to put it in
+Smith's own words, it is "a vital or energetical Spirit or Power of
+Righteousness," "a Principle of Life working in man's spirit," "a
+quickening ministration," "a Seed of God," "a vital Influx, spreading
+through all {312} the powers of the soul and bringing it into a Divine
+Life."[27] There are many close imitations of this real Gospel which
+on the outside look exactly like it, but they only assume "the garish
+dress and attire of religion," they put on "the specious and
+seemingly-spiritual Forms" without the inward Life and Power which are
+always the mark of true religion. These "mimical Christians" reform
+their looks, instruct their tongues, take up the fitting set of duties
+and system of opinions, underprop their religion with sacred
+performances; "chameleon-like, they even turn their insides to whatever
+hue and colour" is demanded of religion; they "furnish this domestick
+Scene of theirs with any kind of matter which the history of religion
+affords them"--only, however they "cunningly fashion out their religion
+by Book-skill," they cannot get "the true and living thing," which
+creates a new spirit and produces a new inward joy: "True Religion is
+no piece of artifice; it is no boiling up of our Imaginative powers nor
+the glowing heats of Passion; though these are too often mistaken for
+it, when in our jugglings in Religion we cast a mist before our eyes.
+But it is a new Nature informing the souls of Men; it is a Godlike
+frame of Spirit, discovering it self most of all in serene and clear
+Minds, in deep Humility, Meekness, Self-denial, Universal Love of God
+and all true Goodness, without Partiality and without Hypocrisie;
+whereby we are taught to know God, and knowing Him to love Him and
+conform ourselves as much as may be to all that Perfection which shines
+forth in Him."[28]
+
+Heaven and Hell for John Smith, as for Boehme and for Whichcote, "have
+their foundation laid in Men's own souls."[29] They are rather
+something within us than something without us. Sin and hell have the
+same origin, "the same lineage and descent." "The Devil is not only
+the name of one particular thing, but a _nature_. He is not so much a
+particular Being designed to torture wicked men in the world to come as
+a hellish and diabolical {313} nature seated in the minds of men. . . .
+Could the Devil change his foul and impure nature, he would neither be
+a Devil nor miserable. . . . All Sin and Wickedness in man's spirit
+hath the Central force and energy of Hell in it, and is perpetually
+pressing down towards it as towards its own place. There needs no
+fatal necessity or Astral influences to tumble wicked men down forcibly
+into Hell: No, Sin itself, hastened by the mighty weight of its own
+nature, carries them down thither with the most swift and headlong
+motion."[30] "Would wicked men dwell a little more at home, and
+_descend into the bottom of their own Hearts_ they would soon find Hell
+opening her mouth wide upon them, and those secret fires of inward fury
+and displeasure breaking out upon them."[31] So, too, the Kingdom of
+Heaven is within. It lies not so much in external things, golden
+streets and crowns, as in the quality and disposition of a man's mind.
+The enjoying of God consists not so much in a change of place as in
+participation in the nature of God and in assimilation to God. Nothing
+can stand firm and sure, nothing can have eternal establishment and
+abiding permanence that "hath not the everlasting arms of true Goodness
+under it."[32]
+
+In a very fine passage, in the noble discourse on "True Religion,"
+Smith says: "I wish there be not among some such a light and poor
+esteem of Heaven, as makes them more to seek after _Assurance of Heaven
+onely in the Idea of it as a thing to come than after Heaven it self_;
+which indeed we can never be well assured of untill we find it rising
+up within ourselves and glorifying our own souls. When true Assurance
+comes, Heaven it self will appear upon the Horizon of our souls, like a
+morning light chasing away all our dark and gloomy doublings before it.
+We shall not then need to light up our Candles to seek for it in
+corners; no, it will display its own lustre and brightness so before us
+that we may see it in its own light, and our souls the true possessours
+of it." "Should a man hear a Voice from Heaven or see a Vision from
+the Almighty to testifie unto him the Love of God towards him [and the
+{314} Assurance of his Salvation]; yet methinks it were more desirable
+to find a Revelation of all _from within_, arising up from the Bottome
+and centre of a man's own soul, in the Reall and Internal impressions
+of a Godlike nature upon his own spirit; and thus to find the
+Foundation and Beginning of Heaven and Happiness within himself; it
+were more desirable to see the crucifying of our own Will, the
+mortifying of the meer Animal life and to see a Divine life rising up
+in the room of it, as a sure Pledge and Inchoation of Immortality and
+Happiness, the very Essence of which consists in a perfect conformity
+and cheerful compliance of all the Powers of our Souls with the Will of
+God."[33]
+
+The consciousness of Immortality rises or falls with the moral and
+spiritual height of the soul. Nothing makes men doubt or question the
+Immortality of their souls so much as their own "base and earthly
+loves," and so, too, inward goodness "breeds a sense of the Soul's
+Immortality": "Goodness and vertue make men know and love, believe and
+delight in their Immortality. When the soul is purged and enlightened
+by true sanctity it is more capable of those Divine irradiations
+whereby it feels it self in conjunction with God. It knows that
+Almighty Love, by which it lives, is stronger than death. It knows
+that God will never forsake His own life which He has quickened in the
+soul. Those breathings and gaspings after an Eternal participation of
+Him are but the energy of His own breath within us."[34]
+
+Smith finds the world in which he lives a fair world, everywhere full
+of "the Prints and Footsteps of God," the finite creatures of which are
+"Glasses wherein God reflects His glory." There are many "golden links
+that unite the world to God," and good men, "conversing with this lower
+world and viewing the invisible things of God in the things that are
+made in the outward Creation, may many times find God secretly flowing
+into their souls and leading them silently out of the Court of the
+Temple into the Holy Place."[35]
+
+{315}
+
+The outward world is thus not something stubbornly foreign to the
+spirit; it is not the enemy's country, but every finite good and
+everything of beauty is "a Blossom of the First Goodness, a Beam from
+the Father of Lights." The spiritual person discovers that the whole
+creation is spiritual. He learns to "love all things in God and God in
+all things, and he sees that God is All in all, the Beginning and
+Original of Being, the Perfect Idea of their goodness and the end of
+their motion." In the calming illumination of this clarified vision,
+the good man, in whose soul religion has flowered, "is no longer
+solicitous whether this or that good thing be mine, or whether my
+perfections exceed the measure of this or that particular Creature, for
+whatever good he beholds anywhere he enjoys and delights in as much as
+if it were his own, and whatever he beholds in himself he looks upon
+not as his _property_ but _as a common good_; for all these Beams come
+from one and the same Fountain and Ocean of Light in whom he loves them
+all with an universal Love. When his affections run along the stream
+of any created excellencies, whether his own or any one's else, yet
+they stay not here but run on until they fall into the Ocean; they do
+not settle into a fond love and admiration either of himself or any
+other's excellencies, but he owns them as so many Pure Effluxes and
+Emanations from God, and in any particular Being loves the Universal
+Goodness. Thus a good man may walk up and down the world as in a
+Garden of Spices and suck a Divine Sweetness out of every flower.
+There is a twofold meaning in every Creature: a Literal and Mystical; a
+good man says of everything that his Senses offer to him: it speaks to
+his lower part but it points out something above to his Mind and
+Spirit. . . . True Religion never finds it self out of the Infinite
+Sphere of Divinity and wherever it finds Beauty, Harmony, Goodness,
+Love, Ingenuity, Wisdom, Holiness, Justice, and the like, it is ready
+to say: _Here is God_. Wheresoever any such Perfections shine out, an
+holy Mind climbs up by these Sunbeams and raises up it self to
+God. . . . A good man finds every place he {316} treads upon _Holy
+Ground_; to him the world is God's Temple."[36]
+
+The supreme instance of the revelation of the Universal through the
+particular, of the invisible through the visible, the Divine through
+the human, is seen in Christ. It was precisely such an event as might
+have been expected, for "the Divine Bounty and Fulness has always been
+manifesting Itself to the spirits of men." Those who have lived by
+inward insight have perpetually found themselves "hanging upon the arms
+of Immortal Goodness." At length, in this One Life the Divine Goodness
+blossomed into perfect flower and revealed its Nature to men. In Him
+divinity and humanity are absolutely united in one Person. In Christ
+we have a clear manifestation of God and in Him, too, "we may see with
+open face what human nature can attain to."[37] This stupendous event,
+however, was no "gracious contrivance," no scheme to restore lapsed men
+in order that God might have "a Quire of Souls to sing eternal
+Hallelujahs to Him"; it was just "the overflowing fountain and efflux
+of Almighty Love bestowing itself upon men and crowning Itself by
+communicating Itself."[38] The Christ who is thus divine Grace become
+visible and vocal is also at the same time the irresistible attraction,
+"strongly and forcibly moving the souls of men into a conjunction with
+Divine Goodness," which is what Smith always means by the great word,
+_Faith_. It is something in the hearts of men which by experience
+"feels the mighty insinuations of Divine Goodness"; complies with it;
+perpetually rises into co-operation with it, and attains its true "life
+and vivacity" by partaking of it.[39] Christ is thus the Node, or
+Centre, of both Grace and Faith.
+
+With this apprehension of Faith as a vital thing--a new and living
+way--Smith thinks very lightly of "notions" and what he calls "a
+knowledge of Divinity [Theology] which appears in systems and
+models."[40] This is but a poor way, he thinks, to "the Land of
+Truth." {317} "It is but a thin and aiery knowledge that is got by meer
+speculation." "This is but spider-like to spin a worthless web out of
+one's own bowels." "Jejune and barren speculations may unfold the
+Plicatures of Truth's garment, but they cannot discover her lovely
+Face." "To find Truth," he says in another figure, "we must break
+through the outward shell of words and phrases which house it," and by
+_experience and practice_ discover the "inward beauty, life and
+loveliness of Truth."[41]
+
+This hard "shell of words and phrases" which must be broken before
+Truth is found, is one of Sebastian Franck's favourite sayings, and we
+find Smith also repeating Franck's vivid accounts of the weakness of
+Scripture when it is treated only as external history, or as words,
+texts, and phrases. "Scripture," he says, in the exact words and
+figures of the German Humanist, "is a Sealed Book which the greatest
+Sophist may be most acquainted with. It is like the Pillar of fire and
+cloud that parted between the Israelites and Egyptians, giving a clear
+and comfortable light to all those that are under the manuduction and
+guidance thereof [_i.e._ those who have the inner experience] but being
+full of darkness and obscurity to those that rebel against it."[42]
+"The dead letter," he says, "is a sandy foundation" for religion,
+because it is never in books and writings but rather in the human soul
+that men must seek for God.[43] Action and not words; life and not
+motions; heart and not brain, hold the key to Truth: "They cannot be
+good at Theorie that are bad at Practice."[44] "Our Saviour," he says,
+"would not draw Truth up into any System, nor would He lay it out into
+Canons or Articles of Faith, because He was not so careful to stock the
+world with Opinions and Notions as to make it thrive with true piety,
+Godlike purity and spiritual understanding"; and in a very happy
+passage, he reminds us that there are other ways of propagating
+religion besides writing books: "They are not alwaies the best Men who
+blot the most paper; Truth is not so {318} voluminous nor swells into
+such a mighty bulk as our Bookes doe. Those minds are not alwaies the
+most chaste that are the most parturient with learned Discourses."[45]
+
+I have, I believe, now given a true account of Smith's type of
+Christianity, It was no new message. It was a re-expression of ideas
+and ideals that had already been often proclaimed to the dull ears of
+the world. He, however, is never a repeater of other men's ideas.
+What he offers is always as much his own as was the life-blood which
+coursed through his heart. He fed upon the literature which was
+kindred to his growing spirit, and his books helped him find the road
+which he was seeking; but he was nobly true to his own theory that the
+way of Life is discovered by spiritual experience rather than by
+"verbal description," and this quiet, sincere scholar and prophet of
+the soul found it thus. He once said that "Truth is content, when it
+comes into the world, to wear our mantles, to learn our language and to
+conform itself as it were to our dress and fashions";[46] that is to
+say, prophets speak in their own dialect and use the modes of their own
+culture, but they are prophets through their own temporal experience of
+that one eternal Reality which shines into their souls in its own
+Light.[47]
+
+What impressed his contemporary friends most was the beauty of his
+spirit, and that is what still most impresses the reader of his
+Discourses. He has succeeded in preserving some of the strong elixir
+of his life in the words which survive him, and we know him as a
+valiant soldier in that great army of soldier-saints who have fought
+with spiritual weapons. "This fight and contest," he himself has told
+us, "with Sin and Satan is not to be known by the rattling of Chariots
+or the sound of an alarm: it is indeed alone transacted upon the inner
+stage of men's souls and spirits--but it never consists in a sluggish
+kind of doing nothing that so God might do all."[48] A Life is always
+battle, and the true Christian is always "a Champion of God" clad in
+the armour of Light for the defeat of {319} darkness and the seed of
+Satan. In this battle of Armageddon John Smith took a man's part, and
+his affectionate disciple Simon Patrick was quite right in saying, as
+the master passed away, "My father, my father, The chariot of Israel
+and the horsemen thereof."
+
+The other members of this impressive group of Cambridge Platonists,
+especially Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, Nathaniel Culverwel and John
+Norris, might well be studied, and they would furnish some additional
+aspects of religious thought, but the teachings of the two exponents
+whom I have selected as representative of the school have brought the
+central ideas and the underlying spirit of this seventeenth century
+religious movement sufficiently into view. Their intimate connection
+with the currents of thought which preceded them has also been made
+adequately clear. This volume does not pretend to be exhaustive, and
+it cannot follow out all the interesting ramifications of the
+complicated historical development which I have been tracing. I have
+been compelled to limit myself to the presentation of typical specimens
+and examples of this continuously advancing spiritual movement which
+found one of its noblest figures in John Smith.
+
+
+
+[1] Simon Patrick uses this phrase in his funeral sermon on his friend
+John Smith. _Select Discourses_ (1673), p. 472.
+
+[2] _Rational Theology_, ii. p. 122.
+
+[3] Patrick's Sermon, _Select Discourses_, p. 496.
+
+[4] Worthington's Sketch is given in the Preface to the Reader in
+_Select Discourses_, pp. iii-xxx, and Patrick's Sermon is given as an
+Appendix to the same volume, pp. 471-512.
+
+[5] Preface, p. vi.
+
+[6] Patrick, _op. cit._ p. 498.
+
+[7] Preface, p. xxviii.
+
+[8] Patrick, _op. cit._ pp. 471 and 472.
+
+[9] _Ibid._ p. 484.
+
+[10] _Ibid._ p. 477.
+
+[11] _Ibid._ p. 474.
+
+[12] _Ibid._ pp. 480-481.
+
+[13] _Ibid._ p. 486.
+
+[14] Preface, p. iii.
+
+[15] This portrait is made up entirely of passages gathered out of
+Patrick's Sermon, and but slightly altered.
+
+[16] _Op. cit._ p. 509.
+
+[17] "A Short Discourse on Superstition," in _Select Discourses_, pp.
+24-36.
+
+[18] "Discourse on Legal Righteousness, etc.," _ibid._ pp. 273-338.
+
+[19] Smith uses this phrase in precisely the same manner as Jacob
+Boehme.
+
+[20] _Select Discourses_, p. 316.
+
+[21] _Ibid._ pp. 319-321, quoted freely.
+
+[22] _Ibid._ p. 21, quoted freely.
+
+[23] _Select Discourses_, pp. 13, 14, 57, 61, and 118.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ p. 370.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ pp. 375, 393, 395, 403, 407-408.
+
+[26] _Ibid._ p. 311.
+
+[27] _Select Discourses_, pp. 303, 305, and 315.
+
+[29] _Ibid._ p. 364. For Smith's view of mimical Christians see pp.
+359-364.
+
+[29] _Ibid._ p. 144.
+
+[30] _Select Discourses_, p. 452.
+
+[31] _Ibid._ p. 456.
+
+[32] _Ibid._ pp. 452 and 445.
+
+[33] _Select Discourses_, p. 416.
+
+[34] _Ibid._ pp. 97-98. Quoted freely.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ pp. 419-420.
+
+[36] _Select Discourses_, pp. 421-423.
+
+[37] _Ibid._ pp. 332 and 336.
+
+[38] _Ibid._ p. 398.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ p. 325.
+
+[40] _Ibid._ p. 2.
+
+[41] _Select Discourses_, pp. 4, 7, and 8.
+
+[42] _Ibid._ p. 278.
+
+[43] _Ibid._ pp. 3 and 288.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ p. 12.
+
+[45] _Select Discourses_, p. 12.
+
+[46] _Ibid._ p. 165.
+
+[47] _Ibid._ p. 260.
+
+[48] _Ibid._ pp. 461 and 458.
+
+
+
+
+{320}
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THOMAS TRAHERNE AND THE SPIRITUAL POETS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
+
+I
+
+The powerful religious upheaval in England which reached its
+culmination during the two middle decades of the seventeenth century,
+profoundly stirred both the upper and lower intellectual strata of
+society. It fused and organized men on the one hand, and carried them
+beyond themselves; and on the other hand it broke up settled habits of
+thought, swept away many customs and practices which had become almost
+irresistible subconscious influences, and left those who were in any
+way morally and intellectually defective at the mercy of chance
+currents and eddies. As a result there appeared a strange medley of
+tiny sects. These groups, seething with enthusiasm, scattered pretty
+much over England, unorganized or loosely organized, generally gathered
+about some influential psychopathic leader, were lumped together in the
+public mind and named "Ranters."[1] They are by no means a negligible
+phenomenon of the period. They reveal the back-wash of the spiritual
+movement, which in the main went steadily onward. They exhibit, in
+their loose and unmoralized freedom, the inherent dangers which attach
+to the proclamation of spiritual liberty, and they furnish a clear
+historical illustration of the truth that progress toward a religion
+grounded upon the inner life of man can only be slowly and painfully
+achieved.
+
+{321}
+
+The religious poets of this period, on the other hand, furnish clear
+evidence of the constructive, organizing and fusing power of these
+newly dawning spiritual insights, as they worked upon the minds of
+highly gifted and endowed persons. Poets are not Reformers. They do
+not consider themselves "commissioned" to reconstruct old systems of
+thought, old forms of faith and old types of church-organization, or to
+re-interpret the Gospel, the way of salvation and the communion of
+saints. Their mission is a different one, though it is no less
+spiritual and, in the best sense of the word, no less practical. The
+poets are always among the first to feel the direction of spiritual
+currents, and they are very sure voices of the deeper hopes and
+aspirations of their epoch. All the religious poets of this particular
+period reveal very clearly the influence of the ideas which were
+central in the teaching of the spiritual leaders whom we have been
+studying. The reader of Milton needs no argument to convince him of
+the fact that, however far removed the great poet was in most points of
+view from the contemporary Quakers, he nevertheless insisted
+emphatically, as they did, on the illumination of the soul by a Light
+within; "a celestial Light," he calls it in _Paradise Lost_, which
+shines inward and irradiates the mind through all her powers, and
+supplies an inward sight of things invisible to sense[2]--a Light which
+steadily increases as it is used by the obedient soul.[3] The origin
+of this inward Light, according to Milton's thought, is the eternal
+Word of God, who is before all worlds and who is the source of all
+revelation, whether inward or outward: the Spirit that prefers
+
+ Before all temples the upright heart and pure.[4]
+
+
+The minor religious poets of the period had not, however, formed their
+intellectual outlook under the imperial sway of theological systems of
+thought in anything like {322} the degree that Milton had. They
+reflect the freer and less rigidly formulated currents of thought.
+"All divinity is love, or wonder," John Donne wrote in one of his
+poems. No phrase could better express the intense religious life of
+the group of spiritual poets in England who interpreted in beautiful,
+often immortal, form this religion of the spirit, this glowing
+consciousness that the world and all its fulness is God's and that
+eternity is set within the soul of man, who never is himself until he
+finds his Life in God.
+
+ E'en like two little bank-dividing brooks,
+ That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams,
+ And having rang'd and search'd a thousand nooks,
+ Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames,
+ Where in a greater current they conjoin:
+ So I my best beloved's am; so He is mine.
+
+ E'en so we met: and after long pursuit,
+ E'en so we joined; we both became entire:
+ No need for either to renew a suit,
+ For I was flax and He was flames of fire.
+ Our firm united souls did more than twine;
+ So I my best beloved's am; so He is mine.[5]
+
+
+Whatever these poets, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Crashaw, Quarles, say
+of the soul and its fuller life, they say quite naturally in terms of
+love and wonder. Religion has become for them the flowering of the
+soul; the flooding of the whole being with health and joy; the
+consummation of life; and they tell of it as lovers tell of their
+discovery and their joy.
+
+ Oh mightie love! man is one world and hath
+ Another to attend him.[6]
+
+
+We have here in these poets, as in the writings of Whichcote and Smith,
+a type of religion which is primarily concerned with the liberation and
+winning of the whole of life, a thing which, they all tell us, can be
+done only in conscious parallelism with the set of eternal currents.
+
+These minor prophets of seventeenth century English literature have
+often been treated as mystics, and there {323} is in all of them,
+except George Herbert, a rich strand of mystical religion, but their
+mysticism is only an element, a single aspect, of a very much wider and
+completer type of religion which includes all the strands that compose
+what I have been calling "spiritual religion"--an inner flooding of the
+life with a consciousness of God, a rational apprehension of the soul's
+inherent relation to the Divine, and a transforming discovery of the
+meaning of life through the revelation in Christ, which sets all one's
+being athrob with love and wonder.
+
+ Eternal God! O thou that only art
+ The sacred fountain of eternal light,
+ And blessed loadstone of my better part,
+ O thou, my heart's desire, my soul's delight,
+ Reflect upon my soul and touch my heart,
+ And then my heart shall prize no good above thee;
+ And then my soul shall know thee; knowing, love thee.[7]
+
+
+
+II
+
+Thomas Traherne is one of the best and most adequate representatives,
+in this literary group, of this type of religion. He was profoundly
+influenced by the revival of Plato and Plotinus, and by the writings of
+the religious Humanists and he had absorbed, consciously or
+unconsciously, the ideas and ideals which appear and reappear in the
+widespread movement which I have been tracing. He was a pure and noble
+soul, a man of deep experience and fruitful meditation, the master of a
+rare and wonderful style, and we shall find in his writings a glowing
+appreciation and a luminous expression of this type of inner, spiritual
+religion.
+
+He was born about the year 1636, probably at Hereford, the son of a
+poor shoemaker, but of a notable and well-endowed family line. He took
+no pains to inform the world of his outward history and we are left
+with guesses as to most of the details of his earthly career, but he
+has himself supplied us with an unusually full account of his {324}
+inward life during the early years of it. "Once I remember," he says,
+"I think I was about four years old when I thus reasoned with myself,
+sitting in a little obscure room of my father's poor house: If there be
+a God certainly He must be infinite in Goodness, and I was prompted to
+this by a real whispering instinct of Nature."[8] Whereupon the child
+wonders why, if God is so rich, he himself is so poor, possessed of "so
+scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts," but he
+tells us that as soon as he was old enough to discover the glory of the
+world he was in, and old enough for his soul to have "_sudden returns
+into itself_," there was no more questioning about poverty and narrow
+fortunes. All the wealth of God was his--
+
+ I nothing in the world did know
+ But 'twas divine.[9]
+
+
+As nobody has better caught the infinite glory of being a child, and as
+nobody in literature has more successfully "set the little child in the
+midst," than has Traherne, it may be well to let him tell us here in
+his splendid enthusiasm what it is to be a child and what the eyes of a
+child can see. He shall do it, first in his magnificent prose and then
+in his fine and simple verse.
+
+"Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious
+apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child. All appeared
+new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and
+beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the
+world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge
+was Divine. . . . My very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one
+brought into the Estate of Innocence. All things were spotless and
+pure and glorious: yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious.
+I knew not that there were any sins, or complaints or laws. I dreamed
+not of poverties, contentions or vices. All tears {325} and quarrels
+were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal.
+I knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for
+tribute or bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an
+Angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory, I saw all the
+peace of Eden; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator's praises, and
+could not make more melody to Adam, than to me. All Time was Eternity,
+and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that an infant should be
+heir of the whole World, and see those mysteries which the books of the
+learned never unfold?
+
+"The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped,
+nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to
+everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as
+gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees
+when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished
+me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and
+almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.
+The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem!
+Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and
+maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls
+tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not
+that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as
+they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the Light
+of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared; which
+talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to
+stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the
+temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and
+silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy
+faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars,
+and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.
+. . . So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the
+dirty devices of this world. Which {326} now I unlearn, and become, as
+it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of
+God."[10]
+
+ How like an Angel came I down!
+ How bright are all things here!
+ When first among His works I did appear
+ O how their Glory did me crown!
+ The World resembled His _Eternity_
+ In which my soul did walk;
+ And everything that I did see
+ Did with me talk.[11]
+
+ Long time before
+ I in my mother's womb was born,
+ A God preparing did this glorious store,
+ The world, for me adorne.
+ Into this Eden so divine and fair
+ So wide and bright, I come His son and heir.[12]
+
+
+Like Vaughan, who, in his "angel-infancy," could
+
+ In these weaker glories spy
+ Some shadows of eternity,
+
+and who
+
+ Felt through all this fleshly dress
+ Bright shoots of everlastingness,[13]
+
+Traherne not only saw, in his paradise-innocence, the glory of the
+earth and sky--the streets paved with golden stones, and boys and girls
+with lovely shining faces--but he also felt that he was part of a
+deeper world which lay about his infancy and wooed him with love.
+
+ O Lord I wonder at Thy Love,
+ Which did my Infancy so early move.[14]
+
+And out of this childhood experience, which many a meditative child can
+match, he insists that God visited him.
+
+ He did Approach, He did me woo;
+ I wonder that my God this thing would do.
+
+ He in our childhood with us walks,
+ And with our thoughts Mysteriously He talks;
+ He often visiteth our Minds.[15]
+
+
+{327}
+
+I know of no one who has borne a louder testimony than Traherne to the
+divine inheritances and spiritual possibilities of the new-born child,
+or who has more emphatically denied the fiction of total depravity: "I
+speak it in the presence of God," he says, "and of our Lord Jesus
+Christ; in my pure primitive Virgin Light, while my apprehensions were
+natural and unmixed, I cannot remember but that I was ten thousand
+times more prone to good and excellent things than to evil."[16] And
+he adds this impressive word on the doctrine of inheritance: "It is not
+our parents' loins, so much as our parents' lives, that enthrals and
+blinds us."[17]
+
+After a happy childhood, during which "The Earth did undertake the
+office of a Priest,"[18] and when his soul was
+
+ A living endless eye
+ Just bounded with the sky,
+ Whose power, whose act, whose essence was to see,[19]
+
+he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in the year 1652, being made B.A.
+in 1656, M.A. in 1661, and Bachelor of Divinity in 1669. He was
+admitted in 1657 to the Rectory of Credenhill, near Hereford, where he
+remained for about ten years, and in 1667 he was made chaplain to Sir
+Orlando Bridgman, in whose service he died in 1674, and was buried
+"under the reading-desk" in the church at Teddington near Hampton Court.
+
+During his lifetime he published _Roman Forgeries_ (1673), an
+unimportant work, and had begun the publication of his _Christian
+Ethics_, which appeared, after his death, in 1675. His _Poems_ and his
+_Centuries of Meditations_ remained in MS. unknown until they were
+discovered in a London bookstall about the year 1897, and their
+authorship was proved by Bertram Dobell who published the _Poems_ in
+1903, and the _Centuries of Meditations_ in 1908. There still remains
+in MS. an octavo volume of meditations and devotions.
+
+Traherne's poems show that he always dwelt near the {328} gate of
+Heaven and was easily aware of the "ancient Light of Eden." An
+accidental bit of gossip, reported in John Aubrey's _Miscellanies_,
+indicates that he was subject to psychical experiences of an unusual
+sort, and the poet himself has reported an impressive crisis-experience
+when he chose his destiny and settled his preference for inward
+treasures, even though it meant, as with George Fox, the wearing of a
+leather suit.
+
+"When I came into the country, and being seated among silent trees, and
+meads and hills, had all my time in mine own hands, I resolved to spend
+it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of happiness, and to satiate
+that burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from my youth. In
+which I was so resolute, that I chose rather to live upon ten pounds a
+year, and to go in leather clothes, and feed upon bread and water, so
+that I might have all my time clearly to myself, than to keep many
+thousands per annum in an estate of life where my time would be
+devoured in care and labour. And God was so pleased to accept of that
+desire, that from that time to this, I have had all things plentifully
+provided for me, without any care at all, my very study of Felicity
+making me more to prosper, than all the care in the whole world. So
+that through His blessing I live a free and a kingly life as if the
+world were turned again into Eden, or much more, as it is at this
+day."[20]
+
+Like his predecessors in this faith, Traherne is never tired of
+declaring the infiniteness of the human soul. Eternity is in the human
+heart, if only the way of the open door is taken, if only the eyes are
+opened to see. God, he says, has made our spirits "centres in
+eternity," opening upon "innumerable infinities." The Ocean is but a
+drop of a bucket to the immensity of the soul, with its abysmal deeps
+and its immeasurable capacities. It is the very essence and being of
+the soul to feel infinity, for "God is ever more near to us than we are
+to ourselves, so that we cannot feel our own souls without feeling
+Him."[21] "You are never," he says, "your true self, till you live
+{329} by your soul more than by your body, and you never live by your
+soul until you feel its incomparable excellence."[22] Its nobility is
+revealed by its insatiable hungers, its surpassing dignity is declared
+by its endless wants, its inability to live by bread alone. "As by the
+seed we conjecture what plant will arise, and know by the acorn what
+tree will grow forth, or by the eagle's egg what kind of bird; so do we
+by the powers of the soul upon earth, know what kind of Being, Person,
+and Glory will be in the Heavens, where its latent powers shall be
+turned into Act, its inclinations shall be completed, and its
+capacities filled."[23]
+
+Not only in a primitive Eden, but in the world as we know it, with its
+black and white, man always bears within himself the mark of a heavenly
+origin, and has the quickening Seed of God in the depth of his soul:
+"The Image of God is seated in the lineaments of the soul." Man is the
+greatest of all miracles; he is "a mirror of all Eternity."[24] His
+thoughts run out to everlasting; he is made for spiritual supremacy and
+has within himself an inner, hidden life greater than anything else in
+the universe.[25] We are "nigh of kin to God" and "nigh of kin
+
+ To those pure things we find
+ In His great mind
+ Who made the world."[26]
+
+There is
+
+ A Spiritual World standing within
+ An Universe enclosed in Skin.[27]
+
+
+With the same enthusiasm with which he proclaims the divine origin and
+the heavenly connections of the soul, Traherne also proclaims the glory
+and beauty of the visible world as a revelation of God.
+
+ Eternity stooped down to nought
+ And in the earth its likeness sought.[28]
+
+The world is not God, for He is Spirit, but the world is "a glorious
+mirror" in which the verities of religion are {330} revealed and in
+which the face of God is at least partially unveiled.[29] It is here
+in this "mirror" that the clairvoyant eye discovers God's being,
+perceives His wisdom, goodness, and power, guesses out the footsteps of
+His love, and finds promises and pledges of the larger fulfilment of
+that love. Here in the world, which is full of "remainders of
+Paradise," is surely the visible porch or gate of Eternity.[30] It is
+easy to believe that God has given us His Son when once we have seen
+the richness of the world which He has given us.[31] But the world is
+never "ours" until we learn how to see it and enjoy it in its beauty,
+even in the most common things, and until we discover that all its
+service and all its excellency are spiritual: "Pigs eat acorns, but
+neither consider the sun that gave them life, nor the influences of the
+heavens by which they were nourished, nor the very root of the tree
+from whence they came. This being the work of Angels who in a wide and
+clear light see even the sea that gave them [the acorns] moisture: And
+feed upon that acorn spiritually while they know the ends for which it
+was created, and feast upon all these as upon a World of Joys within
+it: while to ignorant swine that eat the shell it is an empty husk of
+no taste nor delightful savour."[32]
+
+Men, as well as angels, can learn to use the world spiritually--can
+learn to see how rough, common things are part of "the divine
+exchequer"; how a grain of sand exhibiteth the wisdom of God and
+manifesteth His glory.[33] With this prelude, Traherne gives his
+glowing account of the true, spiritual way to enjoy the world.
+
+"Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you
+awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father's Palace; and look upon
+the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys: having such a
+reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. The bride of
+a monarch, in her husband's chamber, hath no such causes of delight as
+you.
+
+"You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself {331} floweth in
+your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the
+stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world,
+and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as
+well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as
+misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.
+
+"Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your
+jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as
+with your walk and table; till you are intimately acquainted with that
+shady nothing out of which the world was made; till you love men so as
+to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own;
+till you delight in God for being good to all; you never enjoy the
+world. Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more
+present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties
+there, than in your own house; till you remember how lately you were
+made, and how wonderful it was when you came into it: and more rejoice
+in the palace of your glory, than if it had been made but to-day
+morning.
+
+"Yet further, you never enjoy the world aright, till you so love the
+beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade
+others to enjoy it. And so perfectly hate the abominable corruption of
+men in despising it, that you had rather suffer the flames of Hell than
+willingly be guilty of their error. . . . The world is a mirror of
+infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no
+man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men
+disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God. It is more to man since he is
+fallen than it was before. It is the place of Angels and the Gate of
+Heaven. When Jacob waked out of his dream, he said, 'God is here, and
+I wist it not. How dreadful is this place! This is none other than
+the House of God, and the Gate of Heaven.'"[34]
+
+But notwithstanding his exuberant and overflowing joy in creation,
+Traherne is conscious that the world has {332} its "dreggy parts," that
+it has been "muddied" by man's misuse of it, and that the havoc of sin
+is apparent. The light which shined in infancy becomes eclipsed as the
+customs and manners of life close down over it and cover it. Men's
+mouths are full of talk of fleeting, vulgar, and worthless things, and
+they speak no syllable of those celestial and stable treasures which
+form the only wealth of life. The emphasis in education is on the
+wrong things. So with much ado the innocent child is "corrupted and
+made to learn the dirty devices of the world," which he must again
+unlearn and become a little child once more in the Kingdom of God.[35]
+The taint, however, is not in the native structure of the soul, it is
+not through a biological transmission, it is due to false training--it
+is from the parents' lives rather than their loins. Let parents, he
+says, who desire holy children learn to make them possessors of divine
+things _betimes_. It is "deadly barbarous and uncouth" to "put grubs
+and worms" into little children's minds, to teach them to say this
+house is mine, this bauble is a jewel, this gew-gaw is a fine thing,
+this rattle makes music, when they ought to be made instead to see the
+spiritual glory of the earth and sky, the beauty of life, the sweetness
+and nobility of Nature, and to live joyously, like birds, in union and
+communion with God. I am sure, he concludes, that barbarous people
+that go naked come nearer to Adam, God, and the Angels, in the
+simplicity of their wealth, than do many among us who partake of what
+we nick-name civility and mode.[36] The entire work of redemption is,
+thus, to restore man to himself, to bring him once more to the Tree of
+Life, to enable him to discover the glory all about him, to reveal to
+him the real values of things, and to bring to birth within him an
+immortal love. The true healing of the soul is always through the
+birth of love. Before a soul loves, it lives only to itself; as soon
+as love is born it lives beyond itself and finds its life in the object
+of its love. It is Christ who first reveals the full measure of love,
+who makes us see the one adequate Object of love, and who {333} forges
+within our human spirits the invisible bonds of a love that binds us
+forever to Him who so loved us. Here in Him--"a Man loving all the
+world, a God dying for mankind"[37]--we see that we are infinitely
+beloved, that the foundations of an eternal Friendship are laid, that
+God is infinitely prone to love, and that true love spares nothing for
+the sake of what it loves--"O miraculous and eternal Godhead suffering
+on a Cross for me!"[38] "That Cross is a tree set on fire with
+invisible flame which illuminateth all the world. The flame is love:
+the love in His bosom that died upon it."[39]
+
+But there is no salvation for us in the Cross until it kindles the same
+flame of love in us, until that immeasurable love of His becomes an
+irresistible power in us, so that we henceforth live unto Him that
+loved us. It must, if it is to be efficacious, shift all our values
+and set us to loving as He loved--"He who would not in the same cases
+do the same things Jesus Christ hath done can never be saved," for love
+is never timorous.[40] The love of Christ is to dwell within us and
+every man is to be the object of it. God and we are to become one
+spirit, that is, one in will and one in desire. Christ must live
+within us. We must be filled with the Holy Ghost, which is the God of
+Love; we must be of the same mind with Christ Jesus and led by His
+Spirit, and we must henceforth treat every man in respect to the
+greatness of Christ's love--this is salvation in Traherne's conception
+of it, and holiness and happiness are the same thing.[41] The Cross
+has not done its complete work for us until we can say: "O Christ, I
+see thy crown of thorns in every eye; thy bleeding, naked, wounded body
+in every soul; thy death liveth in every memory; thy crucified person
+is embalmed in every affection; thy pierced feet are bathed in every
+one's tears and it is my privilege to enter with thee into every
+soul."[42]
+
+However contemplative and mystical the bent of Traherne's mind may have
+been, he always finds the {334} terminus of spiritual life in action,
+indeed, in brotherly service, in what he calls "blessed operations."
+Speaking apparently of himself, he finely says: "He thought it a vain
+thing to see glorious principles buried in books, unless he did remove
+them into his understanding; and a vain thing to remove them into his
+understanding unless he did revive them and raise them up with
+continual _exercise_. Let this therefore be the first principle of
+your soul--that to have no principles or to live beside them is equally
+miserable. Philosophers are not those that speak but do great
+things."[43] "It is," he writes in words which sound like those of his
+contemporary Winstanley, "it is an indelible principle of Eternal
+truth, that practice and exercise is the Life of all. Should God give
+you worlds and laws and treasures, and worlds upon worlds, and Himself
+also in the Divinest manner, if you will be lazy you lose all. The
+soul is made for action and cannot rest till it be employed. . . . If
+therefore you would be happy, your life must be as full of operation as
+God of treasure."[44]
+
+Love, once kindled in the soul, is the mother of all heroic actions;
+love knows how to abound and overflow--the man who has lighted his life
+from Christ's love is constant in trials, patient in sufferings,
+courageous in assaults, prudent in difficulties, victorious and
+triumphant in action.[45]
+
+Traherne shares with Boehme and with the Cambridge Platonists the view
+that Eternity is as much here as anywhere. Those Christians, he
+thinks, who put off felicity and defer their enjoyment with long delays
+"are to be much suspected."[46] "'Tis not," so he states his law,
+"change of place, but glorious principles well practised that establish
+Heaven in the life and soul. An angel will be happy anywhere and a
+devil miserable, because the principles of the one are always good, of
+the other, bad. From the centre to the utmost bounds of the
+everlasting hills all is Heaven before God, and full of {335} treasure;
+and he that walks like God in the midst of them is blessed."[47] "You
+are in Heaven everywhere."[48] The real business of life, as he
+elsewhere declares, is to "piece this life with the life of Heaven, to
+see it as one with all Eternity, a part of it, a life within it,"[49]
+which reminds us of Vaughan's great words:
+
+ I saw Eternity the other night
+ Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
+ As calm as it was bright:
+ And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
+ Driv'n by the spheres,
+ Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
+ And all her train were hurl'd.[50]
+
+
+And with much penetration Traherne tells us that Eternity is not an
+endless addition of "times "--a weak infinite series of durations, but
+rather a Reality in which all true realities abide, and which retains
+in a present now all beginnings and all endings.[51] Eternity is just
+the real world for which we were made and which we enter through the
+door of love.
+
+ It is a spiritual world within,
+ A living world and nearer far of kin
+ To God than that which first He made.
+ While that doth fade
+ This therefore ever shall endure
+ Within the soul as more divine and pure.[52]
+
+
+
+[1] See my _Studies in Mystical Religion_, chap. xix.
+
+[2] Book III. lines 51-55.
+
+[3] Book III. lines 194-197.
+
+[4] Book I. line 18. Since this chapter was written, Alden Sampson's
+_Studies in Milton_ (New York, 1913) has been published. His valuable
+chapter on "Milton's Confession of Faith" reveals in Milton a very wide
+acquaintance with the ideas which I have been tracing, and shows by a
+vast number of quotations how frequently the poet used these ideas
+sympathetically.
+
+[5] Francis Quarles' "My Beloved is Mine."
+
+[6] George Herbert's poem "Man."
+
+[7] Francis Quarles' "Light."
+
+[8] _Centuries of Meditations_ (London, 1908), iii. 16. For details of
+his life and for the story of the discovery of his writings, see the
+Introduction to _The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne_ (1903) by
+Bertram Dobell.
+
+[9] Traherne's pom "Wonder," iii.
+
+[10] _Centuries of Meditations_, iii. 1, 2 and 3.
+
+[11] "Wonder," i.
+
+[12] "The Salutation"
+
+[13] Vaughan's "The Retreat."
+
+[14] Traherne's "The Approach."
+
+[15] _Ibid._
+
+[16] _Centuries of Meditations_, iii. 8.
+
+[17] _Ibid._
+
+[18] "Dumbness."
+
+[19] "The Preparative."
+
+[20] _Centuries of Meditations_, iii. 46.
+
+[21] _Ibid._ ii. 81. See also ii. 70 and 83.
+
+[22] _Centuries of Meditations_, ii. 92.
+
+[23] _Ibid._ iv. 70.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ i. 19, and iv. 81.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ ii. 23.
+
+[26] "My Spirit."
+
+[27] "Fullness."
+
+[28] "The Choice."
+
+[29] _Centuries of Meditations_, ii. 17.
+
+[30] _Ibid._ ii. 1 and 17.
+
+[31] _Ibid._ ii. 6.
+
+[32] _Ibid._ i. 26.
+
+[33] _Ibid._ i. 25 and 27.
+
+[34] _Centuries of Meditations_, i. 28-31.
+
+[35] _Centuries of Meditations_, iii. 7 and 3.
+
+[36] _Ibid._ iii. 11-13.
+
+[37] _Centuries of Meditations_, i. 59.
+
+[38] _Ibid._ i. 67 and 62.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ i. 60.
+
+[40] _Ibid._ iv. 59.
+
+[41] _Ibid._ iv. 28. See also iv. 31.
+
+[42] _Ibid._ i. 86.
+
+[43] _Centuries of Meditations_, iv. 2.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ iv. 95.
+
+[45] _Christian Ethics_, chapter on "Charity."
+
+[46] _Centuries of Meditations_, iv. 9.
+
+[47] _Centuries of Meditations_, iv. 37.
+
+[48] _Ibid._ iv. 38.
+
+[49] _Ibid._ iv. 93.
+
+[50] Vaughan's poem, "The World."
+
+[51] _Centuries of Meditations_, v. 7-8.
+
+[52] Traherne's poem, "Thoughts."
+
+
+
+
+{336}
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+Few words are needed in conclusion to point out the historical
+significance of the movement which we have been studying, and to indicate
+its connection with the rise and development of seventeenth century
+Quakerism. These chapters have presented sufficient historical evidence
+to show that from the very beginning of the Reformation there appeared a
+group of men who felt themselves commissioned, like the prophets of old,
+to challenge the theological systems of the Reformers, and to cry against
+what proved to be an irresistible tendency toward the exaltation of form
+and letter in religion. They were men of intense religious faith, of
+marked mystical type, characterized by interior depth of experience, but
+at the same time they were men of scholarship, breadth and balance.
+
+Their central loyalty was to the invisible Church which in their
+conception was the Body of Christ, forever growing and expanding through
+the ages under the guidance of the ever-present Spirit; and they esteemed
+but lightly the established Churches which seemed to them formed not
+after the pattern in the mount but after very earthly and political
+models. Challenging, as they did, the formulated doctrines of the
+Reformation, the type of Church which was being substituted for the Roman
+Catholic Church, and the entire body of ceremonial and sacramental
+practices which were being put in place of the ancient sacraments of the
+Church, these "prophets" found themselves compelled to discover the
+foundations {337} for a new type of Church altogether, and to feel their
+way down to a new and fundamental basis of religious authority. That
+would be a momentous task for any age, or for any spiritual leaders, and
+we must not demand the impossible of these sixteenth century
+pathbreakers. What they did do consistently and well was to proclaim the
+spiritual character of God as revealed in Christ, the native capacity of
+the human soul for God, the intimate and inherent relationship of the
+divine and human, the progressive revelation of God in history, the
+priority of the inward Word, the august ethical aspect which must attach
+to any religion adequate for the growing race, and the folly of losing
+the heart and spirit of Christianity in contentions over external,
+temporal, and pictorial features of it.
+
+They themselves were not founders of sects or churches. Their sole
+mission was the propagation of a message, of a body of truth and of
+spiritual ideals. They were from the nature of the case destined to be
+voices crying in a wilderness-world, and they were obliged to trust their
+precious cause to the contagion of their word and life and truth. The
+Quakers of the seventeenth century are obviously one of the great
+historical results of this slowly maturing spiritual movement, and they
+first gave the unorganized and inarticulate movement a concrete body and
+organism to express itself through. The modern student, who goes to the
+original expositions of Quakerism to find what the leaders of this
+movement conceived their message and their mission to be, quickly
+discovers that they were not radical innovators setting forth novel and
+strange ideas, but that they were on the contrary the bearers, the
+interpreters, the living embodiment of ideas which have now become
+familiar to the reader of these chapters.
+
+No one has given us a clearer statement of George Fox's mission and of
+the creation of the new "Society" than has the writer of the "Epistle to
+the Reader" in Fox's strange book _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_
+(1659). This "Epistle to the Reader" was {338} written by Edward
+Burrough and was printed, also under the same title, in Burrough's
+_Works_ in 1672.[1] In this striking document the writer gives his
+account of the existing Church, and over against this dark background he
+sets God's new Reformation that is just beginning, of which he feels
+himself to be the divinely sent herald and prophet. "As our minds became
+turned, and our hearts inclined to the Light which shined in every one of
+us," he writes, "we came to know the perfect estate of the Church; her
+estate before the apostles' days, and in the apostles' days and since the
+days of the apostles. And her present estate we found to be as a woman
+who had once been clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, who
+brought forth Him that was to rule the nations; but she [the Church] was
+fled into the wilderness, and there sitting desolate, in her place that
+was prepared of God for such a season, in the very end of which season,
+when the time of her sojourning was towards a full end, then _we_
+[Friends] were brought forth."[2]
+
+In the Light which broke in upon them, he says, they saw that "the world
+was in darkness" and that "anti-Christ was set up in the temple of God,
+ruling over all, having brought nations under his power, and having set
+up his government over all for many ages; even since the days of the
+apostles and true churches hath he reigned.~.~.~. As for the ministry,
+first, looking upon it with a single eye in the Light of the Spirit of
+God which had anointed us, we beheld it clearly _not to be of Christ, nor
+sent of Him, nor having the commission, power, and authority of Christ,
+as His ministry had in the days of true churches; but in all things, as
+in call, practice, maintenance, {339} and in everything else, in fruits
+and effects we found it to disagree, and to be wholly contrary to the
+true ministry of Christ in the days of the apostles_."[3] His charge
+against the ministers of his day is one now very familiar to us: "You
+preach to people what you have studied out of books and old authors, and
+what you have noted down you preach by an hour-glass and not as the
+Spirit of God gives you utterance. You preach other men's words which
+you have collected."[4] The "call" to ministry, he urges, is based upon
+learning acquired in schools, colleges, and universities, and is not of
+the Spirit, and ministers' lives are obvious signs that they are not in
+the true "apostolic succession."[5] "As for all churches (so called),"
+he continues, "we beheld you all in the apostasy and degeneration from
+the true Church, not being gathered by the Spirit of the Lord, nor
+anointed thereby as the true members of Christ ever were, but to be in
+forms of righteousness without power, and imitations without life. All
+the practices of religion we beheld to be without power and life.~.~.~.
+We beheld all professions [of religion] to be but as coverings of
+fig-leaves, while the [inner] nature stood uncondemned and not
+crucified."[6]
+
+He insists that no true and radical reformation of the Church has taken
+place, that the churches of his day still bear the marks of apostasy as
+did the churches before the Reformation occurred: "Do not professors and
+sects of people have the form without the power of godliness? Are not
+all people still covetous and earthly-minded, and given to the world, and
+proud and vain, even such as profess religion? Are not professors as
+covetous and proud as such as do not profess? Are they not given to the
+world, and doth it not show that they are not changed nor translated?
+And is it not manifest that they have taken up the _form_ of the
+apostles' and Christ's words and practices, and are without the {340}
+life, and not guided by the Spirit of Christ and the apostles in their
+praying and preaching?"[7]
+
+Here, with an air of prophet-like boldness and infallibility, we have
+once again an announcement of the inadequacy of the Reformation, the
+formal and external character of prevailing types of religion, and the
+unapostolic nature of the existing churches. The language describing the
+visible church is throughout the language of a "Seeker." "We ceased," he
+says in words that exactly describe the "Seeker," "from the teachings of
+all men, and their words and their worships, and their temples, and all
+their baptisms and churches, and we ceased from our own words and
+professions and practices in religion.~.~.~. We met together often, and
+waited upon the Lord in pure silence from our own words, and harkened to
+the voice of the Lord and felt His Word in our hearts."[8]
+
+The striking difference between him and the contemporary "Seeker" lies in
+the fact that he profoundly believed, that the time of "apostasy" was now
+at an end, that a new "commission" had come, that a real Reformation was
+being set into operation, and that the apostolic Church--the Church of
+Christ, the Church of the Spirit--had appeared as though let down from
+heaven. He relates how the "Lord raised us [Friends] up and opened our
+mouths in this His Spirit," and how "the Light of Christ revealed and
+made known to us all things that pertain to salvation, redemption, and
+eternal life, needful for man to know," and how through the outpouring
+and anointing of the Spirit "the true Church," "the true worship," "the
+true ministry" have come again to the world. He makes such exalted
+claims as these: we received the pouring out of the spirit upon us; the
+gift of God's eternal Spirit was bestowed upon us as in the days of old;
+the deep things of God were revealed to us; the Lord Almighty brought us
+out of captivity and bondage and put an end to sin and death; {341} the
+babe of glory was born in us; we entered into ever-lasting union,
+fellowship, and covenant with the Lord, and we were raised from death to
+Life. And, finally, he announces the new "commission" in positive words
+of glowing faith: "Then having armed us with power, strength, and wisdom
+and dominion, according to His mind, and having taught us in all things,
+and having chosen us unto His work, God put His sword into our and and
+gave us a perfect _commission_ to go forth in His name and authority,
+giving us the Word from His mouth what to cut down and what to preserve,
+and giving us the everlasting gospel to preach."[9]
+
+In the absolute certainty of his divine "commission," he challenges the
+Churches which are defending their authority "with jails and prisons and
+whips and stocks and inquisitions--all Cain's weapons"--to a "trial" of
+faith and spirit and power, like that on Mount Carmel in the days of
+Elijah, "whether it be they or we that are of the true faith and true
+worship of God that the apostles were in."[10]
+
+There can be no doubt, I think, that the writer of this "Epistle to the
+Reader" in _The Great Mystery_, has come out of the "Seeker" movement, or
+that he has "come out" of it only because he believes that he with others
+have found what they sought, and are the seed and nucleus of the true,
+restored, apostolic Church of God. They refuse absolutely to be called a
+sect; and they assume in all their early writings that they are the
+restored Church of Christ, though they seldom use that word "Church"
+because in their thought it was a name associated with the "apostasy,"
+and they preferred to call themselves "the Seed," or "the Children of the
+Light." These were, as I have sufficiently shown, names already in use.
+
+It is an interesting fact that this "Epistle" dates the beginning of the
+new era as 1652--"it is now {342} about seven years since the Lord raised
+us up in the North of England and opened our mouths in this His
+Spirit"[11]--and that it locates the springing forth of "the Seed" in the
+North of England. It was, we are now well aware, out of the
+Seeker-groups of the northern counties of England that the new "Society"
+was actually born, and it grew, like a rolling snowball, as it gathered
+in the prepared groups of "Seekers," both north and south in England, and
+a little later in America.[12]
+
+The creation of the Quaker "Society" was not the work of any man; the
+groups were there before the formative leader appeared on the scene. In
+fact the very term "Quaker," which was soon fixed upon the new movement
+as the popular name for it, had already been in use--at least as far back
+as 1646--for the members of some of these highly emotional communities.
+As soon as these groups--intense in their expectations--found a leader
+who was already raised to an impelling conviction of immediate contact
+with God and of definite illumination by the living Christ, and possessed
+of an overmastering _sense of mission_, the effect was extraordinary.
+The account of what happened is, we may be sure, none too strong: "The
+gift of God's eternal Spirit was poured upon us as in days of old, our
+hearts were made glad, our tongues were loosed, and we spake with new
+tongues as the Lord gave us utterance and as His Spirit led us."[13]
+Profound psychological experiences occurred; they felt themselves
+baptized together, fused and formed into one group-spirit, swept into
+trembling as by a mighty rushing wind, and carried beyond their common
+ordinary range of thought and power and utterance. Their
+group-experiences of a common divine Spirit coming upon their lives from
+beyond themselves, their discovery that God was in their midst, that
+gifts were conferred upon them, and, above all, Fox's compelling sense of
+apostolic mission--a conviction which was, as it always is,
+contagious--were {343} grounds enough to change these Seeker-groups into
+the seed and nucleus of a Body possessed of the faith that the
+long-expected Church of the Spirit had at last come. They rose to the
+group-consciousness that they were the beginners, in modern times, of a
+Church of the spiritual order, and a community-loyalty was born which
+gave the movement great conquering power and an amazing capacity for
+endurance and suffering.
+
+In Fox we have a person of extraordinary psychical experiences and of
+dynamic leadership, and in him the "prophetical" and "enthusiast" traits
+of the movement are strikingly in evidence. He reveals in a variety of
+ways his connections with the great body of spiritual ideas that had been
+accumulating for more than a century before his time, but for the most
+part these influences worked upon him in sub-conscious ways as an
+atmosphere and climate of his spirit, rather than as a clearly conceived
+body of truth which he got by reading authors and which he apprehended
+through clear intellectual processes. He can be rightly appreciated only
+as he is seen to be a potent member of an organic group-life which formed
+him as much as he formed it.
+
+The expositions, however, of the more trained and scholarly Quakers show
+an explicit acquaintance with the writings of these men whom we have been
+studying, and they cannot be adequately understood in isolation. The
+fruits of reading and of contact with a wider intellectual world are
+clearly in evidence, and the ideas and the peculiar phrases of the
+spiritual reformers "pass and come again" in their voluminous works.
+Robert Barclay is the chief literary exponent of Quakerism. His range of
+familiarity with religious and theological literature is very extensive,
+and he shows intimate acquaintance with contemporary thought. For him,
+as for his spiritual predecessors, the existing Church is "in apostasy";
+it has departed from "the simplicity and purity of the gospel as it was
+in the apostles' days." Christian faith has become "burdened with
+manifold inventions and traditions, with various notions and opinions"
+which {344} have been "substituted instead" of the true religion of
+Christ.[14]
+
+The Quaker interpreters all unite in treating "notions and opinions"--or,
+to use their sweeping phrase, "notional religion"--as barren
+_substitutes_ for a true religion of spiritual reality, which for them is
+always born in a first-hand experience of Christ as the inner spirit and
+life and power of one's entire being and activity. A good specimen
+instance of this position is found in William Penn's Tract, "A Key
+opening the Way to every Capacity," etc.[15] He says: "It is not
+Opinion, or Speculation, or Notions of what is true; or Assent to or
+Subscription of Articles or Propositions, tho' never so soundly worded,
+that makes a Man a true Believer or a true Christian." "Phrases of
+Schoolmen," "notions of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," "conceptions of
+man's meer Wit," "superfining interpretations of Scripture texts," he
+declares to be very chaffy substitutes for a consciousness of Christ's
+Life and Light within, conformity of mind and practice to the will of
+God, and the actual formation of Christ in the inner self.[16] The
+further Reformation, upon the necessity of which he insists, is one that
+will take Christianity not only beyond and beneath outward ceremonies,
+but beyond and beneath all formulations of creed and doctrine, and that
+will ground and establish it in the experience and attitude and verifying
+power of the person's life.[17] This is precisely what all these teachers
+of spiritual religion have all the time been demanding.
+
+The Quaker view of the moral and dynamic character of saving faith, the
+view that justification is a vital process and not merely a forensic
+scheme, is, in heart and essence, indistinguishable from the central
+teaching of these spiritual predecessors of the Quakers. No Quaker has
+presented this view in a more compact, and at the same time adequate way
+than has Barclay in one of his {345} important early Tracts: "The manner
+and way whereby Christ's righteousness and obedience, death and
+sufferings, become profitable unto us and are made ours, is by receiving
+Him, and becoming one with Him in our hearts, embracing and entertaining
+that holy Seed, which as it is embraced and entertained, becometh a holy
+birth in us~.~.~. by which the body of sin and death is done away, and we
+cleansed, and washed, and purged from our sins, _not imaginarily_, but
+really; and we are really and truly made righteous.~.~.~. Christ Himself
+revealed in us, indwelling in us. His life and spirit covering us--that
+is the ground of our justification."[18]
+
+The root principle of Quakerism is belief in a divine Light, or Seed of
+God, in the soul of man. All of the multitudinous Quaker books and
+tracts bear unvarying testimony to that, and all their contemporary
+accounts make that faith, that principle, their _organizing idea_. What
+they all say is that there is a Light in man which shines into his
+darkness, reveals his condition to him, makes him aware of evil and
+checks him when he is in the pursuit of it; gives him a vision of
+righteousness, attracts him toward goodness, and points him infallibly
+toward Christ from whom the Light shines. This Light is pure, immediate,
+and spiritual. It is of God, in fact is God immanently revealed.[19]
+
+Then, again, the figure is changed and what was called Light is now
+called "Seed," and it is thought of as a resident germ of divine Life
+which, through the active co-operation of the individual, produces a new
+creation within, and makes the person through and through of a new nature
+like itself.[20] It is also frequently called "the Word of God," or
+"Grace of God," or "That of God in you," or "Christ within," or "the
+Spirit," or "the Kingdom within you." "By this Seed, Grace, and Word of
+God, and Light wherewith every one is enlightened," {346} Barclay says,
+"We understand a spiritual, heavenly, and invisible Principle in which
+God, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, dwells; a measure [_i.e._ a
+portion] of which divine and glorious Life is in all men as a Seed, which
+of its own nature draws, invites, and inclines to God. This some call
+_vehiculum dei_, or the spiritual Body of Christ, the flesh and blood of
+Christ, which came down from heaven, of which all saints do feed and are
+thereby nourished unto eternal life."[21] But under whatever name it
+goes, it is always thought of as a _saving Principle_. He who says yes
+responds, obeys, co-operates, and allows this resident Seed of God, or
+Christ-Light, to have full sway in him becomes transformed thereby and
+re-created into likeness to Christ, by whom the inner Seed was planted
+and of whose nature it is. The spiritual predecessors of the Quakers, as
+we have seen, all held this view with individual variations of phrase and
+experience. All the Quaker terms for the _Principle_ were used by
+Sebastian Franck and by Caspar Schwenckfeld; and all the men who taught
+the dynamic process of salvation presuppose that something of the divine
+nature, as Light or Seed or Spirit, or the resurrected Christ, is
+directly operative upon or within the human soul. That is, salvation is
+for them more than a moral change, it is a birth-and-life-process,
+initiated and carried through by the _real presence_ of the Divine in the
+human.[22]
+
+The Quakers are perhaps somewhat more emphatic than were their spiritual
+forerunners, with the exception {347} of Schwenckfeld, in their
+declarations that this Seed, this Light, is not _natural_. "We assert,"
+William Penn wrote, "the Light of Christ not to be a Natural Light,
+otherwise than as all men born into the world have a Measure of Christ's
+Light, and so in a sense it may be called Natural to all Men. But this
+Light is something else than the bare Understanding which Man hath as a
+Rational Creature."[23] What man does naturally have, in William Penn's
+view, is a _capacity_ for the Light, but the Light itself is from a
+source wholly heavenly and divine. Barclay, in quite Cartesian fashion,
+interprets it to be "a real spiritual Substance," "a substantial Seed"
+from another world, hidden away within man's soul at birth, lying there
+"like naked grain in stony ground," until the child is old enough to feel
+its stirrings and to determine by his own free choices of obedience or
+disobedience to its movings whether it shall grow and develop or not.[24]
+We plainly have here a double world. The once-born man is "natural,"
+though he carries buried deep in the subsoil of his nature a Seed of God,
+a germ of Life drawn from the higher, spiritual world. He may live in
+and under the dominion of either world, but he must choose which it shall
+be. By response to and participation with the divine Seed of
+radio-active spiritual energy, he can become transformed--utterly and
+completely--into a new nature, and can belong here and now to the
+spiritual World which Christ by His victorious Life has brought across
+the chasm and planted in our soil. On the other hand, by negligence or
+by disobedience he can live a mere empirical, natural life, and keep his
+inestimable Seed of God buried and forgotten in a region of himself which
+he seldom or never visits.
+
+The Quakers, however, as a consequence of their heightened
+group-consciousness, and as a result of the intense experiences enjoyed
+in their gatherings, exhibited a far greater degree of _enthusiasm_ than
+had appeared in the earlier exponents of the inner Word; and they showed
+a heightened element of _prophetism_, both in their faith {348} and
+practice. They devoutly believed that in them the prophecy of Jeremiah
+had found fulfilment: God had written His Word in their hearts, so that
+they were recipients of His will and His message. The more sure Word of
+prophecy, announced by Peter, had come and the Day Star had risen in
+their hearts. Their Light was to them not only a principle of connection
+with a higher world, a germ of a new nativity, it was also a principle
+and basis for continuous revelation, and for definite openings of light
+and guidance on all matters that concern present-day life and practice.
+"The inward command," Barclay says, "is never wanting in the due season
+to any duty."[25]
+
+Like their predecessors, they did not slight the importance of the
+outward word, the Scriptures. They had an immense reverence for them and
+were diligent in the study and skilful in the use of them, though of
+course they used them in a thoroughly uncritical and unhistorical way, as
+did also their opponents. But they would never allow the Scriptures to
+be called the Word of God or to be treated as God's only revelation of
+Himself to man without a challenge. "The Word of God," Barclay says,
+"is, like unto Himself, spiritual, yea, Spirit and Life, and therefore
+cannot be heard and read with the natural external senses as the
+Scriptures can." Our Master, he adds, is always with us. "His letter is
+writ in our hearts and there we find it."[26] "There is," William Penn
+declares, "something _nearer to us_ than Scriptures, to wit, the Word in
+the heart from which all Scriptures came," though he is very emphatic in
+his claim that Friends never slight the Scriptures and believe in their
+divine authority.[27]
+
+It is not necessary to prolong the exposition of early Quakerism farther.
+The similarity of its fundamental position with that of the preceding
+spiritual reformers is perfectly clear. Quakerism is, thus, no isolated
+or sporadic religious phenomenon. It is deeply rooted and embedded in a
+far wider movement that had been {349} accumulating volume and power for
+more than a century before George Fox became a "prophet" of it to the
+English people. And both in its new English, and in its earlier
+continental form, it was a serious attempt to achieve a more complete
+Reformation, to restore primitive Christianity, and to change the basis
+of authority from external things, of any sort whatever, to the interior
+life and spirit of man.
+
+That the _formulation_ of this vast spiritual Reformation, as presented
+by the men who are studied in this volume, was adequate, I do not for a
+moment assert. The views here expounded in their historical setting are
+plainly hampered by inadequate philosophical and psychological
+presuppositions. They need reconstructive interpretation and a fresh
+re-reading, in terms of our richer experience, our larger historical
+perspective, and our truer psychological conceptions. That work of
+reexamination and reinterpretation, especially of the Quaker movement and
+the Quaker message, is a part of the task undertaken in the historical
+volumes which follow this one in this series. It must suffice for the
+present to have reviewed here the story and the struggles of these brave,
+sincere men and their heroic endeavours to proclaim a spiritual
+Christianity. It has been a privilege to live for a little while with
+this succession of high-minded men, to review for our time their type of
+spiritual religion, and to retrace their apostolic efforts to bring the
+world, with its sins and its tragedies and its inner hungers, back to the
+Father's Love and to the real presence of the eternal Christ. They may
+have failed in their intellectual formulation, but at least they
+succeeded in finding a living God, warm and tender and near at hand, the
+Life of their lives, the Day Star in their hearts; and their travail of
+soul, their brave endurance, and their loyal obedience to vision have
+helped to make our modern world.
+
+
+
+[1] This document, though, as stated above, not written by Fox, had his
+approval, and may be taken as exactly expressing his views and his
+position. Many of the early Quaker books show how remarkable was the
+corporate character and the group-spirit of the "Society" at this period.
+Whatever any individual could contribute was given for the common cause
+and went into the life of the whole. I have given the passages, which I
+have quoted from this "Epistle," in modern English.
+
+[2] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_ (London, 1659), p. B1. Jacob
+Boehme had already set Fox the example of calling the existing Church by
+this opprobrious name. See _The Threefold Life of Man_, vii., 56-58.
+
+[3] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_, p. B3.
+
+[4] _Ibid._ p. A6.
+
+[5] _Ibid._ pp. A5-A7.
+
+[6] _Ibid._ p. B4. This is almost word for word Boehme's view.
+
+[7] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_, p. C3.
+
+[8] _Ibid._ p. B1.
+
+[9] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_, p. B2. I have taken some
+liberty in correcting the grammatical form of the passage quoted, but the
+original sense is preserved.
+
+[10] _Ibid._ p. C2.
+
+[11] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_, p. B.
+
+[12] For evidence of Seeker-groups in America, see my _Quakers in the
+American Colonies_.
+
+[13] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_, pp. B1-B2.
+
+[14] Preface to _A Catechism and Confession of Faith_.
+
+[15] _Works_ (London, 1726), ii. p. 781.
+
+[16] _Ibid._ ii. pp. 781-783.
+
+[17] "Salvation lieth not in literal but in experimental
+knowledge."--Barclay's _Apology_, Props. V. and VI. sec. 25.
+
+[18] Barclay, "Truth cleared of Calumnies," _Works_ (London, 1691), i.
+pp. 1-48.
+
+[19] This view appears _passim_ in the works of Isaac Penington.
+
+[20] See Penington's Tract, "Concerning the Seed of God," _Works_
+(edition of 1761), ii. pp. 593-607.
+
+[21] _Apology_, Props. V. and VI. sec. 13. This passage could be exactly
+paralleled in the writings of Schwenckfeld.
+
+[22] It is interesting to see how closely William Law, the great exponent
+of "Spiritual" Christianity in the eighteenth century, carrying on this
+train of thought in another channel, approaches the Quaker position:
+"Thou needest not run here or there saying, 'Where is Christ?' Thou
+needest not say, 'Who shall ascend into heaven, that is, to bring Christ
+down from above?' or, 'Who shall descend into the deep, to bring up
+Christ from the dead?' For, behold, the Word, which is the Wisdom of
+God, is in thy heart. It is there as a bruiser of Thy serpent, as a
+Light unto thy feet and Lanthorn unto thy paths; it is there as an Holy
+Oil, to soften and overcome the wrathful fiery properties of thy nature,
+and change them into the humble meekness of Light and Love; it is there
+as a speaking Word of God in thy soul; as soon as thou art ready to hear,
+this eternal, speaking Word will speak wisdom and peace in thy inward
+parts, and bring forth the birth of Christ, with all His holy nature,
+spirit, and temper within thee."--"Spirit of Prayer," _Works_, vii. p. 69.
+
+[23] _Works_, ii. p. 780.
+
+[24] _Apology_, Props. V. and VI. sec. 13.
+
+[25] "Truth Cleared of Calumnies," _Works_, i. p. 13.
+
+[26] _Ibid._ i. pp. 13-15.
+
+[27] _Works_, ii. p. 782.
+
+
+
+
+{351}
+
+ INDEX
+
+
+ Abrahams, Galenus, 118, 120-121
+ and George Fox, 122-123
+ discussion with Penn and Keith, 122
+ Acontius, J., 115
+ Agrippa of Nettesheim, Cornelius, 55 _n._, 136-137
+ Althamer, A., 48
+ Ambrose, Saint, 267
+ Anabaptism--
+ characteristics of, 17-18, 28, 31, 81 _n._, 112, 267 _n._
+ attacked by Franck, 48
+ Schwenckfeld and, 80
+ Coornhert and, 112
+ Giles Randall and, 254
+ Anabaptists, xv
+ divisions among, 33
+ Anderdon, John--
+ on Behmenists, 227, 231-232
+ Antinomianism, 238, 241, 254, 263
+ Antinomians, xv
+ Aristotle, 211
+ Arminius, J.--
+ controversy over views of, 114
+ and Coornhert, 107
+ and Whichcote, 289, 294
+ and Culverwel, 289
+ Arnold, Gottfried--
+ on Entfelder, 39
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ on Arminius, 107 _n._
+ on Boreel, 118 _n._
+ Astrology, 134, 137
+ as used by Weigel, 148-150
+ as used by Tentzel, 150 _n._
+ Aubrey, John--
+ on Traherne, 328
+ Augsburg--
+ Anabaptist Synod in, 20, 33
+ Augustine, Saint, 6, 9, 246, 267
+ theology of, 22, 204
+ Automatism--
+ of Jacob Boehme, 162, 207
+
+ Baader, F. von--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 153 _n._
+ Baillie, Robert--
+ on Anabaptism, 254 _n._
+ on Giles Randall, 256 _n._; 262
+ Balling, Peter, 123-124, 128
+ influence of Cartesianism on, 124, 128, 130
+ Barclay, Robert (of Ury), 123
+ influence of Cartesianism on, 124, 347
+ on divine Seed in man, 283, 345-346, 347
+ teaching of, 343, 344-345, 348
+ Barclay, Robert--
+ on Boehme's influence on Quakers, 220 _n._
+ Barneveldt, John of, 114 _n._
+ Baxter, Richard--
+ on Behmenists, 227
+ on Vane, 271, 274
+ on Sterry, 280
+ Behmen, Jacob, 155 _n._ (_see_ Boehme)
+ Behmenists, 227-234
+ and Quakers, 231-233
+ Bellers, John--
+ on John Everard, 253 _n._
+ "Bellius, Martinus," 93, 95
+ Bernard, Saint, 6, 267
+ Bewman, Jacob, 220
+ Beza, T., 95, 290, 294
+ Bible, translations from--
+ by Denck, 21
+ by Castellio, 90, 92
+ by de Valdès, 237
+ by Rous, 267
+ Boehme, Jacob, 43 _n._, 139
+ life and character of, 151-171, 208
+ vision of, 148 _n._, 158, 159-161
+ mysticism of, 154, 159, 201-206
+ automatism of, 162, 207
+ symbolism of, 173
+ view of man, xxx
+ view of God, xli _n._, 35 n; 174-177
+ views on salvation, 170, 190-198, 289, 309
+ views on the universe, 150 _n._, 159-160, 172-189
+ writings of, 151 _n._, 161, 165 _n._
+ in England, 208-220
+ influence on--
+ George Fox, 165 _n._, 170 _n._; 221-227, 338 _n._, 339 _n._
+ Quakers, 220, 233
+ Seekers, 220
+ Isaac Newton, 181 _n._, 234
+ John Milton, 234
+ William Law, 153 _n._, 179, 234
+ Sir Harry Vane, 275
+ and the Behmenists, 227-234
+ and B. Whichcote, 289, 302 _n._
+ Boethius, 105
+ Boreel, Adam, 117-120
+ Borellists--
+ views of, 119-120
+ Bosanquet, Bernard, xxxi _n._
+ Bourne, Benjamin--
+ on Randall, 256 n; 257
+ Boutroux, Émile--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 183 _n._
+ Breen, Daniel van, 117
+ Brooks, Thomas--
+ on Everard, 241
+ Brothers of the Common Life, 4
+ Broussoux, Émile--
+ on Castellio, 88 _n._
+ Browne, Sir Thomas, 275
+ Browning, Robert--
+ on Paracelsus, 138
+ Bucer, Martin, 47
+ Buisson, F.--
+ on Castellio, 88 _n._
+ Bünderlin, Johann--
+ life of, 32-34, 40
+ teaching of, 34-39, 69, 76, 169, 190
+ writings of, 34 _n._
+ a mystic, 35
+ Franck's opinion of, 48
+ Buonarotti, Michael Angelo, 237
+ Burnet, Bishop G.--
+ on Vane, 272
+ on Cambridge Platonists, 289-290
+ Burrough, Edward--
+ on mission of "the Children of Light," 337-341
+
+ Cabala, the--
+ teaching of, 134-136
+ Caird, Edward--
+ on Cartesianism, 125 _n._
+ Calvin, xlix, 121
+ relations with Castellio, 89-91, 93, 96
+ influence on Cambridge Platonists, 290, 294, 295
+ Calvinism--
+ in Holland, 106
+ in England, 279
+ and Arminianism, 114
+ Campanus, Johann, 48, 59
+ Carlyle, Thomas--
+ on Rous, 267
+ Castellio, Sebastian--
+ life, 88-93, 97
+ teachings of, 90, 91, 93-102, 107
+ writings, 90, 92-94, 96, 97, 98, 99 _n._, 101, 103 _n._
+ _nom-de-plume_ of, 93, 103 _n._
+ as a Reformer, 103
+ influence in England, 103 _n._, 243
+ on Van der Kodde brothers, 115
+ on Boreel, 118
+ Caton, William--
+ on Castellio, 103 _n._
+ Charles II.--
+ on Vane, 272
+ "Children of the Light," 132, 221, 260, 277, 341
+ Chillingworth, William, 291
+ Christ--
+ in a Faith religion, xxxix-xliv
+ as viewed by--
+ Denck, 25
+ Bünderlin, 37
+ Entfelder, 41, 42
+ Spiritual Reformers, 44, 337
+ Franck, 54, 61
+ Schwenckfeld, 65, 69, 70
+ Castellio, 99-101
+ teachers of "Nature Mysticism," 134
+ Weigel, 142-144
+ Boehme, 183, 185 _n._, 191, 193-194
+ John Sparrow, 216
+ John Everard, 244, 250
+ Pascal, 250 _n._
+ Francis Rous, 269-270
+ Peter Sterry, 284
+ John Smith, 316
+ Thomas Traherne, 332
+ Chrypffs, Nicolaus (_see_ Cusa)
+ Church, the--
+ historical conception of, xlix
+ as conceived by--
+ Montanists, the, xiii
+ Protestant Reformers, l
+ Luther, 8, 121
+ Denck, 38
+ Bünderlin, 38
+ Entfelder, 41
+ Spiritual Reformers, l, 45
+ Franck, 58-59, 145, 199
+ Schwenckfeld, 78-80, 85
+ Seekers, 84, 86, 340
+ Collegiants, 84
+ Borellists, 120
+ Abrahams, 120-121, 122
+ Weigel, 145, 147
+ Boehme, 169-170, 199-201, 226
+ George Fox, 200, 226, 339-340
+ Church, interim, (_see also Sttilstand_)--
+ Coornhert and, 113
+ Cicero, 105
+ Clarendon, Earl of--
+ on Vane, 271, 279
+ Clement of Alexandria, xxxix, 267
+ Colet, John, 236
+ Collegiants, the--
+ and the _Stillstand_, 68 _n._
+ Schwenckfeld and, 84
+ history of, 113-124
+ influence of Descartes and Spinoza on, 123 _seq._
+ Colonna, Vittoria, 237
+ Comans, Michael, 117
+ Commonwealth, English--
+ Reformation in, 266
+ Rous in, 268
+ Vane in, 271-272
+ Puritans in, 290
+ Conscience, liberty of--
+ taught by--
+ Castellio, 93-96
+ Coornhert, 106
+ Boreel, 118
+ Vane, 273, 275
+ Sterry, 286
+ William Caton on, 103 _n._
+ in Holland, 104
+ dangers of, 320
+ Coornhert, D. V.--
+ life, 105-108
+ writings, 105, 106
+ teachings, 106, 108-113
+ and Calvinism, 106, 111
+ and Van der Kodde brothers, 115
+ and Adam Boreel, 118
+ Cotton, John, 292
+ "Covenant of Grace," 274
+ "Covenant of Works," 274, 309
+ Crashaw, Richard, 322
+ Crautwald, Valentine, 67 _n._, 81
+ Cromwell, Oliver, 268, 271, 272, 274, 275, 280
+ Cudworth, Ralph, 280, 290
+ Culverwel, Nathaniel, 319
+ on Arminius, 289
+ Cunitz, M., 47 _n._
+ Curio, Valentin, 18
+ Cusa, Nicholas of, 3, 4
+ translated into English by Everard, 243, 256, 260
+ published by Randall, 256, 260
+
+ Dante, xxiii, 171, 174
+ Dell, William, l, 267 _n._
+ Denck, Hans, 48
+ life of, 18-21
+ writings of, 22 _n._
+ teaching of, xxx, 21-30, 69, 76, 242-243
+ not an Anabaptist, 18
+ begins "Spiritualist" movement, 132, 139, 169, 190
+ Everard's translation of, 242
+ Denqui, John, 242 _n._
+ Descartes, R.--
+ philosophy of, 117, 123-125, 128
+ and Cambridge Platonists, 291
+ Deussen, Paul--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 153 _n._
+ Dilthey, Wilhelm--
+ on justification, 8 _n._
+ Dionysius, the Areopagite, 236, 239
+ his conception of God, xxvii, 247
+ translation of, by Everard, 243
+ influence on Rous, 267
+ on Sterry, 280
+ Dobell, Bertram--
+ on Traherne, 324 _n._; 327
+ Döllinger, Johann--
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ _Dompeldoop_, 116
+ Donne, John, 322
+ Dort, Synod of, 114
+ Dürer, Albrecht, 48
+
+ Ecke, Karl--
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ Eckhart, Meister, 3, 4, 239, 243
+ his conception of God, xxvi, xxvii, 247
+ Ederheimer, Edgar--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 153 _n._
+ Edward VI. of England, 92
+ Ellington, Francis--
+ on Boehme, 221
+ Ellistone, John, 213
+ translates Boehme into English, 213, 217, 221, 234 _n._
+ views of, 217-220, 222
+ Emmanuel College, 279, 290, 291, 306
+ Endern, Carl von, 162 _n._, 165
+ England--
+ influence in--
+ of Castellio, 103 _n._
+ of Schwenckfeld, 84, 87, 103 _n._
+ of Weigel, 139, 141, 146, 148, 150
+ of Boehme, 208-234
+ of Spiritual Reformers, 235, 251, 252, 267, 288
+ of de Valdès, 237-238
+ Quakers in, 132, 221, 227, 337
+ Reformation spirit in, 266-267
+ religious upheaval in, 320
+ Entfelder, Christian--
+ life of, 39, 40
+ writings, 40
+ teaching, 40-43, 69, 169, 190
+ "Enthusiasm," 238
+ "Enthusiasts," xv, 31, 48
+ Erasmus, 34, 51, 55 _n._, 92, 105
+ Christian Humanist, 1 _n._, 3, 47
+ quoted on toleration, 93
+ Erbkam, H. W.--
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ Erigena, 3
+ Etherington, John--
+ on Randall, 255
+ Everard, John--
+ life of, 239-241, 289
+ translations by, 241-243, 250 _n._, 256, 260
+ Sermons, 241
+ teaching, 243-252
+ and Randall, 243 _n._, 256, 260
+ Evil (_see_ Sin)
+
+ Faith--
+ definition of, xxxix
+ in "spiritual" religion, xv
+ as an approach to religion, xxxviii-xlv
+ magic reliance on, 75
+ Confessions of, 118
+ Confessions of, source of divisions, 115
+ view of, held by--
+ Luther, xxxix, 5-11, 75
+ Schwenckfeld, 75, 77-78
+ Castellio, 100
+ Coornhert, 109-110
+ Weigel, 146
+ Boehme, 195-198
+ de Valdès, 236, 237
+ John Smith, 316
+ Quakers, 344
+ Familism, 238, 241, 254, 255, 256 _n._., 258, 263, 267 _n._
+ Faust, xxiii
+ Ferrar, Nicholas, 237, 238
+ Ficino, Marsilius, 134, 235-236
+ influence on Sterry, 280
+ Fox, George, 328
+ mission of, 337-34l, 349
+ character, 343
+ conception of the Church, 200, 226, 339-341
+ and Abrahams, 122-123
+ and Boehme, 165 _n._, 170 _n._, 221-227, 338 _n._, 339 _n._
+ and Justice Hotham, 210
+ and Henry Vane, 278
+ France--
+ Castellio on conditions in, 101-102
+ Francis of Assisi--
+ and Schwenckfeld, 65
+ Franck, Sebastian, 139
+ Humanist and Mystic, 46, 55, 105
+ life of, 47-52, 92
+ writings, 49, 51
+ teachings, 49, 50, 52-63, 69, 93, 199, 242, 243, 247, 346
+ on the _Stillstand_, 86
+ quoted by William Caton, 103 _n._
+ translated by Everard, 242, 243
+ influence on--
+ Coornhert, 107
+ Boreel, 118
+ Weigel, 145, 146 _n._, 148
+ Boehme, 154, 169, 190
+ Franckenberg, Abraham von--
+ on Boehme, 156, 165
+ Frecht, Martin, 47
+ Freedom--
+ views on, of--
+ Spiritual Reformers, xlix
+ Hans Denck, 22, 23
+ Bünderlin, 35
+ Luther, 70
+ Schwenckfeld, 70, 72
+ Castellio, 93-96, 107
+ Coornhert, 106, 113
+ Randall, 258-259
+ Vane, 273, 275
+ Freedom of conscience in Holland, 104
+ Frettwell, Ralph, 232, 233
+ Furley, Benjamin, 128 _n._
+ collection of books, 258 _n._
+
+ Gairdner, W. H. J., xxvii _n._
+ _Gangraena_, Edwards'--
+ on Giles Randall, 254, 256 _n._, 257, 262
+ Gataker, Thomas--
+ on Giles Randall, 254 ft.
+ Gerson, 6
+ Gichtel, J. G.--
+ on Boehme, 153 _n._
+ Gnosticism--
+ view of man in, xii, xiii
+ seven qualities in, 180 _n._
+ God--
+ as conceived--
+ in a Faith religion, xliv
+ by Reason, xxxv-xxxviii
+ by Spiritual Reformers, xlvii, 44
+ by Mystics, xxiv, xxvii-xxviii, 247
+ by Luther, 10, 11
+ by Denck, 22-26
+ by Bünderlin, 35-37
+ by Entfelder, 40
+ by Castellio, 99
+ by Descartes, 125
+ by Spinoza, xxviii, 126-127
+ by Boehme, 35 _n._, 174-177
+ in _The Light on the Candlestick_, 130
+ in the Cabala, 134-135
+ by Justice Hotham, 210
+ by Everard, 246-248
+ by Randall, 260-261, 262
+ Goeters, W.--
+ on Collegiants, etc., 104 _n._
+ "Gomarists," 114
+ Gonzaga, Giulia, 237
+ Goodwin, John--
+ on Randall, 257
+ Grace--
+ salvation by, 75, 99
+ "Covenant of, the," 274
+ as conceived by--
+ the Remonstrants, 114
+ Boehme, 170, 191
+ Gregory of Nazianzen, 267
+ Gregory of Nyssa, 267
+ Gregory Thaumaturgus, 307
+ Grocyn, 236
+ Grotius, Hugo, 114 _n._
+ Grützmacher, R. H.--
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ on Boehme, 168
+
+ Hagen, Carl--
+ on Bünderlin, 34 _n._
+ Haldane, E. S.--
+ on Descartes, 124 _n._
+ Hales, John, 291
+ Harford, Rapha--
+ on Everard, 240, 241
+ Harless, von--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._
+ Harnack, A.--
+ on Luther, 15
+ on Irenaeus, 71 _n._
+ Hartmann, Franz--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._
+ Hartranft, C. D.--
+ editor of _Corpus Schwenchfeldianorum_, 64 _n._
+ Heaven--
+ as conceived by--
+ Spiritual Reformers, xlviii
+ Weigel, 147
+ Boehme, 179, 186-188, 289, 302 _n._, 312, 334
+ Milton, 187 _n._
+ Everard, 252
+ Whichcote, 289, 301-302, 312
+ John Smith, 312-313
+ Thomas Traherne, 334-335
+ Heberle--
+ on Denck, 17 _n._
+ Hegel, G. W. F.--
+ on nature of consciousness, xxxii
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 195 _n._
+ Hegler, A.--
+ on Franck, 48 _n._
+ Hell--
+ as conceived by--
+ Spiritual Reformers, xlviii
+ Weigel, 147
+ Boehme, 179, 186-188, 289, 302 _n._, 312, 334
+ Milton, 187 _n._
+ Whichcote, 289, 301-302, 312
+ John Smith, 312-313
+ Thomas Traherne, 334-335
+ Heppe, H.--
+ on Collegiants, 104 _n._
+ Heraclitus, 63
+ Herbert, George, 237, 322
+ "Hermes Trismegistus," 53, 136 _n._, 210
+ translated by Everard, 243
+ Hetzer, Ludwig, 19, 21
+ Hill, Thomas, 291
+ Hinkelmann, Dr., 167
+ Hobbes, Thomas, 291
+ Hoffman, Melchior, 33
+ Holland--
+ Collegiants in, 68 _n._, 84, 86, 113-124
+ William Caton in, 103 _n._
+ disciples of Castellio in, 102, 103
+ religious liberty in, 104
+ Calvinism in, 106
+ Hotham, Charles--
+ on Boehme, 209, 211, 221
+ Hotham, Durant--
+ on Boehme, 209-210, 211, 221, 222
+ and George Fox, 210
+ views of, 211-212
+ Howgil, Francis, 231
+ Hübmaier, Balthasar, 40
+ Hügel, Friedrich von, xlii
+ Humanists--
+ finding a new world, 1-3
+ view of man, 2, 4, 19, 69
+ view of "Hermes Trismegistus," 243
+ in England, 235-236
+ influence on--
+ Spiritual Reformers, xxx, 289
+ Denck, 18, 19
+ Franck, 46, 47
+ Castellio, 89
+ Coornhert, 105-106
+ Cambridge Platonists, 289
+ Thomas Traherne, 323
+ Hutchinson, Anne, 274
+ Hutten, Ulrich von, 47
+ Hylkema, C. B.--
+ on Collegiants, 104 _n._
+ on Boreel, 118 _n._
+
+ _Imitation of Christ, The_, 4, 267
+ Immortality--
+ John Smith on, 314
+ Independency, 268
+ Inquisition, Spanish, 106
+ Irenaeus, 71
+ Israel, A.--
+ on Weigel, 140 _n._
+
+ Jarrin, Charles--
+ on Castellio, 88 _n._
+ Job, xxiii
+ Joris, David, 108
+ Justification--
+ mediaeval conception of, 8 _n._
+ as conceived by--
+ Luther, 8 _n._, 19, 74
+ Schwenckfeld, 75, 77
+ John Smith, 310
+ the Quakers, 344
+
+ Keith, George, 122, 233
+ Keller, L.--
+ on Denck, 17 _n._, 18 _n._
+ Kempis, Thomas à, 267
+ Kessler, J., 18 _n._
+ Kober, Dr. Tobias, 165
+ Kodde, Giesbert Van der--
+ founder of Collegiants, 115-116
+ Kodde, John Van der, 115, 117
+ Kodde, William Van der, 115
+ Kolde, Th., 20 _n._
+
+ Ladders, mystical, xxiii _n._
+ Langcake, Thomas, 234 _n._
+ "Latitude-men," 279, 288-291
+ Law, William--
+ on Boehme, 153 _n._, 179, 234
+ on Inner Word, 346 _n._
+ Leade, Jane, 228, 230, 232 _n._, 233
+ Lee, Francis, 230-231, 233
+ Letter, the--
+ _versus_ the Spirit in--
+ Denck, 28-29
+ Bünderlin, 36-39
+ Entfelder, 41-43
+ Schwenckfeld, 72-74
+ Franck, 60-62, 154, 245, 317
+ Castellio, 101
+ Coornhert, 108-109
+ _The Light on the Candlestick_, 130
+ Weigel, 148
+ Boehme, 169-170, 201
+ John Ellistone, 217-218
+ Everard, 241, 245-246, 251
+ Randall, 263
+ Rous, 269
+ Vane, 276
+ Sterry, 285
+ John Smith, 316-318
+ Liegnitz Pastors, 67 _n._
+ _Life and Light of a Man in Christ Jesus, The_, 263-265
+ "Light, Children of the," 132, 221, 260, 277, 341
+ Light, Inward, 129-132 (_see_ Inward Word)
+ _Light on the Candlestick, The_, 123, 128
+ teaching of, 128-132
+ circulated as Quaker Tract, 128
+ Linacre, Thomas, 236
+ Loofs, F.--
+ on Luther, 13
+ Lucifer, 178, 185, 192, 234
+ Luther, Martin--
+ child of the people, 4, 9
+ influence of mystics on, 6, 7, 9
+ influence of Humanists on, 7, 8
+ discovers way of Faith, xxxix, 5-8, 15
+ theology of, 9-14, 19, 70, 76
+ as a Reformer, 14-16, 12l
+ quoted on Toleration, 93
+ influence on--
+ Franck, 47
+ Schwenckfeld, 65-69
+ Boehme, 154
+
+ Magic--
+ in use of words, xi
+ as an aspect of--
+ the Sacraments, 13
+ Justification, 75
+ Sacerdotalism, 79
+ Superstition, 309
+ in the Cabala, 135
+ in Agrippa of Nettesheim, 136
+ in Paracelsus, 137
+ Man--
+ as conceived by--
+ Gnostics, xii, xiii
+ the psychologist, xvii
+ the mystics, xxvi, 70
+ the Spiritual Reformers, xxx-xxxii, xlviii, 337
+ the Humanists, 2, 4, 19, 69
+ Luther, 9, 11-12, 70
+ Denck, xxx, 21-23
+ Bünderlin, 35, 36
+ Franck, 53-55
+ Schwenckfeld, 54, 70, 77, 269
+ Castellio, 99
+ Coornhert, 106
+ Remonstrants, 114
+ Descartes, 124-125
+ Spinoza, 127
+ author of _The Light on the Candlestick_, 130-131
+ exponents of "Nature Mysticism," 133
+ Agrippa of Nettesheim, 137
+ Paracelsus, 138
+ Weigel, 142-145
+ Boehme, xxx, 184-186, 188, 190-191
+ Charles Hotham, 211
+ John Ellistone, 218, 219
+ John Sparrow, 218, 219
+ Everard, 248-250
+ Rous, 268
+ Vane, 276-277
+ Sterry, xxx, 283
+ Robert Barclay, 283, 347
+ Cambridge Platonists, 290
+ Whichcote, 296-297
+ John Smith, 310-311
+ English poets, 322, 323
+ Traherne, 327, 328-329
+ the Quakers, 347
+ Mann, Edward, 233 _n._
+ Martensen, H. L.--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._
+ Martyr, Peter, 236
+ Massachusetts--
+ religious controversies in, 273-274
+ McGiffert, A. C.--
+ on Luther, 15
+ Mennonites, 115
+ views of, 116
+ and Collegiants, 116, 120
+ Mildmay, Sir Walter, 279
+ Millennium, the--
+ Vane on, 275, 277-278
+ Milton, John--
+ on heaven and hell, 187 _n._
+ on strange sects, 214
+ on Vane, 271
+ on Inward Word, 321
+ influence of Boehme on, 234
+ and Sterry, 281
+ and Quakers, 321
+ Ministry--
+ must be divinely ordained, 79
+ in interim-Church, 113
+ among Mennonites, 116
+ among Collegiants, 115, 117
+ as conceived by--
+ Weigel, 146-147
+ de Valdès, 237
+ George Fox, 226, 338-339
+ Montanists establish a "spiritual" church, xiii
+ "Montfort, Basil," 93
+ More, Henry, 118, 280, 319
+ More, Sir Thomas, 236
+ "Morning Meeting," the, of London Friends, 232-233
+ Münzer, Thomas--
+ views on Inward Word, 19
+ Mysticism--
+ characteristics of, xix-xxi, 223
+ limitations of, xxii-xxix
+ negative way of, xxv-xxviii
+ in "spiritual" religion, xv
+ the basis of life, 3, 4
+ a pathway to God, 133
+ of Bünderlin, 35
+ of Entfelder, 41
+ of Franck, 46, 55, 62, 155
+ of Coornhert, 108
+ of Spinoza, 123, 125
+ of Ficino, 134
+ of Paracelsus, 138
+ of Weigel, 141, 155
+ of Boehme, 154-155, 159, 201-206
+ of Randall, 258
+ of Vane, 273
+ of English poets, 323
+ of Traherne, 333-334
+ "Mysticism, Nature," 133-139, 148, 154, 180 _n._
+ Mystics--
+ conception of--
+ man, 70
+ salvation, 75
+ the universe, 155
+ God, xxiv, xxvii-xxviii, 246-247
+ influence on--
+ Luther, 6, 7, 9
+ new views, 136 _n._
+ Coornhert, 108
+ Boreel, 118
+ Everard, 247
+ Rous, 267
+ Sterry, 280
+ Cambridge Platonists, 289
+
+ "Nature Mysticism," 133-139, 148, 154, 180 _n._
+ Neo-Platonism, 134, 136 _n._
+ Neo-Pythagoreanism, 134
+ Newton, Sir Isaac--
+ influence of Boehme on, 181 _n._, 234
+ Nicholas, Henry, 108
+ Nicoladoni, A., 21
+ on Bünderlin, 33 _n._
+ Norris, John, 319
+ Novalis--
+ on Boehme, 153 _n._
+
+ Oaths--
+ views on--
+ of Mennonites, 116
+ of Collegiants, 116
+ Ochino, Bernardino, 236, 237, 238
+ OEcolampadius, 18, 21, 34, 137
+ Oporin, Humanist printer, 92
+ Origen, 267, 307
+
+ Paracelsus, 137-139
+ teaching of, 159 _n._, 184
+ symbolism of, 173 _n._
+ influence on--
+ Weigel, 148, 150 _n._
+ Tentzel, 150 _n._
+ Boehme, 154, 174, 175 _n._
+ Parker, Alexander, 233 _n._
+ Pascal, xxx _n._, 94, 250 _n._, 261 _n._
+ Patrick, Simon (S. P.)--
+ on "Latitude-Men," 288 _n._, 290
+ on John Smith, 305 _n._, 306-308, 319
+ Paul St.--
+ use of word "spiritual," xi
+ Penington, Isaac, xix, xxi, 345 _n._
+ Penn, William--
+ and Abrahams, 122
+ teaching of, 344, 347, 348
+ Pennsylvania--
+ migration of Schwenckfelders to, 83
+ Penny, A. J.--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._
+ Pepys, Samuel--
+ on Vane, 272
+ Perfection, doctrine of--
+ John Sparrow on, 216-217
+ Randall on, 254, 255, 259
+ Perkins, 294
+ Personality, xlix, 8
+ Pfeiffer, F.--
+ on Eckhart, xxvi _n._, xxvii _n._
+ Pflug, Julius, 34
+ Philadelphian Society, the, 230, 23l, 233
+ Philosophy--
+ Greek, 134
+ in England, 235-236, 288, 295
+ Arabian, 134
+ Pico of Mirandola, 134
+ Pirkheimer, 47
+ Plato, xxxiv, 53, 134, 211, 268
+ influence on--
+ Ficino, 235-236
+ Peter Sterry, 280
+ Cambridge Platonists, 289, 290
+ Traherne, 323
+ Platonists, Cambridge, 279, 280, 288-291, 319, 334
+ Plotinus, 3, 53, 211, 236, 239, 280, 289, 290, 323
+ Poiret, Peter--
+ on Boehme, 153 _n._
+ Pordage, John, 227-230
+ on Quakers, 230 _n._
+ Pordage, Samuel--
+ on John Sparrow, 217 _n._
+ Predestination, 99
+ as viewed by--
+ Spiritual Reformers, xlix
+ Coornhert, 111
+ Remonstrants, 114
+ Boehme, 164, 204
+ Presbyterianism, 268, 28l
+ Principles, Three--
+ in Boehme's universe, 183
+ Proclus, 280
+ Psalms, translated by Rous, 267
+ Puritans, 279, 290, 291
+ Pythagoras, 210
+
+ Quakers, the--
+ precursors of, xxxii, 31, 83, 116, 123, 132, 146,
+ 263, 264 _n._, 283, 337, 346, 348
+ circulate _The Light on the Candlestick_, 128
+ influence of Boehme on, 220-227, 233 _n._, 338 _n._
+ influence of Everard on, 252 _n._
+ and the Behmenists, 231-233
+ mission of, 337-341
+ organization of, 341-343
+ views of, 343-348
+ Qualities, Seven--
+ in Jacob Boehme, 180-183, 191
+ in Gnosticism, alchemy, etc., 180 _n._
+ Quarles, Francis, 322, 323
+
+ Randall, Giles--
+ and Everard, 243 _n._, 256, 260
+ life of, 253-254
+ teaching, 254, 255, 260-263
+ translations, 255-256, 258, 260, 261
+ Randall, John, 253
+ Ranterism, 31, 210, 241, 267 _n._
+ among Anabaptists, 33
+ Ranters, 320
+ Raphael, 176
+ Reason--
+ in "spiritual" religion, xv
+ as an approach to religion, xxxii-xxxviii
+ use of, for--
+ Luther, 12
+ Franck, 55
+ Castellio, 98, 101
+ Coornhert, 108
+ Ficino, 235-236
+ Rous, 268
+ Durant Hotham, 210, 211
+ Whichcote, 295, 300 _n._
+ Reformation, the--
+ divisions in, 1, 31, 49, 88, 98-99, 169
+ character of, 43-44, 66-67
+ how to be carried out, 82, 112
+ false course of, 97, 121
+ in England, 266-267
+ Spiritual Reformers and, xiv-xv, xlvi, 336-337, 349
+ Reformer, a--
+ types of, 14-16
+ Denck as, 29
+ Bünderlin as, 43-45
+ Entfelder as, 43-45
+ Franck as, 46
+ Schwenckfeld, 64, 65, 75, 139
+ Castellio as, 103
+ Reformers, Spiritual--
+ type of religion, xxix-xxxii, xlvi-li
+ views of early, 43-45, 76, 133
+ views brought into England, 235
+ mission of, 336-337, 349
+ and Spinoza, 127
+ and Weigel, 139, 148
+ and the Cambridge Platonists, 288-290
+ influence of, on--
+ Coornhert, 107
+ Everard, 239, 251-252
+ Randall, 255
+ Vane, 273
+ Milton, 321
+ Traherne, 323
+ Quakerism, 336-337, 348-349
+ Reforms, Economic and Social, 4
+ Religion, First-hand--
+ Faith as, xlv
+ in "Covenant of Grace," 274
+ as taught by--
+ Denck, 26-27
+ Bünderlin, 37-39
+ Entfelder, 42
+ Franck, 45, 58
+ Schwenckfeld, 71-72
+ Spiritual Reformers, 76
+ Castellio, 90, 100
+ Coornhert, 109
+ Weigel, 141
+ Boehme, 154, 170-171, 192 _seq._
+ Durant Hotham, 212
+ John Ellistone, 217-218
+ de Valdès, 237
+ Everard, 244
+ Rous, 267
+ Vane, 272, 274
+ Whichcote, 296, 297-299, 300-301, 322
+ John Smith, 308, 310, 311-312, 318, 322
+ English poets, 322-323
+ Religion of lay type--
+ Humanism and, 3, 4, 8
+ found in Schwenckfeld Societies, 82-83
+ in Collegiant Societies, 115-117, 120
+ in Congregational Church government, 268
+ Religion, rational type of, xxxii-xxxviii
+ Religion, "spiritual," xlvi
+ in Montanism, xiii
+ in Gnostic sects, xii
+ during Reformation period, xiv-xv
+ three tendencies in, xv, xxix, xlv-xlvi
+ Religion, study of, xv-xix
+ Remonstrants, the--
+ views of, 114
+ Reuchlin, J., 47
+ forerunner of Reformation, 134
+ Richter, Gregorius--
+ and Boehme, 162-164, 166-167, 168
+ Rieuwertz, John, 128
+ Roehrich, Gustave--
+ on Denck, 17 _n._
+ Roth, F.--
+ on Schwenckfeld Societies, 83 _n._
+ Rous, Francis--
+ life, 267-268, 270
+ writings, 268
+ teaching, 268-271
+ Rues, S. F.--
+ on Collegiants, 123 _n._
+ Rutherford, Samuel--
+ on Schwenckfeld, 87
+ on de Valdès, 238
+ on Randall, 254, 258, 262, 263
+ "Rynsburgers," 114 (_see_ Collegiants)
+
+ Sabbath, the--
+ names for, 264 _n._
+ true, for Coornhert, 111
+ Sachs, Hans, 47
+ Sacraments, the use of--
+ as taught by--
+ Luther, 12-14, 19
+ Denck, 27
+ Bünderlin, 37, 39
+ Entfelder, 41-43
+ Franck, 59
+ Schwenckfeld, 67-69, 80-82, 86, 270
+
+ Castellio, 101
+ Coornhert, 110-112
+ Collegiants, 116
+ Borellists, 120
+ Weigel, 142, 147
+ Boehme, 201
+ Behmenists, 232-233
+ Jane Leade, 232 _n._
+ Everard, 251
+ Randall, 254, 255
+ Vane, 273
+ Seekers, 273
+ Whichcote, 302-303
+ Salter, Dr. Samuel--
+ on Whichcote, 291 _n._
+ Saltmarsh, John, 267 _n._
+ Salvation--
+ by Faith, xlii-xliv
+ by works, xlvi, 75
+ view of, as held by--
+ Protestant Reformers, xlvi
+ Spiritual Reformers, xlvii-xlix, 44, 76
+ historic Church, 75, 99
+ Mystics, 75
+ Luther, 10-12, 76
+ Denck, 25-27, 28, 243
+ Bünderlin, 36-38
+ Entfelder, 42
+ Franck, 54-55
+ Schwenckfeld, 70-72, 74-78, 285
+ Irenaeus, 70
+ Castellio, 98, 100
+ Coornhert, 110
+ Remonstrants, 114
+ Weigel, 141
+ Boehme, 170, 190-198, 289
+ de Valdès, 236, 237
+ Everard, 250
+ Sterry, 285
+ Whichcote, 289, 293, 301
+ John Smith, 311-312
+ Traherne, 332-333
+ Quakers, 345, 346-347
+ Sampson, Alden--
+ on Milton, 321 _n._
+ Schellhorn, J. G., 66 _n._
+ Schleiermacher, Friedrich, xxxii
+ Schmalkald League, 69
+ Schneider, Walter--
+ on Adam Boreel, 118 _n._
+ Schweinitz, Sigismund von, 167, 168
+ Schweizer, A.--
+ on Castellio, 88 _n._
+ Schwenckfeld, Caspar, 48
+ as a Reformer, 64, 65, 75, 139
+ life, 65-69
+ teaching, 54, 66, 67, 69-87, 154, 269, 285, 346, 347
+ writings, 64 _n._, 70 _n._
+ organizes Societies, 82-83
+ appearance of views in England, 84, 87, 103 _n._
+ influence on--
+ Weigel, 142, 148
+ Boehme, 154, 156 _n._, 190
+ Scriptures, the--
+ views on, as held by--
+ Luther, 12
+ Denck, 28, 29, 242
+ Bünderlin, 36
+ Entfelder, 42
+ Spiritual Reformers, 44, 251
+ Franck, 58, 60, 6l, 243
+ Schwenckfeld, 73
+ Castellio, 101
+ Coornhert, 108
+ Borellists, 120
+ Boehme, 169, 170, 225
+ John Sparrow, 215, 216, 225
+ George Fox, 225
+ Everard, 245, 251
+ Randall, 255
+ Rous, 269
+ Whichcote, 300
+ John Smith, 317
+ Quakers, 348
+ Scultetus, B., 163 _n._
+ Seekers, the--
+ and the _Stillstand_, 68 _n._
+ view of the Church, 84, 86, 340
+ view of sacraments, 273
+ Schwenckfeld and, 84
+ among the Collegiants, 117, 120, 122
+ in England, 122, 267 _n._
+ Boehme of the type of, 159
+ Boehme's influence on, 220-221
+ Vane one of the, 273
+ and the Quakers, 340-342
+ Seidemann, J. R.--
+ on Münzer, 19 _n._
+ Servetus, 93, 96
+ Sewel, William--
+ on Abrahams, 122 _n._
+ "Signature," 174, 183, 222, 223
+ Silesius, Angelus, 244 _n._
+ Simons, Menno, 112, 121
+ Sin--
+ views of, as held by--
+ Franck, 62
+ Schwenckfeld, 70
+ Castellio, 99
+ Remonstrants, 114
+ Boehme, 154, 155, 177-179, 188-189, 191
+ John Sparrow, 216, 217
+ Sterry, 284
+ Whichcote, 301-302
+ John Smith, 312-313
+ Traherne, 331-332
+ Slee, J. C. Van--
+ on Collegiants, 114 _n._
+ Smith, John--
+ life, 305-306
+ character, 305, 306-308, 318
+ teaching, 308-318, 322
+ Societies--
+ organized by Schwenckfeld, 82-83
+ of Collegiants, 115-117, 119-120, 123
+ Society of Friends--
+ organized by George Fox, 337, 341-343
+ Socrates, xxxiii _n._, 211
+ Sopingius, G., 114
+ Sparrow, John--
+ translates Boehme into English, 213-221, 222, 234 _n._
+ views of, 214-217, 225
+ Spinoza, B.--
+ mysticism of, xxviii, 123, 125
+ Philosophy of, 125
+ and the Spiritual Reformers, 127
+ and the Collegiants, 123, 128
+ Spiritual, the word--
+ Paul's use of, xi
+ in Johannine writings, xii
+ among Gnostics, xii
+ Montanists, xiii
+ Spiritual Reformers, xiv-xv
+ "Spiritualists," 12, 31, 48
+ Spruyt, David, 120
+ Steiner, R.--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._
+ Sterry, Peter--
+ life, 279-281
+ writings, 281
+ teachings, xxx, xxxiv, 281-287
+ _Stillstand_, the--
+ Schwenckfeld and, 67, 86, 273
+ Franck and, 86
+ revived by Collegiants and Seekers, 68 _n._
+ Vane adopts type of, 273
+ Stoddart, A. M.--
+ on Paracelsus, 137 _n._
+ Stoicism, 134
+ Stoupe--
+ on Collegiants, 119
+ Strobel, G. T.--
+ on Münzer, 19 _n._
+ Sub-conscious, the, xxviii-xxix
+ Swinburne, A. C., 173
+
+ Tauler, xxvi, 3, 4, 6, 19, 141, 239, 243, 253 _n._, 267
+ his conception of God, 247
+ Taylor, Jeremy, 291
+ Taylor, Thomas--
+ on Boehme, 220
+ "Temperature," 178, 181, 185
+ Tentzel, A., 242
+ use of astrology by, 150 _n._
+ _Theologia Germanica_, xxvi _n._, 4, 6, 239, 263
+ translated by--
+ John Theophilus (Castellio), 103 _n._, 243, 256
+ Everard, 243
+ Randall, 256-257, 258
+ influence on Weigel, 141
+ Theophilus, John (Castellio), 103 _n._, 243
+ Thornton, William, 220
+ Tilken, Balthazar, 170
+ Traherne, Thomas--
+ life, 323-324, 327, 328
+ writings, 327
+ teaching, 322, 324-327, 328-335
+ Trithemius, 137
+ Troeltsch, E.--
+ on Luther, 15 _n._
+ on Franck, 47 _n._
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ Tuckney, Dr. Anthony, 279, 291
+ correspondence with Whichcote, 292-296, 302
+ Tulloch, John--
+ on Cambridge Platonists, 303 _n._, 305
+ Tully, 290
+ Turner, Wyllyam, 84
+
+ Underhill, Evelyn, x
+ Universe, the--
+ as conceived--
+ in a rational religion, xxxii-xxxviii
+ by Bünderlin, 35
+ by Entfelder, 40
+ in "Nature Mysticism," 133
+ in the Cabala, 135
+ by Agrippa of Nettesheim, 137
+ by Paracelsus, 138-139
+ by Weigel, 148
+ by Boehme, 150 _n._, 159-160, 172-189
+ by John Sparrow, 214
+ by John Ellistone, 219
+ by Everard, 248
+ by Vane, 276-278
+ by Sterry, 282
+ by John Smith, 314-316
+ by Traherne, 329-331
+ Vadian, 21
+ Valdès, Alfonso de, 236
+ Valdès, Juan de--
+ life, 236-237
+ teaching, 237
+ influence in England, 237-238
+ Vane, Sir Harry--
+ life, 271-274
+ teaching, 274
+ and George Fox, 278
+ and Sterry, 280
+ Vaughan, Henry, 322, 326, 335
+ Veesenmeyer--
+ on Bünderlin, 33 _n._
+ on Entfelder, 40
+ Vermigli, Pietro Martire, 236, 237, 238
+
+ Wallace, William, xxxvii
+ Walther, Dr. B., 165
+ Walton, Christopher--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 179 _n._
+ on Jane Leade, 230
+ War--
+ views of Collegiants on, 117
+ views of Boehme on, 199
+ Ward, George--
+ on Boehme, 234 _n._
+ Ward, James, xxxvi
+ Warmund, Church of, 115-116
+ Weigel, Valentine--
+ life, 139-140, 148 _n._
+ teaching, 141-150
+ writings, 141, 145, 148
+ influence on Boehme, 139, 148, 150 _n._, 154, 156 _n._, 169, 190
+ influence in England, 139, 141, 146, 148, 150
+ Weissner, Dr. Cornelius, 163, 165
+ Whichcote, Benjamin--
+ life, 279, 289, 291-293
+ teaching, 293-304
+ and Dr. Tuckney, 292-295
+ and John Smith, 306
+ Whitaker, Richard--
+ on Boehme, 208 _n._
+ Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, xxxviii
+ Williams, Roger--
+ on Vane, 275
+ Winstanley, Gerard, 267 _n._, 334
+ Winthrop, John, 274, 275
+ Word of God, Inward--
+ as taught by--
+ the Spiritual Reformers, xxx, xxxviii, li, 32, 44, 337
+ Thomas Münzer, 19
+ Ludwig Hetzer, 19
+ Denck, 24, 27, 28-30, 243
+ Bünderlin, 36-39
+ Entfelder, 41
+ Franck, 53, 56-58, 346
+ Schwenckfeld, 66, 72, 346, 347
+ Castellio, 101
+ Coornhert, 108-109
+ _The Light on the Candlestick_, 129-132
+ Weigel, 147
+ Boehme, 169
+ John Sparrow, 214-216
+ George Fox, 215
+ John Ellistone, 218
+ de Valdès, 238
+ Everard, 246, 251-252
+ Randall, 263
+ Rous, 268-269
+ Vane, 276, 279
+ Milton, 321
+ William Law, 346 _n._
+ root principle of Quakerism, 345, 348
+ Wordsworth, William, xxiii, xxxv
+ Worthington, John--
+ on John Smith, 306, 307
+
+ Zwickau Prophets, 12
+ Zwingli, 121
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPIRITUAL REFORMERS IN THE 16TH &
+17TH CENTURIES***
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th
+Centuries, by Rufus M. Jones
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries
+
+
+Author: Rufus M. Jones
+
+
+
+Release Date: March 28, 2008 [eBook #24934]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPIRITUAL REFORMERS IN THE 16TH &
+17TH CENTURIES***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+ Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed
+ in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page
+ breaks occurred in the original book.
+
+
+
+
+
+SPIRITUAL REFORMERS IN THE 16TH & 17TH CENTURIES
+
+by
+
+RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt.
+
+Professor Of Philosophy, Haverford College, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MacMillan and Co., Limited
+St. Martin's Street, London
+1914
+
+Copyright
+
+
+
+
+_OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES_
+
+_EDITED By RUFUS M. JONES_
+
+
+STUDIES IN MYSTICAL RELIGION. (1908.)
+ By Rufus M. Jones.
+
+THE QUAKERS IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES. (1911).
+ By Rufus M. Jones, assisted by Isaac Sharpless and Amelia M. Gummere.
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF QUAKERISM. (1912.)
+ By William Charles Braithwaite.
+
+THE SECOND PERIOD OF QUAKERISM. (_In preparation._)
+ By William Charles Braithwaite.
+
+THE LATER PERIODS OF QUAKERISM. (_In preparation._)
+ By Rufus M. Jones.
+
+
+
+
+{v}
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In my _Quakers in the American Colonies_ I announced the preparation of
+a volume to be devoted mainly to Jacob Boehme and his influence. I
+soon found, however, as my work of research proceeded, that Boehme was
+no isolated prophet who discovered in solitude a fresh way of approach
+to the supreme problems of the soul. I came upon very clear evidence
+that he was an organic part of a far-reaching and significant
+historical movement--a movement which consciously aimed, throughout its
+long period of travail, to carry the Reformation to its legitimate
+terminus, the restoration of apostolic Christianity. The men who
+originated the movement, so far as anything historical can be said to
+be "originated," were often scornfully called "Spirituals" by their
+opponents, while they thought of themselves as divinely commissioned
+and Spirit-guided "Reformers," so that I have with good right named
+them "Spiritual Reformers."
+
+I have had two purposes in view in these studies. One purpose was the
+tracing of a religious movement, profoundly interesting in itself, as a
+great side current of the Reformation. The other purpose was the
+discovery of the background and environment of seventeenth century
+Quakerism. There can be little doubt, I think, that I have here found
+at least one of the great historical sources of the Quaker movement.
+This volume, together with my _Studies in Mystical Religion_, will at
+any rate {vi} furnish convincing evidence that the ideas, aims,
+experiences, practices, and aspirations of the early Quakers were the
+fruit of long spiritual preparation. This movement, as a whole, has
+never been studied before, and my work has been beset with
+difficulties. I have been aided by helpful monographs on individual
+"Reformers," written mainly by German and French scholars, who have
+been duly credited at the proper places, but for the most part my
+material has been drawn from original sources. I am under much
+obligation to my friend, Theodor Sippell of Schweinsberg, Germany. I
+am glad to announce that he is preparing a critical historical study on
+John Everard and the Ranters, which will throw important light on the
+religious ideas of the English Commonwealth. He has read my proofs,
+and has, throughout my period of research, given me the benefit of his
+extensive knowledge of this historical field. I wish to express my
+appreciation of the courtesy and kindness which I have received from
+the officials of the University Library at Marburg. William Charles
+Braithwaite of Banbury, England, has given me valuable help. My wife
+has assisted me in all my work of research. She has read and re-read
+the proofs, made the Index, and given me an immense amount of patient
+help. I cannot close this Preface without again referring to the
+inspiration of my invisible friend, John Wilhelm Rowntree, in whose
+memory this series was undertaken.
+
+
+HAVERFORD, PENNSYLVANIA,
+
+_January_ 1914.
+
+
+
+
+{vii}
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+WHAT IS "SPIRITUAL RELIGION" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MAIN CURRENT OF THE REFORMATION . . . . . . . . . . . 1
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HANS DENCK AND THE INWARD WORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+TWO PROPHETS OF THE INWARD WORD: BUeNDERLIN AND ENTFELDER 31
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SEBASTIAN FRANCK: AN APOSTLE OF INWARD RELIGION . . . . . 46
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CASPAR SCHWENCKFELD AND THE REFORMATION OF THE "MIDDLE WAY" 64
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SEBASTIAN CASTELLIO: A FORGOTTEN PROPHET . . . . . . . . . 88
+
+
+
+{viii}
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+COORNHERT AND THE COLLEGIANTS--A MOVEMENT FOR
+ SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HOLLAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+VALENTINE WEIGEL AND NATURE MYSTICISM . . . . . . . . . . 133
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+JACOB BOEHME: HIS LIFE AND SPIRIT . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+BOEHME'S UNIVERSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+JACOB BOEHME'S "WAY OF SALVATION" . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+JACOB BOEHME'S INFLUENCE IN ENGLAND . . . . . . . . . . . 208
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+EARLY ENGLISH INTERPRETERS OF SPIRITUAL RELIGION:
+ JOHN EVERARD, GILES RANDALL, AND OTHERS . . . . . . . . 235
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HIGH PLACES--ROUS, VANE, AND STERRY 266
+
+
+{ix}
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, THE FIRST OF THE "LATITUDE-MEN" . . . 288
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+JOHN SMITH, PLATONIST--"AN INTERPRETER OF THE SPIRIT" . . 305
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THOMAS TRAHERNE AND THE SPIRITUAL POETS OF THE
+ SEVENTEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
+
+
+INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
+
+{x}
+
+ Within thy sheltering darkness spin the spheres;
+ Within the shaded hollow of thy wings.
+ The life of things,
+ The changeless pivot of the passing years--
+ These in thy bosom lie.
+ Restless we seek thy being; to and fro
+ Upon our little twisting earth we go:
+ We cry, "Lo, there!"
+ When some new avatar thy glory does declare,
+ When some new prophet of thy friendship sings,
+ And in his tracks we run
+ Like an enchanted child, that hastes to catch the sun.
+
+ And shall the soul thereby
+ Unto the All draw nigh?
+ Shall it avail to plumb the mystic deeps
+ Of flowery beauty, scale the icy steeps
+ Of perilous thought, thy hidden Face to find,
+ Or tread the starry paths to the utmost verge of the sky?
+ Nay, groping dull and blind
+ Within the sheltering dimness of thy wings--
+ Shade that their splendour flings
+ Athwart Eternity--
+ We, out of age-long wandering, but come
+ Back to our Father's heart, where now we are at home.
+
+
+ EVELYN UNDERHILL in _Immanence_, p. 82.
+
+
+
+
+{xi}
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+WHAT IS "SPIRITUAL RELIGION"
+
+I
+
+There is no magic in words, though, it must be confessed, they often
+exercise a psychological influence so profound and far-reaching that
+they seem to possess a miracle-working efficacy. Some persons live all
+their lives under the suggestive spell of certain words, and it
+sometimes happens that an entire epoch is more or less dominated by the
+mysterious fascination of a sacred word, which needs only to be spoken
+on the house-top to set hearts beating and legs marching.
+
+"Spiritual" has always been one of these wonder-working words. St.
+Paul, in Christian circles, was the first to give the word its unique
+value. For him it named a new order of life and a new level of being.
+In his thought, a deep cleavage runs through the human race and divides
+it into two sharply-sundered classes, "psychical men" and "pneumatical
+men"--men who live according to nature, and men who live by the life of
+the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth
+earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, _empirical_, parts of a vast
+nature-system, doomed, as is the entire system, to constant flux and
+mutability and eventually to irretrievable wreck and ruin; the natural,
+psychical, corruptible man cannot inherit incorruption.[1] On the
+other hand, the pneumatical or spiritual man {xii} "puts on"
+incorruption and immortality. He is a member of a new order; he is
+"heavenly," a creation "not made with hands," but wrought out of the
+substance of the spiritual world, and furnished with the inherent
+capacity of eternal duration, so that "mortality is swallowed up of
+life."[2]
+
+This word, thus made sacred by St. Paul's great use of it to designate
+the new race of the saved, was made the bearer in the Johannine
+writings of a no less exalted message, which has become a living and
+indissoluble part of the religious consciousness of the Christian
+world. "Eternal life"--or, what in these writings is the same thing,
+"life"--comes through the reception of the Spirit, in a birth from
+above. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is
+born of the Spirit is Spirit."[3] When the Spirit comes as the
+initiator of this abundant life, then we "know that we abide in Him and
+He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit," and it becomes
+possible for the Spirit-led person to be guided "into all the truth,"
+to "love even as He loved," and to "overcome the world."[4] Here,
+again, the human race is divided into those who have "received of the
+Spirit," and those who have not so received; those who are "born from
+above" and those who have had only a natural birth; the twice-born and
+the once-born; those who are "of the Spirit," _i.e._ spiritual, and
+those who are "of this world," _i.e._ empirical.
+
+The Gnostic Sects of the second century had one common link and badge;
+they all proposed a "way," often bizarre and strange-sounding to modern
+ears, by which the soul, astray, lost, encumbered, or imprisoned in
+matter, might attain its freedom and become _spiritual_. Most of the
+Gnostic teachers, who in their flourishing time were as thick as
+thistle-downs in summer, conceived of man as consisting of two "halves"
+which corresponded with two totally different world-orders. There was
+in man, or there belonged to man (1) a visible body, which {xiii} was
+again dichotomized, and believed to be composed, according to many of
+the Gnostics, of a subtle element like that of which they supposed Adam
+in his unfallen state was made, which they named the _hylic_ body, and
+a sheath of gross earthly matter which they called the _choical_
+body.[5] There was also (2) another, invisible, "half," generally
+divided into lower and higher stories. The lower story, the psychical,
+was created or furnished by the Demiurge, or sub-divine creator of the
+natural system, while the top-story, or pneumatical self, was a
+_spiritual seed_ derived from the supreme spiritual Origin, the Divine
+Pleroma, the Fulness of the Godhead. Those who possessed this
+spiritual seed were "the elect," "the saved," who eventually, stripped
+of their sheath of matter and their psychical dwelling, would be able
+to pass all "the keepers of the way," and rise to the pure spiritual
+life.
+
+The Montanists launched in the second century a movement, borne along
+on a mountain-wave of enthusiasm, for a "spiritual" Church composed
+only of "spiritual" persons. They called themselves "the Spirituals,"
+and they insisted that the age or dispensation of the Spirit had now
+come. The Church, rigidly organized with its ordained officials, its
+external machinery, and its accumulated traditions, was to them part of
+an old and outworn system to be left behind. In the place of it was to
+come a new order of "spiritual people" of whom the Montanist prophets
+were the "first fruits,"--a new and peculiar people, born from above,
+recipients of a divine energizing power, partakers in the life of the
+Spirit and capable of being guided on by progressive revelations into
+all the truth. To be "spiritual" in their vocabulary meant to be a
+participator in the Life of God, and to be a living member of a group
+that was led and guided by a continuously self-revealing Spirit. This
+Spirit was conceived, however, not as immanent and resident, not as the
+{xiv} indwelling and permeative Life of the human spirit, but as
+foreign and remote, and He was thought of as "coming" in sporadic
+visitations to whom He would, His coming being indicated in
+extraordinary and charismatic manifestations.
+
+This type of "spiritual religion," though eventually stamped out in the
+particular form of Montanism, reappeared again and again, with peculiar
+local and temporal variations, in the history of Christianity.[6] To
+the bearers of it, the historic Church, with its crystallized system
+and its vast machinery, always seemed "unspiritual" and traditional.
+They believed, each time the movement appeared, that _they_ had found
+the way to more abundant life, that the Spirit had come upon them in a
+special manner, and was through them inaugurating a higher order of
+Christianity, and they always felt that their religion of direct
+experience, of invading energy, of inspirational insights, of
+charismatic bestowals, and of profound emotional fervour was distinctly
+"spiritual," as contrasted with the historic Church which claimed
+indeed a divine origin and divine "deposits," but which, as they
+believed, lacked the continuous and progressive leadership of the
+Spirit. They were always very certain that their religion was
+characteristically "spiritual," and all other forms seemed to them
+cold, formal, or dead. In their estimates, men were still divided into
+spiritual persons and psychical persons--those who lived by the "heart"
+and those who lived by the "head."
+
+Parallel with the main current of the Protestant Reformation, a new
+type of "spiritual religion" appeared and continued to manifest itself
+with mutations and developments, throughout the entire Reformation era,
+with a wealth of results which are still operative in the life of the
+modern world. The period of this new birth was a time of profound
+transition and ferment, and a bewildering variety of roads was tried to
+spiritual Canaans and new Jerusalems, then fondly believed to {xv} be
+near at hand. It is a long-standing tragedy of history that the right
+wing of a revolutionary or transforming movement must always suffer for
+the unwisdom and lack of balance of those who constitute the left, or
+extreme radical, wing of the movement. So it happened here. The
+nobler leaders and the saner spirits were taken in the mass with those
+of an opposite character, and were grouped under comprehensive labels
+of reproach and scorn, such as "Antinomians," "Enthusiasts," or
+"Anabaptists," and in consequence still remain largely neglected and
+forgotten.
+
+The men who initiated and guided this significant undertaking--the
+exhibition in the world of what they persistently called "spiritual
+religion"--were influenced by three great historic tendencies, all
+three of which were harmoniously united in their type of Christianity.
+They were the Mystical tendency, the Humanistic or Rational tendency,
+and the distinctive Faith-tendency of the Reformation. These three
+strands are indissolubly woven together in this type of so-called
+spiritual Religion. It was an impressive attempt, whether completely
+successful or not, to widen the sphere and scope of religion, to carry
+it into _the whole of life_, to ground it in the very nature of the
+human spirit, and to demonstrate that to be a man, possessed of full
+life and complete health, is to be religious, to be spiritual. I
+propose, as a preliminary preparation for differentiating this special
+type of "spiritual religion," to undertake a study, as brief as
+possible, of these three underlying and fundamental strands or
+tendencies in religion which will, of course, involve some
+consideration of the inherent nature of religion itself.
+
+For my present purpose it is not necessary to study the twilight
+history of religion in primitive races nor to trace its origins in the
+cradle-stage of human life. Anthropologists are rendering a valuable
+service in their attempts to explore the baffling region of primitive
+man's mind, and they have hit upon some very suggestive clues, though
+so far only tentative ones, to the psychological experiences and
+attitudes which set man's feet on the {xvi} momentous religious trail.
+At every stage of its long and devious history, religion has been _some
+sort of life-adjustment to realities which were felt to be of supreme
+importance either to the individual or to the race_, and it becomes
+thus possible for the scientific observer to note a developmental
+process and to discover a principle which links it in with a universal
+scheme of evolution.
+
+But religion can never be adequately treated either in terms of racial
+origins or of biological history, though there can be no doubt whatever
+that there are genetic and biological factors to be considered. Nor,
+again, can religion be adequately and exhaustively dealt with by the
+psychological method of investigation. The psychological studies of
+religion in recent years have greatly enriched our knowledge of the
+range and scope and power of man's psychic nature and functions, of his
+instincts, desires, valuations, needs, yearnings, beliefs, and modes of
+activity and behaviour, and particularly of the important influence
+which the social group has exercised and still exercises in the
+furtherance of religious attitudes and ideals. But the psychological
+method has obvious and inherent limitations. Like any other natural
+science, psychology is limited to description and causal explanation of
+the phenomena of its special field, which in this case is states of
+consciousness. It does not pretend, or even aspire, to pronounce upon
+the ultimate nature of consciousness, nor upon the moral significance
+of personality. Psychology is as empirical as any other science. It
+modestly confines its scope of research to what _appears_ in finite and
+describable forms. It possesses no ladder by which it can transcend
+the empirical order, the fact-level. The religion which the
+psychologist reports upon is necessarily stripped of all transcendental
+and objective reference. Its wings are severely clipped. It is only
+one of man's multitudinous _reactions_ in the presence of the facts of
+his time and space world. It is nakedly subjective and _works_, not
+because there is Something or Some One beyond, which answers it, and
+corresponds with its up-reach, but only {xvii} because undivided
+faith-attitudes always liberate within the field of consciousness
+energy for life-activity.
+
+We need not blame the psychologist for this radical reduction of the
+age-long pretensions of religion. If he is to bring religion over into
+the purview of the scientific field, he can do nothing else but reduce
+it. Science can admit into its world nothing that successfully defies
+descriptive treatment. The poet may know of flowers which "can give
+thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," but science discovers
+no such flowers in its field. Its flowers are amazingly complex, but
+they call for no handkerchief. They are merely aggregations of
+describable parts, each of which has well-defined functions. The "man"
+whom science studies is complicated almost beyond belief. He is an
+aggregation of trillions of cells. He is such a centre of vibrations
+that a cyclone is almost a calm compared to the constant cyclic storms
+within the area of man's corporeal system. His "mental states" have
+their entries and exits before "the foot-lights of consciousness" and
+exhibit a drama more intricate than any which human genius has
+conceived. But each "state" is a definite, more or less describable,
+_fact_ or _phenomenon_. For science, "man's" inner life, as well as
+his corporeal bulk, is an aggregate of empirical items. No loophole is
+left for freedom--that is for any novel undetermined event. No
+shekinah remains within for a mysterious "conscience" to inject into
+this fact-world insights drawn from a higher world of noumenal, or
+absolute, reality. "Man" is merely a part of the naturalistic order,
+and has no way of getting out of the vast net in which science catches
+and holds "all that is."
+
+There is, I repeat, no ground for blaming the psychologist for making
+these reductions. His science can deal only with an order of facts
+which will conform to the scientific method, for wherever science
+invades a field, it ignores or eliminates every aspect of novelty or
+mystery or wonder, every aspect of reality which cannot be brought
+under scientific categories, _i.e._ every aspect which cannot be
+treated quantitatively and causally and {xviii} arranged in a congeries
+of interrelated facts occurring according to natural laws. The only
+cogent criticism is that any psychologist should suppose that his
+scientific account is the "last word" to be spoken, that his reports
+contain all the returns that can be expected, or that this method is
+the only way of approach to truth and reality. Such claims to the
+rights of eminent domain and such dogmatic assertions of exclusive
+finality always reveal the blind spot in the scientist's vision. He
+sees steadily but he does not see wholes. He is of necessity dealing
+with a reduced and simplified "nature" which he constantly tends to
+substitute for the vastly richer whole of reality that boils over and
+inundates the fragment which submits to his categories. We do well to
+gather in every available fact which biology or anthropology or
+psychology can give us that throws light on human behaviour, or on
+primitive cults, or on the richer subjective and social religious
+functions of full-grown men. But the interior insight got from
+religion itself, the rich wholeness of religious experience, the
+discovery within us of an inner nature which defies description and
+baffles all plumb-lines, and which _can draw out of itself more than it
+contains_, indicate that we here have dealings with a type of reality
+which demands for adequate treatment other methods of comprehension
+than those available to science.
+
+In the old Norse stories, Thor tried to empty the famous drinking-horn
+in the games of Utgard, but to his surprise he found that, though the
+horn looked small, he could not empty it, for it turned out that the
+horn was immersed in the limitless and bottomless ocean. Again he
+tried to lift a small and insignificant-looking animal, but, labour as
+he might, he could not lift it, for it was grown into, and was organic
+with, the whole world, and could not be raised without raising the very
+ground on which the lifter stood! Somewhat so, the reality of religion
+is so completely bound up with the whole personal life of man and with
+his conjunct life in the social group and in the world of nature; it
+is, in short, so much an {xix} affair of man's whole of experience, of
+his spirit in its undivided and synthetic aspects, that it can never be
+adequately dealt with by the analytic and descriptive method of this
+wonderful new god of science, however big with results that method may
+be.
+
+The interior insight, the appreciation of religion, the rich and
+concrete whole of religious consciousness, is, and will always remain,
+the primary way to the _secret_ of religion--religion in its "first
+intention"--as the experience of time-duration is the only possible way
+to the elemental meaning of time. It has in recent years in many
+quarters become the fashion to call this "interior insight," this
+appreciation of religion from within, "mysticism"; and to assume that
+here in mysticism we come upon the very essence of religion. This
+conclusion, however, is as narrow and as unwarranted as is the
+truncation of religion at the hands of science. The mystical element
+in religion is only one element in a vastly richer complex, and it must
+not be given undue emphasis and imperial sway in the appreciation of
+the complete whole of "spiritual religion." We must, too, carefully
+discriminate _mystical experience_ from the elaborate body of doctrines
+and theories, historically known as "mysticism," which is as much an
+_ism_ as are the other typical, partial, and more or less abstract
+formulations of religion.
+
+Mysticism for the mystic himself is characterized by a personal
+experience through which the ordinary limitations of life and the
+passionate pursuits of the soul are transcended, and a self-evident
+conviction is attained that he is in communion, or even in union, with
+some self-transcending Reality that absolutely satisfies and is what he
+has always sought. "This is He, this is He," the mystic exclaims:
+"There is no other: This is He whom I have waited for and sought after
+from my childhood!"[7]
+
+The experience is further characterized by the inrush {xx} of new
+energies as though a mysterious door had been pushed open--either out
+or in--admitting the human spirit to wider sources of life. "Fresh
+bubblings from the eternal streams of Life flowing into the soul" is
+the way the recipient often describes it. All the deep-lying powers of
+the inward self, usually so divergent and conflicting--the foreground
+purposes defeated by background inhibitions, and by doubts on the
+border,--become liberated and unified into one conscious life which is
+not merely intellectual, nor merely volitional, nor solely emotional,
+but an undivided whole of experience, intensely joyous, enriched with
+insight and pregnant with deeds of action. As in lofty experiences of
+appreciation of beauty, or of music, or when the chords of life are
+swept by a great love, or by a momentous moral issue, the spirit rises
+in mystical experience to a form of consciousness which no longer marks
+clock-time and succession of events, whether outward or inward. It may
+afterwards take hours or days or weeks or even years to spread out and
+review and apprehend and adjust to the experience--"the opening," to
+use George Fox's impressive word--but while it is _there_ it is held in
+one unbroken synthetic time-span. It is, to revive a scholastic
+phrase, a _totum simul_, an all-at-once experience, in which parts,
+however many, make one integral whole, as in a melody or in a work of
+art; so that the mystic has a real experience of what we try to express
+by the word Eternity. It feels as though the usual insulations of our
+own narrow personal life were suddenly broken through and we were in
+actual contact with an enfolding presence, life-giving, joy-bringing,
+and light-supplying.
+
+In instances where the intensity is great, unusual psychological
+phenomena appear. Sometimes voices are heard, or sounds "like a mighty
+rushing wind"; sometimes there are automatic visions of light, or of
+forms or figures, as, for instance, of Christ, or of a cross; sometimes
+automatic writing or speaking attends the experience; sometimes there
+are profound body-changes of a temporary, or even permanent character;
+sometimes there {xxi} is a state of swoon or ecstacy, lasting from a
+few seconds to entire days. These physical phenomena, however, are as
+spiritually unimportant and as devoid of religious significance as are
+the normal bodily resonances and reverberations which accompany, in
+milder degrees, all our psychic processes. They indicate no high rank
+of sainthood and they prove no miracle-working power. The significant
+features of the experience are the consciousness of fresh springs of
+life, the release of new energies, the inner integration and
+unification of personality, the inauguration of a sense of mission, the
+flooding of the life with hope and gladness, and the conviction,
+amounting in the mind of the recipient to certainty, that God is found
+as an environing and vitalizing presence--as the recipient already
+quoted reports his conviction: "I have met with my God; I have met with
+my Saviour. I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His
+wings."[8]
+
+If _everybody_ had experiences of that sort there would be no more
+doubt of the existence of an actual spiritual environment in vitalizing
+contact with the human spirit than there now is of an external world
+with which we correspond. There is _a priori_ no reason against the
+reality of such an inner spiritual universe. It is precisely as
+conceivable that constructive and illuminating influences should stream
+into our inner selves from that central Light with which our inmost
+self is allied, as that objects in space and time should bombard us
+with messages adapted to our senses. The difference is that we all
+experience the outer environment and only a few of us experience the
+inner. The mystic himself has no doubt--_he sees_, but he cannot give
+quite his certainty of vision to any one else. He cannot, like "the
+weird sisters" of Greek story, lend out his eye for others to see with.
+He can only talk about, or write about, what he has seen, and his words
+are often words of little meaning to those who lack the vision.
+
+{xxii}
+
+II
+
+But the very characteristics of mystical religion which give it its
+self-evidence and power at the same time mark limits to its scope and
+range. It is and must be primarily and essentially first-hand
+experience, and yet it is an experience that is by no means universal.
+It is not, so far as we can see from the facts at hand, an experience
+which attaches to the very nature of consciousness as such, or indeed
+one which is bound to occur even when the human subject strains forward
+all the energies of his will for the adventure, or when by strict
+obedience to the highest laws of life known to him he _waits_ for the
+high visitation. Some aspect is involved over which the will has no
+control. Some other factor is implied besides the passion and the
+purity of the seeking soul. The experience "comes," as an inrush, as
+an emergence from the deeper levels of the inner life, but the glad
+recipient does not know how he secured the prize or how to repeat the
+experience, or how to tell his friend the way to these "master moments"
+of blessedness.
+
+There are numerous persons who are as serious and earnest and
+passionate as the loftiest mystical saint, and who, in spite of all
+their listening for the inner flow of things, discover no inrushes,
+feel no invasions, are aware of no environing Companion, do not even
+feel a "More of Consciousness conterminous and continuous with their
+own." Their inner life appears impervious to divine bubblings. The
+only visitants that pass over the threshold of their consciousness are
+their own mental states, now bright and clear, now dim and strange, but
+all bearing the brand and mark of temporal origin. This type of
+experience must not, therefore, be insisted on as the only way to God
+or to the soul's homeland. Spiritual religion must not be put to the
+hazard of conditions that limit its universality and restrict it to a
+chosen few. To insist on mystical experience as the only path to
+religion would involve an "election" no less inscrutable and {xxiii}
+pitiless than that of the Calvinistic system--an "election" settled for
+each person by the peculiar psychic structure of his inner self.[9]
+
+There is another limitation which must always attach to religion of the
+purely mystical type. In so far as it is an _experience_ of the inward
+type, it is indescribable and incommunicable. That does not mean or
+imply any lessened value in the experience itself, it only means that
+it is very difficult to mint it into the universal coinage of the
+world. The recovery of faith, after some catastrophic bankruptcy of
+spiritual values, as with Job or Dante or Faust, cannot be described in
+analytic steps. The loss of faith in the rationality of the universe,
+the collapse of the "beautiful world" within, can be told step by step;
+the process of integration and reconstruction, on the other hand,
+always remains somewhat of a mystery, though it is plain enough that a
+new and richer inner world has been found. So, too, with Mysticism.
+The experience itself may, and often does, bring to the recipient an
+indubitable certainty of spiritual realities, revealing themselves
+within his own spirit, and, furthermore, it is often productive of
+permanent life-results, such as augmented conviction, heightened tone
+of joy, increased unification of personality, intense moral passion and
+larger conquering power, but he, nevertheless, finds it a baffling
+matter to draw from his mystical experience concrete information about
+the nature and character of God, or to supply, from the experience
+alone, definite contributions that can become part of the common
+spiritual inheritance of the race.
+
+ The soul
+ Remembering how she felt, but _what_ she felt
+ Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
+ Of possible sublimity.[10]
+
+
+{xxiv}
+
+There can be, I think, no doubt that the persons whom we call mystics
+have enormously added to the richness of our conception of God, or that
+they have made impressive contributions to the capital stock of our
+religious knowledge. But I question whether these increments of
+knowledge can be fairly traced to "information" which has entered the
+world through the secret door of mystical "openings." The conception
+of God by which we live, and our knowledge of eternal life, are in the
+main not formed of the material which has mysteriously dropped into the
+world by means of "sudden incursions," or "oracular communications"
+through persons of extraordinary psychical disposition. What we get
+from the mystic, or from the prophet, is not his "experience" but his
+interpretation, and as soon as he begins to _interpret_, he does so by
+means of the group-material which the race has gathered in its
+corporate experience through the ages. The valuable _content_ of his
+message, so far as he succeeds in delivering one, the ideas with which
+his words are freighted, bear the marks of the slow accumulations of
+spiritual experience, and they reveal the rich and penetrative
+influence of the social group in which the mystic's inner life formed
+and ripened. They have a history as all ideas do.
+
+The real fact of the matter is, that the great mystics are religious
+geniuses. They make their contribution to religion in ways similar to
+those in which the geniuses in other fields raise the level of human
+attainments and achievements. They swiftly seize upon and appreciate
+the specific achievements of the race behind them; they are profoundly
+sensitive to the aspirations of their time and to the deep-lying
+currents of their age; they are suggestible in an acute degree, through
+heightened interest, to certain ideas or truths or principles which
+they synthesise by such leaps of insight that slow-footed logic seems
+to be transcended. Then these unifying and intensifying experiences to
+which they are subject give them irresistible conviction, "a surge of
+certainty," a faith of the mountain-moving order, and an increasing
+{xxv} dynamic of life which, in the best cases, is manifest in thoughts
+and words and deeds. Their mystical experience seldom supplies them
+with a new intellectual content which they communicate, but their
+experience enables them rather to _see_ what they know, to get
+possession of themselves, and to fuse their truth with the heat of
+conviction. The mystical experience is thus a way of heightening life
+and of increasing its dynamic quality rather than a way to new
+knowledge.
+
+The _negative way_, which has been such a prominent and prevailing
+characteristic of historical mysticism that many writers have made it
+the distinct and sufficient differentia of mysticism, has often
+produced intensity and depth, but it is, nevertheless, a mark of the
+limitation of this type of religion. The indescribable and
+undifferentiated character of mystical experience is no doubt partly
+responsible for the emphatic place which negation has held in
+mysticism. The experience itself, which seems like "a flight of the
+alone to the Alone," can be told in no words except those of negation.
+"The mortal limit of the self" seems loosed, and the soul seems merged
+into that which it forever seeks but which having found it cannot
+utter. But the type of metaphysics through which most of the great
+mystics of history have done their thinking and have made their
+formulations is still further responsible for the excessive negativity
+of their systems.
+
+There is, of course, a negative element or aspect in all genuine
+religion. No person can grow rich in spiritual experience or can gain
+an intimate acquaintance with a God of purity and truth without
+negating the easy ways of instinct, the low pursuits of life which end
+in self, the habits of thought and action which limit and hamper the
+realization of the diviner possibilities of the whole nature.
+Sometimes the eye that hinders must be plucked out or the right hand
+cut off and thrust away for the sake of a freer pursuit of the soul's
+kingdom. There is, too, a still deeper principle of negativity
+involved in the very fibre of personal life itself. No one can advance
+without {xxvi} surrender, no one can have gains without losses, no one
+can reach great goals without giving up many things in themselves
+desirable. There is "a rivalry of me's" which no person can ever
+escape, for in order to choose and achieve one typical self another
+possible self must be sternly sacrificed. In a very real sense it
+remains forever true that we must die to live, we must die to the
+narrow self in order to be raised to the wider and richer self.
+
+But the _negative way_ of mysticism is more rigorous and more thorough
+in its negation than that. Its negations "wind up the hill all the way
+to the very top." Even the _self_ must be absolutely negated. "The
+self, the I, the me and the like, all belong to the evil spirit. The
+whole matter can be set forth in these words: Be simply and wholly
+bereft of self." "The I, the me, and the mine, nature, selfhood, the
+Devil, sin, are all one and the same thing."[11] Not only so, but all
+_desire_ for any particular thing, or any particular experience must be
+utterly extirpated. "Whatever Good the creature as creature can
+conceive of and understand is something this or that," and therefore
+not the One Real Good.[12] "So long as thy soul has an image, it is
+without simplicity, and so long as it is without simplicity it doth not
+rightly love God."[13] "Divine love can brook no rival." He who seeks
+God must "rid himself of all that pertains to the creature." He that
+would find the absolute Good must withdraw not only beyond all his
+senses, but beyond all desires, into an inner "solitude where no word
+is spoken, where is neither creature nor image nor fancy." "Everything
+depends," Tauler counsels us, "upon a fathomless sinking into a
+fathomless nothingness. . . . God has really no place to work in but
+the ground where all has been annihilated. . . . Then when all forms
+have ceased, in the twinkling of an eye, the man is transformed. . . .
+Thou must sink into the unknown and unnamed abyss, and above all ways,
+images, forms, and above all powers, {xxvii} lose thyself, deny
+thyself, and even unform thyself."[14] The moment the will focusses
+upon any concrete aim as its goal, it must thereby miss that Good which
+is above and beyond all particular "things" that can be conceived or
+named.
+
+But the _negative way_ winds up farther still. It ends in the
+absolutely negative Silent Desert of Godhead "where no one is at home."
+Its way up is the way of abstraction and withdrawal from everything
+finite. He whom the soul seeks cannot be found in anything "here" or
+"now"; He must be "yonder." "It is by no means permitted," says one of
+the great experts in negation, "to speak or even to think anything
+concerning the super-essential and hidden Deity. . . . It is a Unity
+above mind, a One above conception and inconceivable to all
+conceptions, a Good unutterable by word."[15] "Thou must love God,"
+Eckhart says, "as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He
+is, a sheer, pure, absolute One, sundered from all two-ness and in whom
+we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness."[16] God, the
+Godhead, is thus the absolute "Dark," "the nameless Nothing," an empty
+God, a characterless Infinite. "Why dost thou prate of God," Eckhart
+says, "whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue!" The rapt soul at the
+end of his road, at the top of the hill, only knows that every finite
+account is false and that the only adequate word is an everlasting Nay.
+
+ Whatever idea your mind comes at,
+ I tell you flat
+ God is _not_ that.[17]
+
+
+The great mystics have always saved themselves by neglecting to be
+consistent with this rigorous negation and abstraction. In their
+practice they have cut through their theory and gone on living the rich
+concrete life. {xxviii} But the theory itself is a false theory of
+life, and it leads only to a God of abstraction, not to the God of
+spiritual religion. The false trail, however, is to be charged, as I
+have said, not so much to mystical experience as to the metaphysics
+through which the mystics, not only of Christian communions, but of
+other faiths, were compelled to do their thinking. There was no other
+way of thinking known to them except this way of negation. The
+Infinite was the not-finite; the Absolute was precisely what the
+contingent was _not_. The perfect was free of every mark of
+imperfection. Behind all manifestations was the essential Substance
+which made the manifestations. The completely Real was above all
+mutation and process. "For one to assign," therefore, "to God any
+human attributes," as Spinoza, the supreme apostle of this negative way
+has said, "is to reveal that he has no true idea of God." It has taken
+all the philosophical and spiritual travail of the centuries to
+discover that there may be a concrete Infinite, an organic Absolute, an
+immanent Reality, and that the way to share in this comprehending Life
+is at least as much a way of affirmation as of negation, a way that
+leads not into "the Dark" but into the Light, and not into a
+"fathomless nothing," but into an abundant and radiant life.
+
+Mysticism, as a type of religion, has further staked its precious
+realities too exclusively upon the functions of what to-day we call the
+sub-conscious. Impressed with the divine significance of "inward
+bubblings," the mystic has made too slight an account of the testimony
+of Reason and the contribution of history. The subconscious functions
+are very real and very important aspects of personal life, and can
+never again be ignored in any full account of personality. They
+influence every thought, feeling, attitude, volition, opinion, mood,
+and insight, and are thus operative in all the higher as well as in all
+the lower phases of human life and character. Metaphorically, but only
+metaphorically, we speak of the sub-conscious as a vast zone, an
+indefinable margin, surrounding the narrow focus of attention, and we
+may {xxix} figuratively, but only figuratively, call it the subliminal
+"region" where all our life-gains, and often the gains of the race, are
+garnered. The contributions from this mental underworld are
+inestimable--we could not be men without them--but this subconscious
+zone is a source of things bad as well as good, things silly as well as
+things wise, of rubbish as well as of treasures, and it is diabolical
+as well as divine. It seems in rare moments to connect, as though it
+were a hidden inland stream, with the "immortal sea which brought us
+hither," and we feel at times, through its incomes, as though we were
+aware of _tides_ from beyond our own margin. And, in fact, I believe
+we are.
+
+But obviously we cannot assume that whatever comes spontaneously out of
+the subconscious is divinely given. It mothers strange
+offspring--Esaus as well as Jacobs; its openings, its inrushes, its
+bubblings must be severely tested. Impulses of many sorts feel
+categorically imperative, but some call to deeds of light and some to
+deeds of darkness. They cannot be taken at their face value; they must
+be judged in some Court which is less capricious and which is guided by
+a more universal principle--something _semper et ubique_. A spiritual
+religion of the full and complete type will, I believe, have inward,
+mystical depth, it will keep vitalized and intensified with its
+experiences of divine supplies, and of union and unification with an
+environing Spirit, but it must at the same time soundly supplement its
+more or less capricious and subjective, and always fragmentary,
+mystical insights with the steady and unwavering testimony of Reason,
+and no less with the immense objective illumination of History.
+
+
+
+III
+
+The men whom I am here calling Spiritual Reformers are examples of this
+wider synthesis. They all read and loved the mystics and they
+themselves enjoyed times of direct refreshment from an inward Source of
+Life, but {xxx} they were, most of them, at the same time, devoted
+Humanists. They shared with enthusiasm the rediscovery of those
+treasures which human Reason had produced, and they rose to a more
+virile confidence in the sphere and capacity of Reason than had
+prevailed in Christian circles since the days of the early Greek
+Fathers. They took a variety of roads to their conclusion, but in one
+way or another they all proclaimed that deep in the central nature of
+man--an inalienable part of Reason--there was a Light, a Word, an Image
+of God, something permanent, reliable, universal, and unsundered from
+God himself. They all knew that man is vastly more than "mere man."
+Hans Denck, one of the earliest of this group of Spiritual Reformers,
+declared that there is a _witness to God_ in the soul of every man, and
+that without this inward Word it would be as impossible to bring men to
+God by outward means as it would be to show sunlight to eyeless men.
+He anticipated the great saying of Pascal in these words, "Apart from
+God no one can either seek or find God, for he who seeks God already in
+truth has Him."[18] "We are," says Jacob Boehme, who belongs in this
+line of Spiritual Reformers, "of God's substance: we have heaven and
+hell in ourselves."[19] There is in us, Peter Sterry says, a _unity of
+spirit_ which holds all things together in an _at-once_ experience, "a
+spire-top of spirit where all things meet and sit recollected and
+concentred in an unfathomed Depth of Life."[20] Most of these men were
+in revolt against scholasticism and all its works. They speak often
+very slightingly of "Reasoning," the attempt to find a way to ultimate
+Realities by logical syllogisms, but they, nevertheless, believed great
+things of man's rational and moral nature. They are often confused and
+cloudy in their explicit accounts of this ultimate moral and rational
+nature. They everywhere indicate the conceptual limitations {xxxi}
+under which even those who were the most emancipated from tradition
+were compelled to do their thinking in that age. They could not break
+the age-long spell and mighty fascination with which the Adam story and
+the Garden of Eden picture had held the Christian world. They were
+convinced, however, that the Augustinian interpretation of the fall,
+with its entail of an indelible taint upon the race forever, was an
+inadequate, if not an untrue account, though they could not quite
+arrive at an insight which enabled them to speak with authority on the
+fundamental nature of man. But with an instinct that pointed right,
+they took Adam as a type of the unspoiled man, and they saw writ large
+in him the possibilities and potentialities of man. What had been
+originally possible in Adam became, according to their thought, actual
+realization in Jesus Christ--the form and type of man, the true Head of
+the race--and in spite of the havoc and spoiling, which sin had
+wrought, that original possibility, that divine potentiality, still
+reappears in every child, who comes now, as Adam did, made in the image
+of God, with the breath of God in him, and with creative freedom of
+will to settle his own destiny. Some of the Reformers whom I am here
+studying centre this image of God, this immense divine potentiality, in
+the ideal man, in man as God conceives him in his perfect state, or as
+God by His Grace intends him to be, and they do not go the whole bold
+way of asserting that this man we know, this man who lives in time and
+space, who loves and sins and suffers, has and always has, in the very
+structure of his inmost moral and rational being, a divine, unlost,
+inalienable, soul-centre which is unsundered from God, and bears
+eternal witness to our origin from Him, our potential likeness to Him,
+and our capacity to receive illumination from Him.[21] But this latter
+{xxxii} bolder view of the inherent greatness of man's essential nature
+is the prevailing tendency of these men. They are thus the forerunners
+of the Quaker faith that there is something of God in man, and they
+continue the direct line, which goes back for ancestry to the Socratic
+movement in philosophy of those who find God involved and implicated in
+the nature of normal self-consciousness and in the idea of the Good
+toward which we live.[22]
+
+Mystics and prophets, as Seely well says in _Ecce Homo_, seem to
+themselves to "discover truth not so much by a process of reasoning as
+by _an intense gaze_, and they announce their conclusions with the
+voice of a herald, using the name of God and giving no reasons." The
+rational way of approach is different. It seeks to draw out by a
+process of rational argument what is involved in the outer or inner
+facts that are present to consciousness. It does not claim the power
+to make bricks without clay, to construct its conclusions out of
+nothing. Its only legitimate field is that of interpreting experience.
+There have always been men who were religious because they could not
+help being religious, because a Universe without God seemed to them
+utterly irrational and unthinkable. Schleiermacher is only one witness
+in a long and impressive succession of thinkers that have insisted that
+"consciousness of God and self-consciousness are inseparable."[23] It
+is obvious even to the unmetaphysical person that self-consciousness
+always presupposes and involves something prior to one's own existence
+and some reality transcending the reality of one's own self. The
+finite is intelligible only through the infinite, the temporal only
+through the eternal. We cannot think at all without appealing to some
+_permanent more of reality_ than is just now given in our particular
+finite experience, and no matter how far one travels on the road of
+knowledge one always finds it still necessary to make reference to _a
+transcending more_. "All consciousness is," as Hegel {xxxiii} showed
+in 1807, in his philosophical Pilgrim's Progress, the _Phenomenology of
+Spirit_, "an appeal to more consciousness," and there is no rational
+halting-place short of a self-consistent and self-explanatory spiritual
+Reality, which explains the origin and furnishes the goal of all that
+is real.
+
+On the other hand, there have always been men who have not granted any
+such compelling implications to self-consciousness. They have
+maintained that "finites" are forever "finites," and that there are no
+bridges that carry us from our finite "nows" and "heres" to an infinite
+Reality. The infinite Reality, they all admit, is conceivable; it is
+"an idea" to which any mind can rise by normal processes of thought,
+"but," so they say, "an _idea_ of an infinite Reality, an Infinite
+merely conceived in the mind, is different, by the whole width of the
+sky, from an actual objective infinite Reality that is _there_, and
+that contains inherently all that our hearts seek in God."
+
+It is quite true, of course, that the presence of "an idea" in our mind
+does not of itself prove the existence of a corresponding objective
+reality _out there_ in a world independent of our mind. There is most
+assuredly no way of bridging "the chasm" between mind and an objective
+world beyond and outside of mind, when once the "chasm" is assumed.
+But the fundamental error lies in the assumption of any such "chasm."
+The "chasm" which yawns between the inner and outer world is of our own
+making. Whenever we know anything, wherever there is knowledge at all,
+there is a synthetic indivisible whole of experience in which a subject
+knows an object. Subject and object cannot be really sundered without
+putting an instant end to knowledge--leaving "a bare grin without a
+face!" The only way we know anything is that we know we know it in
+experience. We do not ever succeed in proving that objects exist _out
+there_ in the world beyond us exactly correspondent to these ideas in
+our minds. That is a feat of mental gymnastics quite parallel to that
+of "finding" {xxxiv} the self with which we do the seeking. The
+crucial problem of knowledge is not to discover a bridge to leap the
+chasm between the mind within and the world beyond. It is rather the
+problem of finding a basis of verifying and testing what we know, and
+of making knowledge a consistent rational whole.
+
+The method of testing and verifying any fact of truth which we have on
+our hands, is always to organize it and link it into a larger whole of
+knowledge which we ourselves, or the wider group of persons in which we
+are organic members, have verified, and to see that it fits in
+consistently into this larger whole, and in this rational process we
+always assume, and are bound to assume, some sort of Reality that
+transcends the fleeting and temporal, the caprice of the moment, the
+will of the subject, the here and the now. The mind that knows and
+knows that it knows must, as Plato centuries ago declared, rise from
+the welter and flux of momentary seemings to true Being, to the
+eternally Real,[24] and the knowledge process of binding fragments of
+experience into larger wholes and of getting articulate insight into
+the significance of many facts grasped in synthetic unity--in the
+"spire-top of spirit," as Sterry puts it--carries the mind steadily and
+irresistibly on to an infinitely-inclusive and self-explanatory
+spiritual Whole, which is always implied in knowledge. Some reference
+to the _permanent_ is necessary in judging even the fleetingness of the
+"now," some confidence in the eternally true is essential for any
+pronouncement upon the false, some assurance of the infinite is
+presupposed in the endless dissatisfaction with the finite, some appeal
+to a total whole of Reality is implicated in any assertion that _this
+fact here and now_ is known as real. Any one who feels the full
+significance of what is involved in knowing the _truth_ has a coercive
+feeling that Eternity has been set within us, that our finite life is
+deeply rooted in the all-pervading Infinite.
+
+The great thinkers of the first rank who have undertaken to sound the
+significance of rational knowledge, {xxxv} and who have appreciated the
+meaning of the synthetic unity of the knowing mind and the world of
+objects that submit to its forms of thought, have recognized that there
+must be some deep-lying fundamental relation between the mind that
+knows and the world that is known, some Reality common to both outer
+and inner realms. They have, almost without exception, found
+themselves carried along irresistibly to an ultimate Reality that is
+the ground and explanation of all the fragmentary facts of experience,
+and without which nothing can be held to be permanent or rational--
+
+ Something far more deeply interfused,
+ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+ And the round ocean and the living air,
+ And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
+ A motion and a Spirit, that impels
+ All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
+ And rolls through all things.[25]
+
+
+The technical logical formulation of arguments to _prove_ the existence
+of God as objectively real--arguments from causality, ontological
+arguments, and arguments from design--all of which assume a "chasm"
+between the knower and the object known, seem to us perhaps on critical
+analysis thin and insufficient. The bridge of formal logic seems too
+weak to carry us safely over from a finite here to an infinite yonder,
+from a contingent fact to an Absolute Reality, from something given
+_in_ consciousness to Something existent outside and beyond it; but it
+is an impressive and significant fact that all finite experience, both
+of inner and outer events, involves a More yet, that we cannot think
+finite and contingent things without rational appeal to Something
+infinite and necessary, that human experience cannot be rationally
+conceived except as a fragment of a vastly more inclusive Experience,
+always recognized within the finite spirit, that unifies and binds
+together into one self-explanatory whole all that is absolutely Real
+and True, and this is Reason's conviction of God.
+
+{xxxvi}
+
+When once the conviction is _felt_ and the rational postulate of God is
+made, it immediately verifies its practical value in the solution of
+our deepest problems. A happy illustration of the practical value and
+verifying evidence of the rational postulate of God has been given by
+James Ward: "Suppose," he says, "that the earth were wrapt in clouds
+all day while the sky was clear at night, so that we were able to see
+the planets and observe their movements as we do now, though the sun
+itself was invisible. The best account we could give of the planetary
+motions would still be to refer them to what for us, in accordance with
+our supposition, would only be an imaginary focus [or centre of
+physical energy], but one to which was assigned a position identical
+with the sun's [present] position."[26] This assumption would at once
+unlock the mystery and account for the varying movements of these
+visible bodies and the more rigorously the hypothesis were applied, the
+more exactly it would verify itself. So, too, with Reason's sublime
+venture of faith. The nature of self-consciousness demands the
+postulate, and once it is made it _works_.
+
+The same result follows any attempt adequately to account for the moral
+imperative--the will to live the truly good life. The moral will turns
+out always to be imbedded in a deeper, richer, more inclusive Life than
+that of the fragmentary finite individual. There is a creative and
+autonomous central self in us which puts before us ideals of truth and
+beauty and goodness that are nowhere to be "found" in this world of
+sense-facts, and that yet are more real and august than any things our
+eyes see or our hands handle. Our main moral problem is not to adjust
+our inner ideals to our environment, but rather to compel the
+environment to level up to our ideals. The world that ought to be
+makes us forever dissatisfied with the world that is, and sets us with
+a fixity of purpose at the task of realizing the Kingdom which might
+possibly be, which we know ought to be, and which, therefore, has our
+loyal endeavour that it {xxxvii} shall be, regardless of the cost in
+pain and sacrifice. Man, as William Wallace has put it, "projects his
+own self-to-be into the nature he seeks to conquer. Like an assailant
+who should succeed in throwing his standard into the strong central
+keep of the enemy's fortress, and fight his way thereto with assured
+victory in his eyes of hope, so man with the vision of his soul
+prognosticates his final triumph."[27] But if the life of moral
+endeavour is to be essentially consistent and reasonable there must be
+a world of Reality that transcends this realm of empirical, causal, and
+utilitarian happenings. Struggle for ends of goodness must be at least
+as significant in function as struggle for existence; our passion for
+what ought to be must have had birth in an inner eternal environment at
+least as real as that which produced our instincts and appetite for the
+things by which we live in time. If the universe is through and
+through rational, there must be some personal Heart that _cares_; some
+moral Will that guarantees and backs our painful strivings--our
+groaning and travailing--to make what ought to be come into play here
+in the world which is. This postulate is Reason's faith in God, and
+again it _works_.
+
+The evolution of life--if it is evolving as we believe it is,
+and if it is to be viewed with rational insight as an upward
+process--irresistibly involves and implies some sort of fundamental
+intelligence and conscious purpose, some Logos steering the mighty
+movement. We have outgrown crude arguments from "design," and we
+cannot think of God as a foreign and external Creator, working as a
+Potter on his clay; but it is irrational to "explain" a steadily
+unfolding movement, an ever-heightening procession of life, by
+"fortuitous variations," by "accidental" shifts of level, or even by a
+blind _elan vital_. If there is an increasing purpose and a clearly
+culminating drama unfolding in this moving flood of life, then there is
+some Mind that sees the way, and some Will that directs the march of
+Life. And this confidence of ours in some divine Event to which the
+whole creation moves, {xxxviii} this insight that there must be a
+significant and adequate explanation for the immanent teleology and
+beauty with which our universe is crammed, is, once more, Reason's
+postulate of God. There is something in us, indissoluble from Reason
+itself--a Light, a Word, a Witness as these Spiritual Reformers
+insisted--which links us in all the deeper processes of
+self-consciousness with _That Which Is_ and without which "knowledge"
+would be a mere flux of seemings, a flight of _seriatim_ items.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ When this world's pleasures for my soul sufficed,
+ Ere my heart's plummet sounded depths of pain,
+ I called on reason to control my brain,
+ And scoffed at that old story of the Christ.
+
+ But when o'er burning wastes my feet had trod,
+ And all my life was desolate with loss,
+ With bleeding hands I clung about the cross,
+ And cried aloud, "Man needs a suffering God."[28]
+
+
+There can be no doubt that the compulsions and implications of rational
+insight have brought multitudes of men to God, have given them an
+unescapable conviction of His reality, and have swayed their wills to
+live in conformity to His perfect Goodness; and it is also true that
+when for any cause this clue of rationality is missed or lost, men
+flounder about in the fog and pass through periods of inward tragedy
+amounting often to despair. But the approach of Reason still leaves
+much to be desired. It points to something deeper than the transitory
+flux of things, it raises our minds to some sort of ultimate and
+self-explanatory Reality, it compels the conviction that there is an
+all-inclusive Logos--Mind or Spirit--that explains what is and what
+ought to be, and what in the unfolding course of things is to be; but
+it does not bring us to a personal God who is our loving Friend and the
+{xxxix} intimate Companion of our souls, it does not help us solve the
+mystery of human suffering that lies heavily upon our lives, and it
+does not bring to our spirits _the saving reinforcement of personal
+Love_ that must be a central feature of a spiritual and adequate
+religion.
+
+There is still another way of approach to a Religion for mature minds
+which has been no less universally operative and no less dynamic in its
+transforming effects upon human lives than either of the two tendencies
+so far considered--I refer to the way of Faith. By Faith I mean the
+soul's moral or appreciative apprehension of God as _historically
+revealed_, particularly as revealed in the personal life of Jesus
+Christ. This Faith-way to God cannot be wholly separated--except by an
+artificial abstraction--from the inward way of mysticism, or from the
+implications of Reason. It is no blind acceptance of traditional
+opinions, no uncritical reliance on "authority," or on some mysterious
+infallible oracle. It is the spiritual response--or "assent," as
+Clement of Alexandria called it--the moral swing of our inmost self, as
+we catch insights of a loving Heart and holy Will revealed through the
+words and lives and sufferings of saints and prophets, who have lived
+by their vision of God, and supremely revealed in the Life and Love,
+the Passion and the Triumphs of that Person whose experience and
+character and incarnation of life's possibilities seem at last adequate
+for all the needs--the heights and the depths--of this complex life of
+ours.
+
+It was Luther's living word which first brought the momentous
+significance of Faith to clear consciousness in the sixteenth century.
+But the new way of Faith meant many and discordant things, according to
+the preparation of the ears of those who heard. It spoke, as all
+Pentecosts do, to each man in his own tongue. To those who came to the
+Lutheran insight with a deep hunger of spirit for reality and with
+minds liberated by Humanistic studies, the Faith-message meant new
+heavens and a new earth. It was a new discovery of God, and a new
+estimate of man. They suddenly caught {xl} a vision of life as it was
+capable of becoming, and they committed their fortunes to the task of
+making that possible world real. By a shift of view, as revolutionary
+as that from Ptolemaic astronomy to the verifiable insight of
+Copernicus, they passed over from the dogma of a Christ who came to
+appease an angry God, and to found a Church as an ark of safety in a
+doomed world, to the living apprehension of a Christ--verifiable in
+experience--who revealed to them, in terms of His own nature, an
+eternally tender, loving, suffering, self-giving God, and who made them
+see, with the enlightened eyes of their heart, the divine possibilities
+of human life. Through this insight, they were the beginners of a new
+type of Christianity, which has become wide-spread and impressive in
+the modern world, a type that finds the supreme significance of
+Christ's Life in His double revelation of the inherent nature of God,
+and the immense value and potentiality of man, and that changes the
+emphasis from schemes of salvation to interpretations of life, from the
+magic significance of doctrine to the incalculable worth of the moral
+will.
+
+These men were weak in historical sense, and, like everybody else in
+their generation, they used Scripture without much critical insight.
+But they hit upon a principle which saved them from slavery to texts,
+and which gave them a working faith in the steady moral and spiritual
+development of man. I mean the principle that this Christ whom they
+had discovered anew was an eternal manifestation of God, an immanent
+Word of God, a Spirit brooding over the world of men, as in the
+beginning over the face of the waters, present in the unfolding events
+of history as well as in the far-away "dispensations of Grace." As a
+result, they grew less interested in the problem that had fascinated so
+many mystics, the problem of the super-empirical evolution of the
+divine Consciousness; the super-temporal differentiation of the unity
+of the Godhead into a Father and Son and self-revealing Holy Ghost; and
+they tried rather to appreciate and to declare the concrete revelation
+through Christ, and {xli} the import of His visible and invisible
+presence in the world.[29]
+
+This approach of Faith, this appreciation of the nature of God as He
+has been unveiled in the ethical processes of history, especially in
+the Person of Christ, and in His expanding conquest of the world, must
+always be one of the great factors of spiritual religion. The profound
+results of higher criticism, with its stern winnowings, have brought us
+face to face with problems unknown to the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries. So much of what seemed the solid continent of historical
+truth has weathered and crumbled away that some have wondered whether
+any irreducible nucleus would remain firm and permanent above the flood
+of the years, and whether the religion of the future must not dispense
+with the historical element, and the Faith-aspect that goes with it,
+and rest wholly upon present inward experience.
+
+There are, however, I believe, no indications worth considering, of the
+disappearance of Jesus Christ from human history. On the contrary, He
+holds, as never before, the commanding place in history. He still
+dominates conscience, by the moral sway of His Life of Goodness, as
+does no other Person who has ever lived; and by the attractive power of
+His life and love He still sets men to living counter to the strong
+thrust of instinct and impulse as does no one else who has ever touched
+the springs of conduct. The Faith-aspect is still a very live element
+in religion, and it is, as it has been so often before, precisely the
+aspect which supplies concrete body and filling and objective ethical
+direction to our deep sub-conscious yearnings and strivings and
+experiences.
+
+Once at least there shone through the thin veil of matter a personal
+Life which brought another kind of world than this world of natural law
+and utilitarian aims full into light. There broke through here in the
+face of Jesus {xlii} Christ a revelation of Purpose in the universe so
+far beyond the vague trend of purpose dimly felt in slowly evolving
+life that it is possible here to catch an illuminating vision of what
+the goal of the long drama may be--the unveiling of sons of God. Here
+the discovery can be made that the deepest Reality toward which Reason
+points, and which the mystical experience _feels_, is no vague
+Something Beyond, but a living, loving Some One, dealing with us as
+Person with person. In Him there comes to focus in a Life that we can
+love and appreciate a personal character which impresses us as being
+absolutely good, and as being in its inexhaustible depth of Love and
+Grace worthy to be taken as the revelation of the true nature of the
+God whom all human hearts long for. And finally through this personal
+revelation of God in Christ there has come to us a clear insight that
+pain and suffering and tragedy can be taken up into a self-chosen Life
+and absorbed without spoiling its immense joy, and that precisely
+through suffering-love, joyously accepted, a Person expressing in the
+world the heart of God may become the moral and spiritual Saviour of
+others. As von Hugel has finely said: "A Person came and lived and
+loved, and did and taught, and died and rose again, and lives on by His
+power and His Spirit forever within us and amongst us, so unspeakably
+rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above
+us precisely in being so divinely near that His character and teaching
+require, for an ever fuller yet never complete understanding, the
+varying study, and different experiments and applications, embodiments
+and unrollings of all the races and civilizations, of all the
+individual and corporate, the simultaneous and successive experiences
+of the human race to the end of time."[30]
+
+The only salvation worth talking about is that which consists of an
+inner process of moral transformation, through which one passes over
+"the great divide" from a life that is self-centred and dominated by
+impulse and sin to a life that is assured of divine forgiveness, that
+has {xliii} conceived a passion for a redeemed inward nature, that is
+conscious of help from beyond its own resources, and that is dedicated
+to the task of making moral goodness triumph over the evil of the
+world. Any experience which brings to the soul a clear vision of the
+moral significance of human life, and that engenders in us a practical
+certainty that God is working with us in all our deepest undertakings,
+tends to have saving efficacy and to bring about this inward
+transformation. But nowhere else in the universe--above us or within
+us--has the moral significance of life come so full into sight, or the
+reality of actual divine fellowship, whether in our aspirations or in
+our failures, been raised to such a pitch of practical certainty as in
+the personal life and death and resurrection and steady historical
+triumph of Jesus Christ. He exhibits in living fulness, with
+transforming power, a Life which consciously felt itself one with the
+heart and will of God. He reveals the inherent blessedness of
+Love--even though it may involve suffering and pain and death. He
+shows the moral supremacy, even in this imperfect empirical world, of
+the perfectly good will, and He impresses those who _see_ Him--see Him,
+I mean, with eyes that can penetrate through the temporal to the
+eternal and find His real nature--as being the supreme personal
+unveiling of God, as worthy to be our Leader, our Ideal Life, our
+typical personal Character, and strong enough in His infinite Grace and
+divine self-giving to convince us of the eternal co-operation of God
+with our struggling humanity, and to settle our Faith in the essential
+Saviourhood of God.
+
+He who sees _that_ in Christ has found a real way to God and has
+discovered a genuine way of salvation. It is the way of Faith, but
+Faith is no airy and unsubstantial road, no capricious leap. There is
+no kind of aimful living conceivable that does not involve faith in
+something trans-subjective--faith in something not given in present
+empirical experience. Even in our most elementary life-adjustments
+there is something operative in us which far underlies our conscious
+perceiving and {xliv} the logic of our conclusions. We are moved, not
+alone by what we clearly picture and coldly analyse, but by deep-lying
+instincts which defy analysis, by background and foreground fringes of
+consciousness, by immanent and penetrative intelligence which cannot be
+brought to definite focus, by the vast reservoirs of accumulated wisdom
+through which we _feel_ the way to go, though we can pictorially
+envisage no "spotted trees" that mark the trail.
+
+This religious and saving Faith, through which the soul discovers God
+and makes the supreme life-adjustment to Him, is profoundly moral and,
+in the best sense of the word, rational. It does not begin with an
+assumption, blind or otherwise, as to Christ's metaphysical nature, it
+does not depend upon the adoption of systematically formulated
+doctrines; it becomes operative through the discovery of a personal
+Life, historically lived--and continued through the centuries as a
+transforming Spirit--rich enough in its experience to exhibit the
+infinite significance of life, inwardly deep enough in its spiritual
+resources to reveal the character of God, and strong enough in
+sympathy, in tenderness, in patience, and in self-giving love to beget
+forever trust and confidence and love on the part of all who thus find
+Him.
+
+The God whom we learn to know in Christ--the God historically
+revealed--is no vague first Cause, no abstract Reality, no all-negating
+Absolute. He is a concrete Person, whose traits of character are
+intensely moral and spiritual. His will is no fateful swing of
+mechanical law; it is a morally good will which works patiently and
+forever toward a harmonized world, a Kingdom of God. The central trait
+of His character is Love. He does not become Father, He is not
+reconciled to us by persuasive offerings and sacrifices. He is
+inherently and by essential disposition Father and the God of all
+Grace. He is not remote and absentee--making a world "in the
+beginning," and leaving it to run by law, or only occasionally
+interrupting its normal processes--He is immanent Spirit, working
+always, the God of beauty and organizing purpose. He {xlv} is Life and
+Light and Truth, an Immanuel God who can and does show Himself in a
+personal Incarnation, and so exhibits the course and goal of the race.
+The way of Faith is a way to God, and the religion of this type is as
+properly _a first-hand religion_ as that of any other type.
+
+I have, of course, by no means exhausted the types of mature religion.
+There are other ways of approach to God, other roads by which the soul
+finds the way home--"On the East three gates; on the North three gates;
+on the South three gates; and on the West three gates"--and they will
+continue to be sacred ways--_viae sacrae_--for those who travel them
+and thus find their heart's desire. What we should learn from this
+brief study is that religion is too rich and complex an experience to
+be squeezed down to some one isolated aspect of life or of
+consciousness. There are many ways to God and any way that actually
+brings the soul to Him is a good way, but the best way is that one
+which produces upon the imperfect personal life the profoundest saving
+effects, the most dynamic moral reinforcement, and which brings into
+sway over the will the goal of life most adequate for men like us in a
+social world like ours.
+
+For most of us no one way of approach--no single type of religion--is
+quite sufficient for all the needs of our life. Most of us are
+fortunate enough to have at least moments when we feel in warm and
+intimate _contact_ with a divine, enwrapping environment more real to
+us than things of sense and of arithmetic, and when the infinite and
+eternal is no less, but immeasurably more, sure than the finite and
+temporal. Most of us, again, succeed, at least on happy occasions of
+mental health, in finding rational clues which carry us through the
+maze of contingency and clock-time happenings, through the
+imperfections of our slow successive events, to the One Great Now of
+perfect Reality which explains the process, and we attain to an
+intellectual love of God. And in spite of the literary difficulties of
+primitive narratives and of false trails which the historical Church
+has again and again taken, almost any serious, earnest soul to-day
+{xlvi} may find that divine Face, that infinitely deep and luminous
+Personality who spoke as no man ever spake, who loved as none other
+ever loved, who saw more in humanity than anybody else has ever seen,
+and who felt as no other person ever has that He was one in heart and
+mind and will with God; and having found Him, by a morally responsive
+Faith which dominates and transforms the inward self, one has found God
+as Companion, Friend, and Saviour. Where all these ways converge, and
+a soul enjoys the privilege of mystical contact, the compulsion of
+rational insight, and the moral reinforcement of personal Faith in
+Christ, religion comes to its consummate flower, and may with some
+right be called "spiritual Religion."
+
+
+
+V
+
+The most radical step which these spiritual Reformers took--the step
+which put them most strikingly out of line with the main course of the
+Reformation--was their break with Protestant Theology. They were not
+satisfied with a programme which limited itself to a correction of
+abuses, an abolition of mediaeval superstitions, and a shift of
+external authority. They were determined to go the whole way to a
+Religion of inward life and power, to a Christianity whose only
+authority should be its dynamic and spiritual authority. They placed
+as low an estimate on the saving value of orthodox systems of
+theological formulation as the Protestant Reformers did on the saving
+value of "works." To the former, salvation was an affair neither of
+"works" nor of what they called "notions," _i.e._ views, beliefs, or
+creeds. They are never weary of insisting that a person may go on
+endless pilgrimages to holy places, he may repeat unnumbered
+"paternosters," he may mortify his body to the verge of
+self-destruction, and still be unsaved and unspiritual; so, too, he may
+"believe" all the dogma of the most orthodox system of faith, he may
+take on his lips the most sacred words of sound doctrine, and yet be
+utterly alien {xlvii} to the kingdom of God, a stranger and a foreigner
+to the spirit of Christ. They were determined, therefore, to go
+through to a deeper centre and to make only those things pivotal which
+are absolutely essential to life and salvation.
+
+They began their reconstruction of the meaning of salvation with (1) a
+new and fresh interpretation of God, and (2) with a transformed
+eschatology. As I have already said, they re-discovered God through
+Christ, and in terms of His revelation; and coming to God _this way_,
+they saw at once that the prevailing interpretations of the atonement
+were inadequate and unworthy. God, they declared, is not a Suzerain,
+treating men as his vassals, reckoning their sins up against them as
+infinite debts to be paid off at last in a vast commercial transaction
+only by the immeasurable price of a divine Life, given to pay the debt
+which had involved the entire race in hopeless bankruptcy. Nor, again,
+in their thought is He a mighty Sovereign, meting out to the world
+strict justice and holding all sin as flagrant disloyalty and appalling
+violation of law, never to be forgiven until the full requirements of
+sovereign justice are met and balanced and satisfied. All this seemed
+to them artificial and false. Salvation, as they understand it, cannot
+be conceived as escape from debt nor as the satisfaction of justice,
+since it is a personal life-relationship with a personal God who is and
+always was eternal Love. God's universe, both outer and inner, is
+loaded with moral significance, is meant for discipline, and therefore
+it has its stern aspects and drives its lessons home with the
+unswerving hammer of _consequences_. But in the personal Heart of the
+universe, Love and Tenderness and Sympathy and Forgiveness are supreme,
+and every process and every instrument of salvation, in the divine
+purpose, is vital, ethical, spiritual.
+
+God has shown Himself as Father. He has revealed the immeasurable
+suffering which sin inflicts on love. To find the Father-Heart; to cry
+"Abba" in filial joy; to die to sin and to be born to love, is to be
+saved. Jacob Boehme gave this new conception of God, and its bearing
+{xlviii} on the way of salvation, the most adequate expression that was
+given by any of this group, but all these so-called spiritual Reformers
+herein studied had reached the same insight at different levels of
+adequacy. Their return to a more vital conception of salvation, with
+its emphasis on the value of personality, brought with it, too, a new
+humanitarian spirit and a truer estimate of the worth of man. As they
+re-discovered the love of God, they also found again the gospel of love
+and brotherhood which is woven into the very tissue of the original
+gospel of divine Fatherhood.
+
+Their revised eschatology was due, at least partly, to this altered
+account of the character of God, but it was also partly due to their
+profound tendency to deal with all matters of the soul in terms of life
+and vital processes. Heaven and Hell were no longer thought of as
+terminal places, where the saved were everlastingly rewarded and the
+lost forever punished. Heaven and Hell were for them inward
+conditions, states of the soul, the normal gravitation of the Spirit
+toward its chosen centre. Heaven and Hell cease, therefore, to be
+eschatological in the true sense of the word; they become present
+realities, tendencies of life, ways of reacting toward the things of
+deepest import. Heaven, whether here or in any other world, is the
+condition of complete adjustment to the holy will of God; it is joy in
+the prevalence of His goodness; peace through harmonious correspondence
+with His purposes; the formation of a spirit of love, the creation of
+an inward nature that loves what God loves and enjoys what He enjoys.
+
+Hell, here or elsewhere, is a disordered life, out of adjustment with
+the universal will of God; it is concentration upon self and self-ends;
+the contraction of love; the shrinking of inward resources; the
+formation of a spirit of hate, the creation of an inward nature that
+hates what God loves. Hell is the inner condition inherently attaching
+to the kind of life that displays and exhibits the spirit and attitude
+which must be overcome before God with His purposes of goodness can be
+{xlix} ultimately triumphant and all in all. Salvation, therefore,
+cannot be thought of in terms of escape from a place that is dreaded to
+a place that is desired as a haven. It is through and through a
+spiritual process--escape from a wrongly fashioned will to a will
+rightly fashioned. It is complete spiritual health and wholeness of
+life, brought into operation and function by the soul's recovery of God
+and by joyous correspondence with Him.
+
+Here is the genuine beginning in modern times of what has come to be
+the deepest note of present-day Christianity, _the appreciation of
+personality as the highest thing in earth or heaven_, and the
+initiation of a movement to find the vital sources and resources for
+the inner kindling of the spirit, and for raising the whole personal
+life to higher functions and to higher powers.
+
+Putting the emphasis, as they did, on personal religion, _i.e._ on
+experience, instead of on theology, they naturally became exponents of
+free-will, and that, too, in a period when fore-ordination was a
+central dogma of theology. This problem of freedom, which is as deep
+as personality itself, always has its answer "determined" by the point
+of approach. For those who _begin_ with an absolute and omnipotent
+God, and work down from above, the necessarian position is determined.
+Their answer is: "All events are infallibly connected with God's
+disposal." For those who start, however, from actual experience and
+from the testimony of consciousness, freedom feels as certain as life
+itself. Their answer is: "Human will is a real factor in the direction
+of events and man shapes his own destiny toward good or evil."
+Calvin's logic is irresistible if his assumptions are once granted.
+These spiritual Reformers, however, were untouched by it, because they
+began from the interior life, with its dramatic movements, as their
+basal fact, and man as they knew him was free.
+
+This spiritual movement involved, as a natural development, an entire
+shift from the historical idea of the Church as an authoritative and
+supernatural instrument of salvation, to a Church whose authority was
+entirely vital, {l} ethical, spiritual, dynamic. The Church of these
+spiritual Reformers was a Fellowship, a Society, a Family, rather than
+a mysterious and supernatural entity. They felt once again, as
+powerfully perhaps as it was possible in their centuries to feel it,
+the immense significance of the Pauline conception of the Church as the
+continued embodiment and revelation of Christ, the communion of saints
+past and present who live or have lived by the Spirit. Through this
+spiritual group, part of whom are visible and part invisible, they held
+that the divine revelation is continued and the eternal Word of God is
+being uttered to the race. "The true religion of Christ," as one of
+these spiritual teachers well puts it, "is written in the soul and
+spirit of man by the Spirit of God; and the believer is the only book
+in which God now writes His New Testament."[31] This Church of the
+Spirit is always being built. Its power is proportional to the
+spiritual vitality of the membership, to the measure of apprehension of
+divine resources, to the depth of insight and grasp of truth, to the
+prevalence of love and brotherhood, to the character of service, which
+the members exhibit. It possesses no other kind of power or authority
+than the power and authority of personal lives formed into a community
+by living correspondence with God, and acting as human channels and
+organs of His Life and Spirit. Such a Church can meet new formulations
+of science and history and social ideals with no authoritative and
+conclusive word of God which automatically settles the issue. Its only
+weapons are truth and light, and these have to be continually
+re-discovered and re-fashioned to fit the facts which the age has found
+and verified. Its mission is _prophetic_. It does not dogmatically
+decide what facts must be believed, but it sees and announces the
+spiritual significance of the facts that are discovered and verified.
+It was, thus, in their thought a growing, changing, ever-adjusting
+body--the living body of Christ in the world. To the Protestant
+Reformers this spiritual ideal presented "a Church" so shorn and
+emasculated as to be {li} absolutely worthless. It seemed to them a
+propaganda which threatened and endangered the mighty work of
+reformation to which they felt themselves called, and they used all the
+forces available to suppress and annihilate those of this other "way."
+
+Nearly four hundred wonderful years have passed since the issue was
+first drawn, since the first of these spiritual prophets uttered his
+modest challenge. There can be no question that the current of
+Christian thought has been strongly setting in the direction which
+these brave and sincere innovators took. I feel confident that many
+persons to-day will be interested in these lonely men and will follow
+with sympathy their valiant struggles to discover the road to a genuine
+spiritual religion, and their efforts to live by the eternal Word of
+God as it was freely revealed as the Day Star to their souls.
+
+
+
+[1] 1 Cor. xv. 50.
+
+[2] 2 Cor. v. 1-4.
+
+[3] John iii. 6.
+
+[4] 1 John iv. 13; John xiii. 34 and xvi. 13; 1 John iv. 4.
+
+[5] They found their authority for this outer sheath of body in the
+text which says: "The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife coats of
+skins, and clothed them."--Gen. iii. 21.
+
+[6] Many of these historical reappearances are considered in my
+_Studies in Mystical Religion_.
+
+[7] Isaac Penington, "A True and Faithful Relation of my Spiritual
+Travails," _Works_ (edition of 1761), i. pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii.
+
+[8] Isaac Penington's _Works_, i. pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii.
+
+[9] The exact and sharply-defined "ladders" of mystic ascent which form
+a large part of the descriptive material in books on Mystical Religion
+are far from being universal ladders. Like creeds, or like religious
+institutions, they powerfully assist certain minds to find the way
+home, but they seem unreal and artificial to many other persons, and
+they must be considered only as symbolisms which speak to the condition
+of a limited number of spiritual pilgrims.
+
+[10] Wordsworth's "Prelude," Bk. ii.
+
+[11] _Theologia Germanica_, chaps. xxii. and xliii.
+
+[12] _Ibid._ chap. liii.
+
+[13] _Meister Eckhart_, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 20.
+
+[14] Tauler's Sermons. See especially Sermons IV. and XXIII. in
+Hutton's _Inner Way_.
+
+[15] _The Divine Names_ of Dionysius the Areopagite, chap. i. sec. i.
+
+[16] _Meister Eckhart_, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 25-30.
+
+[17] Quoted in W. H. J. Gairdner's _The Reproach of Islam_, p. 151.
+
+[19] Denck's _Was geredet sey, dass die Schrift_, B. 2. Pascal's
+saying is: "Comfort thyself; thou wouldst not be seeking Me hadst thou
+not already found Me."--Le Mystere de Jesus, sec. 2.
+
+[19] _The Threefold Life of Man_, xiv. 72.
+
+[20] Sterry's _Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the
+Soul of Man_, p. 24.
+
+[21] "The finite individual soul seems naturally to present a double
+aspect. It looks like, on the one hand, a climax or concentration of
+the nature beneath it and the community around it, and, on the other
+hand, a spark or fragment from what is above and beyond it. It is
+crystallized out of the collective soul of nature or society, or it
+falls down from the transcendental soul of heaven or what is above
+humanity. In both cases alike it has its share of divinity."--Bernard
+Bosanquet, _The Value and Destiny of the Individual_ (London, 1913), p.
+1.
+
+[22] The way to the world of Perfect Reality, Socrates says in the
+_Theaetetus_, consists in likeness to God, nor is there, he adds,
+anything more like God than is a good man.--_Theaetetus_ 176 A and B.
+
+[23] Schleiermacher's _Glaubenslehre_.
+
+[24] _Republic_ vii. 518 B.
+
+[25] Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."
+
+[26] _Realm of Ends_, p. 230.
+
+[27] _Lectures and Addresses_, p. 193.
+
+[28] Ella Wheeler Wilcox, _Poems of Life and Moments_.
+
+[29] Jacob Boehme, however, shows this fascination for the
+super-empirical at its height and culmination. It was an attempt,
+though a bungling attempt, to pass from an abstract God to a God of
+_character_, and it was a circuitous way of getting round the problem
+of evil.
+
+[30] _Mystical Elements of Religion_, i. p. 26.
+
+[31] William Dell's sermon on "The Trial of Spirits," _Works_, p. 438.
+
+
+
+
+{1}
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MAIN CURRENT OF THE REFORMATION
+
+I
+
+One of the greatest tragedies in Christian history is the division of
+forces which occurred in the Reformation movements of the sixteenth
+century. Division of forces in the supreme spiritual undertakings of
+the race is of course confined to no one century and to no one
+movement; it is a very ancient tragedy. But the tragedy of division is
+often relieved by the fact that through the differentiation of opposing
+parties a vigorous emphasis is placed upon aspects of truth which might
+otherwise have been allowed to drop out of focus. This
+sixteenth-century division is peculiarly tragic, because through the
+split in the lines the very aspects of truth which were most needed to
+give the movement a steady increment of insight and power were lost in
+the din and confusion of party warfare.
+
+There was a short but glorious period--the years from 1517 to
+1523--during which it seemed as though the spiritual and intellectual
+travail of the three preceding centuries was to consummate in the birth
+of a movement that would draw together and unify all the liberating
+forces which had slowly become available. The Humanists of the
+Renaissance, no less than Columbus, were finding a new world.[1] They
+had boldly travelled out beyond the {2} boundaries which the medieval
+mind had set to human interests, and had discovered that man was more
+than the abstract being whose "soul" had alone concerned ecclesiastics
+and schoolmen. Man, the Humanists saw, is possessed in his own right
+of great powers of reason. He is a creative and autonomous being, he
+has vast capacities for life and enjoyment to which the Church had
+failed to minister. They stood amazed at the artistic and literary
+culture, the political and intellectual freedom and the great richness
+of life which the newly discovered classical literature revealed as
+having existed in the pre-Christian world, and at the wonderful
+comprehension of life revealed in the Gospels. With commendable
+passion they proposed to refresh and reshape the world through the new
+models, the new ideals, and the new spirit which they had discovered.
+First of all they would wipe out the old Augustinian cleavage which had
+carried its sharp dualism wherever it ran. They would no longer
+recognize the double world scheme--a divine realm set over against an
+undivine realm, the "sacred" set over against the "secular," the
+spiritual set over against the natural, the Church set against the
+world, faith set in contrast to reason, the spirit pitted against the
+flesh, "the other world" put in such light that "this world" by
+contrast lay dull in the shadow. Those who were broadened and
+liberated by the new learning found not only a new world in classical
+literature, but they also found a new gospel in the Gospel. As they
+studied the New Testament documents themselves and became freed from
+the bondage of tradition they discovered that the primitive message
+dealt with life and action rather than with theology. They found the
+key to the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Parables of
+Jesus, and they shifted the emphasis from doctrine to ethics. This
+change of emphasis quite naturally involved another change. It brought
+man into greater prominence, and the Church as an ecclesiastical system
+into less prominence; for life, they discovered, was settled in the
+teaching of Christ by the {3} attitude of the will and by the formation
+of character, rather than by the mediation of a priesthood external to
+man. "I wish," Erasmus wrote to Capito in 1518, "that there could be
+an end of scholastic subtleties, or, if not an end, that they could be
+thrust into a second place and Christ be taught plainly and simply.
+The reading of the Bible and the early Fathers will have this effect.
+Doctrines are taught now which have no affinity with Christ, and only
+darken our eyes."[2] Again in 1521 he wrote to a friend, words which
+appear again and again in his letters: "It would be well for us if we
+thought less about our dogmas and more about the gospel,"[3] or, as he
+often puts it, "if we made less of dogmatic subtleties and more of
+Scripture." So far as Humanism was a religious force it was pushing
+toward a religion of the lay-type, with man himself--man with his
+momentous will--as the centre of interest.
+
+Another important influence was slowly but pervasively filtering down
+into the life of the people and preparing the way for a religion of
+greater personal vitality and spiritual inwardness; I mean the
+testimony of the great mystics. One has only to study the life and
+writings of such a scholar as Nicolaus Chrypffs--generally called
+Cusanus, or Nicholas of Cusa--who died shortly before Luther was
+born,[4] to see what a live force the mystical teaching was even in
+this period of Renaissance. God is for him, as for his great masters,
+Plotinus, Erigena, Eckhart, and Tauler, the infinite and indescribable
+subsoil of the universe, in whose Reality all the roots of life and all
+the reality of things are grounded. The soul, by nature spiritual and
+immortal, at its apex rises above the contradictions which lower
+knowledge everywhere meets and comes into possession, by a "learned
+ignorance," of Truth itself and into an unspeakable union with God.
+But it was not merely among scholars like Nicholas that mysticism
+formed the elemental basis of life and thought; it had, through the
+circles of the {4} "Brothers of the Common Life,"[5] and through such
+masterpieces as the _Imitation of Christ_, the _Theologia Germanica_,
+and the Sermons of Eckhart and of John Tauler, become a part of the
+spiritual atmosphere which serious-minded men breathed. Every one of
+the men who belong in my list of "Spiritual Reformers" read and loved
+"the golden book of German Theology," and most of them knew the other
+writings of the great fourteenth-century mystics. There are
+unmistakable evidences of a subtle formative influence from these rich
+sources, which explains the simultaneous sporadic outbreak of similar
+views in widely sundered places.
+
+There was, thus, abroad at the opening of the Reformation a deep
+yearning among serious people for a religion of inward experience, a
+religion based not on proof-texts nor on external authority of any
+kind, but on the native capacity of the soul to seek, to find and to
+enjoy the living God who is the Root and Sap of every twig and branch
+of the great tree of life. The general trend of this mystical
+tendency, as also of the Humanistic movement, was in the direction of
+lay-religion, and both movements alike emphasized the inherent and
+native capacity of man, whose destiny by his free choice is in his own
+hands.
+
+There were, too, at work many other deep-lying tendencies away from the
+bondage and traditions of the past; aspiration for economic and social
+reforms to liberate the common people and give them some real chance to
+be persons--tendencies which all the Reformers treated in this book
+deeply felt and shared.
+
+All these movements toward intellectual, spiritual, and social freedom
+seemed at first to find their champion in the dynamic hero, whose
+ninety-five theses on the door at Wittenberg shook the world awake in
+1517. He was by birth and spirit a child of the people--"ein Kind des
+Volkes"--and he seemed to be a prophet, divinely called to voice their
+dumb aspirations. He possessed, {5} like all great prophets, a
+straightforward moral honesty and sincerity, an absolute fearlessness,
+a magnetic and commanding personality, an unusual mastery of the
+vernacular speech, and an abundant power of pathos, humour, and satire.
+All the world loves a hero who can say in the face of real danger, "I
+would go forward to Worms if there were as many devils there as there
+are tiles on the roof!" or again, "I would go to Leipzig if it rained
+Duke Georges for nine days running!"[6]
+
+He had, too, unusual religious depth and power which sprang, as in the
+case of the great mystics, from a profound inward experience. Luther,
+like St. Paul and St. Augustine, and many another spiritual guide of
+the race, came upon his supreme insights in sudden epoch-making
+revelations or illuminations by which he found himself on a new level,
+with the line of march shifted and all values altered. His conversion
+and dedication to religion was an instance of this type. So, too, was
+his discovery of the way of Faith. Legend has very likely coloured our
+accounts of this experience, but for purposes of valuation it is of
+little moment to us whether the dynamic flash came to him in his cell
+at Wittenberg as he was studying the Epistle to the Romans, or whether
+it came while he was climbing the penitential stairway in Rome.[7] When
+all legendary coverings are stripped away we have left an inner event
+of the first importance, a _live idea_ bursting into consciousness like
+a new star on the field of vision. By processes much deeper and richer
+than those of logical argument, his mind leaped to the certainty of
+infinite grace and forgiving love in God as revealed in Christ. In a
+word, this baffled and despairing monk, striving in vain to heap up
+merits enough to win {6} divine favour, suddenly discovered a new God
+who filled his whole world with a new light and freedom and joy. His
+name for this discovery was Faith ["Glaube"], but Faith in its first
+intention for Luther meant a personal experience or discovery of God,
+brought into full view and clear apprehension in Christ. "No one can
+understand God or God's Word," Luther once wrote, "unless he has it
+revealed immediately ["on Mittel"] by the Holy Ghost, but nobody can
+receive anything from the Holy Ghost unless he experiences it. In
+experience the Holy Ghost teaches as in His own school, outside of
+which nothing of value can be learned."[8]
+
+Not only was Faith for Luther thus possessed of a mystical character as
+an inward discovery and as a personal experience which laid hold on God
+immediately, but it also owed its illuminating birth in his
+consciousness largely to the influence of the writings and the lives of
+the mystics. However suddenly the "revelation" seemed to burst into
+his mind, there had nevertheless been a long period of psychological
+gestation and preparation for it before the epoch-making moment finally
+came. He had already in his early convent days come under the spell of
+St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Gerson, and many another guide into the
+deep regions of inward personal religion, and his intimate friend, the
+Vicar-general Staupitz, had been to him in some sense a personal
+embodiment of this type of religion. But the German mystics of the
+fourteenth century, with their mighty experience and their
+extraordinary depth, carried him still farther in this direction. He
+was so enthusiastic over that beautiful anonymous classic of mystical
+religion, the _Theologia Germanica_, that he twice edited and published
+it, declaring in his Preface that he had learned from it "more of what
+God and Christ and man and all things are" than from any other book
+except the Bible and St. Augustine. John Tauler, the great Dominican
+preacher of Strasbourg, impressed him no less profoundly. "Neither in
+the Latin nor the German language," he {7} wrote to Spalatin in 1516,
+"have I ever found purer or more wholesome teaching, nor any that so
+agrees with the Gospel." Both these great teachers of spiritual
+religion helped him to see that complete confidence in and surrender to
+the will of God is salvation--"Put off thy own will and there will be
+no hell."
+
+In Luther's earlier writings we come frequently upon passages which
+reveal the way in which experience still saturates Faith for him, and
+which exhibit the mystical depth of his Christianity at this period.
+Commenting on the phrase, "Christ liveth in me" (Gal. ii. 20), in his
+_Commentary on Galatians_[9] he says, "He [Christ] is my form, my
+furniture, and perfection, adorning and beautifying my faith as the
+colour, the clear light, the whiteness, do garnish and beautify the
+wall. Thus are we constrained grossly to set forth this matter. For
+we cannot _conceive_ that Christ is so nearly joined and united unto us
+as the colour or whiteness is unto the wall. But Christ thus joined
+and united unto me and abiding in me, liveth this life in me which now
+I live; yea, Christ Himself is this life which now I live. Wherefore
+Christ and I in this behalf are both one."[10] And in a famous passage
+in the tract "On Christian Liberty," he declares that "Faith has the
+incomparable grace of uniting the soul to Christ as bride to husband,
+so that the soul possesses whatever Christ Himself possesses."
+
+Not only was this Luther of the early period the hero of the people and
+the prophet of a deep and inward religion, he seemed also to have
+found, even more emphatically than had the Humanists, a far-reaching
+principle of individualism which took the key from the Church and put
+it into the hands of the Christian man himself. Salvation in its
+essence, he sees, is conferred upon no one from without. The soul is
+dependent for it upon no organization, no traditions, no dogma, no
+sacred performances. It is a transaction between the {8} individual
+soul and God, and the person who lays hold on God in living faith
+thereby has salvation, assurance, and joy. With this principle of
+individualism there came naturally to Luther a new conception of the
+Church altogether.[11] It was for him, in ideal at least, a community
+or congregation ["Gemeinde"] of believers, each member a spiritual
+priest, ministering to the spiritual and social life of all: "I believe
+that there is on earth, wide as the world is, not more than one holy
+universal Christian Church, which is nothing else than the community or
+assembly of the saints. . . . I believe that in this community or
+Christendom, all things are common, and each one shares the goods of
+the others and none calls anything his own. Therefore all the prayers
+and good works of the entire community help me and every believer, and
+support and strengthen us at every time in life and in death."[12]
+
+This ideal of a priesthood of believers, ministering to each other in
+mutual service and practising neighbourly love in daily life, would, if
+it had been actually carried into effect, have marked a great step in
+the direction in which the Humanists were going, namely, the transfer
+of the emphasis from dogma to life, from doctrine to ethics, from
+ecclesiasticism to personality. Luther's great discovery that personal
+faith is the only thing which counts toward God, and that love and
+service are the only things in the human sphere which have religious
+significance would have introduced, if it had been put full into play,
+a new era of personal freedom and a new stage in the progress of the
+Kingdom of God as a world-wide brotherhood of men engaged in mutual
+service.
+
+
+{9}
+
+II
+
+But the young Luther of these glowing ideals is not the actual Luther
+of the Protestant Reformation, any more than the Augustine of the
+mighty spiritual experiences portrayed in the _Confessions_ is the St.
+Augustine of history. The historical Luther had the hero-spirit in him
+in high degree; he had mystical depth and inward experience as we have
+seen, and he possessed the prophetic power of vision and forereach
+which makes him often seem far in advance of his time; but these
+dynamic traits were more than overbalanced by his fundamentally
+conservative disposition and by his determination not to go faster or
+farther than he could carry Germany, especially the nobility, with him.
+He was, in a very real sense, a child of his time, a product of
+medieval Europe, and he never succeeded in liberating himself from the
+tight swaddling-bands in which his youth was wrapped. He could not
+comprehend, as we shall see, the bold spirits who were dedicated to the
+task of reinterpreting Christianity in terms of the new age; he loved
+the old, in so far as it seemed to him unspoiled by apostacy and
+corruption, and he naturally kept reverting to the ancient dogma and
+the accepted theology of the old Church instead of leading the way into
+a fresh, vital, spiritual form of Christianity adapted to the social
+aspiration of the time.
+
+In spite of the fact that Luther knew and loved the German mystics and
+had himself received a powerful inward experience of Christ as the
+bridegroom of his soul--an experience which quickened all the forces of
+his will and raised him to the rank of a world-hero--nevertheless his
+normal tendency was toward a non-mystical type of Christianity, toward
+a Christianity thoroughly based on Scripture, logically constructed out
+of concepts of the nature of God and Man, so ancient, sacred, and
+orthodox, that they seemed to him axioms of theology and capable of
+being formulated into a saving {10} system of truth, as universal and
+as unalterable as the multiplication table.
+
+However unconscious Luther himself may have been of the shift of
+emphasis that was taking place in him as the movement progressed, the
+historical observer has no difficulty in noting the change from the
+Luther who is endeavouring to sound the deeps of life itself, and whose
+religion is the creation of the inward stream of life within him; and
+the Luther who wanders far afield from experience, draws curious
+conclusions from unverified concepts, piles text on text as though
+heaven could be scaled by another Pelion on Ossa, and once more turns
+religion back to the cooled lava-beds of theology. He never could
+succeed in getting the God of his heart's glowing faith into the
+theologies which he laboriously builded. As soon as he started
+constructing he invariably fell back upon the building-material which
+had already been quarried, and which lay at hand. His experimental
+Faith discovered a God of all Grace, but his inherited _concept_ of
+God, the God of the Old Testament and of theology, was vastly
+different, and remained to the end unrevolutionized by his heart's
+insight. This background conception of God comes to extreme expression
+in his _De servo arbitrio_ ["The Unfree Will"] of 1525: "This is the
+acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so
+many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us
+necessarily doomed to damnation, so that . . . He seems to delight in
+the tortures of the wretched and to be more deserving of hatred than of
+love. _If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows
+so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be
+no need of faith._" There could, in his thought, be no salvation for
+man, no hope, and no joy, until some way of escape was found from the
+stern judgments of this angry and wrathful God. This way of escape is
+found in what Luther calls "the Word of God," by which he means "the
+Gospel of God concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and
+glorified."[13] {11} This Word of God is for him the sum total of "the
+promises that God is _for us_": "the pure Gospel" of a pardoning,
+forgiving God; the revelation in the Cross of Christ that no self-merit
+counts or is needed, but that on Christ's account God forgives the
+sinner and bestows His Grace upon him.
+
+Speaking theologically, Faith consists in believing in the God whom
+Christ has historically revealed--believing without any doubt that He
+will be and will do to us according to the things which are said of Him
+in "the Word of God." It must be said that for Luther himself, Faith
+was an "active, powerful thing," "a deliberate confidence in the grace
+of God," which made him "joyous and intrepid" and "for which he could
+die a thousand deaths";[14] but there was always an irresistible
+tendency in the Lutheran teaching for faith to drop to the lower level
+of doctrine, and to consist in the acceptance of a scheme of
+justification.
+
+This tendency was, I say, easy and irresistible just because Luther did
+not normally and naturally think of God as being inherently and
+essentially loving, gracious, tender, and forgiving, that is to say,
+_fundamentally a Father_ and in his deepest nature like the self-giving
+Christ. For him, as for so many other theologians, God _becomes_
+forgiving and gracious on account of Christ's merit and righteousness
+and thus no longer imputes sin to us. Because of what Christ did, God
+now beholds us with an attitude of mercy, grace, and forgiveness, and,
+on condition of our faith, imputes to us the righteousness of Christ.
+Salvation is, thus, a plan by which we escape from the God of justice
+and wrath and have our dealings with a God who has become merciful
+because our sin has been balanced off by somebody else's merit and
+righteousness.
+
+Not only did Luther continue this medieval fiction of God's nature and
+character, he had also always in mind a fictitious and constructed
+"man." Man for him is a being devoid of "merit," a creature whose
+personal {12} goodness in and of itself is of no value. Even Faith
+itself, by which salvation is received, is not an attitude or function
+of man's own will or reason. It is, like everything else connected
+with salvation, something divinely given, supernaturally initiated, a
+work of God, an _opus operatum_--"Mit unserer Macht ist nichts
+gethan"--and therefore "faith" and "reason" belong in totally different
+compartments of the human being. Nor, furthermore, when he is absorbed
+with his system, is salvation ever synonymous for him with an
+inwardly-transformed and spiritually-renewed self. Salvation means for
+him _certainty of divine favour_. It does not inherently carry with it
+and involve in its intrinsic meaning a new life, a joyous adjustment of
+will to the Will of God. If man is to attain to a moral transformation
+of life, he must receive an added gift of supernatural grace, that is,
+the power of sanctification through the Holy Spirit. This conception
+made it impossible for him to look for the coming of a divine kingdom
+by slow processes now at work in the world.
+
+Luther did not intend to make the "Word of God" synonymous with the
+Scriptures, and in his great Prefaces to St. Paul's _Epistles_ he does
+not identify the two. The Word of God is, as we have seen, the
+revelation, the message, the gospel, of Grace through Christ Jesus,
+wherever expressed, enunciated, or preached. But the pledged Word of
+God found in the Scriptures seemed to him the main miracle of the ages,
+and as, in his contests with Zwickau "Prophets," "Anabaptists," and
+"Spiritualists," he found himself forced to produce a fixed touchstone
+of faith and a solid authority to take the place left vacant by the Old
+Church, he swung naturally toward the dogma of the absolute authority
+of Scripture, and he laid, without wishing to do so, the foundation for
+the view of the second generation of Protestantism, that the infallible
+Scripture is God's final communication to helpless man, and is the
+ultimate and only basis of authority in religion.
+
+His conception of the sacraments in like manner, {13} because of his
+crude supernaturalism and his inadequate intellectual and spiritual
+penetration, drifted to a semi-medieval view. He intended to transform
+these ceremonies and to have them fit "the pure Word of God." In his
+primary _intention_ they were to be no longer objective works of grace,
+but were to have a subjective value only, a faith-significance. They
+were to be conceived as pictorial, symbolic ways of learning the one
+important truth of salvation--God's grace and forgiveness; for God
+deigns, he said, to speak to his immature creatures by signs and
+pictures. But the imperial sway of the past powerfully moved him; his
+own conservative disposition carried him along paths which an
+enlightened reason would not have taken, and the heat of the
+controversy often blinded him to some of the precious truths that had
+seemed clear to him in the creative period of Faith. In the bitter
+controversy with the "spiritual prophets" on the question of
+sacraments, he wrote words which seem strangely out of harmony with his
+earlier views and with his own experience: "External things in religion
+must precede internal experiences which come through [_i.e._ are
+mediated by] external things, for God has resolved to give nobody the
+internal gifts except through the external things. He will give nobody
+the Spirit and Faith without the use of external word and sign."[15]
+Without meaning to surrender the precious jewel of a religion
+spiritually grounded, he once more introduced "the awful mystery" of
+the sacraments, and opened the door for the conception of the rite as
+an _opus operatum_--a grace of God objectively real. He retained
+infant baptism as _an efficacious act_, and, obsessed as he was by the
+literal words, _Hoc est corpus_--"this is my body"--he went back into
+the abandoned path of scholasticism,[16] and restored the mysterious
+and miraculous real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.[17] It is
+true, as Loofs has said, that {14} "Luther re-discovered Christianity
+as religion," but it is also unfortunately true as well that he lacked
+the insight, faith, and boldness of spirit to trust the people of his
+age and of the future with "Christianity as religion," and instead gave
+them a Christianity theologically constructed, deeply marred with
+residual superstitions and mysteries, and heavily laden with the
+inheritances of dark and medieval ages.
+
+
+
+III
+
+There are two types of religious genius, both of which play great roles
+in history. There is first the genius who, inspired by the ideal of
+some earlier prophet, or made wise because he has himself discovered
+the trend of celestial currents, sees through the complex and tangle of
+his time, and forecasts a truth which all men in a happier coming age
+will recognize. When he has once seen it, this vision transforms all
+his ideas and aims, and spoils forever for him all meaner gains, all
+half truths, all goods which must be won through surrender of a
+possible better. He will be obedient to that vision regardless of all
+cost. He will bear witness to the full light which he has seen even
+though he can compel nobody else in the heedless world of his
+generation to see it. He may only cry in the wilderness, but at all
+events he will _cry_, and he will cry of that highest thing his heart
+knows.
+
+There is, on the other hand, the genius who understands his own age
+like an open book. He is almost hypersensitive to the movings of his
+time. He feels the silent yearnings and strivings of the dumb
+multitudes about him; he anticipates in his thought what the rest are
+incipiently thinking--he is the clear voice and oracle of the spirit of
+his age. He knows to a nicety how far his contemporaries will allow
+themselves to be carried. {15} He will not over-hurry, he will not
+outrun their possible speed, and he will sacrifice everything to carry
+his epoch with him toward the goal which he sees. He is contented to
+keep his roots deep in the past, and he tempers all his creative
+insights with a judicious mixture of the experience of the past and the
+ideas which time has made sacred. He will not satisfy the idealist who
+wants leaps, and he will not please the radical in any period; but if
+he is brave, wise, and sincere, and, withal, possessed of rare gifts of
+interpretation and unusual powers of leadership, he may be able to
+shape the course of history no less effectively, perhaps more surely,
+than the genius who insists upon an immediate march straight across
+country to Canaan the moment he glimpses it from his Pisgah.
+
+Luther was a reformer of this second type. He was beset by very real
+limitations. Dr. McGiffert does not overstate the facts when he says:
+"He cared little for clearness and consistency of thought. A
+satisfactory and adequate world-view was not of his concern. Of
+intellectual curiosity he had scarcely any; of interest in truth for
+truth's sake none at all. . . . He remained entirely without
+intellectual difficulties, finding no trouble with the most extreme
+supernaturalism."[18] In many respects, as Harnack has insisted, his
+Christianity was a "medieval phenomenon."[19] Only in one thing was he
+supremely the master of his age and the hero of a new time--in his
+discovery of a way of Faith which makes a man "intrepid" even in the
+wreck of worlds and "in a thousand deaths." On the lower levels of
+life, where most of his work was done, he was strangely under the sway
+of the past, a distruster of reason, a restorer of ancient doctrine, a
+conservative in thought and action, a friend of rulers, a guardian, as
+far as he could be, of the _status quo_--a leader who anathematized
+radicals and enthusiasts and who staved off and postponed for nearly
+four hundred years the truly liberating and thoroughly {16} adequate
+reformation. He was determined to be the repairer of the "Old Church,"
+not the builder of a "New Church," and he was resolved not to travel
+farther nor faster than the substantial men of his time considered safe
+and wise.
+
+But less was perhaps more. There will at least always be those who
+think that the sinuous way of progress is the most certain way of
+advance. The slow incline, the gradual spiral, each wind of the curve
+"ever not quite" the old level--that is the most approved method of
+leaving an outworn past and of moving forward into a new stage of
+history. It may be so. It certainly is true that through Luther's
+_insight_ new reliance upon God came to men, new energy of faith was
+won, and by his work of repair, conservative and cautious though it
+was, in the long sweep of time a liberated Christianity has come, a
+vital social gospel has become effective, and great vistas of progress
+are opening out before the Church of Christ. But it is impossible to
+forget that other group--those men of the other type--who even in
+Luther's day saw the way straight across into Canaan, the men who saw
+their vision fade away unrealized, and who failed to behold the fruit
+of their spiritual travail largely because Luther misunderstood them,
+refused to give them aid and comfort, and finally helped to marshal the
+forces which submerged them and postponed their victory. We may not
+blame him, but it is not fair to these heroic souls that they should
+longer lie submerged in the oblivion of their defeat. I shall try in
+these pages to bring up into the light the principles and ideas which
+they proclaimed to Europe, perhaps ahead of their time.
+
+
+
+[1] In the South the movement showed a tendency to drift back into a
+refined paganism. In the North, however, it was deeply Christian in
+interest, in feeling, and in its moral aspirations. Erasmus was by far
+the greatest figure and the most influential person in the group of
+Humanists of this latter type.
+
+[2] Epistle CCVII.
+
+[3] Epistle DLXXXVII.
+
+[4] 1401-1464.
+
+[5] Nicholas belonged to one of these circles. "The Brethren of the
+Common Life" are treated in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_, chap.
+xiv.
+
+[6] Letter to the Elector Frederick, March 5, 1522.
+
+[7] The story that Luther, climbing the _Scala Santa_ in 1510, suddenly
+was impressed by the words, "The just shall live by faith," is based on
+a reminiscence of Luther's son Paul. Luther's own reference to the
+ascent of the _Scala Santa_ makes no allusion to any such experience.
+He merely says that when he reached the top of the stairs, which he
+climbed in the hope of getting the soul of an ancestor out of
+Purgatory, he thought to himself, "Who knows whether this prayer will
+avail?" Luther began his lectures on _Romans_ in 1515, and his dynamic
+experience probably belongs near this date.
+
+[8] Preface to the _Magnificat_ written in 1521.
+
+[9] First given as Lectures in 1516-17, and published in 1519.
+
+[10] A _Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians_.
+
+[11] Dilthey says in _Archiv fuer Geschichte der Philosophie_, Bd. v.
+Heft 3, p. 358: "The Justification of which the medieval man had inward
+experience was the descending stream of objective forces upon the
+believer from the transcendental world, through the Incarnation, in the
+channels of the ecclesiastical institutions, priestly consecration,
+sacraments, confession, and works. It was something which took place
+in connection with a super-sensible regime. The Justification by faith
+of which Luther was inwardly aware was the personal experience of the
+believer standing in the continuous line of Christian fellowship, by
+whom assurance of the Grace of God is experienced in response to
+personal faith, an experience derived from the appropriation of the
+work of Christ."
+
+[12] _Saemmtliche Werke_ (Erlangen edition), xxii. p. 20.
+
+[13] On Christian Liberty, _Primary Works_, p. 106.
+
+[14] See his Preface to _The Epistle to the Romans_.
+
+[15] _Wider die himlichen Propheten vom Sacrament_, ii. Anno 1525.
+
+[16] See P. Loofs, _Dogmengeschichte_ (Vierte Auflage, 1906), pp.
+752-755.
+
+[17] In his instructions to Melanchthon for the Cassel Conference with
+Butzer in 1534, Luther said, "In and with the bread, the body of Christ
+is truly partaken of, accordingly all that takes place actively and
+passively in the bread takes place actively and passively in the body
+of Christ and the latter is distributed, eaten and masticated with the
+teeth."
+
+[18] McGiffert, _Protestant Thought before Kant_ (1911), p. 20. See
+also the same view in Troeltsch, _Protestantisches Christentum und
+Kirche in der Neuzeit_ (2nd Auflage), p. 481.
+
+[19] _History of Dogma_, vii. p. 169.
+
+
+
+
+{17}
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HANS DENCK AND THE INWARD WORD[1]
+
+Hans Denck has generally been enrolled among the Anabaptists, and it is
+possible to use that name of scorn with such a latitude and looseness
+that it includes not only Denck but all the sixteenth-century exponents
+of a free, inward religion. Anabaptism has often been treated as a
+sort of broad banyan-tree which flourished exuberantly and shot out
+far-reaching branches of very varied characters, but which held in one
+organic unity all the branches that found soil and took root. A name
+of such looseness and covering capacity is, however, of little worth,
+and it would promote historical accuracy if we should confine the term
+to those who opposed infant baptism and who insisted instead upon adult
+baptism, not as a means of Grace, but as a visible sign of the covenant
+of man with God. The further characteristic marks which may be
+selected to differentiate Anabaptism from other movements of the period
+are:
+
+1. The treatment of the Gospel as a new law to be literally followed
+and obeyed by all who are to have the right to be called "saints."
+
+2. The true Church is a _visible_ Church, the community of the saints,
+founded by covenant, with adult baptism as its sign, formed exactly on
+the pattern of the apostolic {18} Church and preserved in strict purity
+by rigorous church discipline; and
+
+3. The denial to magistrates of all power to persecute men for their
+faith and doctrine on the ground that the Gospel gives them no such
+authority--its great commandment being love.[2]
+
+Hans Denck, though in his early period of activity closely identified
+with this movement and regarded as one of its chief leaders in Germany,
+does not properly belong, however, to the banyan-tree of Anabaptism.
+His writings reveal ideas and tendencies of such enlarged scope that it
+appears clear that he had discovered and was teaching another type of
+Christianity altogether.[3] He is the earliest exponent in the
+sixteenth century of a fresh and unique type of religion, deeply
+influenced by the mystics of a former time, but even more profoundly
+moulded by the new humanistic conceptions of man's real nature.
+
+There are few biographical details of Denck's life available. He was,
+most probably, a native of Bavaria,[4] and he was born about the year
+1495. He studied in the University of Ingolstadt, where he was
+admitted among the baccalaureates in 1517.[5] In the year 1520 we
+catch a glimpse of him in close association with the Humanists of
+Augsburg.[6] In 1522 he was at work in Basle as proof-reader for the
+famous publisher, Valentin Curio, and was living in intimate fellowship
+with the great scholar OEcolampadius, whose lectures on the Prophet
+Isaiah he heard.[7] In the autumn of the same year, on the
+recommendation of OEcolampadius, he was appointed Director of St.
+Sebald's School in Nuremberg, which was then the foremost seat of
+learning in that city, {19} a great centre of classical humanistic
+studies. During the first period of his life in Nuremberg he was
+closely identified with the Lutheran movement, but he soon shifted his
+sympathies, and aligned himself with the radical tendencies which at
+this period were championed in Nuremberg by Thomas Muenzer, who, in
+spite of his misguided leadership and fanatical traits, had discovered
+a genuine religious principle that was destined to become significant
+in safer hands.[8] Muenzer read Tauler's sermons from his youth up; in
+his own copy of these sermons, preserved in the library at Gera, a
+marginal note says that he read them almost continually, and that here
+he learned of a divine interior Teaching. It was Muenzer's teaching of
+the living Voice of God in the soul, his testimony to the reality of
+the inner heavenly Word, which God Himself speaks in the deeps of man's
+heart, that won the Humanist and teacher of St. Sebald's School to the
+new and perilous cause. He also formed a close friendship with Ludwig
+Hetzer, who, like Muenzer, taught that the saving Word of God must be
+inward, and that the Scriptures can be understood only by those who
+belong to the School of Christ. Having once caught the _idea_ from
+these impassioned leaders, Denck proceeded directly to work it out and
+to develop its implications in his own fashion. He was himself sane,
+clear-minded, modest, sincere, far-removed from fanaticism, and eager
+only to find a form of religion which would fit the eternal nature of
+things on the one hand, and the true nature of man on the other--man, I
+mean, as the Humanist conceived him.[9]
+
+Already in this Nuremberg period, Denck became fully convinced that
+Luther's doctrine of sin and justification was an artificial
+construction--_Einbildung_--and that his conception of Scripture and
+the Sacraments was destined to clamp the new-found faith in iron bonds,
+tie it to outworn tradition, and make it incapable of a progressive
+{20} and vital unfolding. He declared in his testimony or "confession"
+to the city council of Nuremberg in 1524, that although he had not yet
+a full experience of the inward, powerful Word of God, he distinctly
+felt its life as an inner witness which God had planted within him, a
+spark of the Divine Light breaking into his own soul, and in the
+strength of this direct experience he denied the value of external
+ceremonies, and declared that even the Bible itself cannot bring men to
+God without the assistance of this inner Light and Spirit.[10]
+
+As a result of this change of attitude, the schoolmaster of St.
+Sebald's was banished from the city of Nuremberg, January 21, 1525, and
+from this time until his early death he was homeless and a wanderer.
+He spent some months--between September 1525 and October 1526--in
+Augsburg endeavouring to organize and direct the rapidly expanding
+forces of the liberal movement. He was during these months, and
+especially during the period of the great Anabaptist synod which was
+held at this time in Augsburg, endeavouring to give the chaotic
+movement of Anabaptism a definite direction, with the main emphasis on
+the mystical aspect of religion. He hoped to call a halt to the vague
+socialistic dreams and the fanatical tendencies that put the movement
+in constant jeopardy and peril, and he was striving to call his
+brotherhood to an inner religion, grounded on the inherent nature of
+the soul, and guided by the inner Word rather than on "a new law" set
+forth in the written word. There were, however, too many eddies and
+currents to be mastered by one mind, too many varieties of faith to be
+unified under one principle, and Denck's own view was too intangible,
+inward, and spiritual, to satisfy the enthusiasm either of the seething
+masses or of {21} the leaders who saw a new Jerusalem just ready to
+come down out of heaven from God.[11]
+
+After the Augsburg period, Denck spent some time in Strasbourg, where
+he gained many followers. Capito bears testimony at this time to the
+purity of Denck's life, to his moderation and goodwill, and to the
+impressive effect of his preaching and teaching upon the people of the
+city.[12] Vadian, the Humanist and reformer of St. Gall, too, in spite
+of his disapproval of some of Denck's ideas, speaking of him in
+retrospect after his death, called him "a most gifted youth, possessed
+of all excellencies." But his teaching was too strange and unusual to
+be allowed currency even in free Strasbourg. After being granted a
+public discussion he was ordered to leave the city forthwith. During a
+short stay in Worms, following the Strasbourg period, in collaboration
+with Ludwig Hetzer, they brought to a successful conclusion a German
+translation of the Prophets from the Hebrew, a work which Hetzer had
+begun. This important piece of scholarly work was published under the
+title, _Alle Propheten nach hebraeischer Sprache verteutscht_, in Worms,
+April 3, 1527, and had a wide circulation and use, its main demerit
+being that it had been done by "Anabaptists."
+
+Pursued on every hand, hunted from place to place, he finally sought
+peace and shelter with his old friend, the teacher who had first
+inspired him in his youth, OEcolampadius, and here in Basle in a quiet
+retreat, he died of the plague in November 1527, hardly more than
+thirty-two years of age.[13]
+
+We must now turn to the little books of this persecuted and homeless
+Humanist to see what his religious teaching really was, and to discover
+the foundation principle which lay at the root of all the endeavours of
+this period to launch a Christianity grounded primarily on the {22}
+fundamental nature of man.[14] Denck writes like a man with a
+message--straight to the mark, lucid, vivid, and intense. He believes
+what he says and he wants others to see it and believe it. His
+writings are entirely free from the controversial temper, and they
+breathe throughout the spirit of tolerance and charity. He knows when
+to stop, and brings his books to an end as soon as he has made his
+points clear. The fundamental fact of man's nature for Denck is
+personal _freedom_. Starting with no theological presuppositions he is
+under no obligation to make the primary assumption common to all
+Augustinian systems that man is devoid of any native capacities which
+have to do with spiritual salvation. He begins instead with man as he
+knows him--a sadly marred and hampered being, but still possessed of a
+potentially Divine nature, and capable of co-operating, by inward
+choices and decisions, with the ceaseless effort of God to win him
+completely to Himself. His little book, _What does it mean when the
+Scripture says God does and works Good and Evil_, is throughout a
+protest against the idea of "election," which, he says, involves "a
+limitation of the Love of God," and it is a penetrating account of the
+way in which man by his free choices makes his eternal destiny.[15]
+"God compels nobody, for He will have no one saved by compulsion."[16]
+"God has given freewill to men that they may choose for themselves,
+either the good or the bad. Christ said to His disciples, 'Will ye
+{23} go away?' as though He would say, 'You are under no
+compulsion.'"[17] "God," he says again in the _Widerruf_, "forces no
+one, for love cannot compel, and God's service is, therefore, a thing
+of complete freedom."[18]
+
+It is freedom, too, which explains the fact of sin. God is in no way
+the author of sin; He is wholly good; He can do nothing but what is
+good; He ordains no one to sin; He is the instigator of no evil at all.
+All the sin and moral evil of the world have come from our own evil
+choices and purposes. "The thing which hinders and has always hindered
+is that our wills are different from God's will. God never seeks
+Himself in His willing--we do. There is no other way to blessedness
+than to lose one's self-will."[19] "He who surrenders his
+selfishness," he says in another treatise, "and uses the freedom which
+God has given him, and fights the spiritual battle as God wills that
+such battles are to be fought and as Christ fought His, can in his
+measure be like Christ."[20] The whole problem of salvation for him
+is, as we shall see, to bring about such a transformation in man that
+sin ceases, and the least thing thought, said, or done out of harmony
+with the will of God becomes bitter and painful to the soul.[21] "To
+be a Christian," he once wrote, "is to be in measure like Christ, and
+to be ready to be offered as He gave Himself to be offered. I do not
+say that we _are_ perfect as Christ was, but I say rather that we are
+to seek the perfection which Christ never lost. Christ calls Himself
+the Light of the world, but He also tells His disciples that _they_ too
+are the light of the world. All Christians in whom the Holy Ghost
+lives--that is all real Christians--are one with Christ in God and are
+like Christ. They will therefore have similar experiences, and what
+Christ did they will also do."[22]
+
+Not only is there a power of free choice in the soul; there is as well
+an elemental hunger in man which pushes him Godward. "God," he often
+says, "can give only {24} to those who hunger." In a very great
+passage which reminds one of Pascal he says: "The kingdom of God is in
+you and he who searches for it outside himself will never find it, for
+_apart from God no one can either seek or find God, for he who seeks
+God, already in truth has Him_."[23] He says nearly the same thing
+again in the little book, _Vom Gesetz Gottes_: "He who does not know
+God from God Himself does not ever know Him." This central insight of
+Denck's religious faith that God and man are not completely sundered,
+but meet, as he says,[24] in the deeps of ourselves, is grounded upon
+the fact of experience that there is within us a supra-individual
+Reality which becomes revealed to us sometimes as a Light, sometimes as
+a Word, sometimes as a Presence or environing Spirit. This testimony
+is Denck's main contribution, and we must next see how he sets it
+forth. There is, he says, a witness in every man. He who does not
+listen to it blinds himself, although God has given him originally a
+good inward eyesight. If a man will keep still and listen he will hear
+what the Spirit witnesses within him. Not only in _us_ but in the
+heathen and in Jews this witness is given, and men might be preached to
+outwardly forever without perceiving, if they did not have this witness
+in their own hearts.[25] The Light shines, the invisible Word of God
+is uttered in the hearts of all men who come into the world, and this
+Light gives all men freedom and power to become children of God.[26]
+There is both an inward principle of revelation which he calls _das
+innere Wort_, and a principle of active power which he calls _die Kraft
+des Allerhoechsten_ (the power of the Highest), not two things, but one
+reality under two aspects and two names, and he insists that he who
+turns to this Divine, spiritual reality, which is one with God, and
+obeys it and loves its leading has already found God and has come to
+himself. "Oh, who will give me a voice," he writes, "that I may cry
+aloud to the whole world that God, the all highest, is in the deepest
+abyss {25} within us and is waiting for us to return to Him. Oh, my
+God, how does it happen in this poor old world, that Thou art so great
+and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears
+Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest
+Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name! Men flee from Thee and
+say they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot
+see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee!"[27]
+
+This self-giving nature of God is everywhere taken for granted--it is
+just _that_ which he feels that Christ has once for all made sun-clear,
+and it is because He is essentially self-giving that God pours out His
+life and love upon us as He does His sunshine upon the grass and
+flowers. "The Word of God is with thee before thou seekest; He gives
+before thou hast asked; He opens to thee before thou hast knocked." God
+like a Father deals with His wayward children. "Oh, blessed is the
+man," he writes, "who in his need finds the love of God and comes to
+Him for forgiveness!"[28] No one of us who has been washed from his
+sins, he beautifully says, ought to eat a piece of bread without
+considering how God loves him and how he ought to love God, who in
+Jesus Christ His Son laid aside His right to Divinity that His love
+might appear complete.[29] "It has pleased the eternal Love," he
+writes, "that that Person in whom Love was shown in the highest degree
+should be called the Saviour of His people. Not that it would be
+possible for human nature to make anybody saved, but God was so
+completely identified in Love with Him that all the Will of God was the
+will of this Person, and the sufferings of this Person were and counted
+as the sufferings of God Himself."[30]
+
+Christ is for him the complete manifestation of life and the perfect
+exhibition or unveiling of God's love, and he who appreciates this
+love, feels its attraction, and lives a life which corresponds to his
+soul's insight, becomes {26} himself Christlike, forsakes sin and self,
+and enters upon a life of salvation. "All who are saved," he says,
+"are of one spirit with God, and he who is the foremost in love is the
+foremost of those who are saved."[31] "He who gets weary of God has
+never found Him," while the person who has found Him in this love-way
+will be ready and willing to give up even his own salvation and accept
+damnation for the love of God, since he knows in his heart that "God is
+so wholly good that He can give to such a man only what is highest and
+best, and that is Himself!"[32] That is to say, he who is willing to
+be damned for the love of God never will be damned!
+
+But salvation must never be conceived as something which is the result
+of a transaction. It is from beginning to end a life-process and can
+in no way be separated from character and personal attitude of will.
+"He who depends on the merit of Christ," he says, "and yet continues in
+a fleshly, wicked life, regards Christ precisely as in former times the
+heathen held their gods. He who really believes that Christ has saved
+him can no longer be a servant of sin, for no one believes rightly
+until he leaves his old life."[33] "It is not enough," he elsewhere
+writes, "that God is in thee; thou must also be in God, that is,
+partake of the life of God. It does not help to have God if thou dost
+not honour Him. It is no avail to call thyself His child _if thou dost
+not behave thyself like a child_!"[34] He insists that no one can be
+"called righteous" or be "counted righteous" until he actually _is_
+righteous. Nothing can be "imputed" to a man which is not ethically
+and morally present as a living feature of his character and conduct.
+No one, he truly says, can know _Christ as a means of salvation_ unless
+he follows Him in his life. He who does not witness to Christ in his
+daily walk grows into a different person from the one he is called to
+be.[35] The person who lives on in sin does not really know God, and,
+{27} to use his fine figure; is like a man who has lost his home and
+gone astray, and does not even know that he is _at home_, when his
+Father has found him and has welcomed him back, but still goes on
+hunting for home and for Father, since he does not recognize his home
+or his Father when he has found them![36]
+
+Salvation, then, for Hans Denck is wholly an inward process, initiated
+from above through the Divine Word, the Christ, whom we know outwardly
+as the historical Person of the Gospel, and whom we know inwardly as
+the Revealer of Light and Love, the Witness in us against sin, the
+Voice of the Father to our hearts, calling us home, the Goal of our
+spiritual quest, the Alpha and the Omega of all religious truth and all
+spiritual experience. The Way to God, he says, is Christ inwardly and
+spiritually known.[37] But however audible the inner Word may be;
+however vivid the illumination; however drawing the Love, there is
+never compulsion. The soul itself must hear and see and feel; must say
+yes to the appeal of Love, and must co-operate by a continuous
+adjustment of the personal will to the Will of God and "learn to behave
+as a child of God."
+
+Having reached the insight that salvation is entirely an affair of the
+spirit, an inward matter, Denck loosened his hold upon the external
+things which had through long centuries of history come to be
+considered essential to Christianity. Sacraments and ceremonies
+dropped to a lower level for him as things of no importance. With his
+characteristic breadth and sweetness, he does not smite them as an
+iconoclast would have done; he does not cry out against those who
+continue to use them. He merely considered them of no spiritual
+significance. "Ceremonies," he writes in his dying confession, "in
+themselves are not sin, but whoever supposes that he can attain to life
+either by baptism or by partaking of bread, is still in
+superstition."[38] "If all ceremonies," he adds, "were lost, little
+harm would come of it."[39] {28} He appeals to Christians to stop
+quarrelling over these outward and secondary matters, and to make
+religion consist in love to neighbour rather than in zeal for outward
+ceremonies. He laid down this great principle: "All externals must
+yield to love, for they are for the sake of love, and not love for
+their sake."[40]
+
+He was, consistently with his fundamental ideas, profoundly opposed to
+every tendency to make Christianity a legal religion. His friends, the
+Anabaptists, were inclined to turn the Gospel of Christ into "a new
+law," and to make religion consist largely in scrupulous obedience to
+this perfect law of life. To all this he was radically alien, for it
+was, he thought, only another road back to a religion of the letter,
+while Christ came to call us to a religion of the spirit. "He who has
+not the Spirit," he wrote, "and who fails to find Him in the
+Scriptures, seeks life and finds death; seeks light and finds darkness,
+whether it be in the Old or in the New Testament."[41] "He who thinks
+that he can be _made truly righteous_ by means of a Book is ascribing
+to the dead letter what belongs to the Spirit."[42] He does not
+belittle or undervalue the Scriptures--he knew them almost by heart and
+took the precious time out of his brief life to help to translate the
+Prophets into German--but he wants to make the fact forever plain that
+men are saved or lost as they say _yes_ or _no_ to a Light and Word
+within themselves. "The Holy Scriptures," he writes in his dying
+testimony, "I consider above every human treasure, but not so high as
+the Word of God which is living, powerful, and eternal, for it is God
+Himself, Spirit and no letter, written without pen or paper so that it
+can never be destroyed. For that reason, salvation is not bound up
+with the Scriptures, however necessary and good they may be for their
+purpose, because it is impossible for the Scriptures to make good a bad
+heart, even though it may be a learned one. A good heart, however,
+with a Divine Spark in it is improved by everything, and to such the
+Scriptures will bring blessedness {29} and goodness."[43] The
+Scriptures--the external Word--as he many times, in fact somewhat
+tediously, declares, are witnesses and pointers to the real and
+momentous thing, the Word which is very near to all souls and is
+written in the heart, and which increases in clearness and power as the
+will swings into parallelism with the will of God, and as the life
+grows in likeness to the Divine image revealed in Christ. This inward
+life and spiritual appreciation do not give any ground for relaxing the
+moral obligations of life. No fulfilling of the law by Christ, no
+vanishing of the outward and temporal, furnish any excuse to us for
+slacking a jot or tittle of anything which belongs to the inherent
+nature of moral goodness. "Christ," he says, "fulfilled the law, not
+to relieve us of it, but to show us how to keep it in truth. The
+member must partake of what the Head partakes."[44] _To love God alone
+and to hate everything that hinders love_ is a principle which, Denck
+believes, will fulfil all law, ancient or modern.[45]
+
+Such were the ideas which this young radical reformer, dreamer perhaps,
+tried to teach his age. The time was not ripe for him, and there was
+no environment ready for his message. He spoke to minds busy with
+theological systems, and to men whose battles were over the meaning of
+inherited medieval dogma. He thought and spoke as a child of another
+world, and he talked in a language which he had learned from his heart
+and not from books or from the schools. It is "the key of David," he
+says, that is, an inward experience, which unlocks all the solid doors
+of truth, but there were so few about him who really had this "key"!
+His task, which was destined to be hard and painful, which was in his
+lifetime doomed to failure, was not self-chosen. "I opened my mouth,"
+he says, "against my will and I am speaking to the world because God
+impels me so that I cannot keep silent. God has called me out and
+stationed me at my post, and He knows whether good will come of it or
+not."[46]
+
+{30}
+
+It is not often that a man living in the atmosphere of seething
+enthusiasm, pitilessly pricked and goaded by brutal and unfeeling
+persecutors, compelled to hear his precious truth persistently called
+error and pestilent heresy, keeps so calm and sane and sure that all
+will be well with him and with his truth as does Denck. "I am heartily
+well content," is his dying testimony, "that all shame and disgrace
+should fall on my face, if it is for the truth. It was when I began to
+love God that I got the disfavour of men."[47] He confesses that he
+has found it difficult to "keep a gentle and a humble heart" through
+all his work among men, to "temper his zeal with understanding," and to
+"make his lips say always what his heart meant,"[48] but he did, at
+least, succeed in loving God and in hating everything that hindered
+love. In an epoch in which the doctrine was new and revolutionary, he
+succeeded in presenting the principle of the Inward Word as the basis
+of religion without giving any encouragement to libertinism or moral
+laxity, for he found the way of freedom to be a life of growing
+likeness to Christ, he held the fulfilling of the law to be possible
+only for those who accept the burdens and sacrifices of love, and he
+insisted that the privileges of blessedness belong only to those who
+_behave like sons_.
+
+
+
+[1] The best studies on Denck are Heberle's articles in _Theol. Studien
+und Kritiken_ (1851), Erstes Heft, and (1855) Viertes Heft. Gustave
+Roehrich's _Essai sur la vie, les ecrits et la doctrine de Jean Denk_
+(Strasbourg, 1853). Ludwig Keller's _Ein Apostel der Wiedertaeufer_
+(Leipzig, 1882). The last two books must, however, be followed with
+much caution.
+
+[2] One branch of the Anabaptists held that the "saints" may, however,
+rightly use the sword to execute the purposes of God upon the godless,
+and to hasten the coming of the Thousand Years' Reign of the Kingdom.
+
+[3] I have included him, in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_ (1908),
+among the Anabaptists, but he can be called one only by such a loose
+use of the word that it ceases to have any _definite_ significance.
+
+[4] See J. Kessler's _Sabbata_ (1902), p. 150.
+
+[5] L. Keller, _Johann von Staupitz_, p. 207.
+
+[6] _Ibid._ p. 208.
+
+[7] OEcolampadius' Letter to Pirkheimer, April 25, 1525.
+
+[8] Georg Theodor Strobel, _Leben, Schriften und Lehren Muenzers_
+(Nuernberg, 1795); J. R. Seidemann, _Thomas Muenzer_ (Dresden, 1842).
+
+[9] A contemporary chronicle calls Denck a scholar, eloquent, modest
+and, withal, learned in Hebrew.--Kessler's _Sabbata_, p. 150.
+
+[10] This "Confession" is in the archives of Nuremberg, and has been
+extensively used in Keller's _Ein Apostel der Wiedertaeufer_, see
+especially pp. 49-62. See also Th. Kolde, _Kirchengeschichtliche
+Studien_ (1888), p. 231 f. In this connection much interest attaches
+to a passage in a letter which Luther wrote to Johann Brismann,
+February 4, 1525. He says: "Satan has carried it so far that in
+Nuremberg some persons are denying that Christ is anything, that the
+Word of God is anything, that the Eucharist is anything, that
+Magistracy is anything. They say that only God is."
+
+[11] See Nicoladoni's _Johannes Buenderlin von Linz_ (Berlin, 1893), p.
+114.
+
+[12] Letter of Capita to Zwingli, December 26, 1526.
+
+[13] Kessler says that OEcolampadius in a Christian spirit was with him
+at his death. _Op. cit._ p. 151.
+
+[14] The little books of Denck from which I shall extract his teaching
+are: (1) _Vom Gesetz Gottes_ ("On the Law of God"), printed without
+place or date, but probably published in 1526. I have used the copy in
+the Koenigliche Bibliothek in Berlin, sig. Co. 2152. (2) _Was geredet
+sey doss die Schrift sagt Gott thue und mache guts und boeses_ ("What
+does it mean when the Scripture says God does and works Good and
+Evil"), 1526. Copies of this are to be found in the University Library
+of Marburg, also in the Koenigliche Bibliothek of Dresden. (3)
+_Widerruf_ ("Confession "), 1527. I have used the copy in the
+Koenigliche Bibliothek in Dresden sig. Theol. Cathol. 817 (4) _Ordnung
+Gottes und der Creaturen Werck_ ("The Divine Plan and the Work of the
+Creature"), 1527, in the above library in Dresden. (5) _Wer die
+Warheif warlich lieb hat_, etc., no date ("Whoever really loves the
+Truth," etc.), and (6) _Von der wahren Liebe_ ("On the True Love"),
+1527. This last tract has been republished in America by the
+Mennonitische Verlagshandlung, Elkhart, Indiana, 1888.
+
+[15] "To hear the Word of God," he elsewhere says, "means life; to hear
+it not means death."--_Ordnung Gottes_, p. 17.
+
+[16] _Was geredet sey_, p. C. (The paging is by letters.)
+
+[17] _Was geredet sey_, B. 3.
+
+[18] _Widerruf_, sec. iv.
+
+[19] _Was geredet sey_, B.
+
+[20] _Ibid._ B. 5.
+
+[21] _Venn Gesetz Gottes_, p. 15.
+
+[22] _Was geredet sey_, B. 6.
+
+[23] _Was geredet sey_, B. 2.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ B. 5.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ B. 1 and 2.
+
+[26] _Ordnung Gottes_, p. 7.
+
+[27] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 27.
+
+[28] _Was geredet sey_, D. 1 and 2.
+
+[29] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 33.
+
+[30] _Van der wahren Liebe_ (Elkhart reprint), p. 7.
+
+[31] _Van der wahren Liebe_ (Elkhart reprint), p. 8.
+
+[32] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 19.
+
+[33] _Widerruf_, ii.
+
+[34] _Was geredet sey_, B. 1.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ D.
+
+[36] _Was geredet sey_, A. 4 and 5.
+
+[37] _Ibid_. B. 3.
+
+[38] _Widerruf_, vii.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ vii.
+
+[40] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 33.
+
+[41] _Ibid._ p. 22.
+
+[42] _Ibid._ p. 21.
+
+[43] _Widerruf_, i.
+
+[44] _Vom Gesetz Gottes_, p. 9.
+
+[45] _Ibid._ p. 12.
+
+[46] _Was geredet sey_, Preface.
+
+[47] _Widerruf_, Preface.
+
+[48] _Ibid._, Preface.
+
+
+
+
+{31}
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+TWO PROPHETS OF THE INWARD WORD: BUNDERLIN AND ENTFELDER
+
+I
+
+The study of Denck in the previous chapter has furnished the main
+outlines of the type of Christianity which a little group of men,
+sometimes called "Enthusiasts," and sometimes called "Spirituals," but
+in reality sixteenth-century Quakers, proclaimed and faithfully
+practised in the opening period of the Reformation. They differed
+fundamentally from Luther in their conception of salvation and in their
+basis of authority, although they owed their first awakening to him;
+and they were not truly Anabaptists, though they allied themselves at
+first with this movement, and earnestly laboured to check the ominous
+signs of Ranterism and Fanaticism, and the misguided "return" to
+millennial hopes and expectations, to which many of the Anabaptist
+leaders were prone.
+
+The inner circle of "Spirituals" which we are now engaged in
+investigating was never numerically large or impressive, nor was it in
+the public mind well differentiated within the larger circle of
+seething ideas and revolutionary propaganda. The men themselves,
+however, who composed it had a very sure grasp of a few definite,
+central truths to which they were dedicated, and they never lost sight,
+in the hurly-burly of contention and in the storm of persecution, of
+the goal toward which they were bending their steps. They did not
+endeavour {32} to found a Church, to organize a sect, or to gain a
+personal following, because it was a deeply settled idea with them all
+that the true Church is invisible. It is a communion of saints,
+including those of all centuries, past and present, who have heard and
+obeyed the divine inner Word, and through co-operation with God's
+inward revelation and transforming Presence have risen to a mystical
+union of heart and life with Him. Their apostolic mission--for they
+fully believed that they were "called" and "sent"--was to bear witness
+to this eternal Word within the soul, to extend the fellowship of this
+invisible Zion, and to gather out of all lands and peoples and visible
+folds of the Church those who were ready for membership in the one
+family and brotherhood of the Spirit of God. They made the mistake,
+which has been very often made before and since, of undervaluing
+external helps and of failing to appreciate how important is the
+visible fellowship, the social group, working at common tasks and
+problems, the temporal Church witnessing to its tested faith and
+proclaiming its message to the ears of the world; but they did
+nevertheless perform a very great service in their generation, and they
+are the unrecognized forerunners of much which we highly prize in the
+spiritual heritage of the modern world.
+
+The two men whose spiritual views we are about to study are, I am
+afraid, hardly even "names" to the world of to-day. They were not on
+the popular and winning side and they have fallen into oblivion, and
+the busy world has gone on and left them and their little books to lie
+buried in a forgotten past. They are surely worthy of a resurrection,
+and those who take the pains will discover that the ideas which they
+promulgated never really died, but were quick and powerful in the
+formation of the inner life of the religious societies of the English
+Commonwealth, and so of many things which have touched our inner world
+to-day.
+
+Johann Buenderlin, like his inspirer Denck, was a scholar of no mean
+rank. He understood Hebrew; he knew the Church Fathers both in Greek
+and Latin; he {33} makes frequent reference to Greek literature for
+illustration, and he was well versed in the dialectic of the schools,
+though he disapproved of it as a religious method.[1] He was enrolled
+as a student in the University of Vienna in 1515, under the name of
+Johann Wunderl aus Linz, Linz being a town of Upper Austria. After
+four years of study he left the University in 1519, being compelled to
+forgo his Bachelor's degree because he was too poor to pay the required
+fee.[2] The next five years of his life are submerged beyond recovery,
+but we hear of him in 1526 as a preacher in the service of Bartholomaeus
+von Starhemberg, a prominent nobleman of Upper Austria, and he was at
+this time a devout adherent of the Lutheran faith. He was in Augsburg
+this same year, 1526, at the time of the great gathering of
+Anabaptists, and here he probably met Hans Denck, at any rate he
+testified in 1529 before the investigating Judge in Strasbourg that he
+received adult baptism in Augsburg three years before. He seems to
+have gone from Augsburg to Nikolsburg, where he was present at a public
+Discussion in which a definite differentiation appeared between the
+moderate and the radical, the right and left, wings of the Anabaptists.
+Buenderlin took part in this Discussion on the "moderate" side. He
+remained for some time--perhaps two years--in Nikolsburg and faced the
+persecution which prevailed in that city during the winter of
+1527-1528. The next year he comes to notice in Strasbourg where, for a
+long time, a much larger freedom of thought was allowed than in any
+other German city of the period. The great tragedy which he had to
+experience was the frustration of the work of his life by the growth
+and spread of the Ranter influence in the Anabaptist circles, through
+the leadership of Melchior Hoffman and others of a similar spirit. He
+loved freedom, and here he saw it degenerating into license. He was
+devoted to a religion of experience and of inner authority, and now
+{34} he saw the wild extremes to which such a religion was exposed. He
+was dedicated to a spiritual Christianity, and now he was compelled to
+learn the bitter lesson that there are many types and varieties of
+"spiritual religion," and that the masses are inclined to go with those
+who supply them with a variety which is spectacular and which produces
+emotional thrills. Our last definite information concerning Buenderlin
+shows him to have been in Constance in 1530, from which city he was
+expelled as a result of information against the "soundness" of his
+doctrine, furnished in a letter from OEcolampadius. From this time he
+drops completely out of notice, and we are left only with conjectures.
+One possible reference to him occurs in a letter from Julius Pflug, the
+Humanist, to Erasmus in 1533. Pflug says that a person has newly
+arrived in Litium (probably Luetzen) who teaches that there are no words
+of Christ as a warrant for the celebration of the Sacrament of the
+Supper, and that it is to be partaken of only in a spiritual way. He
+adds that God had intervened to protect the people from such heresy and
+that the heretic had been imprisoned. The usual penalty for such
+heresy was probably imposed. This description would well fit Johann
+Buenderlin, but we can only guess that he was the opponent of the
+visible Sacrament mentioned in the letter which Erasmus received in
+1533.[3]
+
+Buenderlin's religious contribution is preserved in three little books
+which are now extremely rare, the central ideas of which I shall give
+in condensed form and largely in my own words, though I have faithfully
+endeavoured to render him fairly.[4] His style is difficult, {35}
+mainly because he abounds in repetition and has not learned to write in
+an orderly way. I am inclined to believe that he sometimes wrote, as
+he would no doubt preach, in a prophetic, rapturous, spontaneous
+fashion, hardly steering his train of thought by his intellect, but
+letting it go along lines of least resistance and in a rhythmic flood
+of words; his central ideas of course all the time holding the
+predominant place in his utterance. He is essentially a mystic both in
+experience and in the ground and basis of his conception of God and
+man. This mystical feature is especially prominent in his second book
+on why God became incarnate in Christ, and I shall begin my exposition
+with that aspect of his thought.
+
+God, he says, who is the eternal and only goodness, has always been
+going out of Himself into forms of self-expression. His highest
+expression is made in a heavenly and purely spiritual order of angelic
+beings. Through these spiritual beings He objectifies Himself, mirrors
+Himself, knows Himself, and becomes revealed.[5] He has also poured
+Himself out in a lower order of manifestation in the visible creation
+where spirit often finds itself in opposition and contrast to that
+which is not spirit. The highest being in this second order is man,
+who in inward essence is made in the image and likeness of God, but
+binds together in one personal life both sensuous elements and divine
+and spiritual elements which are always in collision and warfare with
+each other. Man has full freedom of choice and can swing his will over
+to either side--he can live upward toward the divine goodness, or he
+can live downward toward the poor, thin, limiting isolation of
+individual selfhood. But {36} through the shifting drama of our human
+destiny God never leaves us. He is always within us, as near to the
+heart of our being as the Light is to the eye. Conscience is the
+witness of His continued Presence; the drawing which we feel toward
+higher things is born in the unlost image of God which is planted in
+our nature "like the tree of Life in Eden." He pleads in our hearts by
+His inner Word; He reveals the goodness of Himself in His vocal
+opposition to all that would harm and spoil us, and He labours
+unceasingly to be born in us and to bring forth His love and His
+spiritual kingdom in the domain of our own spirits. The way of life is
+to die to the flesh and to the narrow will of the self, and to become
+alive to the Spirit and Word of God in the soul, to enter into and
+participate in that eternal love with which God loves us. This central
+idea of the double nature of man--an upper self indissolubly linked
+with God and a lower self rooted in fleshly and selfish desires--runs
+through all his writings, and in his view all the processes of
+revelation are to further the liberation and development of the higher
+and to weaken the gravitation of the lower self.
+
+His first book deals with God's twofold revelation of
+Himself--primarily as a living Word in the soul of man, and secondarily
+through external signs and events, in an historical word, and in a
+temporal incarnation. With a wealth and variety of expression and
+illustration he insists and reiterates that only through the
+citadel--or better the sanctuary--of his inner self can man be
+spiritually reached, and won, and saved. Nobody can be saved until he
+knows himself at one with God; until he finds his will at peace and in
+harmony with God's will; until his inward spirit is conscious of unity
+with the eternal Spirit; in short, until love sets him free with the
+freedom and joy of sons of God. Priests may absolve men if they will,
+and ministers may pronounce them saved, but all _that_ counts for
+nothing until the inward transformation is a fact and the will has
+found its goal in the will of God: "Love must bloom and the spirit {37}
+of the man must follow the will of God written in his heart."[6]
+
+All external means in religion have one purpose and one function; they
+are to awaken the mind and to direct it to the inward Word. The most
+startling miracle, the most momentous event in the sphere of temporal
+sequences, the most appealing account of historical occurrences can do
+nothing more than give in parable-fashion hints and suggestions of the
+real nature of that God who is eternally present within human spirits,
+and who is working endlessly to conform all lives to His perfect type
+and pattern. In the infant period of the race, both among the Hebrews
+and the Gentile peoples, God has used, like a wise Teacher, the symbol
+and picture-book method. He has disciplined them with external laws
+and with ceremonies which would move their child-minded imaginations;
+but all this method was used only because they were not ripe and ready
+for the true and higher form of goodness. "They used the face of Moses
+until they could come to the full Light of the truth and righteousness
+of God, for which all the time their spirits really hungered and
+thirsted."[7] The supreme instance of the divine pictorial method was
+the sending of Christ to reveal God visibly. Before seeing God in
+Christ men falsely thought of Him as hostile, stern, and wrathful; now
+they may see Him in this unveiling of Himself as He actually is,
+eternally loving, patiently forgiving, and seeking only to draw the
+world into His love and peace: "When the Abba-crying spirit of Christ
+awakens in our hearts we commune with God in peace and love."[8] But
+no one must content himself with Christ after the flesh, Christ
+historically known. That is to make an idol of Him. We can be saved
+through Him only when by His help we discover the essential nature of
+God and when He moves us to go to living in the spirit and power as
+Christ Himself lived. His death as an outward, historical fact does
+not save us; it is the supreme expression of His limitless love and the
+complete dedication {38} of His spirit in self-giving, and it is
+effective for our salvation only when it draws us into a similar way of
+living, unites us in spirit with Him and makes us in reality partakers
+of His blood spiritually apprehended. Christ is our Mediator in that
+He reveals the love of God towards us and moves our will to appreciate
+it.[9]
+
+Every step of human progress and of spiritual advance is marked by a
+passage from the dominion of the external to the sway and power of
+inward experience. God is training us for a time when images, figures,
+and picture-book methods will be no longer needed, but all men will
+live by the inward Word and have the witness--"the Abba-crying
+voice"--in their own hearts. But this process from outward to inward,
+from virtue impelled by fear and mediated by law to goodness generated
+by love, gives no place for license. Buenderlin has no fellowship with
+antinomianism, and is opposed to any tendency which gives rein to the
+flesh. The outward law, the external restraint, the discipline of fear
+and punishment are to be used so long as they are needed, and the
+written word and the pictorial image will always serve as a norm and
+standard, but the true spiritual goal of life is the formation of a
+rightly fashioned will, the creation of a controlling personal love,
+the experience of a guiding inward Spirit, which keep the awakened soul
+steadily approximating the perfect Life which Christ has revealed.
+
+The true Church is for Buenderlin as for Denck, the communion and
+fellowship of spiritual persons--an invisible congregation;
+ever-enlarging with the process of the ages and with the expanding
+light of the Spirit. He blames Luther for having stopped short of a
+real reformation, of having "mixed with the Midianites instead of going
+on into the promised Canaan," and of having failed to dig down to the
+fundamental basis of spiritual religion.[10]
+
+In his final treatise[11] he goes to the full length of the implication
+of his principle. He recounts with luminous {39} simplicity the
+mystical _unity_ of the spiritual Universe and tells of the divine
+purpose to draw all our finite and divided wills into moral harmony
+with the Central Will. Once more religion is presented as wholly a
+matter of the inward spirit, a thing of insight, of obedience to a
+living Word, of love for an infinite Lover, the bubbling of living
+streams of water in the heart of man. He declares that the period of
+signs and symbols and of "the scholastic way of truth" is passing away,
+and the religion of the New Testament, the religion of life and spirit,
+is coming in place of the old. As fast as the new comes ceremonies and
+sacraments vanish and fall away. They do not belong to a religion of
+the Spirit; they are for the infant race and for those who have not
+outgrown the picture-book. Christ's baptism is with power from above,
+and He cleanses from sin not with water but with the Holy Ghost and the
+burning fire of love. As soon as the spiritual man possesses "the key
+of David," and has entered upon "the true Sabbath of his soul," he
+holds lightly all forms and ceremonies which are outward and which can
+be gone through with in a mechanical fashion without creating the
+essential attitude of worship and of inner harmony of will with God:
+"When the Kingdom of God with its joy and love has come in us we do not
+much care for those things which can only happen outside us."[12]
+
+
+
+II
+
+Christian Entfelder held almost precisely the same views as those which
+we have found in the teaching of Buenderlin. He has become even more
+submerged than has Buenderlin, and one hunts almost in vain for the
+events of his life. Hagen does not mention him. Gruetzmacher in his
+_Wort und Geist_ never refers to him. The great _Realencyklopaedie fur
+protestantische Theologie und Kirche_ has no article on him. Gottfried
+Arnold in his {40} _Kirchenund Ketzer-Historien_ merely mentions him in
+his list of "Witnesses to the Truth." The only article I have ever
+found on him is one by Professor Veesenmeyer in Gabler's _N. theol.
+Journal_ (1800), iv. 4, pp. 309-334.
+
+He first appears in the group of Balthasar Huebmaier's followers and at
+this period he had evidently allied himself with the Anabaptist
+movement, which gathered into itself many young men of the time who
+were eager for a new and more spiritual type of Christianity. Huebmaier
+mentions Entfelder in 1527 as pastor at Ewanzig, a small town in
+Moravia, where, as he himself later says, he diligently taught his
+little flock the things which concerned their inner life. In the
+eventful years of 1520-1530 he was in Strasbourg in company with
+Buenderlin,[13] and in this latter year he published his first book,
+with the title: _Von den manigfaltigen in Glauben Zerspaltungen dise
+jar erstanden_. ("On the many Separations which have this year arisen
+in Belief.") A second book, which is also dated 1530, bears the title:
+Von waren Gotseligkayt, etc. ("On true Salvation.") He wrote also a
+third book, which appeared in 1533 under the title: _Von Gottes und
+Christi Jesu unseres Herren Erkandtnuss_, etc. ("On the Knowledge of
+God and Jesus Christ our Lord.")
+
+His style is simpler than that of Buenderlin. He appears more as a man
+of the people; he is fond of vigorous, graphic figures of speech taken
+from the life of the common people, much in the manner of Luther, and
+he breathes forth in all three books a spirit of deep and saintly life.
+His fundamental idea of the Universe is like that of Buenderlin. The
+visible and invisible creation, in all its degrees and stages, is the
+outgoing and unfolding of God, who in His Essence and Godhead is one,
+indivisible and incomprehensible. But as He is essentially and
+eternally Good, He _expresses_ Himself in revelation, and goes out of
+Unity into differentiation and multiplicity; but the entire spiritual
+movement of the universe is back again toward the fundamental Unity,
+for Divine Unity is both the Alpha and the Omega of the {41} deeper
+inner world. His main interest is, however, not philosophical and
+speculative; his mind focuses always on the practical matters of a true
+and saintly life. Like his teacher, Buenderlin, his whole view of life
+and salvation is mystical; everything which concerns religion occurs in
+the realm of the soul and is the outcome of direct relations between
+the human spirit and the Divine Spirit. In every age, and in every
+land, the inner Word of God, the Voice of the Spirit speaking within,
+clarifying the mind and training the spiritual perceptions by a
+progressive experience, has made for itself a chosen people and has
+gathered out of the world a little inner circle of those who know the
+Truth because it was formed within themselves. This "inner circle of
+those who know" is the true Church: "The Church is a chosen, saved,
+purified, sanctified group in whom God dwells, upon whom the Holy Ghost
+was poured out His gifts and with whom Christ the Lord shares His
+offices and His mission."[14]
+
+There is however, through the ages a steady ripening of the Divine
+Harvest, a gradual and progressive onward movement of the spiritual
+process, ever within the lives of men: "Time brings roses. He who
+thinks that he has all the fruit when strawberries are ripe forgets
+that grapes are still to come. We should always be eagerly looking for
+something better."[15] There are, he says, three well-marked stages of
+revelation: (1) The stage of the law, when God, the Father, was making
+Himself known through His external creation and by outward forms of
+training and discipline; (2) the stage of self-revelation through the
+Son, that men might see in Him and His personal activity the actual
+character and heart of God; and (3) the stage of the Holy Spirit which
+fills all deeps and heights, flows into all lives, and is the One God
+revealed in His essential nature of active Goodness--Goodness at work
+in the world. Externals of every type--law, ceremonies, rewards and
+punishments, {42} historical happenings, written Scriptures, even the
+historical doings and sufferings of Christ--are only pointers and
+suggestion-material to bring the soul to the living Word within, "to
+the Lord Himself who is never absent," and who will be spiritually born
+within man. "God," he says, "has once become flesh in Christ and has
+revealed thus the hidden God and, as happened in a fleshly way in Mary,
+even so Christ must be spiritually born in us." So, too, everything
+which Christ experienced and endured in His earthly mission must be
+re-lived and reproduced in the life of His true disciples. There is no
+salvation possible without the new birth of Christ in us, without
+self-surrender and the losing of oneself, without being buried with
+Christ in a death to self-will and without rising with Him in joy and
+peace and victory.[16] He who rightly loves his Christ will speak no
+word, will eat no bit of bread, nor taste of water, nor put a stitch of
+clothes upon his body without thinking of the Beloved of his
+soul. . . . In this state he can rid himself of all pictures and
+symbols, renounce everything which he possesses, take up his cross with
+Christ, join Him in an inward, dying life, allow himself, like grain,
+to be threshed, winnowed, ground, bolted, and baked that he may become
+spiritual food as Christ has done for us. Then there comes a state in
+which poverty and riches, pain and joy, life and death are alike, when
+the soul has found its sabbath-peace in the Origin and Fount of all
+Love.[17] His first book closes with a beautiful account of the return
+of the prodigal to His Father and to His Father's love, and then he
+breaks into a joyous cry, as if it all came out of his own experience:
+"Who then can separate us from the Love of God?"
+
+Those who rightly understand religion and have had this birth and this
+Sabbath-peace within themselves will stop contending over outward,
+external things, which make separations but do not minister to the
+spirit; they will give up the Babel-habit of constructing theological
+{43} systems,[18] they will pass upward from elements to the essence,
+they will stop building the city-walls of the Church out of baptism and
+the supper, which furnish "only clay-plastered walls" at best, and they
+will found the Church instead upon the true sacramental power of the
+inward Spirit of God.[19] The true goal of the spiritual life is such
+a oneness with God that He is in us and we in Him, so that the inner
+joy and power take our outer life captive and draw us away from the
+world and its "pictures," and make it a heartfelt delight to do all His
+commandments and to suffer anything for Him.[20]
+
+Here, then, in the third decade of the sixteenth century, when the
+leaders of the Reformation were using all their powers of dialectic to
+formulate in new scholastic phrase the sound creed for Protestant
+Christendom, and while the fierce and decisive battle was being waged
+over the new form in which the Eucharist must be celebrated, there
+appeared a little group of men who proposed that Christianity should be
+conceived and practised as _a way of living_--nothing more nor less.
+They rejected theological language and terminology root and branch.
+They are as innocent of scholastic subtlety and forensic conceptions as
+though they had been born in this generation. They seem to have wiped
+their slate clean of the long line of Augustinian contributions, and to
+have begun afresh with the life and message of Jesus Christ, coloured,
+if at all, by local and temporal backgrounds, by the experience of the
+earlier German mystics who helped them to interpret their own simple
+and sincere experiences. They are as naive and artless as little
+children, and they expect, as all enthusiasts do in their youth, that
+they have only to announce their wonderful truths and to proclaim their
+"openings" in order to bring the world to the light! They go to the
+full length of the implications of their {44} fresh insight without
+ever dreaming that all the theological world will unite, across the
+yawning chasms of difference, to stamp out their "pestilent heresy,"
+and to rid the earth of persons who dare to question the traditions and
+the practices of the centuries.
+
+Instead of beginning with the presupposition of original sin, they
+quietly assert that the soul of man is inherently bound up in the Life
+and Nature of God, and that goodness is at least as "original" as
+badness. They fly in the face of the age-long view that the doctrine
+of Grace makes freewill impossible and reduces salvation wholly to a
+work of God, and they assert as the ineradicable testimony of their own
+consciousness that human choices between Light and Darkness, the
+personal response to the character of God as He reveals Himself, the
+co-operation of the will of man with the processes of a living and
+spiritual God are the things which save a man--and this salvation is
+possible in a pagan, in a Jew, in a Turk even, as well as in a man who
+ranges himself under Christian rubrics and who says paternosters. They
+reject all the scholastic accounts of Christ's metaphysical nature,
+they will not use the term Trinity, nor will they admit that it is
+right to employ any words which imply that God is divided into
+multiform personalities; but nevertheless they hold, with all the
+fervour of their earnest spirits, that Christ is God historically and
+humanly revealed, and that to see Christ is to see the true and only
+God, and to love Christ is to love the Eternal Love.
+
+In an age which settled back upon the Scriptures as the only basis of
+authority in religious faith and practice, they boldly challenged that
+course as a dangerous return to a lower form of religion than that to
+which Christ had called men and as only legalism and scribism in a new
+dress. They insisted that the Eternal Spirit, who had been educating
+the race from its birth, bringing all things up to better, and who had
+used now one symbol and now another to fit the growing spiritual
+perception of men, is a real Presence in the deeps of men's {45}
+consciousness, and is ceaselessly voicing Himself there as a living
+Word whom it is life to obey and death to disregard and slight. Having
+found this present, immanent Spirit and being deeply convinced that all
+that really matters happens in the dread region of the human heart,
+they turned away from all ceremonies and sacraments and tried to form a
+Church which should be purely and simply a Communion of saints--a
+brotherhood of believers living in the joy of an inward experience of
+God, and bound together in common love to Christ and in common service
+to all who are potential sons of God.
+
+
+
+[1] See Veesenmeyer's article on Buenderlin in _N. lit. Anzeiger_ for
+August 1807, P. 535.
+
+[2] The details of his life here given have been gathered mainly from
+the excellent monograph on _Johannes Buenderlin_ by Dr. Alexander
+Nicoladoni. (Berlin, 1893.)
+
+[3] This incident is given in Dr. Carl Hagen's _Deutschlands
+literarischt und religioese Verhaeltnisse im Reformalionszeitalter_,
+1868, iii. p. 310.
+
+[4] The books are:--
+
+(1) _Ein gemayne Berechnung ueber der Heiligen Schrift Inhalt_, etc.
+("A General Consideration of the Contents of Holy Scripture.") Printed
+in Strasbourg in 1529.
+
+(2) _Aus was Ursach sich Gott in die nyder gelassen und in Christo
+vermenschet ist_, etc., 1529. ("For what cause God has descended here
+below and has become incarnate in Christ.")
+
+(3) _Erklaerung durch Vergleichung der biblischen Geschrift, doss der
+Wassertauf sammt andern aeusserlichen Gebraeuchen in der apostolischen
+Kirchen geubet, on Gottes Befelch und Zeugniss der Geschrift, von
+etlichen dieser Zeit wider efert wird_, etc., 1530. ("Declaration by
+comparison of the Biblical Writings that Baptism with Water, together
+with other External Customs practised in the Apostolic Church, have
+been reinstated by some at this time without the Command of God or the
+Witness of the Scriptures.")
+
+These three books can be found bound in one volume, with writings of
+Denck and others, in the Koenigliche Bibliothek in Dresden. There is
+also a copy of his third book in Utrecht. Besides using the books
+themselves I have also used the monograph by Nicoladoni and the study
+of Buenderlin in Hagen, _op. cit._ iii. pp. 295-310.
+
+[5] This idea is reproduced and greatly expanded in the writings of the
+famous Silesian Mystic, Jacob Boehme.
+
+[6] _Ein gemayne Berechnung_, p. 57.
+
+[7] _Ibid._ p. 14.
+
+[8] _Ibid._ p. 221.
+
+[9] _Ein gemayne Berechnung_, pp. 218-221, freely rendered.
+
+[10] _Ibid_. pp. 30-34.
+
+[11] _Erklaerung durch Vergleichung._
+
+[12] _Aus was Ursach_, p. 33. These phrases, "Key of David" and
+"Sabbath Rest for the Soul," occur in the writings of all the spiritual
+reformers.
+
+[13] See _N. lit. Anzeiger_ (1807), p. 515.
+
+[14] Entfelder to his brethren at the end of his first book: _Von
+Zerspaltungen_.
+
+[15] Vorrede to _Von Zerspaltungen_.
+
+[16] _Von waren Gotseligkayt_, pp. 18-21.
+
+[17] See especially _Von Zerspaltungen_, pp. 6-8.
+
+[18] This "Babel-habit of constructing theological systems" is
+constantly referred to by Jacob Boehme, as we shall see. I believe
+that Boehme had read both Buenderlin and Entfelder.
+
+[19] See _Von Zerspaltungen_, passim, especially p. 17.
+
+[20] _Von waren Gotseligkayt_, p. 13.
+
+
+
+
+{46}
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SEBASTIAN FRANCK: AN APOSTLE OF INWARD RELIGION
+
+Sebastian Franck is one of the most interesting figures in the group of
+German Reformers, a man of heroic spirit and a path-breaking genius,
+though for many reasons his influence upon his epoch was in no degree
+comparable with that of many of his great contemporaries. No person,
+however great a genius he may be, can get wholly free from the
+intellectual climate and the social ideals of his period, but
+occasionally a man appears who has the skill and vision to hit upon
+nascent aspirations and tendencies which are big with futurity, and who
+thereby seems to be far ahead of his age and not explicable by any
+lineage or pedigree. Sebastian Franck was a man of this sort. He was
+extraordinarily unfettered by medieval inheritance, and he would be able
+to adjust himself with perfect ease to the spirit and ideas of the modern
+world if he could be dropped forward into it.
+
+He is especially interesting and important as an exponent and interpreter
+of a religion based on inward authority because he unites, in an unusual
+manner, the intellectual ideals of the Humanist with the experience and
+attitude of the Mystic. In him we have a Christian thinker who is able
+to detach himself from the theological formulations of his own and of
+earlier times, and who could draw, with breadth of mind and depth of
+insight, from the wells of the great original thinkers of all ages, and
+who, besides, in his own deep and serious soul could feel the inner flow
+of central realities. He was no doubt {47} too much detached to be a
+successful Reformer of the historical Church, and he was too little
+interested in external organisations to be the leader of a new sect; but
+he was, what he aspired to be, a sincere and unselfish contributor to the
+spread of the Kingdom of God, and a significant apostle of the invisible
+Church.[1]
+
+Sebastian Franck was born in 1499 at Donauwuerth in Schwabia. He began
+his higher education in the University of Ingolstadt, which he entered
+March 26, 1515. He went from Ingolstadt to Heidelberg, where he
+continued his studies in the Dominican College which was incorporated
+with the University. Here he was associated in the friendly fellowship
+of student life with two of his later opponents, Martin Frecht and Martin
+Bucer, and here he came under the influence of Humanism which in the
+scholarly circles in Heidelberg was beginning to take a place along with
+the current Scholasticism of the period. While a student in Heidelberg
+he first heard Martin Luther speak on the insufficiency of works and on
+faith as the way of salvation, and though he must have felt the power of
+this great personality and the freshness of the message, he was not yet
+ripe for a radical change of front.[2] He seems to have felt through
+these student years that a new age was in process of birth, but though he
+was following the great events he remained to the end of his University
+period an adherent of the ancient Church and was ordained a priest about
+the year 1524; but very soon after he went over to the party of Reform,
+and was settled as a reforming preacher in the little church at
+Gustenfelden near Nuremberg. During this period he came into close and
+intimate relation with the powerful humanistic spirit of that important
+city. Hans Sachs was already a person of fame and influence in
+Nuremberg, and here he became acquainted with the writings of the most
+famous humanists of the day--Erasmus, Hutten, Reuchlin, Pirkheimer, {48}
+Althamer and others. In 1528 he married Ottilie Behaim, a woman of rare
+gifts, whose brothers were pupils of Albrecht Duerer, and who were
+themselves in sympathy with the freer tendencies of the time as expressed
+by the Anabaptists. Franck, however, though sympathizing with the
+aspirations of the Anabaptists for a new age, did not feel confidence in
+their views or their methods. His first literary work was a translation
+into German of Althamer's _Diallage_, which contained an attack from the
+Lutheran point of view upon the various Enthusiasts of the period,
+especially the Anabaptists. In his original preface to this work Franck,
+though still in most respects a Lutheran, already reveals unmistakable
+signs of variation from the Wittenberg type, and he is plainly moving in
+the direction of a religion of the spiritual and mystical type freed from
+the limitations of sect and party. Even in this formative stage he
+insists that the Spirit, and not commentaries, is the true guide for the
+interpretation of Scripture; he already contrasts Spirit and letter,
+outer man and inner man, and he here lays down the radical principle,
+which he himself soon put into practice, that a minister of the Gospel
+should resign his charge as soon as he discovers that his preaching is
+not bearing spiritual fruit in the transformation of the lives of his
+congregation.[3]
+
+Sometime before 1530 Franck had come into intimate connection with Denck,
+Buenderlin, Schwenckfeld, and other contemporary leaders of the
+"Spiritual" movement, and their influence upon him was profound and
+lasting, because their message fitted the aspirations which, though not
+yet well defined, were surging subconsciously in him.[4] There are
+throughout his writings very clear marks of Schwenckfeld's influence upon
+him, but Buenderlin especially spoke to his condition and helped him
+discover the road which his feet were seeking. In an important letter
+which Franck wrote to Johann Campanus in 1531, he calls Buenderlin a
+scholar, a {49} wonderfully reverent man, dead to the world, powerful in
+the Scriptures, and mightily gifted with an enlightened reason; and this
+letter shows that he himself has been moving rapidly in the direction in
+which Buenderlin and Denck were travelling, though neither now nor at any
+time was Franck a mere copier of other men's ideas.[5] "We must
+unlearn," he writes, "all that we have learned from our youth up from the
+papists, and we must change everything we have got from the Pope or from
+Luther and Zwingli." He predicts that the external Church will never be
+set up again, "for the inward enlightenment by the Spirit of God is
+sufficient."
+
+In his _Tuerkenchronik_, or "Chronicle and Description of Turkey,"
+published in 1530, he had already declared his dissatisfaction with
+ceremonies and outward forms of any sort, his refusal to be identified
+with any existing, empirical Church, his solemn dedication to the
+invisible Church, and his determination to be an apostle of the Spirit.
+"There already are in our times," he writes, "three distinct Faiths,
+which have a large following, the Lutheran, Zwinglian and Anabaptist; and
+a _fourth_ is well on the way to birth, which will dispense with external
+preaching, ceremonies, sacraments, bann and office as unnecessary, and
+which seeks solely to gather among all peoples an invisible, spiritual
+Church in the unity of the Spirit and of faith, to be governed wholly by
+the eternal, invisible Word of God, without external means, as the
+apostolic Church was governed before its apostasy, which occurred after
+the death of the apostles."[6]
+
+The year that dates his autobiographical letter to Campanus saw the
+publication in Strasbourg of Franck's best-known literary work:
+_Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel_ ("A Universal Chronicle of the
+World's History from the Earliest Times to the Present").[7] It has {50}
+often been pointed out that much of the material of this great Chronicle
+is taken over from earlier Chroniclers, especially from the Nuremberger
+Schedel, and it is furthermore true that Franck's _Book of the Ages_
+contains large tracts of unhistorical narrative, set forth after the
+manner of Chroniclers without much critical insight, but the book,
+nevertheless, has a unique value. It abounds in Franck's peculiar irony
+and paradox, and it unfolds his conception of the spiritual history of
+the race, under the tuition of the Divine Word. At the beginning are
+patriarchs living in the dawn of the world under the guidance of inward
+vision, and at the end are saints and heretics, whom Franck finds among
+all races, bravely following the same inward Light, now after the ages
+grown clearer and more luminous, and sufficient for those who will
+patiently and faithfully heed it, while the real "heretics" for him are
+"heretics of the letter." "We ought to act carefully before God"--this
+is Franck's constant testimony--"hold to God alone and look upon Him as
+the cause of all things, and we ought always in all matters to notice
+what God says in us, to pay attention to the witness of our hearts, and
+never to think, or act, against our conscience. For everything does not
+hang upon the bare letter of Scripture; everything hangs, rather, on the
+spirit of Scripture and on a spiritual understanding of the inner meaning
+of what God has said. If we weigh every matter carefully we shall find
+its true meaning in the depth of our spiritual understanding and by the
+mind of Christ. Otherwise, the dead letter of Scripture would make us
+all heretics and fools, for everything can be bedecked and defended with
+texts, therefore let nobody confound himself and confuse himself with
+Scripture, but let every one weigh and test Scripture to see how it fits
+his own heart. If it is against his conscience and the Word within his
+own soul, then be sure he has not reached the right meaning, according to
+the mind of the Spirit, for the Scriptures must give witness to the
+Spirit, never against it."[8]
+
+{51}
+
+The _Chronica_ naturally aroused a storm of opposition against this bold
+advocate of the inner Way. Even Erasmus, who had been canonized in
+Franck's list of heretics, joined in the outcry against the chronicler of
+the world's spiritual development. His book was confiscated, he was
+temporarily imprisoned, and for the years immediately following he was
+never secure in any city where he endeavoured to pursue his labours. He
+supported himself and his family, now by the humble occupation of a
+soap-boiler, now by working in a printing-house, sometimes in Strasbourg,
+sometimes in Esslingen, and sometimes in Ulm, only asking that he "might
+not be forced to bury the talent which God had given him, but might be
+allowed to use it for the good of the people of God."
+
+In 1534 his _Weltbuch_ appeared from a press in Tuebingen, and the same
+year he published his famous _Paradoxa_, which contains the most clear
+and consistent exposition of his mystical and spiritual religion. Other
+significant books from his pen are his translation of Erasmus' _Moriae
+Encomion_ ("Praise of Folly"), with very important additions; _Von der
+Eitelkeit aller menschlichen Kunst und Weisheit_ ("The Vanity of Arts and
+Sciences"), following the treatise by Agrippa von Nettesheim; _Von dem
+Baum des Wissens Gutes und Boeses ("Of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
+and Evil");[9] the _Germaniae Chronicon_ ("Chronicle of Germany"), 1538;
+_Die guldin Arch_ ("Golden Arch"), 1538; and _Das verbuetschiert mit 7
+Siegeln verschlossene Buch ("The Seven-sealed Book"), 1539.
+
+The closing years of his life were passed in Basle, where he peacefully
+worked at his books and at type-setting, while the theologians fired
+their paper guns against him, and here in Basle he "went forth with God"
+on his last journey to find a safe and quiet "city with foundations,"
+probably about the end of the year 1542. Three years before his {52}
+death he had written in his "Seven-sealed Book" of the soul's journey
+toward God in these words: "The longer one travels toward the city he
+seeks the nearer and nearer he comes to the goal of his journey; exactly
+so is it with the soul that is seeking God. If he will travel away from
+himself and away from the world and seek only God as the precious pearl
+of his soul, he will come steadily nearer to God, until he becomes one
+spirit with God the Spirit; but let him not be afraid of mountains and
+valleys on the way, and let him not give up because he is tired and
+weary, _for he who seeks finds_."[10] "The Sealed Book" contains an
+"apology" by Franck which is one of the most touching and one of the most
+noble documents from any opponent of the course which the German
+Reformation was taking. "I want my writings accepted," he declares,
+"only in so far as they fit the spirit of Scripture, the teaching of the
+prophets, and only so far as the anointing of the Word of God, Christ the
+inward Life and Light of men, gives witness to them. . . . Nobody is the
+master of my faith, and I desire to be the master of the faith of no one.
+I love any man whom I can help, and I call him brother whether he be Jew
+or Samaritan. . . . I cannot belong to any separate sect, but I believe
+in a holy, Christlike Church, a fellowship of saints, and I hold as my
+brother, my neighbour, my flesh and blood, all men who belong to Christ
+among all sects, faiths, and peoples scattered throughout the whole
+world--only I allow nobody to have dominion over the one place which I am
+pledged to the Lord to keep as pure virgin, namely my heart and my
+conscience. If you try to bind my conscience, to rule over my faith, or
+to be master of my heart, then I must leave you. Except _that_,
+everything I am or have is thine, whoever thou art or whatever thou
+mayest believe."[11]
+
+It was Franck's primary idea--the principle to which he was dedicated and
+for which he was content to suffer, {53} in the faith that men in future
+times would come to see as he did[12]--that man's soul possesses a native
+capacity to hear the inward Word of God. He often calls Plato and
+Plotinus and "Hermes Trismegistus" his teachers, who "had spoken to him
+more clearly than Moses did"[13] and, like these Greek teachers of the
+nature of the soul's furnishings, he insisted that we come "not in entire
+forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness," but that there is a divine
+element, an innermost essence in us, in the very structure of the soul,
+which is the starting-point of all spiritual progress, the mark of man's
+dignity, the real source of all religious experience, and the eternal
+basis of the soul's salvation and joy. He names this inward endowment by
+many names. It is the Word of God ("Wort Gottes"), the Power of God
+("Kraft Gottes"), Spirit ("Geist"), Mind of Christ ("Sinn Christi"),
+Divine Activity ("goettliche Wirkung"), Divine Origin ("goettlicher
+Ursprung"), the inward Light ("das innere Licht"), the true Light ("das
+wahre Licht"), the Lamp of the soul ("das innere Ampellicht"). "The
+inward Light," Franck says in the _Paradoxa_, "is nothing else than the
+Word of God, God Himself, by whom all things were made and by whom all
+men are enlightened." It is, in Franck's thought, not a capricious,
+subjective impulse or vision, and it is not to be discovered in sudden
+ecstatic experiences; nor, on the other hand, is the divine Word, for
+Franck, something purely objective and transcendent. It is rather a
+common ground and essence for God and man. It is God in His
+self-revealing activity; God in His self-giving grace; God as the
+immanent ground of all that is permanently real, and at the same time
+this divine endowment forms the fundamental nature of man's soul--"Gottes
+Wort ist in der menschlichen Natur angelegt"[14]--and is the original
+substance of our being. Consciousness of God and consciousness of self
+have one fundamental source in this deep where God and man are
+unsundered. "No man can see or know himself unless he sees and knows, by
+the Light and Life that is {54} in him. God the eternally true Light and
+Life; wherefore nobody can ever know God outside of himself, outside that
+region where he knows himself in the ground of himself. . . . Man must
+seek, find, and know God through an interrelation--he must find God in
+himself and himself in God."[15] This deep ground of inner reality is in
+every person, so far as he is a person; it shines forth as a steady
+illumination in the soul, and, while everything else is transitory, this
+Word is eternal and has been the moral and spiritual guide of all peoples
+in all ages.
+
+Franck thus differs in a vital point from Schwenckfeld. The latter
+starts with man as utterly lost and devoid of any inherent goodness. By
+a sudden, supernatural event, at a temporal moment, divine forces break
+into the soul from without and supply it with a revitalizing energy.
+Man--lost, fallen, sin-blasted and utterly helpless--is by a divine and
+heavenly creative movement _made_ a new Adam. For Franck, the soul has
+never lost the divine Image, the pearl of supreme price, the original
+element which is God Himself in the soul. We are all, in the deepest
+centre of our being, like Adam, possessed of a substantial essence, not
+of earth, not of time and space, not of the shadow but of the eternal,
+spiritual, and heavenly type. It may become overlaid with the rubbish of
+earth, it may long lie buried in the field of the human heart, it may
+remain concealed, like the grain of radium in a mass of dark pitchblende,
+and be forgotten, but we have only to return home within ourselves to
+find the God who has never been sundered from us and who could not leave
+us without leaving Himself. We do not need to cross the sea to find Him,
+we do not need to climb the heavens to reach Him--the Word is nigh thee,
+the Image is in thy heart, turn home and thou shalt find Him.[16]
+
+The bottomless and abysmal nature of the human soul comes first into
+clear revelation in the Person of Christ, who is, Franck declares, truly
+and essentially both God and Man. In Christ the invisible, eternal, {55}
+self-existent God has clothed Himself with flesh and become Man, has made
+Himself visible and vocal to our spiritual eyes and ears, and in Christ
+God has given us an adequate goal and norm of life, a perfect pattern
+("Muster") to walk by and to live by. Here we can see both the character
+of God and the measure of His expectation for us. But we must not stop
+with the Christ after the flesh, the Christ without. He first becomes
+our life and salvation when He is born within us and is revealed in our
+hearts, and has become the Life of our lives. We must eat His body,
+drink His blood until our nature is one with His nature and our spirit
+one in will and purpose with His spirit.[17]
+
+Franck belongs in many respects among the mystics, but with peculiar
+variations of his own from the prevailing historical type of mysticism.
+He is without question saturated with the spirit of the great mystics; he
+approves their inner way to God and he has learned from them to view this
+world of time and space as shadow and not as reality. No mystic,
+further, could say harsher things than he does of "Reason."[18] Human
+reason--or more properly "reasoning"--has for him, as for them, a very
+limited area for its demesne. It is a good guide in the realm of earthly
+affairs. It can deal wisely with matters that affect our bodily comfort
+and our social welfare, but it is "barren" in the sphere of eternal
+issues. It has no eye for realities beyond the world of three
+dimensions. It goes blind as soon as it tries to speculate about God.
+He looks for no final results in spiritual matters from intellectual
+dialectics, whether they be of the old scholastic type, or of the new
+type of speculations, formulations and subtleties of the Protestant
+theologians.
+
+Franck always comes back to _experience_ as his basis of religion, as his
+way to truth and to divine things. "Many," he says, "know and teach only
+what they have picked up and gathered in, without having experienced it
+{56} in the deeps of themselves."[19] "He who wishes to know what is in
+the Temple must not stand outside, merely hearing people read and talk
+about God. _That_ is all a dead thing. He must go inside and have the
+experience for himself ("selbst erfahren"). Then first everything
+springs into life."[20] But "experience" with him does not mean
+enthusiastic visions and raptures. He puts as little value on ecstasies
+and emotional vapourings as he does on dialectic. Ecstasies lead men as
+often on false trails as on right tracks. They supply no criterion of
+certitude; they furnish no concrete ideas or ideals to live by; but still
+further, they do not bring all the deep-lying powers of the soul into
+play as any true source of religion must do. _He_ is striving to find a
+foundation-principle for the spiritual life which shall not be capricious
+or sporadic, and which shall not be confined to one aspect of the inner
+self, but which shall burn on as a steady illumination in the soul and be
+the basis of all moral activity and all spiritual development. He finds
+this principle, as we have seen, in the Word of God, which is a divine
+reality, an eternal and self-existent activity, opening upward into all
+the resources of God, and at the same time forming the fundamental nature
+and ground-structure of the soul. A person may live--many persons do--in
+the outer region of the self, using the natural instincts with which he
+is supplied, pursuing the goals of life which appeal to common sense and
+steering the earthly course by custom and by reason, but it is always
+possible to have a wider range of experience, to live in deeper currents,
+and to draw upon a _profounder source of insight_. This deeper
+experience--which is the basis of Franck's mysticism and, for him, the
+very heart of any genuine religion--consists of a personal discovery of
+this eternal Word of God within and an irradiation of the whole being
+through the co-operation of the will with it. The will is king in
+man,[21] and can open or shut the gate which leads to life. It can make
+its world good or it {57} can make it evil; just as out of one and the
+same flower the bee gets honey and the spider poison.[22] It can swing
+over its allegiance to God the Spirit of truth, or to the god of the
+world who is anti-Christ.
+
+This experience of the Word of God which is thus brought about by the
+will of man--by an innermost personal choice--affects, Franck insists,
+all the faculties of the inner life. Reason now becomes illumined with a
+Light which it never had until the gate into its deeper region was
+opened. Now, through co-operation with the Spirit of God, reason becomes
+capable of higher processes, and can deal with divine things because it
+has actual _data_ to work upon. The emotions, too, are no longer blind
+and instinctive, they no longer carry the will whither it would not.
+They are now the overflow of an inner experience which is too rich and
+full for expression,[23] which transcends the intellectual apprehension
+of it, but they are spiritualized and controlled from within. The moral
+life is especially heightened, and this is for Franck one of the main
+evidences that a divine source has been tapped. The discovery of the
+Word of God creates and constructs an autonomous "kingdom of the
+conscience" ("Reich des Gewissens"), gives us "a thousand-fold witness of
+God," and becomes to us the tree of life and the tree of knowledge.[24]
+
+In his little book on "the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil"--a
+book which was destined to have a far-reaching influence--he declares
+that the Garden-of-Eden story is a mighty parable of the human soul. All
+that is told in the Genesis account is told of what goes on in the
+mysterious realm within us. It is told as though it were an external
+happening, it is in reality an internal affair. The Paradise and the
+Fall, the Voice of God and the tempting voice of the serpent, the Tree of
+Life and the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, are all in our own
+hearts as they were in the heart of Adam. Heaven and Hell are there.
+The one stands fully revealed in the triumphant Adam, who is Christ; the
+other is {58} exhibited in its awfulness in the disobedient Adam of the
+Fall.
+
+As fast as the life comes under the sway of the "kingdom of conscience"
+and a solid moral character is formed, the inner guidance of the Word of
+God becomes more certain and more reliable. Only the good person has a
+sure and unerring perception of the truth, just as only the scientist
+sees the laws of the world, and as only the musician perceives the
+harmony of sounds. Not only must all spiritual experience be subject to
+the moral test, it must further be tested by the Light of God in other
+men and in history, and by the _spirit of Scripture_, which is the
+noblest permanent fruit of the Eternal Word. Every person must _prove_
+the authority of his religion. He must have his heart conquered and his
+mind taken captive and his will directed by his truth so that he would be
+ready to face a thousand deaths for it,[25] and he must, through his
+truth and insight, come into spiritual unity and co-operation with all
+who form the invisible Church.
+
+The invisible Church forms the central loyalty of Franck's fervent soul.
+"The true Church," he writes, "is not a separate mass of people, not a
+particular sect to be pointed out with the finger, not confined to one
+time or one place; it is rather a spiritual and invisible body of all the
+members of Christ, born of God, of one mind, spirit, and faith, but not
+gathered in any one external city or place. It is a Fellowship, seen
+with the spiritual eye and by the inner man. It is the assembly and
+communion of all truly God-fearing, good-hearted, new-born persons in all
+the world, bound together by the Holy Spirit in the peace of God and the
+bonds of love--a Communion outside of which there is no salvation, no
+Christ, no God, no comprehension of Scripture, no Holy Spirit, and no
+Gospel. I belong to this Fellowship. I believe in the Communion of
+saints, and I am in this Church, let me be where I may; and therefore I
+no {59} longer look for Christ in lo heres or lo theres."[26] This
+Church, which the Spirit is building through the ages and in all lands,
+is, once more, like the experience of the individual Christian, entirely
+an inward affair. "Love is the one mark and badge of Fellowship in
+it."[27] No outward forms of any sort seem to him necessary for
+membership in this true Church. "External gifts and offices make no
+Christian, and just as little does the standing of the person, or
+locality, or time, or dress, or food, or anything external. The kingdom
+of God is neither prince nor peasant, food nor drink, hat nor coat, here
+nor there, yesterday nor to-morrow, baptism nor circumcision, nor
+anything whatever that is external, but peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,
+unalloyed love out of a pure heart and good conscience, and an unfeigned
+faith."[28]
+
+In his Apology he says that he has withdrawn "from all theological
+disputations, from all sectarian statements of creed, from baptism and
+all ceremonies," and "I stand now," he adds, "only for what is
+fundamental and essential for salvation"--that is, vital participation in
+the Life of God revealed in the soul.[29] "I am looking," he writes in
+the opening of the _Paradoxa_, "for no new and separate Church, no new
+commission, no new baptism, no new dispensation. The Church has already
+been founded on Christ the Rock, and since the outward keys and
+sacraments have been misused and have gone by, He now administers the
+sacraments inwardly in spirit and in truth. He baptizes His own, even in
+the midst of Babylon, and feeds them with His own body, and will do so
+unto the end of the world."[30]
+
+In a letter to Campanus he says, "I am fully convinced [by a study of the
+early Church Fathers] that, after the death of the apostles, the external
+Church of Christ, with its gifts and sacraments, vanished from the earth
+and withdrew into heaven, and is now hidden in spirit and in truth, and
+for these past fourteen hundred years {60} there has existed no true
+external Church and no efficacious sacraments."[31]
+
+His valuation of Scripture fits perfectly into this religion of the
+inward life and the invisible Church. The true and essential Word of God
+is the divine revelation in the soul of man. It is the _prius_ of all
+Scripture and it is the key to the spiritual meaning of all Scripture.
+To substitute Scripture for the self-revealing Spirit is to put the dead
+letter in the place of the living Word, the outer Ark in place of the
+inner sanctuary, the sheath in place of the sword, the horn-pane Lantern
+in place of the Light.[32] This letter killed Christ in Judea; it is
+killing Him now. It has split the Church into fragments and sects and is
+splitting it now.[33] It always makes a "Babel" instead of a Church. It
+kept the Pharisees from seeing Moses face to face; it keeps men now from
+seeing the Lord face to face.[34] Franck insists that, from its inherent
+nature, a written Scripture cannot be the final authority in religion:
+(_a_) It is outward, external, while the seat of religion is in the soul
+of man. (_b_) It is transitory and shifting, for language is always in
+process of change, and written words have different meanings to different
+ages and in different countries, while for a permanent religion there
+must be a living, eternal Word that fits all ages, lands, and conditions.
+(_c_) Scripture is full of mystery, contradiction, and paradox which only
+"The key of David"--the inner experience of the heart--can unlock.
+Scripture is the Manger, but, unless the Holy Spirit comes as the day
+star in the heart, the Wise man will not find the Christ.[35] (_d_)
+Scripture at best brings only knowledge. It lacks the power to deliver
+from the sin which it describes. It cannot create the faith, the desire,
+the love, the will purpose which are necessary to win that which the
+Scriptures portray. No book--no amount of "ink, paper, and letters"--can
+make a man good, since religion is not knowledge, but a way of living, a
+{61} transformed life, and _that_ involves an inward life-process, a
+resident creative power. "In Pentecost all books are transcended."[36]
+
+As Franck pushes back through "the ink, paper, and letters of Scripture"
+to the Spirit and Truth which these great writings reveal, when they are
+read and apprehended in the light of an inward spiritual experience, so,
+too, he is always seeking, _through_ the historical Christ, to find the
+Eternal Christ--the ever-living, ever-present, personal Self-Revelation
+of God. He says, in his "Seven-Sealed Book," "I esteem Christ the Word
+of God above all else, for without Him there is no salvation, and without
+Him no one can enjoy God."[37] "Christ," he says in the _Paradoxa_, "has
+been called the Image, the Character, the Expression of God, yes, the
+Glory and Effulgence of His Splendour, the very Impression of His
+Substance, so that in Him God Himself is seen and heard and known. For
+it is God Himself whom we see and hear and perceive in Christ. In Him
+God becomes visible and His nature is revealed. Everything that God is,
+or knows, or wills, or possesses, or can do, is incarnated in Christ and
+put before our eyes. Everything that can be said of God can as truly be
+said of Christ."[38]
+
+But this Christ, who is the very Nature and Character of God made visible
+and vocal, is, as we have seen, not limited to the historical Person who
+lived in Galilee and Judea. He is an eternal Logos, a living Word,
+coming to expression, in some degree, in all times and lands, revealing
+His Light through the dim lantern of many human lives--a Christ reborn in
+many souls, raised again in many victorious lives, and endlessly
+spreading His Kingdom through the ever-widening membership of the
+invisible Church.[39] Without this eternal revelation of Himself in a
+spiritual Fellowship of many members, God would not be God, as a Vine
+would not be a Vine without branches; and contrariwise there could be no
+spiritual humanity without the inward immanent {62} presence of this
+Self-Revealing God in Christ.[40] As in Palestine, so everywhere,
+Christ--not only Christ after the flesh, but after the Spirit--is a
+crucified Christ. Only those can open the Sealed Book--can penetrate the
+divine Revelation--who bear the mark of the Cross on their forehead, who
+have eaten the flesh and drunk the blood of the suffering and crucified
+Christ, who have discovered that the Word of God is eternally a Word of
+the Cross.[41] God is nearest to us when He seems farthest away. He was
+nearest to Christ when He was crying: "My God, why hast Thou forsaken
+me?" So, too, now he who is nearest to the cross is nearest to God, and
+where the flesh is being crucified and the end of all outward things is
+reached, _there God is found_.[42]
+
+Sin means, for Franck as for all mystics of his type, the _free choice_
+of something for one's private and particular self in place of life-aims
+that fulfil the good of the whole and realize the universal Will of God.
+To live for the flesh instead of for the spirit, to pursue the aims of a
+narrow private self where they conflict with the spirit of universal
+love, to turn from the Word of God in the soul to follow the idle voices
+of the moment--that is the very essence of sin. It is not inherited, it
+is self-chosen, and yet there is something in our disposition which sets
+itself in array against the divine revelation within us. The Adam-story
+is a genuine life-picture. It is a chapter out of the book of the ages,
+the life of humanity. We do not sin and fall because he did; we sin and
+fall because we are human and finite, as he was, and choose the darkness
+instead of the Light, prefer Satan to God, pursue the way of death
+instead of the way of Life, as he did.[43]
+
+This will be sufficient to show the essential character of the religion
+of this lonely man and to present the main tendencies of his bold and
+independent thought. He had no desire to be the head of a party; he was
+too remote {63} from the currents of evangelical Christianity to impress
+the common people whom he loved, and he was too radical a thinker to lead
+even the scholars who had become liberated from tradition by their
+humanistic studies and by historical insight. He was a kind of
+sixteenth-century Heraclitus, seeing the flow and flux of all things
+temporal, finding paradox and contradiction everywhere, discovering life
+to be a clash of opposites, with its "way up" and its "way down," on the
+surface a pessimist, but at the heart of himself an optimist; and
+finally, beneath all the folly of history and all the sin and stupidity
+of human life, seeing with the eye of his spirit One Eternal Logos who
+steers all things toward purpose, who suffers as a Lamb slain for the
+flock, who reveals His Truth and Life in the sanctuary of the soul, and
+who through the ages is building an invisible Church, a divine Kingdom of
+many members, in whom He lives as the Life of their lives.
+
+
+
+[1] Troeltsch calls him a "literarischer Prophet der alleinigen
+Erloesungskraft des Geistes und des inneren Wortes," _Die Soziallehren_,
+p. 886.
+
+[2] See article by M. Cunitz in _Nouvelle Revue de Theologie_, vol. v. p.
+361.
+
+[3] See Alfred Hegler's _Geist und Schrift bei Sebastian Franck_
+(Freiburg), 1892, pp. 28-48.
+
+[4] See next chapter for an account of Caspar Schwenckfeld.
+
+[5] This Letter to Campanus, written originally in Latin, is extant in a
+Dutch translation, "Eyn Brieff van Sebastiaen Franck van Weirdt,
+geschreven over etlicken jaren in Latijn, tho synen vriendt Johan
+Campaen." See Hegler, _op. cit._ pp. 50-53.
+
+[6] _Chronica und Beschreibung der Tuerkey_ (Nurnberg, 1530), K. 3 b.
+
+[7] My copy is the first edition, printed in Strasbourg by Balthasser
+Beck, 1531.
+
+[8] _Chronica_, p. 452 b.
+
+[9] These three books were included in a volume entitled _Die vier
+kronbuechlein_ (1534).
+
+[10] _Das verbuetschterte Buch_, p. 5.
+
+[11] Pp. 5-8 of the Apologia to _Das verbuetschierte Buch_.
+
+[12] See _Apologia_, p. 2.
+
+[13] _Ibid._ p. 3.
+
+[14] Hegler, _op. cit._ p. 98.
+
+[15] _Die guldin Arch_, Preface 3b-4a.
+
+[16] _Paradoxa_, sec. 101.
+
+[17] _Paradoxa_, sec. 99 and 138.
+
+[18] Franck translated both Erasmus' _Praise of Folly_ and Agrippa's
+_Vanity of Arts and Sciences_.
+
+[19] _Moriae Encomion_, p. 149.
+
+[20] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 13.
+
+[21] _Moriae Enc._ p. 97b.
+
+[22] _Paradoxa_, sec. 29.
+
+[23] _Moriae Enc._ p. 93a.
+
+[24] _Paradoxa_, sec. 63.
+
+[25] _Moriae Enc._ p. 110. For the testing of the Word, see Hegler, _op.
+cit._ pp. 117-119.
+
+[26] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 8.
+
+[27] _Paradoxa_, sec. 9.
+
+[28] _Ibid._ sec. 45.
+
+[29] _Das verbuetschierte Buch_, Apology, p. 11.
+
+[30] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 8.
+
+[31] This Letter is preserved in J. G. Schellhorn's _Amoenitates
+literariae_ (1729), xi. pp. 59-61.
+
+[32] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 4.
+
+[33] _Ibid._ sec. 6.
+
+[34] _Ibid._ sec. 2.
+
+[35] See _Das verbuetschierte Buch_, passim.
+
+[36] Quoted from Hegler, _op. cit._ p. 104.
+
+[37] _Das verbuetschierte Buch_, p. 3.
+
+[38] _Paradoxa_, sec. 101.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ sec. 101.
+
+[40] _Paradoxa_, sec. 8.
+
+[41] _Das verbuetschierte Buch_, pp. 6-9, and _Paradoxa_, sec. 41.
+
+[42] _Paradoxa_, sec. 41 and 42.
+
+[43] _Moriae Enc._ p. 111. _Paradoxa_, passim, especially sec. 28-32.
+See also Hegler _op. cit._ pp. 127-136.
+
+
+
+
+{64}
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CASPAR SCHWENCKFELD AND THE REFORMATION OF THE "MIDDLE WAY"[1]
+
+Among all the Reformers of the sixteenth century who worked at the
+immense task of recovering, purifying, and restating the Christian
+Faith, no one was nobler in life and personality, and no one was more
+uncompromisingly dedicated to the mission of bringing into the life of
+the people a type of Christianity winnowed clean from the husks of
+superstition and tradition and grounded in ethical and spiritual
+reality, than was Caspar Schwenckfeld, the Silesian noble. No one, to
+a greater degree than he, succeeded in going behind, not only
+Scholastic formulations but even behind Pauline interpretations of
+Christ, to Christ Himself. The aspects of the Christ-life which
+powerfully moved him were very different from {65} those which moved
+Francis of Assisi three centuries earlier, but the two men had this
+much in common--they both went to Jesus Christ for the source and
+inspiration of their religion, they both lived under the spell of that
+dominating Personality of the Gospels, they both felt the power of the
+Cross and saw with their inner spirits that the real healing of the
+human soul and the eternal destiny of man were indissolubly bound up
+with the Person of Christ.[2] Here again, as in the early years of the
+thirteenth century, there came a gentle Reformer of religion, who would
+use no compulsion but love, who knew how to suffer patiently with his
+Lord, and whose entire programme was the restoration of primitive
+Christianity, though of necessity it would be restored, if at all, in
+terms of the spiritual ideals of the sixteenth century, as the
+Christianity of St. Francis had been in terms of thirteenth-century
+ideals.
+
+Caspar Schwenckfeld was born of a noble family in the duchy of
+Liegnitz, in Lower Silesia, in 1489. He studied in Cologne, in
+Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and probably also in the University of Erfurt,
+though he attained no University degree. His period of systematic
+study being over, about 1511 he threw himself into the life of a
+courtier, with the prospect of a successful worldly career before him.
+Luther's heroic contest against the evils and corruptions of the Church
+and his proclamation of a Reforming faith shook the prosperous courtier
+wide awake and turned the currents of his life powerfully toward
+religion. He deeply felt at this time, what he expressed a few years
+later, that a new world was coming to birth and the old one dying away.
+To the end of his days, and in spite of the harsh treatment which he
+later received from the Wittenberg Reformer, Schwenckfeld always
+remembered that it was the prophetic trumpet-call of Luther which had
+summoned him to a new life, and he always carried about with him in his
+long exile--an exile for which Luther was largely responsible--a
+beautiful respect and {66} appreciation for the man who had first
+turned him to a knowledge of the truth.[3]
+
+From the very beginning of his awakening he shows the moral earnestness
+of a prophet, and even in his earliest writings he emphasizes the
+inwardness of true religion and the importance of a personal experience
+of the living, creative Divine Word.[4] As a result of this passion of
+his for the formation of moral and spiritual character in the lives of
+the people, he was very acute and sensitive to note the condition which
+actually existed around him, and he was not long in detecting, much to
+his sorrow, aspects of weakness in the new type of Christianity which
+was spreading over Germany. Even as early as 1524, in _An Admonition
+to all the Brethren of Silesia_[5] he called attention to the
+superficiality of the change which was taking place in men's lives as a
+result of the Reformation--"the lack of inward grasp" as he calls
+it--and to the externality of the new Reform, the tendency to stop at
+"alphabetical promises of salvation." He gives a searching examination
+to the central principles of Luther's teachings and approves of them
+all, but at the same time he points out that little will be gained if
+they be adopted only as intellectual statements and formulated views.
+He pleads for a faith in Christ and an appreciation of Him that shall
+"reach the deep regions of the spirit," renew the heart, and produce a
+new man in the believer--"the atoning work of Christ must be
+vital"--and for a type of religion that will involve suffering with
+Christ, real conformity of will to His will, dying to self and rising
+again with Him, which means that we cannot "take the {67} cross at its
+softest spot."[6] He calls with glowing passion for a radical
+transformation of personal and social life, and for a serious attempt
+to revive primitive Christianity with its conquering power.
+
+Luther himself was always impressed with the lack of real, intense,
+personal religion which resulted from the Reformation movement, and he
+often bewailed this lack. He said once to Schwenckfeld in this early
+period, "Dear Caspar, genuine Christians are none too common. I wish I
+could see two together in a place!" But with all his titanic power to
+shake the old Church, Luther was not able to sift away the accumulated
+chaff of the ages and to seize upon the inward, living kernel of
+Christ's Gospel in such a real and vivid presentation that men were
+once again able to find the entire Christ, and were once again lifted
+into apostolic power through the discovery of Him. This was the task
+to which Schwenckfeld now felt himself summoned. It seemed to him that
+the entire basis of salvation should be grasped in a way quite
+different from Luther's way of formulation, and this called for a
+restatement of the whole revelation of God in Christ and of the work of
+Christ in the soul of man.[7]
+
+Luther's final break with the spiritual Reformer of Silesia, which
+occurred in 1527, was primarily occasioned by Schwenckfeld's teaching
+on the meaning and value of the Lord's Supper, though their difference
+was by no means confined to that point. Schwenckfeld's position had
+culminated in 1526 in a suspension of the celebration of the Lord's
+Supper--the so-called _Stillstand_--until a right understanding and
+true practice of it according to the will of the Lord should be
+revealed.[8] "We know at present of no apostolic commission," he
+wrote, "nor {68} again do we make any claim to be regarded as apostles,
+for we have neither received the fulness of the Holy Spirit nor the
+apostolic seal for such an office. We dwell in humility and ascribe
+nothing to ourselves, except that we bear witness to Christ, invite men
+to Christ, preach Christ and His infinite work of salvation, and labour
+as much as we can that Christ may be truly known."[9]
+
+Into the bitter controversy over the Sacrament--a controversy between
+noble and sincere Reformers, which forms the supreme internal tragedy
+of the Reformation--we need not now enter. We shall in the proper
+place give Schwenckfeld's position upon it, though only in so far as it
+belongs in an exposition of his type of spiritual Christianity; but the
+immediate effect of his position and practices was such a collision
+with Luther, and the arousal of such hostility on the part of the
+Lutherans of Silesia, that the continued pursuit of Schwenckfeld's
+mission in that country became impossible. He was, however, not
+expelled by edict, but under compulsion of the existing situation; and
+in order not to be a trouble to his friend, the Duke of Liegnitz, he
+went in 1529 into voluntary exile, never to return. For thirty years
+he was a wanderer without a permanent home on the earth, but he could
+thank his Lord Christ, as he did, for granting him through all these
+years an inward freedom, and for bringing him into "His castle of
+Peace." He once wrote: "If I had wanted a good place on earth, if I
+had cared more for temporal than for eternal things, and if I would
+have deserted my Christ, then I might have stayed in my fatherland and
+in my own house, and I might have had the powerful of this world for my
+friends."[10]
+
+He sojourned for longer or shorter periods in Strasbourg, Augsburg,
+Ulm, and other cities, but nowhere was he safe from his enemies, and he
+always faced the prospect of banishment even from his place of
+temporary sojourn. {69} Furious declarations were passed against him
+by the Schmalkald League in 1540, for to his anti-Lutheran views on the
+sacraments he had now added teachings on the nature of Christ which the
+theologians pronounced unorthodox. Three years later he sent a
+messenger to Luther in hope of a friendly understanding. Luther's
+answer was brief and final: "The stupid fool, possessed by the devil,
+understands nothing. He does not know what he is babbling. But if he
+won't stop his drivel, let him at least not bother me with the booklets
+which the devil spues out of him."[11] At the ministerial Council of
+Protestant States in 1556 Schwenckfeld was denounced in the most
+vituperous language of the period, and the civil authorities were urged
+to proceed against him as a dangerous heretic. He always had,
+notwithstanding this pursuit of theological hate, many powerful
+friends, and a large number of brave and devoted followers who were
+glad to risk goods, home, and life for the sake of what was to them the
+living Word of God. He died--or as his friends preferred to say, he
+had a quiet and peaceful "home passage"--at Ulm in 1561. Of the
+purity, the brave sincerity, the nobility, the outward and inward
+consistency of his life there is no question. His enemies had no word
+to say which reflected upon the motives of his heart or upon the
+genuine piety of his life. His religion cost him all that he held dear
+in the outer world--he had not taken "the cross at the softest
+spot"--and he practised his faith as the most precious thing a man
+could possess in this world or in any other.
+
+We must now turn to a study of his type of Christianity, which will be
+presented here not in the order of its historical development, but as
+it appears in perspective in his life and writings. He does not ground
+his conception of salvation, his idea of religion _ueberhaupt_, as the
+humanistic Reformers, Denck, Buenderlin, Entfelder, and Franck, do, on
+the essentially divine nature of the {70} soul in its deepest
+reality,[12] nor again as the medieval mystics do, on the substantial
+presence within the soul of a divine soul-centre, an unlost and
+inalienable Spark or Image of God which can turn back home and unite
+itself with its Source, the Godhead. He begins, as Luther does, with
+man "fallen," "dead in sin," by nature "blind and deaf" to divine
+realities. For him, as for Luther, there exists no _natural_ freedom
+of the will, by which a person can spontaneously and of his own
+initiative rise up, shake off the shackles of sin, and go to living as
+a son of God. This stupendous event, this absolute shift of the
+life-level, comes, and can come, he thinks, only through an act of God,
+directly, immediately wrought upon the soul. Salvation must be a
+supernatural event. Through this act of God from above there results
+within the soul an experience which in every respect is a new creation.
+It is a cataclysmic event of the same order as the _fiat lux_ of cosmic
+creation, a rebirth through which the man who has it once again comes
+into the condition Adam was in before he fell.
+
+Everything which has to do with salvation in Schwenckfeld's
+Christianity goes back to the historical Christ.[13] Christ is the
+first-born of this new creation. He is the first "new Adam," who by
+His triumphant life and victorious resurrection has become for ever "a
+life-giving Spirit," the creative Principle of a new humanity. In
+Christ the Word of God, the actual Divine Seed of God, became flesh,
+entered into our human nature and penetrated it with Spirit and with
+Life, conquered its stubborn bent toward sin, and transfigured and
+transformed this human flesh into a divine and heavenly substance. By
+obedience to the complete will of God, even to the extreme depths of
+suffering, sacrifice, and death on the Cross for {71} the love of men,
+Christ glorified human flesh, exalted it from flesh to spirit, and in
+His resurrected heavenly life He is able to unite Himself inwardly with
+the souls of believers, so that His spiritual resurrected flesh and
+blood can be their food and drink, and He can become the life-giving
+source of a new order of humanity, the spiritual Head of a new race.
+"If the soul of man," he wrote, "is to be truly nourished, vitally fed
+and watered, so that it comes into possession of Eternal Life, it must
+die to its fleshly life and _receive into itself a divine and spiritual
+Life, having its source in the Being of God and mediated to the soul by
+the living, inward-working Flesh and Blood of Jesus Christ_," through
+which mediation we come into spiritual union and vital fellowship with
+God who is Spirit.[14]
+
+Salvation for Schwenckfeld, therefore, is participation in the life of
+this new creation, this new world-order. To become a Christian, in his
+sense of the word, is to pass over one of the most decisive watersheds
+in the universe, to go from one kingdom to another kingdom of a higher
+rank. The _process_--for it is a vital process--is from beginning to
+end in the realm of experience. By the exercise of faith in the
+crucified, risen, and glorified God-Man, as the life-giving Spirit,
+real power from a higher world streams into the soul. Something
+"pneumatic," something which belongs ontologically to a higher
+spiritual world-order, comes into the person as a divinely bestowed
+germ-plasm, with living, renewing, organizing power. As with Irenaeus,
+so with Schwenckfeld, salvation is "real redemption," the "deification"
+of mortal man, the actual formation of an immortal nature, the
+restoration of humanity to what it originally was, through the
+in-streaming life-energy of a mystical Adam-Christ, the Founder and
+Head of a new spiritual race.[15]
+
+By this incoming spiritual power and life-substance the entire
+personality of the recipient is affected. The {72} recreative energy
+which pours in transforms both soul and body. The inner eternal Word
+of God, who became flesh, acts upon the inner nature of man, so that
+the believing man is changed into something spiritual, divine and
+heavenly, and like Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word of God.[16] There
+comes, with this epoch-making experience, a sense of freedom not known
+before, a power of control over the body and its appetites, an
+illumination of the intellect, a new sensitiveness of conscience to the
+meaning of sin, an extraordinary expansion of the vision of the goal of
+life--which is a full-grown man in Christ,--and an apprehension of the
+gift of the Spirit sufficient for the achievement of that goal. Not
+least among the signs of transfiguration and of heightened life is the
+attainment of a joy which spreads through the inward spirit and shines
+on the face--a joy which can turn hard exile into a _Ruheschloss_, "a
+castle of peace."
+
+Those who have experienced this dynamic transfiguration gain thereby
+gifts, capacities, and powers to hear the Word of God within their own
+souls, and thus this Word, which is the same life-giving Spirit that
+became flesh in Christ and that produces the new creation in man,
+becomes a perpetual inward Teacher in those who are reborn. "Precious
+gifts of the Holy Ghost flow from the essential Being of God into the
+heart of the believer." There is, Schwenckfeld holds, a double
+revelation of God. The primary Word of God is eternal, spiritual,
+inward. "The Word, when spiritual messengers preach or teach, is of
+two kinds with a decided difference in their manner of working. One is
+of God, even is God, and lives and works in the heart of the messenger.
+This is the inner Word, and is in reality nothing else than the
+continued manifestation of Christ. He is inwardly revealed, and heard
+with the inward ears of the heart."[17] It is, in fact, God Himself
+_operating_ as Life and Spirit and Light upon the spiritual substance
+of the human soul, first as the Life-Seed which forms the new creation
+in man, and afterwards as the permanent {73} nourishing and tutoring
+Spirit who leads the obedient soul on into all the Truth, and perfects
+it into the likeness and stature of Christ. "There is a living, inner
+Scripture, written in the believer's heart by the finger of God."
+"This inner Scripture has an active creative power of holiness, and
+makes holy, living, righteous and saved all those in whose hearts it is
+written."
+
+The _divine word_ in the secondary sense is the outward word--the word
+of Scripture. "The other word which serves the inner Word with voice,
+sound, and expression is the external word, and is heard by the
+external man with his ears of sense, and is written and read in
+letters. He who has read and heard only that, and not the inner Word,
+has not heard the Gospel of Christ, the Gospel of Grace, nor has he
+received or understood it."[18] It is at best only the witness or
+testimony which assists the soul to find the real life-giving Word.
+Cut apart from the inner spiritual Word, the word of the letter is
+"dead," as the body would be if sundered from the spirit. "It paints
+truth powerfully for the eye, but it cannot bring it into the
+heart."[19] "The Scriptures cannot bring to the soul that of which
+they speak. This must be sought directly from God Himself."[20] In
+his practical use of Scripture and in his estimate of its importance he
+is hardly behind Luther himself. "There is," he says, "no writing on
+earth like the Holy Scriptures."[21] His Christianity is penetrated
+and illuminated at every point by the profound spiritual experiences of
+the saints of the Bible, and still more by the vivid portraits of
+Christ in the Gospels, by the words from His lips recorded there, and
+by the experiences of the apostles and the development of the primitive
+Church. He never doubts or questions the inspiration of the
+Scriptures; quite the contrary, he holds that Scripture is "given by
+God" and is an inexhaustible well of inspired truth from which the soul
+can endlessly draw. The actual content of Christian faith is supplied
+by the historical revelation; {74} but Schwenckfeld always insists that
+written words, however inspired, are still external to the soul, and
+merely record historical events which have happened to others in other
+ages. "If man," he writes, "is to understand spiritual things and is
+to know and judge rightly, he must bring the divine Light to the
+Scriptures, the Spirit to the letter, the Truth to the picture, and the
+Master to His created work. . . . In a word, to understand the
+Scriptures a man must become a new man, a man of God; he must be in
+Christ who gave forth the Scriptures."[2] That which is to change the
+inner nature of a man must be something personally experienced and not
+external to him; must be in its own nature as spiritual as the soul
+itself is and not material, as written words are. "The pen cannot
+completely bring the heart to the paper, nor can the mouth entirely
+express the well of living water within itself."[23] The Bible leads
+to Christ and bears witness of Him as no other book does, but it is not
+Christ. And even the Bible remains a closed book until Christ opens
+it.[24] The Scriptures tell, as no other writings do, of the Word of
+God and its life-operations in the world, but they are still not the
+Word of God. The spiritual realities of life cannot be settled by
+laboriously piling up texts of Scripture, by subtle theological
+dialectic, or by learned exegesis of sacred words. If these spiritual
+realities are to become real and effective to us, it must be through
+the direct relation of the human spirit with the divine Spirit--the
+inward spiritual Word of God.[25] "He who will see the truth must have
+God for eyes."[26]
+
+Schwenckfeld's view of the process of salvation and the permanent
+illumination of the reborn soul by a real incoming divine
+substance--whether called Word or Seed--is the _dynamic_ feature of his
+Christianity. He is endeavouring to find a foundation for a religious
+energism that will avoid the dangers which beset Luther's principle
+{75} of "justification by faith." From the inception of the
+Reformation movement there had appeared a tendency to regard the
+exercise of "faith" as all that was required for human salvation.
+Luther did not mean it so, but it was the easy line of least resistance
+to hold that "faith" had a magic effect in the invisible realm, that is
+to say: As soon as a person exercised "faith," God counted the "faith"
+for righteousness, and regarded that person as "justified." The
+important operation was thus in a region outside the soul. The
+momentous shift was not in the personal character of the individual,
+but in the way the individual was regarded and valued in the heavenly
+estimates. It was the discovery of the prevalence of this crude and
+magical reliance on "faith" which first drove Schwenckfeld to a deeper
+study of the problems of religion. It was the necessity that he felt
+to discover some way by which man himself could be actually renewed,
+transformed, recreated, and _made_ righteous--rather than merely
+counted or reckoned righteous by some magical transaction--that made
+him an independent reformer and set him on his solitary way.
+
+To this deep and central question of religion, How is a human soul
+saved? there were in Schwenckfeld's day four well-known answers:
+
+(1) There was the answer of the Church in which he was born. Salvation
+is by Grace, mediated through the sacramental channels of the
+mysterious and divinely founded Church. Man's part consists in the
+performance of the "works" which the Church requires of him and the
+proper use of the sacramental means of Grace. Through these
+sacramental channels actual Grace, substantial divine help, comes into
+man and works the miracle of salvation in him.
+
+(2) There was the answer of the great mystics, not always clear and
+simple, but very profound and significant. The Ground and the Abyss of
+the soul is one substance with the eternal and absolute Godhead.
+Finite strivings, isolated purposes, selfish aims, centrifugal pursuits
+are vain and illusory. We lose our lives in so far as we live {76} in
+self-will and in self-centred joys. The way home, the way of
+salvation, is a return to that Ground-Reality from which we have gone
+out--a return to union and oneness of Life with the infinite Godhead.
+
+(3) The third answer is that of Luther: "Salvation is by faith." This
+seems at first to be a dynamic answer. It breaks in on the distracted
+world like a new moral trumpet-call to the soul. It comes to men like
+a fresh Copernican insight which discovers a new religious
+world-centre. The soul by its own inward vision, by its moral
+attitude, by the swing of the will, can initiate a new relation with
+God, and so produce a new inward kingdom. That, however, is not
+Luther's message. He could not take that optimistic view of life
+because it implied that man has within himself a native capacity for
+God, and can rise to the vision and attitude which lead to a moral
+renewal of the self. Luther never succeeded in clearing his principle
+from scholastic complications. He never put it upon a moral and
+dynamic foundation. It remains to the last a mysterious principle, and
+was easily open to the antinomian interpretation, that upon the
+exercise of faith God for Christ's merits "counts man justified"--an
+interpretation dear to those who are slack-minded and prone to forensic
+schemes of salvation.
+
+(4) The fourth view was that of the humanist-spiritual Reformers, men
+of the type of Denck and Buenderlin, who are the precursors of what we
+to-day call the ethical way of salvation. They assume that salvation
+is from beginning to end a moral process. God is in essence and nature
+a loving, self-revealing, self-giving God, who has in all ages unveiled
+Himself in revelations suited to the spiritual stature of man, has in
+the fulness of time become incarnate in Christ, and forever pleads with
+men through His Spirit to come to Him. Those who see and hear, those
+who respond and co-operate, _i.e._ those who exercise faith, are
+thereby morally transformed into an inward likeness to Him, and so
+enter upon a life which prefers light to darkness, goodness to sin,
+love to hate.
+
+{77}
+
+Schwenckfeld was not satisfied with any of these views. He knew and
+loved the mystics, but he was too much impressed with the mighty Life
+and message of the historical Christ to adopt the mystic's way. He
+felt that Lutheran Christianity was too scholastic, too dependent on
+externals, too inclined to an antinomian use of "faith." He could not
+go along the path of the Humanist-Spirituals, for he believed that man
+had been ruined in the Fall, was too deeply scarred with sin to help
+himself, was without freewill, was devoid of native capacity for
+spiritual vision and saving faith. Salvation, if it is to be effected
+at all, must be initiated by Divine Grace and must be accomplished _for
+man_ by God. But it could be for Schwenckfeld no forensic adjustment,
+no change of reckoning in the heavenly ledgers. "Justification," he
+once wrote, "is not only forgiveness of sins, but it is more, it is the
+actual healing and renewing of the inward man."[27] It must involve a
+real and radical transformation of man's nature--man must cease from
+sin and the love of it, he must receive from beyond himself a passion
+for goodness and a power to enable him to achieve it. The _passion_
+for goodness, in Schwenckfeld's view, is created through the vision of
+the God-Man who has suffered and died on the Cross for us, and has been
+glorified in absolute newness of life; and the _power_ for moral
+holiness is supplied to the soul by the direct inflowing of divine
+Life-streams from this new Adam, who is henceforth the Head of the
+spiritual order of humanity, the Life-giving Spirit who renews all who
+receive Him in faith. "Faith," he says, "is a penetrating stream of
+light flowing out from the central divine Light and Fire, which is God
+Himself, into our hearts by which we are inflamed with love for God and
+for our neighbour, and by which we see both what we lack in ourselves
+and what can abundantly supply our lack, so that we may be made ready
+for the Kingdom of God and be prepared to become children of God."[28]
+"Real faith," he elsewhere says, "that is to say, justifying faith, can
+come from nothing {78} external. It is a gracious and gratuitous gift
+of God through the Holy Spirit. It is an emanation ["Troepflein"] from
+the eternal Life of God, and is of the same essence and substance as
+God Himself."[29] It is, in fact, the Eternal Word of God become vocal
+and vital within the inner region of our own lives.[30]
+
+The Church, in Schwenckfeld's conception, is this complete spiritual
+community of which Christ is the Head. "We maintain," he wrote in the
+early period of his mission, and it remained the settled view of his
+life, "that the Christian Church according to the usage of the
+Scripture is the congregation or assembly of all or of many who with
+heart and soul are believers in Christ, whose Head is Christ our Lord,
+as St. Paul writes to the Ephesians and elsewhere, and who are born of
+God's Word alone, and are nourished and ruled by God's Word."[31] "The
+Christian Church," he elsewhere says, "is the entire community of the
+children of God. It is the actual Body of Christ, the Seed of Abraham,
+the House of the living God, the Temple of the Holy Spirit. It has its
+life and power through the obedience of faith, it manifests to the
+world the Name of the Lord, the goodness and the glory of Him who
+called its members from darkness into His marvellous Light. Wherever
+such a Church is gathered, there also is Christ, its Head, who governs
+it, teaches it, guards and defends it, works in it and pours His Life
+into its members, to each according to the measure of his living faith.
+This inward invisible Christ belongs to all ages and all times and
+lands."[32] The Church, in its true life and power, is thus for him a
+continuation of the apostolic type. He had no interest in the
+formation of a sectarian denomination, and he was fundamentally averse
+to a State-Church system. The true Church community can be identified
+with no temporal, empirical organization--whether established or
+separatist. It is a spiritual invisible community as wide as the
+world, including all persons in all regions of {79} the earth and in
+all religious communions who are joined in life and spirit to the
+Divine Head. It expands and is enlarged by a process of organic growth
+under the organizing direction of the Holy Spirit. "As often," he
+writes, "as a new warrior comes to the heavenly army, as often as a
+poor sinner repents, the body of Christ becomes larger, the King more
+splendid, His Kingdom stronger, His might more perfect. Not that God
+becomes greater or more perfect in His essence, but that flesh becomes
+more perfect in God, and God dwells in all His fulness in the flesh
+into which in Jesus Christ He ever more pours Himself."[33] Each soul
+that enters the _kingdom of experience_ through the work of the
+Life-giving Spirit is builded into this invisible expanding Church of
+the ages, and is endowed with some "gift" to become an organ of the
+Divine Head. All spiritual service arises through the definite call
+and commission of God, and the persons so called and commissioned are
+rightly prepared for their service, not by election and ordination, but
+by inward compulsion and illumination through the Word of God. The
+preacher possesses no magical efficacy. His only power lies in his
+spiritual experience, his clarified vision, and his organic connection
+with Christ the Head of the Church and the source of its energy. If
+his life is spiritually poor and weak and thin, if it lacks moral
+passion and insight, his ministry will be correspondingly ineffective
+and futile, for the dynamic spiritual impact of a life is in proportion
+to its personal experience and its moral capacity to transmit divine
+power. Here again the emphasis is on the moral aspect of religion as
+contrasted with the magical. There can be no severing of the
+ecclesiastical office or function from the moral character of the
+person himself. Schwenckfeld has cut away completely from
+sacerdotalism and has returned, as far as with his limited historical
+insight he knew how to do it, to the ideal of the primitive Apostolic
+Church. The true mark and sign of membership in the community of
+saints--the invisible Church--is, for him as for St. Paul, {80}
+possession of the mind of Christ, faith, patience, integrity, peace,
+unity of spirit, the power of God, joy in the Holy Ghost, and the
+abounding gifts and fruits of the Spirit. "No outward unity or
+uniformity, either in doctrine or ceremonies, or rules or sacraments,
+can make a Christian Church; but inner unity of spirit, of heart, soul
+and conscience in Christ and in the knowledge of Him, a unity in love
+and faith, does make a Church of Christ."[34] The Church is in a very
+true sense bone of Christ's bone and flesh of His flesh, vitalized by
+His blood, empowered by His real presence, and formed into an organism
+which reveals and exhibits the divine and heavenly Life--a world-order
+as far above the natural human life as that is above the plant.
+
+Quite consistently with this spiritual view of religion--this view that
+the true Church is an invisible Church--Schwenckfeld taught that the
+true sacrament is an inner and spiritual sacrament, and not legal and
+external like those of the Old Testament. "God must Himself, apart
+from all external means, through Christ touch the soul, speak in it,
+work in it, if we are to experience salvation and eternal life."[35]
+The direct incoming of the Divine Spirit, producing a rebirth and a new
+creation in the man himself, is the only baptism which avails with God
+or which makes any difference in the actual condition of man. Baptism
+in its true significance is the reception of cleansing power, it is an
+inward process which purifies the heart, illuminates the conscience,
+and is not only necessary for salvation but in fact _is_ salvation.
+Christian baptism is therefore not with water, but with Christ: it is
+the immersion of the soul in the life-giving streams of Christ's
+spiritual presence.
+
+Schwenckfeld was always kindly disposed toward the Anabaptists, but he
+was not of them. He presented a very different type of Christianity to
+their type, which he penetratingly criticized, though in a kindly
+spirit. He did not approve of rebaptism, for he insisted that the
+all-important matter was not how or when water was applied, {81} but
+the reception of _Christ's real baptism_, an inner baptism, a baptism
+of spirit and power, by which the believing soul, the inner man, is
+clarified, strengthened, and made pure.[36]
+
+His view of the Lord's Supper in the same way fits his entire
+conception of Christianity as an inward religion. It was through his
+study of the meaning and significance of the Supper that he arrived at
+his peculiar and unique type of religion. He began his meditation with
+the practical test--the case of Judas. If the bread and wine of the
+Last Supper were identical with the body and blood of Christ, then
+Judas must have eaten of Christ as the other disciples did, and,
+notwithstanding his evil spirit, he must have received the divine
+nature into himself--but that is impossible.
+
+In his intellectual difficulty he turned to the great mystical
+discourse in the sixth chapter of John, in the final interpretation of
+which he received important suggestion and help from Valentine
+Crautwald, Lector of the Dom in Liegnitz. In this remarkable discourse
+Christ promises to feed His disciples, His followers, with His own
+flesh and blood, by which they will partake of the eternal nature and
+enter with Him into a resurrection life. The "flesh and blood" here
+offered to men cannot refer to an outward sacrament which is eaten in a
+physical way, because in the very same discourse Christ says that
+outward, physical flesh profits nothing. It is the Spirit that gives
+life, and, therefore, the "flesh and blood" of Christ must be
+synonymous with the Word if they are actually to recreate and nourish
+the soul and to renew and vitalize the spirit of man.
+
+This feeding and renewing of the soul through Christ's "flesh and
+blood," Schwenckfeld treats, as we have seen, not as a figure or
+symbol, but as a literal fact of Christian experience. Through the
+exercise of faith in the person of the crucified, risen, and glorified
+Christ--the creative Adam--incorruptible, life-giving substance comes
+into the soul and transfigures it. Something from the divine {82} and
+heavenly world, something from that spiritualized and glorified nature
+of Christ, becomes the actual food of man's spirit, so that through it
+he partakes of the same nature as that of the God-Man. Not once or
+twice, but as a continuous experience, the soul may share this glorious
+meal of spiritual renewal--this eating and drinking of Christ.
+
+The external supper--and for that matter the external baptism too--may
+have a place in the Church of Christ as a pictorial symbol of the
+actual experience, or as a visible profession of faith, but this
+outward sign is, in his view, of little moment, and must not occupy the
+foreground of attention, nor be made a subject of polemic or of
+insistence. The new Creation, the response of faith to the living
+Word, the transfiguration of life into the likeness of Christ, are the
+momentous facts of a Christian experience, and none of these things is
+_mediated_ by external ceremonies.
+
+It was his ideal purpose to promote the formation of little groups of
+spiritual Christians which should live in the land in quietness, and
+spread by an inward power and inspiration received from above. He saw
+clearly that no true Reformation could be carried through by edicts or
+by the proclamations of rulers, or by the decision of councils. A
+permanent work, from his point of view, could be accomplished only by
+the slow and patient development of the religious life and spiritual
+experience of the people, since the goal which he sought was the
+formation, not of state-made Churches, but of renewed personal lives,
+awakened consciences, burning moral passion, and first-hand conviction
+of immediate relation with the World of Divine Reality. To this work
+of arousing individual souls to these deeper issues of life, and of
+building up little scattered societies under the headship of Christ,
+which should be, as it were, oases of the Kingdom of God in the world,
+he dedicated his years of exile. All such quiet inward movements
+progress, as Christ foresaw, too slowly and gradually "for
+observation"; but this method of reforming the Church through rebirth
+and the creation of Christ-guided societies {83} accomplished, even
+during Schwenckfeld's life, impressive results. There were many, not
+only in Silesia but in all regions which the missionary-reformer was
+able to reach, who "preferred salt and bread in the school of Christ"
+to ease and plenty elsewhere, and they formed their little groups in
+the midst of a hostile world. The public records of Augsburg reveal
+the existence, during Schwenckfeld's life, of a remarkable group of
+these quiet, spiritual worshippers in that city. Their leaders were
+men of menial occupations--men who would have attracted no notice from
+the officials of city or Church if they had been contented to conform
+to any prevailing or recognized type of religion. Under the
+inspiration which they received from the writings of Schwenckfeld they
+formed "a little meeting"--in every respect like a seventeenth-century
+Quaker meeting--in their own homes, meeting about in turn, discarding
+all use of sacraments, and waiting on God for edification rather than
+on public preaching. They read the books and epistles of Schwenckfeld
+in their gatherings, they wrote epistles to other groups of
+Schwenckfeldians, and received epistles in turn and read them in their
+gatherings. They objected to any form of religious exercise which
+seemed to them incomprehensible to their spirits and which did not
+spring directly out of the inward ministry of the Word of God. They
+were eventually discovered, their leaders banished, their books burned,
+and their little meeting of "quiet spirituals" ("stillen Frommen") as
+they called themselves was ruthlessly stamped out.[37] Societies
+something like this were formed in scores of places, and continued to
+cultivate their inward piety in the Fatherland, until harried by
+persecution they migrated in 1734 to Pennsylvania, where they have
+continued to maintain their community life until the present day.
+
+But the most important effect of Schwenckfeld's life and work must not
+be sought in the history of these {84} visible societies which owed
+their origin to his apostolic activity. His first concern was always
+for the building of the invisible community of God throughout the whole
+world--not for the promotion of a sect--and his greatest contribution
+will be found in the silent, often unnoticed, propagation of his
+spirit, the contagious dissemination of his ideas, the gradual
+influence of his truth and insight upon Christian communions and upon
+individual believers that hardly knew his name. His correspondence was
+extraordinarily extensive; his books and tracts, which were legion,
+found eager readers and transmitters, and slowly--too slowly for
+observation--the spiritual message of the homeless reformer made its
+way into the inner life of faithful souls, who in all lands were
+praying for the consolation of God's new Israel. Even so early as
+1551, an English writer, Wyllyam Turner, in a book written as "a
+preservative and treacle against the poyson of Pelagius," especially as
+"renewed" in the "furious secte of the Annabaptistes," mentions the
+"Swengfeldianes" as one of the heads of "this monstre in many poyntes
+lyke unto the watersnake with seven heads."[38] There is, however,
+slight evidence of the spread of Schwenckfeld's views, whether they be
+called "poyson" or "treacle," in England during the sixteenth century,
+though they are clearly in evidence in the seventeenth century. One of
+the most obvious signs of his influence in the seventeenth century,
+both in England and in Holland, appears in the spread of principles
+which were embodied in the "Collegiants" of Holland and the
+corresponding societies of "Seekers" in England.[39] The cardinal
+principle of these groups in both countries was the belief that the
+visible Church had become apostate and had lost its divine
+authoritative power, that it now lacked apostolic ministry and
+efficacious sacraments and "the gifts of the Spirit" which demonstrate
+the true apostolic succession. Therefore those who held this view,
+"like doves without their mates," were _waiting_ and _seeking_ for the
+appearing of a {85} new apostolic commission, for the fresh outpouring
+of God's Spirit on men, and for the refounding of the Church, as
+originally, in actual demonstration and power.
+
+It was a settled view of Schwenckfeld's that the visible Church had
+lost its original power and authority, and he cherished, too, a
+persistent faith and hope that in God's good time it would again be
+restored to its pristine vitality and its original conquering power.
+"We ask," he writes, "where in the world to-day there is gathered
+together an external Church of the apostolic form and type, and
+according to the will of Christ."[40] And yet scattered everywhere
+throughout the world--even in Turkey and Calcutta[41]--God has, he
+says, His own faithful people, known only to Him, who live Christlike
+and holy lives, whom Christ the living Word, that became flesh,
+baptizes inwardly with the Holy Spirit and inwardly feeds without
+external preaching or sacrament, writes His law in their hearts and
+guides into Eternal Life.[42] But the time is coming when once more
+there will be in the world an apostolic and completely reformed Church
+of Christ, His living body and the organ of the Spirit, with divine
+gifts and powers and commission. In the interim let the chosen
+children of God, he writes, rejoice and comfort themselves in this,
+that their salvation rests neither in an external Church, nor in the
+external use of sacraments, nor in any external thing, but that it
+rests alone in Jesus Christ our Lord, and is received through true and
+living faith.[43]
+
+For Schwenckfeld himself the important matter was the increase of this
+inward life, the silent growth of this kingdom of God in the hearts of
+men, the spread of this invisible Church, but his writings plainly
+suggest that God will eventually restore the former glory to His
+visible Church. "You are," he says, in one of his epistles, "to pray
+earnestly that God will raise up true apostles and preachers and
+evangelists, so that His Church may {86} be reformed in Christ, edified
+in the Holy Ghost, and unified into one, and so that our boasting of
+the pure preaching of the Gospel and the right understanding and use of
+the sacraments may be true before God,"[44] and the time is coming, we
+may in good faith believe, when the sacraments will be used according
+to the will of Christ, and then there will be a true Christian Church,
+taught outwardly by apostolic ministers and taught inwardly by the Lord
+Himself.[45] Fortunately, however, salvation does not depend upon
+anything outward, and during the _Stillstand_ or interim there is no
+danger to be feared from the intermission of outward ceremonies.[46]
+
+Sebastian Franck graphically describes this waiting, seeking attitude
+as well known in his time. He wrote in his "Chronicle" (1531): "Some
+are ready to allow Baptism and other ceremonies to remain in abeyance
+["stilston," evidently Schwenckfeld's _Stillstand_] until God gives a
+further command and sends true labourers into His harvest-field. For
+this some have great longings and yearnings and wish nothing else."[47]
+The intense _expectation_ which the Seekers, both in Holland and
+England, exhibit was, of course, a much later development, was due to
+many influences, and is connected only indirectly with the reforming
+work and the Gospel message of Schwenckfeld. It indicates, in the
+exaggerated emphasis of the Seekers, a failure to grasp the deeper
+significance of spiritual Christianity as a present reality, and it
+misses the truth, which the world has so painfully slowly grasped, that
+the only way to form an apostolic and efficacious visible Church is not
+through sudden miracles and cataclysmic "restorations" and
+"commissions," but by the slow contagion and conquering power of this
+inward kingdom, of this invisible Church, as it becomes the spirit and
+life of the outward and visible Church. This truth the Silesian
+reformer knew full well, and for this reason he was ready at all costs
+to be a quiet apostle of the invisible Community of God and let the
+outward {87} organism and organ of its ministry come in God's own way.
+The nobler men among the English Seekers, as also among the Dutch
+Societies, rose gradually to this larger view of spiritual religion,
+and came to realize, as Schwenckfeld did, that the real processes of
+salvation are inward and dynamic. Samuel Rutherford is not a very safe
+witness in matters which involve impartial judgment, or which concern
+types of spiritual experience foreign to his own type, but he is
+following a real clew when he connects, as he does, the leaders of
+spiritual, inward religion in his day, especially those who had shared
+the seeker aspirations, with Schwenckfeld.[48] Rutherford's account is
+thoroughly unfair and full of inaccuracies, but it suffices at least to
+reveal the fact that Schwenckfeld was a living force in the period of
+the English Commonwealth, and that, though almost a hundred years had
+passed since his "home-passage" from Ulm was accomplished, he was still
+making disciples for the ever-enlarging community and household of God.
+
+
+
+[1] The most important material for a study of Schwenckfeld is the
+following:--
+
+_Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum_, edited by C. D. Hartranft. Published
+Leipzig, vol. i. (1907); vol. ii. (1911); vol. iii. (1913). Other
+volumes to follow.
+
+_Schriften von Kaspar Schwenckfeld_, in 4 folio volumes. Published
+between the years 1564-1570. Indicated in my notes as vol. i., vol.
+ii., vol. iii. A, vol. iii. B. There are, too, many uncollected books
+and tracts, to some of which I refer in footnotes.
+
+Karl Ecke, _Schwenckfeld, Luther, und der Gedanke einer apostolischen
+Reformation_ (Berlin, 1911). Important book, but to be followed with
+caution.
+
+R. H. Gruetzmacher, _Wort und Geist_ (Leipzig, 1902).
+
+Gottfried Arnold, _Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historien_, i. pp. 1246-1299.
+(Edition of 1740.)
+
+H. W. Erbkam, _Geschichte der prolestantischen Sekten im Zeitaller der
+Reformation_ (Hamburg und Gotha, 1848), pp. 357-475.
+
+Doellinger, _Die Reformation_, i. pp. 257-280.
+
+Ernst Troeltsch, _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und
+Gruppen_ (Tuebingen, 1912), pp. 881-886.
+
+[2] Christ, Schwenckfeld insisted, is the sum of the whole Bible, and
+to learn to know Christ fundamentally is to grasp the substance of the
+entire Scripture.
+
+[3] He wrote in 1543 to Luther: "I owe to you in God and the truth all
+honour, love, and goodwill, because from the first I have reaped much
+fruit from your service, and I have not ceased to pray for you
+according to my poor powers."--_Schriften_, ii. p. 701 d.
+
+[4] In _An Epistle to the Sisters in the Cloister at Naumberg_, written
+probably in the autumn of 1523, he says: "A true Christian life in its
+essential requirements does not consist in external appearance . . .
+but quite the contrary, it does consist in personal trust in God
+through an experience of Jesus Christ, which the Holy Ghost brings
+forth in the heart by the hearing of the Divine Word."--_Corpus
+Schwenckfeldianorum_, i. p. 118.
+
+[5] _Ermahnung dess Missbrauchs etlicher fuernemsten Artikel des
+Evangelii_ (1524). _Corpus Schw._ ii. pp. 26-105.
+
+[6] "Wir greyffen das Creutz noch am waichsten Ort an."--_Ermahnung
+dess Missbrauchs_. Corpus Schw. ii. p. 89.
+
+[7] "There are now in general two parties that make wrong use of the
+Gospel of Christ, one of which turns to the right and the other to the
+left of the only true and straight way. The first party is that of the
+Papacy . . . the other party consists of those to whom God has now
+granted a gracious light--But!"--_Ermahnung dess Missbrauchs_.
+
+[8] The _Stillstand_ was proposed in a _Circular Letter_ written by
+Schwenckfeld, Valentine Crautwald, and the Liegnitz Pastors, April 21,
+1526.--_Corpus Schwenckfeld_, i. pp. 325-333.
+
+[9] The revival of this idea of a _Stillstand_, that is, of a
+suspension of certain time-honoured practices of the Church until a
+further revelation and new enduement should be granted, will be
+referred to in later chapters, especially in connection with the
+_Collegiants_ of Holland and the English _Seekers_.
+
+[10] Ecke, _op. cit._ p. 217.
+
+[11] Arnold, _op. cit._ ii. p. 251. There are many similar references
+to Schwenckfeld in Luther's _Table Talk_, and he usually calls him by
+the opprobrious name of "Stenkfeld."
+
+[12] "Ein natuerliches Licht kennt Schwenckfeld nicht."--Gruetzmacher,
+_Wort und Grist_ (Leipzig, 1902), p. 168.
+
+[13] The important data for Schwenckfeld's doctrine of Christ and the
+way of salvation will be found in the following writings by him:--
+
+_Von der goettlichen Kindschaft und Herrlichkeit des ganzen Sones
+Gottes_ (1538).
+
+_Ermanunge zum wahren und selig machende Erkaenntnis Christi_ (1539).
+
+_Konfession und Erklaerung von Erkaenntnus Christi und seiner goettlichen
+Herrlichkeit_ (1540).
+
+[14] _Schriften_, i. p. 664. See also p. 662.
+
+[15] For the doctrine of deification in Irenaeus see Harnack, _Hist. of
+Dogma_, ii. pp. 230-318.
+
+[16] See _Schriften_, i. p. 768.
+
+[17] _Ibid._ i. p. 767 a.
+
+[18] _Schriften_, i. p. 767 a.
+
+[19] _Die heilige Schrift_. x. d.
+
+[20] _Ibid._ cviii. c.
+
+[21] _Ibid._ ii. b.
+
+[22] _Die heilige Schrift._ vi. and vii.
+
+[23] _Vom Worte Gottes_, xxii. c.
+
+[24] _Die heilige Schrift._ iv. b.
+
+[25] _Catechismus vom Wort des Creuetses, vom Wort Gottes, und vom
+Underscheide des Worts des Geists und Buchstabens._
+
+[26] _Die heilige Schrift._ iv. c.
+
+[27] _Schriften_, i. p. 725.
+
+[28] _Ibid._ i. p. 634.
+
+[29] _Schriften_, i. p. 380.
+
+[30] See _ibid._ ii. p. 421.
+
+[31] _Corpus Schwenck._ i. p. 295.
+
+[32] _Schriften_, iii. A.
+
+[33] _Schriften_, ii. p. 290.
+
+[34] _Schriften_, ii. p. 785.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ i. p. 768 b.
+
+[36] _Schriften_, i. p. 513. For a criticism of the legalism of the
+Anabaptists see _ibid._ i. pp. 801-808.
+
+[37] The details are given in Friederich Roth's _Augsburgs
+Reformations-Geschichte_ (Muenchen, 1907), iii. p. 245 ff.
+
+[38] _A Preservative or Treacle against the Poyson of Pelagius, etc._
+(1551), A iii.
+
+[39] For a fuller account of the Collegiants see Chap. VII.
+
+[40] _Schriften_, iii. B, p. 572.
+
+[41] _Ibid._ ii. p. 783.
+
+[42] _Ibid._ a. p. 784.
+
+[43] _Ibid._ iii. A, p. 146.
+
+[44] _Schriften_, ii. p. 785.
+
+[45] _Ibid._ ii. p. 783.
+
+[46] _Ibid._ iii. A, p. 74.
+
+[47] Franck's _Chronica_ (1531), p. ccccli.
+
+[48] Rutherford, _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_ (1648), chap. v.
+
+
+
+
+{88}
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SEBASTIAN CASTELLIO: A FORGOTTEN PROPHET[1]
+
+Reformation history has been far too closely confined to a few main
+highways of thought, and few persons therefore realize how rich in
+ideas and how complex in typical religious conceptions this spiritual
+upheaval really was. The types that prevailed and won their way to
+wide favour have naturally compelled attention and are adequately
+known. There were, however, very serious and impressive attempts made
+to give the Reformation a totally different course from the one it
+finally took in history, and these attempts, defeated by the sweep of
+the main current, became submerged, and their dedicated and heroic
+leaders became forgotten. Many of these spiritual ventures which for
+the moment failed and were submerged are in striking parallelism with
+currents of thought to-day, and our generation can perhaps appreciate
+at their real worth these solitary souls who were destined to see their
+cause defeated, to hear their names defamed, and to live in jeopardy
+among the very people whom they most longed to help.
+
+Sebastian Castellio is one of these submerged venturers. While he
+lived he was so absolutely absorbed in the battle for truth that he
+took no pains at all to acquaint posterity with the details of his
+life, or to make his name quick and powerful in the ears of men. When
+he died {89} and laid down the weapons of his spiritual warfare his
+pious opponents thanked God for the relief and did what they could to
+consign him to oblivion. But after the long and silent flow of years
+the world has come up to his position and can appreciate a spirit who
+was too far in advance of the line of march to be comprehended in his
+lifetime. He was born in the little French village of St. Martin du
+Fresne--not many miles west of Lake Geneva in the year 1515. The home
+was pinched with poverty, but somebody in the home or in the village
+discovered that little Bastian was endowed with unusual gifts and must
+be given the chance to realize the life which his youth forecast; and
+that ancient family sacrifice, which has glorified so many homes of
+poverty, was made here in St. Martin, and the boy, possessed with his
+eager passion for knowledge, was started on his course in the College
+de la Trinite in Lyons. He soon found himself bursting into a new
+world, the world of classic antiquity, which the Humanists were
+restoring to the youth of that period, and he experienced that
+emancipating leap of soul and thrill of joy which such a world of
+beauty can produce upon a lofty spirit that sees and appreciates it.
+Some time during the Lyons period he came also under a still greater
+and more emancipating influence, the divine and simple Christ of the
+Gospels, whom the most serious of the Humanists had rediscovered, and
+to whom Castellio now dedicated the central loyalty of his soul.
+
+At twenty-five years of age, now a splendid classical scholar, radiant
+with faith and hope and the vision of a new age for humanity which the
+recovered gospel was to bring in, Castellio went to Strasbourg to share
+the task of the Reformers and to put his life into the new movement.
+Calvin, then living in Strasbourg, received the brilliant recruit with
+joy and took him into his own home. When the great Reformer returned
+to Geneva in 1541 to take up the mighty task of his life he summoned
+Castellio to help him, and made him Principal of the College of Geneva,
+which Calvin planned to make one of the {90} foremost seats of Greek
+learning and one of the most illuminating centres for the study of the
+Scriptures. The young scholar's career seemed assured. He had the
+friendship of Calvin, he was head of an important institution of
+learning, the opportunity for creative literary work was opening before
+him, and he was aspiring soon to fulfil the clearest call of his
+life--to become a minister of the new gospel. His first contribution
+to religious literature was his volume of "Sacred Dialogues," a series
+of vivid scenes out of the Old and New Testaments, told in dialogue
+fashion, both in Latin and French.[2] They were to serve a double
+purpose: first, to teach French boys to read Latin, and secondly, to
+form in them a love for the great characters of the Bible and an
+appreciation of its lofty message of life. The stories were really
+good stories, simple enough for children, and yet freighted with a
+depth of meaning which made them suitable for mature minds. Their
+success was extraordinary, and their fine quality was almost
+universally recognized. They went through twenty-eight editions in
+their author's lifetime, and they were translated into many
+languages.[3] His bent toward a religion of a deeply ethical and
+spiritual type already appears in this early work, and here he
+announces a principle that was to rule his later life and was to cost
+him much suffering: "The friend of Truth obeys not the multitude _but
+the Truth_."
+
+At the very time this book was appearing, an opportunity offered for
+testing the mettle of his courage. One of those ever-recurrent plagues
+that harassed former ages, before microbes were discovered, fell upon
+Geneva. The minister, who had volunteered to give spiritual comfort to
+those who were suffering with the plague in the hospital, was stricken
+with the dread disease, and a new volunteer was asked for. The records
+of the city show that Castellio, though not yet ordained, and under no
+obligation to take such risk, offered himself for the {91} hazardous
+service when the ministers of the city declined it. The ordination
+through human hands was, however, never to come to him, and a harder
+test of courage than the plague was before him. In the course of his
+studies he found himself compelled to take the position that the "Song
+of Solomon" was an ancient love poem, and that the traditional
+interpretation of it as a revelation of the true relation between
+Christ and the Church was a strained and unnatural interpretation. He
+also felt that as a scholar he could not with intellectual honesty
+agree with the statement in the Catechism that "Christ descended into
+Hell." Calvin challenged both these positions of Castellio, but his
+opposition to him was clearly far deeper than a difference of opinion
+on these two points. Calvin instinctively felt that the bold and
+independent spirit of this young scholar, his qualities of leadership,
+and his literary genius marked him out as a man who could not long be
+an easy-minded and supple subordinate. A letter which Calvin wrote at
+this time to his friend Viret shows where the real tension lay.
+"Castellio has got it into his head," he writes, "that I want to rule!"
+The great Reformer may not have been conscious yet of such a purpose,
+but there can be no question that Castellio read the signs correctly,
+and he was to be the first, as Buisson has said, to discover that "to
+resist Calvin was in the mind of the latter, to resist the Holy
+Ghost."[4] Calvin successfully opposed his ordination, and made it
+impossible for him to continue in Geneva his work as an honest scholar.
+To remain meant that he must surrender his right of independent
+judgment, he must cease to follow the line of emancipated scholarship,
+he must adjust his conscience to fit the ideas that were coming to be
+counted orthodox in the circle of the Reformed faith. _That_ surrender
+he could no more make than Luther could surrender to the demands of his
+opponents at Worms. He quietly closed up his work in the College of
+Geneva and went into voluntary exile, to seek a sphere of life where he
+might think and speak as {92} he saw the truth and where he could keep
+his conscience a pure virgin.
+
+He settled in Basle, where Erasmus had found a refuge, and where, two
+years before, the exiled and hunted Sebastian Franck, the spiritual
+forerunner of Castellio, had died in peace. For ten years (1545-1555)
+he lived with his large family in pitiable poverty. He read proof for
+the Humanist printer Oporin, he fished with a boat-hook for drift-wood
+along the shores of the Rhine,--"rude labour no doubt," he says, "but
+honest, and I do not blush for having done it,"--and he did whatever
+honest work he could find that would help keep body and soul together.
+Through all these years, every moment of the day that could be saved
+from bread-winning toil, and much of his night-time, went into the
+herculean task to which he had dedicated himself--the complete
+translation of the Bible from its original languages into both Latin
+and French.[5] Being himself one of the common people he always had
+the interests and needs of the common people in view, and he put the
+Bible into current sixteenth-century speech. His French translation
+has the marked characteristics of the Renaissance period. He makes
+patriarchs, prophets, and the persons of the New Testament live again
+in his vivid word-pictures, as the great contemporary painters were
+making them live on their canvases. But that which gave his
+translation its great human merit and popular interest was a serious
+defect in the eyes of the theologians. It was vivid, full of the
+native Oriental colour, true in the main to the original, and strong in
+its appeal to religious imagination, but painfully weak in its support
+of the dogmas and doctrines around which the theological battles of the
+Reformation were centring. Still less were the theologians pleased
+with the Preface of his Latin Bible, dedicated to the boy-king of
+England, Edward VI. Here he boldly insists that the Reformation, {93}
+wherever it spreads, shall champion the principle of _free conscience_,
+and shall wage its battles with spiritual weapons alone. The only
+enemies of our faith, he says, are vices, and vices can be conquered
+only by virtues. The Christ who said if they strike you on one cheek
+turn the other, has called us to the spiritual task of instructing men
+in the truth, and that work can never be put into the hands of an
+executioner! "I address you, O king," he concludes, "not as a prophet
+sent from God, but as a man of the people who abhors quarrels and
+hatred, and who wishes to see religion spread by love rather than by
+fierce controversy, by purity of heart rather than by external methods.
+. . . Read these sacred writings with a pious and religious heart, and
+prepare yourself to reign as a mortal man who must give an account to
+immortal God. I desire that you may have the meekness of Moses, the
+piety of David, and the wisdom of Solomon."[6]
+
+Two years after this appeal to the new Protestantism to make the great
+venture of spreading its truth by love and persuasion, there came from
+Geneva the decisive answer in the burning of Servetus, followed by the
+famous _Defence_ before the world, written mainly by Calvin, of the
+course that had been taken. One month later, a brief Latin work
+appeared from the press with the title, _De haereticis, an sint
+persequendi, etc._ (Magdeburgi, 1554), followed in very short time by a
+French edition (Rouen, 1554). The body of the work contained
+impressive passages in favour of toleration from Church Fathers, from
+Luther, Erasmus, Sebastian Franck, and others, concluding with a
+passage from "Basil Montfort," a name which thinly veils Bastian
+Castellio himself. The Preface was addressed to the Duke of
+Wurtemberg, bore the name of "Martinus Bellius," and was beyond doubt
+written by Castellio, who inspired and directed the entire work, in
+which he was assisted by a very small group of refugees in Basle of
+similar ideas on this subject to his {94} own. This Preface is one of
+the mother documents on freedom of conscience, from which in time came
+a large offspring, and it is, furthermore, an interesting
+interpretation of a type of Christianity then somewhat new in the
+world. Its simplicity, its human appeal, its restrained emotional
+power, its prophetic tone, its sincerity and depth of earnestness mark
+it as a distinct work of genius, almost in the class with Pascal's
+_Provincial Letters_.
+
+"If thou, illustrious Prince, had informed thy subjects that thou wert
+coming to visit them at an unnamed time and had requested them to be
+prepared in white garments to meet thee on thy coming; what wouldst
+thou do, if, on arrival, thou shouldst find that instead of robing
+themselves in white they had occupied themselves in violent debate
+about thy person--some insisting that thou wert in France, others that
+thou wert in Spain; some declaring that thou would come on horseback,
+others that thou would come by chariot; some holding that thou would
+come with great pomp, others that thou would come without train or
+following? And what especially wouldst thou say if they debated not
+only with words but with blows of fist and strokes of sword, and if
+some succeeded in killing and destroying others who differed from them?
+'He will come on horseback.' 'No, he won't; he will come by chariot.'
+'You lie.' 'No, I do not; _you_ are the liar.' 'Take _that_'--a blow
+with the fist. 'You take _that_'--a sword-thrust through the body. O
+Prince, what would you think of such citizens? Christ asked us to put
+on the white robes of a pure and holy life, but what occupies our
+thought? We dispute not only of the way to Christ, but of His relation
+to God the Father, of the Trinity, of predestination, of free will, of
+the nature of God, of angels, of the condition of the soul after
+death,--of a multitude of matters that are not essential for salvation,
+and _matters, in fact, which never can be known until our hearts are
+pure, for they are things which must be spiritually perceived_."
+
+With a striking boldness, but with beautiful simplicity of spirit, he
+describes "an honest follower of Christ"--and {95} it is himself whom
+he is describing--"who believes in God the Father and in His Son Jesus
+Christ, and who wants to do His will, but cannot see that will just as
+others about him see it, in matters of intellectual formulation and in
+matters of external practice." "I cannot," he adds, "do violence to my
+conscience for fear of disobeying Christ. I must be saved or lost by
+my own personal faith, not by that of another. I ask you, whether
+Christ, who forgave those who went astray, and commanded His followers
+to forgive until seventy times seven, Christ who is the final Judge of
+us all, if He were here, would command a person like that to be killed!
+. . . O Christ, Creator and King of the world," he cries out, "dost
+Thou see and approve these things? Hast Thou become a totally
+different person from what Thou wert? When Thou wert on earth, nothing
+could be more gentle and kind, more ready to suffer injuries. Thou
+wert like a sheep dumb before the shearers. Beaten, spit upon, mocked,
+crowned with thorns, crucified between thieves, Thou didst pray for
+those who injured Thee. Hast Thou changed to this? Art Thou now so
+cruel and contrary to Thyself? Dost Thou command that those who do not
+understand Thy ordinances and commandments as those over us require,
+should be drowned, or drawn and quartered, and burned at the stake!"
+
+The Christian world holds this view now. It is a part of the necessary
+air we breathe. But at this crisis in modern history it was
+unforgivably _new_.[7] One man's soul had the vision, one man's entire
+moral fibre throbbed with passion for it, and his rich intellectual
+nature pleaded for it as the only course of reason: "To burn a man is
+not to defend a doctrine, it is to _burn a man_!" But it was a voice
+crying in a wilderness, and from henceforth Castellio was a marked and
+dangerous man in the eyes of all who were opposed to "Bellianism "--as
+the principle of toleration was nicknamed in honour of Martinus
+Bellius--and that included almost all the world. But to the end of his
+life, and in almost every one of his multitudinous {96} tracts he
+continued to announce the principle of religious liberty, and to work
+for a type of Christianity which depended for its conquering power
+solely on its inherent truth and on its moral dynamic.
+
+Calvin, who recognized the hand of Castellio in this powerful defence
+of freedom of thought, called his opponent "a monster full of poison
+and madness," and proceeded to demolish him in a Reply. In his _Contra
+libellum Calvini_, which is an answer to this Reply, Castellio declares
+that Calvin's act in burning Servetus was a bloody act, and that now
+his book is a direct menace to honest, pious people. "I," he adds,
+"who have a horror of blood, propose to examine the book. I do not
+defend Servetus. I have never read his books. Calvin burned them
+together with their author. I do not want to burn Calvin or to burn
+his book. I am only going to _answer_ it." He notes that Calvin
+complains of "novelties and innovations," a strange complaint, he
+thinks, from a man who "has introduced more innovations in ten years
+than the entire Church had introduced in six centuries!" All the
+sects, he reminds the great Reformer, claim to be founded on the Word
+of God. They all believe that their religion is true. Calvin says
+that his is _the only true one_. Each of the others says that his is
+the only true one. Calvin says that they are wrong. He makes himself
+(by what right I do not know) the judge and sovereign arbiter. He
+claims that he has on his side the sure evidence of the Word of God.
+Then why does he write so many books to prove what is evident? The
+truth is surely not evident to those who die denying that it is truth!
+Calvin asks how doctrine is to be guarded if heretics are not to be
+punished. "Doctrine," cries Castellio, "Christ's doctrine means loving
+one's enemies, returning good for evil, having a pure heart and a
+hunger and thirst for righteousness. _You_ may return to Moses if you
+will, but for us others Christ has come."
+
+Love, he constantly insists, is the supreme badge of any true
+Christianity, and the traits of the beatitudes in a person's life are a
+surer evidence that he belongs in {97} Christ's family, than is the
+fact that he holds current opinions on obscure questions of belief.
+"Before God," he writes in his _Defensio_, a work of the year 1562, to
+those who wish to hunt him off the face of the earth, "and from the
+bottom of my heart, I call you to the spirit of love." "By the bowels
+of Christ, I ask and implore you to leave me in peace, to stop
+persecuting me. Let me have the liberty of my faith as you have of
+yours. At the heart of religion I am one with you. It is in reality
+the same religion; only on certain points of interpretation I see
+differently from you. But however we differ in opinion, why cannot we
+love one another?"
+
+He was, however, never to have the peace for which he pleaded, and he
+was never to experience the love and brotherly kindness for which he
+longed. Whole sheaves of fiery arrows were shot at him, and in tract
+after tract he had to see himself called "monster," "wretch," "dog,"
+"pest," "fog-bank," and finally to see himself proclaimed to the world
+as a petty thief "who was supporting himself by stealing wood from his
+neighbours"! With beautiful dignity Castellio tells the story of how
+he fished for public drift-wood on the shores of the Rhine, and how he
+kept his family alive by honest toil, when he was living in pitiable
+poverty, "to which," he says to Calvin, "everybody knows that thy
+attacks had brought me." "I cannot conceive how thou of all persons,
+thou who knowest me, can have believed a tale of theft about me, and in
+any case have told it to others."[9]
+
+Compelled, as he was, to see the Reformation take what seemed to him
+the false course--the course of defending itself by persecution, of
+buttressing itself on election, of elevating, through a new
+scholasticism, doctrine above life,--he turned more and more, as time
+went on, toward interior religion, the cultivation of an inner
+sanctuary, the deepening of the mystical roots of his life, and the
+perfection of a religion of inner and spiritual life. "I have never
+taken holy things lightly," {98} he once wrote, and in the later years
+of what proved to be his brief as well as stormy life, he drew nearer
+to Christ as the Life of his life, and laboured with deepening passion
+to practise and present a religion of veracity, of reality and of
+transforming power. "It is certain," he says in his _Contra libellum
+Calvini_, "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and there is
+furthermore no doubt about the worth of love--love to God and love to
+man. There is no doubt, again, of the worth of forgiveness, of
+patience, of pity, of kindness, and of obedience to duty. Why leave
+these sure things and quarrel over inscrutable mysteries?"
+
+This point that the things which are essential to salvation are clear
+and luminous is a frequently occurring one in his writings.
+Impenetrable mysteries do not interest him, and he declares with
+reiteration that controversies and divisions are occasioned mainly by
+the proclamation of dogma on these inscrutable things. In a remarkable
+work, which remains still in manuscript--his _De arte dubitandi et
+confidendi, sciendi et ignorandi_,--he pleads for a religion that fits
+the facts of life and for the use of intelligence even in these lofty
+matters of spiritual experience where most astonishing miracles occur.
+He returns, in this writing, to his old position that the truths which
+concern salvation are clear and appeal powerfully to human reason.
+"There are, I know," he says, "persons who insist that we should
+believe even against reason. It is, however, the worst of all errors,
+and it is laid upon me to fight it. I may not be able to exterminate
+the monster, but I hope to give it such a blow that it will know that
+it has been hit. Let no one think that he is doing wrong in using his
+mental faculties. It is our proper way of arriving at the truth."[9]
+
+Without entering in detail into the bottomless controversy of those
+times, let us endeavour to get an adequate view of Castellio's type of
+Christianity, and then we shall be able to form an estimate of the man
+who in the {99} strong power of his faith stood almost alone as the
+great battle of words raged around him.[10]
+
+Those on the other side of the controversy began always from the
+opposite end of the spiritual universe to his point of departure.
+_They_ were fascinated with the mysteries of the Eternal Will, and used
+all the keys of their logic to unlock the mysteries of foreknowledge,
+predestination, and grace which has wrought the miracle of salvation
+for the elect. Castellio, on the other hand, in true modern fashion,
+starts always with the concrete, the near and the known, to work upward
+to the nature of the unknown. We must, he says, try to discover the
+Divine attributes and the Divine Character by first finding out what
+our own deepest nature implies. If God is to speak to us it must be in
+terms of our nature. Before undertaking to fathom with the plummet of
+logic the unsoundable mystery of foreknowledge, let us see what we can
+know through a return to the real nature of man as he is, and
+especially to the real nature of the new Adam who is Christ, the Son of
+God. Man, as both Scripture and his own inner self testify, is made
+_in the image of God_, is dowered with freedom to determine his own
+destiny, may go upward into light, or downward into darkness. Man thus
+made, when put to trial, _failed_, followed lower instincts instead of
+higher, and experienced the awful penalty of sin, namely its cumulative
+power, the tendency of sin to beget sin, and to make higher choices
+ever more difficult. Christ, however, the new Adam, has _succeeded_.
+He has completely revealed the way of obedience, the way in which
+spirit conquers flesh. He is the new kind of Person who lives from
+above and who exhibits the cumulative power of goodness. His victory,
+which was won by His own free choice, inspires all men who see it with
+faith and hope in man's spiritual possibilities. Castellio declines to
+discuss Christ's metaphysical nature, except in so far as His life has
+revealed {100} it to us. He sees in Him the Heart and Character of
+God, the certainty of Divine love and forgiveness, and the way of life
+for all who desire to be spiritually saved, which means, for him, the
+formation of a new inward self, a purified nature, a morally
+transformed man, a will which no longer loves or wills sin. "Christ
+alone," he says, "can heal the malady of the soul, but He can heal it."
+"There is," he says again, "no other way of salvation for any man than
+the way of self-denial. He must put off his old man and put on
+Christ--however much blood and sweat the struggle may cost." Man, he
+insists, is always wrong when he represents God as angry. Christ
+showed that God needed no appeasing, but rather that man needed to be
+brought back to God by the drawing of Love, and be reconciled to Him.
+
+Faith--which for every prophet of human redemption is the key that
+unlocks all doors for the soul--is for Castellio the supreme moral
+force by which man turns God's revelations of Himself into spiritual
+victories and into personal conquests of character. It is never
+something forensic, something magical. It is, as little, mere belief
+of historical facts and events. It is, on the contrary, a moral power
+that moves mountains of difficulty, works miracles of transformation,
+and enables the person who has it to participate in the life of God.
+It is a passionate leap ("elan") of the soul of the creature toward the
+Creator; it is a way of renewing strength in Him and of becoming a
+participator in His divine nature. It is a return of the soul to its
+source. It is a _persistent will_, which multiplies one's strength a
+hundredfold, makes Pentecost possible again, and enables us to achieve
+the goal which the vision of our heart sees. The only obstacle to this
+all-conquering faith is selfishness, the only mortal enemy is
+self-will.[11]
+
+There have been, Castellio holds, progressive stages in the Divine
+education of the race, and in man's apprehension of God. The mark of
+advance is always found in the progress from law and letter to spirit,
+and from {101} outward practices and ceremonies to inward experience.
+Divine revelations can always be taken at different levels. They can
+be seen in a literal, pictorial, temporal way, or they can be read
+deeper--by those who are purified by faith and love, and made partakers
+of the self-giving Life of God--as eternal and spiritual realities.
+The written word of God is the garment of the Divine Thought which is
+the real Word of God. It takes more than eyes of flesh to see through
+the temporal garment to the inner Life and Spirit beneath. Only the
+person who has in himself the illumination of the same Spirit that gave
+the original revelation can see through the garment of the letter to
+the eternal message, the ever-living Word hidden within.[12] In the
+Christianity of the full-grown spiritual man, sacraments and everything
+external must be used only as pictorial helps and symbolic suggestions
+for the furtherance of spiritual life. Within us, as direct offspring
+of God, as image of God, there is a Divine Reason, which existed before
+books, before rites, before the foundation of the world, and will exist
+after books and rites have vanished, and the world has gone to wreck.
+It can no more be abolished than God Himself can be. It was by this
+that Jesus Christ, the Son of God--called, in fact, Logos of God--lived
+and taught us how to live. It was in the Light of this that He
+transcended books and rites and declared, without quoting text, "God is
+Spirit and thou shalt worship God in spirit and in truth." This Reason
+is in all ages the right investigator and interpreter of Truth, even
+though time changes outward things and written texts grow corrupt.[13]
+
+As his life was drawing to a close, he sent forth anonymously another
+powerful prophet-call for the complete liberation of mind and
+conscience. Ten years before the awful deeds of St. Bartholomew's Day,
+he issued his little French book with the title _Conseil a la France
+desolee_--Counsel {102} to France in her Distress. It is a calm and
+penetrating diagnosis of the evils which are destroying the life of
+France and working her desolation. It throbs with noble patriotism and
+is full of real prophetic insight, though he spoke to deaf ears and
+wrote for blind eyes. The woes of France--her torn and distracted
+condition--are mainly due to the blind and foolish method of attempting
+to force intelligent men to accept a form of religion which in their
+hearts they do not believe is true. There can be no united people,
+strong and happy, until the blunder of compelling conscience entirely
+ceases. He pleads in tenderness and love with both religious parties,
+Catholics and Evangelicals, to leave the outgrown legalism of Moses and
+go to the Gospels for a religion which leads into truth and freedom.
+"O France, France," he cries--as formerly a greater One had said, "O
+Jerusalem, Jerusalem"--"my counsel is that thou cease to compel men's
+consciences, that thou cease to kill and to persecute, that thou grant
+to men who believe in Jesus Christ the privilege of serving God
+according to their own innermost faith and not according to some one
+else's faith. And you, that are private people, do not be so ready to
+follow those who lead you astray and push you to take up arms and kill
+your brothers. And Thou, O Lord our Saviour, wilt Thou give to us all
+grace to awake and come to our senses before it is forever too late.
+I, at least, have now done my duty and spoken my word of truth." St.
+Bartholomew's Day was the answer to this searching appeal, and the
+land, deaf to the call of its prophet, was to become more "desolate"
+still.
+
+Just as the storm of persecution that had been gathering around him for
+years was about to burst pitilessly upon him in 1563, he quietly died,
+worn out in body, and "passed to where beyond these voices there is
+peace." His students in the University of Basle, where, in spite of
+the opposition from Geneva, he had been Professor of Greek for ten
+years, bore his coffin in honour on their shoulders to his grave, and
+his little band of disciples devoted themselves to spreading, in
+Holland and wherever {103} they could find soil for it, the precious
+seed of his truth, which had in later years a very wide harvest.[14]
+
+He was not a theologian of the Reformation type. He did not think the
+thoughts nor speak the dialect of his contemporaries. They need not be
+blamed for thanking God at his death nor for seeing in him an
+arch-enemy of their work. They were honestly working for one goal, and
+he was as honestly living by the light of a far different ideal. The
+spiritual discipline of the modern world was to come through their
+laborious systems, but he, anticipating the results of the travail and
+the slow spiral progress, and seeing in clear vision the triumph of
+man's liberated spirit, with exuberant optimism believed that the
+religion of the Spirit could be had for the taking--and he stretched
+out his hand for it!
+
+"I am," he cried out beneath the bludgeons, "a poor little man, more
+than simple, humble and peaceable, with no desire for glory, only
+affirming what in my heart I believe; why cannot I live and say my
+honest word and have your love?" The time was not ready for him, but
+he did his day's work with loyalty, sincerity, and bravery, and seen in
+perspective is worthy to be honoured as a hero and a saint.[15]
+
+
+
+[1] F. Buisson, _Sebastien Castellion, sa vie et son oeuvre_ (Paris,
+1892), 2 vols.; Charles Jarrin, _Deux Oublies_ (Bourg, 1889); Emile
+Broussoux, Sebastien Castellion, sa vie, ses oeuvres, et sa theologie
+(Strasbourg, 1867); A. Schweizer, _Die protestantischen Centraldogmen_
+(Zuerich, 1854), pp. 311-373.
+
+[2] _Dialogi sacri, latino-gallici, ad linguas moresque puerorum
+formandos_. Liber primus. Geneve, 1543.
+
+[3] There were at least three English translations--1610, 1715, and
+1743.
+
+[4] Buisson, _op. cit._ i. p. 205.
+
+[5] His Latin Bible appeared in 1551 and the French Bible in 1555.
+During this period he also brought out a new edition of his "Sacred
+Dialogues," an edition of Xenophon, a translation of the Sibylline
+Oracles, a Latin poem on Jonah, and a Greek poem on John the Baptist,
+the Forerunner.
+
+[6] Calvin, in striking contrast, had written to the same boy-king in
+1548: "Under the cover of the Gospel, foolish people would throw
+everything into confusion. Others cling to the superstitions of the
+Antichrist at Rome. _They all deserve to be repressed by the sword
+which is committed to you_."
+
+[7] Beza called it "diabolical doctrine."
+
+[8] He selected as the title of this book the opprobrious word which
+Calvin had used in the charge--_Harpago_, _i.e._ "Boat-hook."
+
+[9] This MS. is in the Bibliotheque de l'Eglise des Remontrants in
+Rotterdam. I have used only the extracts given from it in Buisson and
+Jarrin.
+
+[10] The main lines of Castellio's Christianity can be found in his
+_Dialogi quatuor_: (i.) De praedestinatione, (ii.) De electione, (iii.)
+De libero arbitrio, (iv.) De fide (Gouda, 1613) and in his _Scripta
+selecta_. (1596).
+
+[11] For Faith see _De fide and De arts dub._ ii. 212.
+
+[12] This idea comes out in his Preface to the Bible, in his _Moses
+latinus_, and in his manuscript work, _De arte dubitandi_.
+
+[13] _De arte dubitandi_.
+
+[14] Under the nom-de-plume of John Theophilus, Castellio translated
+the _Theologia Germanica_ into Latin, and published it with an
+Introduction. His translation carried this "golden book" of mystical
+religion into very wide circulation, and became a powerful influence,
+especially in England, as we shall see, in reproducing a similar type
+of religious thought.
+
+The Quaker William Caton, who spent the latter part of his life in
+Holland, cites Castellio seven times in his Tract, _The Testimony of a
+Cloud of Witnesses, who in their Generation have testified against that
+horrible Evil of Forcing of Conscience and Persecution about Matters of
+Religion_ (1662), and he seems very familiar with his writings. He
+also cites Schwenckfeld and Franck on pp. 37 and 17 respectively.
+
+[15] Castellio's plea for toleration, _Traite des Heretiques a savoir,
+si on les doit persecuter_ (Rouen, 1554), has just been reissued in
+attractive form in Geneva, edited by Olivet and Choisy.
+
+
+
+
+{104}
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+COORNHERT AND THE COLLEGIANTS--A MOVEMENT
+ FOR SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HOLLAND
+
+The struggle for political liberty in the Netherlands forms one of the
+most dramatic and impressive chapters in modern history, but the story of
+the long struggle in these same Provinces for the right to believe and to
+think according to the dictates of conscience is hardly less dramatic and
+impressive. Everybody knows that during the early years of the
+seventeenth century Holland was the one country in Europe which furnished
+cities of refuge for the persecuted and hunted exponents of unpopular
+faiths, and that the little band of Pilgrims who brought their precious
+seed to the new world had first preserved and nurtured it in a safe
+asylum among the Dutch; but the slow spiritual travail that won this soul
+freedom, and the brave work of spreading, on that soil, a religion of
+personal insight and individual experience are not so well known.[1] The
+growth and development of this great movement, with its numerous
+ramifications and differentiations, obviously cannot be told here, but
+one or two specimen lines of the movement will be briefly studied for the
+light they throw upon this general type of religion under consideration,
+and for their specific influence {105} upon corresponding spiritual
+movements in England and America.
+
+The silent propagation and germination of religious ideas in lands far
+away from their original habitat, their sudden appearance in a new spot
+like an outbreak of contagion, are always mysterious and fascinating
+subjects of research. Some chance talk with a disciple plants the seed,
+or some stray book comes to the hand of a baffled seeker at the moment
+when his soul is in a suggestible state, and lo! a new vision is created
+and a new apostle of the movement is prepared, often so inwardly and
+mysteriously that to himself he seems to be "an apostle not of men nor by
+man." One of the earliest Dutch exponents and interpreters of this type
+of spiritual religion which we have been studying as a by-product of the
+Reformation in Germany, and one who became an apostle of it because at a
+critical period of his life the seeds of it had fallen into his awakened
+mind, was Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert.[2]
+
+He was born in Amsterdam in 1522. He perfected himself as expert in
+copper-plate engraving and etching, and intended to pursue a quiet career
+in his adopted city of Haarlem, but he found himself disturbed with
+"intimations clear of wider scope." A keen desire to go back to the
+original sources of religious truth and to read the New Testament and the
+Fathers in their own tongue induced him to learn Greek and Latin after he
+was thirty years of age. He possessed excellent gifts and natural
+abilities of mind, and he soon had an enviable reputation for skill and
+learning. Like Sebastian Franck, whom he resembled in many points, he
+was profoundly interested in history and in the stages of man's
+historical development, and, like the former, he undertook the
+translation of great masterpieces which expressed the ideas that
+peculiarly suited his own temper of mind, such as Boethius' _Consolation
+of Philosophy_; Cicero, _On Duties_; and Erasmus' _Paraphrases of the New
+Testament_. He was throughout {106} his life deeply influenced by
+Erasmus, and his writings show everywhere a very strong humanistic
+colouring. It was no accident that one of his most important literary
+works was on Ethics ("Sittenkunst"), for his primary interest centred in
+man and in the art of living well ("Die Kunst wohl zu leben").[3]
+
+As he developed into independent manhood, he threw himself with great
+zeal into the cause of political freedom for the city of Haarlem, on
+account of which he suffered a severe imprisonment in the Hague in 1560,
+and at a later time was compelled to flee into temporary exile. He
+attracted the attention of William of Orange, who discovered his
+abilities and made him Secretary to the States-General in 1572, prized
+him highly for his character and abilities, commissioned him to write
+important state papers, and intrusted very weighty affairs to him.
+
+In his youth he had been an extensive traveller and had seen with his own
+eyes the methods which the Spanish Inquisition employed to compel
+uniformity of faith and, with his whole moral being revolting from these
+unspiritual methods, he dedicated himself to the cause of liberty of
+religious thought, and for this he wrote and spoke and wrought with a
+fearlessness and bravery not often surpassed.[4] With this passion of
+his for intellectual and spiritual freedom was joined a deeply grounded
+disapproval of the fundamental ideas of Calvinism, as he found it
+expounded by the preachers and theologians of the Reformed Church in
+Holland. As a Humanist, he was convinced of man's freedom of will, and
+he was equally convinced that however man had been marred by a _fall_
+from his highest possibilities, he was still possessed of native gifts
+and graces, and bore deep within himself an unlost central being, which
+in all his wanderings joined him indissolubly to God. On the great
+theological {107} issues of the day he "disputed," with penetrating
+insight, against the leading theologians of the Netherlands, and he
+always proved to be a formidable antagonist who could not be put down or
+kept refuted. Jacobus Arminius, at the turning of his career, was
+selected by the Consistory to make once for all a refutation of
+Coornhert's dangerous writings. He, however, became so impressed, as he
+studied the works which he was to refute, that he shifted his own
+fundamental points of belief, accepted many of Coornhert's views, and
+became himself a greater "heretic" and a more dangerous opponent of
+Calvinism than the man whom he was chosen to annihilate.[5]
+
+Sometime in his religious development--it is impossible to settle
+precisely when or where--he read the writings of the spiritual Reformers,
+and received from them formative influences which turned him powerfully
+to the cultivation of inward religion for his own soul and to the
+expression and interpretation of a universal Christianity--a Christianity
+of the inward Word and of an invisible Church. The lines of similarity
+between many of his views and those of Franck are so marked that no one
+can doubt that he read the books and meditated upon the bold teachings of
+this solitary apostle of the invisible Church. In fact he frequently
+mentions Franck by name in his writings and quotes his views. It is
+certain, too, that he admired, loved, and translated the writings of
+Sebastian Castellio, the French Humanist, first an admirer and then
+opponent of Calvin, pioneer defender of freedom of thought, and exponent
+of inward and spiritual religion of the type of the German Spiritual
+Reformers,[6] and it is unmistakable that we have, in this Dutch
+self-taught scholar, a virile interpreter of this same type of
+Christianity, marked with his own peculiar variation, and penetrated with
+the living convictions of his personal faith and first-hand experience.
+While putting emphasis on personal experience and on inward insight he
+nevertheless, like Franck, was suspicious {108} and wary of mystical
+"enthusiasm" and of "private openings." He criticized the "revelations"
+of David Joris and Henry Nicholas, and in place of their caprice he
+endeavoured to find the way to a religion grounded in the nature of
+things and of universal value. He was deeply read in the Mystics and
+constantly used their terminology, but he often gave new meaning to their
+words and pursued quite a different goal from that which absorbs the true
+mystic.
+
+Coornhert makes a sharp distinction between lower knowledge and higher
+knowledge--knowledge proper. Lower knowledge does not get beyond images
+and copies of true reality. It is sufficient for man's practical
+guidance in the affairs of this world of space and time, but it becomes
+only a "dead knowledge" when it is applied to matters of eternal moment.
+The higher knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge won through direct
+experience and practice of the will. This higher knowledge is possible
+for man because through Reason he partakes of the Word of God which is
+Reason itself revealed and uttered, and therefore he may know God and
+know of his own salvation with a certainty that far transcends the lower
+knowledge which he possesses of external things, or of mere historical
+happenings.[7]
+
+This Word of God is eternal, and is the source of all spiritual light and
+truth that have come to the race in all ages. Through it the patriarchs
+discovered how to live well, even in a world of sin, and through this
+same Word the prophets saw the line of march for their people, and by the
+power and inspiration of this Word the written word was given as a
+temporary guidance, as a pedagogical help, as a lantern on men's paths,
+until the morning Star, Jesus Christ, the living Word, should rise and
+shine in men's hearts. The living Word is, thus, vastly different from
+the written word. One is essence, the other only image or shadow; one is
+eternal, the other is temporal; one is uncreated, the other is made; one
+is the Light itself, the other is the lantern through which the {109}
+Light shines; one is Life itself, the other is only the witness of this
+Life--the finger which points toward it.[8]
+
+True religion is distinguished from all false or lower forms of religion
+in this, that true religion is always inward and spiritual, is directly
+initiated within the soul, is independent of form and letter, is
+concerned solely with the eternal and invisible, and verifies itself by
+producing within man a nature like that of God as He is seen in Christ.
+The "law" of true religion is a new and divinely formed disposition
+toward goodness--a law written in the heart; its temple is not of stone
+or wood, but is a living and spiritual temple, its worship consists
+entirely of spiritual activities, _i.e._ the offering of genuine praise
+from appreciative hearts, the sacrifice of the self to God, and the
+partaking of divine food and drink through living communion with Christ
+the Life. Religion, of this true and saving sort, never comes through
+hearsay knowledge, or along the channels of tradition, or by a head
+knowledge of texts of the written word. It comes only with inward
+experience of the Word of God, and it grows and deepens as the will of
+man lives by the Will of God, and as the kingdom of God comes, not in
+some far-away Jerusalem, or in some remote realm above the sky, but _in a
+man's own heart_.
+
+This true and saving religion is begun, and completed, within the soul by
+a process which Coornhert names by the great historic word, _faith_.
+Faith is the soul's free assent to the living Word of God as, through
+amazing grace, it offers itself to man in the desperate straits of his
+life. Man is so made that he perpetually seeks some desired satisfaction
+and, in his restless search for this unattained good, he tries many false
+and specious trails, is endlessly baffled and deceived, and finally
+discovers, if he is fortunate enough to come to himself, that he is like
+a shipwrecked man on a single plank with sea everywhere about him and no
+haven in sight. In this strait the Light, which he has not noted before,
+breaks in on his darkness, and the way of Grace is presented to him in
+{110} Christ. He feels himself called to a strange way of finding his
+desired satisfaction--no longer the way of flesh and worldly wisdom, but
+the way of the cross, of suffering, and of sacrifice. Reason,
+enlightened by the Word of God, prompts him to assent; the Scriptures,
+laden with promises, bear their affirmative testimony, and thus he makes
+his venture of faith, takes the risk of the voluntary sacrifice of his
+own pleasant desires, his preference for ways of ease and comfort, his
+self-will, and makes the bold experiment of trusting the Word of God, as
+it reveals itself to him, and of following Christ. He finds that his
+faith verifies itself at every step, his experiment carries him on into
+an experience, his venture brings him to the reality he is seeking.
+Every stage of this pragmatic faith, which in a word is _obedience to the
+Light_, makes the fact and the meaning of sin clearer, at the same time
+makes the knowledge of God more real and the nature of goodness more
+plain, and it leads away from a superstition of fear to a religion of
+love and of joy.[9]
+
+All other religions, besides this true and inward religion of the spirit,
+called by Coornhert "outer or external religions," are considered of
+value only as preparatory stages toward the one true religion which
+establishes the kingdom of God in man's heart. With this fundamental
+view, he quite naturally regards all external forms and ceremonies as
+temporary, and he holds that all of them, even the highest of them, are
+nothing else than visible signs, figures, shadows, symbols, pointing to
+invisible, spiritual, eternal realities, which in their nature are far
+different from the signs and symbols. The signs and symbols can in no
+way effect salvation; they can at best only suggest to the quickened soul
+the true realities, to know which is salvation. The real and availing
+circumcision, as the spiritual prophets and apostles always knew, was a
+circumcision of the heart, and not of the flesh, and so, too, the true
+and availing baptism is a baptism into the life, death, and resurrection
+of Christ, {111} and cleanses the soul of its sins and produces "a good
+conscience toward God"--the old sinful man is buried and a new and
+Christlike man is raised. The same transforming effects attach to the
+real communion in which the finite human spirit feeds upon its true
+divine food and drink--the Life of Christ given for us. The real Sabbath
+is not a sacred day, kept in a ceremonial and legal sense, but rather an
+inward quiet, a prevailing peace of soul, a rest in the life of God from
+stress and strain and passion. The Church has been pitiably torn and
+mutilated by disputes over the genuine form of administering these outer
+ceremonies, supposing them to be in themselves sacraments of life. As
+soon as they are recognized to be what they really are, only temporary
+signs and symbols, then the main emphasis can be put where it properly
+belongs, and where Christ himself always put it, on love and on the
+practice of love. No ceremony, even though instituted by Christ himself
+and practised with absolute correctness, can make a bad heart good, but
+love--love which suffers long and is kind--flows only from a renewed and
+transformed heart which already partakes of the same nature as that which
+was incarnate in Christ. Imprisonment, isolation, exile, excommunication
+may deprive one of the outward ceremonies, but neither death nor life,
+nor any outward circumstance in the universe, need separate the soul from
+the love of God in Christ, or deprive it of the privilege of loving![10]
+
+Coornhert criticizes the great Reformers for having put far too weighty
+emphasis on externals, and he especially criticizes Calvin for having
+given undue prominence to "pure doctrine" and to the right use of
+sacraments. It is impossible, he insists, to establish authoritatively
+from Scripture this so-called "pure doctrine." In fact, many parts of
+Scripture are against the doctrine of predestination, and Scripture is
+always against the doctrine of perseverance in sin. All speculations
+about the Trinity, or about the dual nature of Christ, transcend our
+knowledge and should be rejected. Furthermore {112} there is no
+authoritative Scripture or revelation for the new forms of the sacrament
+that have been introduced by the Reformers and are being made essential
+to salvation. The true Reformation, he thinks, should be devoted to the
+construction of the invisible Church, which has existed in all ages of
+the world, but which is kept from realizing its full scope and power
+because the attention of men is too greatly absorbed with signs and
+symbols and outward things.[11]
+
+For similar reasons he disapproved of the Anabaptists, even in their
+purified form as worked out under the guidance of Menno Simons. They
+still held, as did the reformed churches, that the true Church is a
+visible church which every one to be a Christian must join, though this
+true Church, as they conceive it, consists only of "saints." They claim
+the authoritative right to ban all persons who, according to their
+opinion, are not "saints." This right Coornhert denies. He further
+disapproves of their literal interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount,
+and of the obstacles which they put in the way of the free exercise of
+prophecy on the part of the members of the community. He insists that a
+person may be a Christian and yet belong to no visible church, if
+meantime he is a true member of the invisible Communion. He himself
+refrained from taking the communion supper, either with Papists,
+Lutherans, or Calvinists, because he said they all set the sacrament
+above the real characteristic mark of Christian membership, which is
+love, and because there is no divine command, with distinct and
+unambiguous authority, for the efficacious celebration of the sacrament,
+which in any case could not be rightly kept so long as sectarian
+hostility and lack of love prevail in the contending visible
+churches.[12] Under these circumstances, Coornhert, who was intensely
+concerned for the sincere, simple-minded souls, perplexed by the maze of
+varying sects and parties, refused to found a new sect or to head a new
+schismatic movement. On behalf of those who could not {113} conform, he
+pleaded for freedom of conscience and for the right to live in the world
+undisturbed as members of the invisible Church, using or omitting outward
+ceremonies as conscience might direct, waiting meantime and seeking in
+quiet faith for the coming of new and divinely commissioned apostles who
+would _really reform_ the apostate Churches, unite all divided sects, and
+gather in the world a true Church of Christ.[13]
+
+Meantime, while waiting for this true apostolic Church to appear,
+Coornhert approved of the formation of an _interim-Church_. This Church,
+according to his programme, would accept as truth, and as true practice,
+anything plainly and clearly taught in the canonical Scripture, but he
+advised against using glosses and commentaries made by men, since that is
+to turn from the sun to the stars and from the spring to the cistern.
+This interim-Church was to have no authoritative teachers or preachers.
+In place of official ministry, the members were to edify one another in
+Christian love, with the reservation that they would welcome further
+illumination out of the Scriptures wherever they have made a mistake or
+gone wrong. All persons who confess God as Father, and Jesus Christ as
+sent by God, and who in the power of faith abstain from sins, may belong
+to this interim-Church. For the sake of those who are still weak and
+spiritually immature, he allowed the use of ceremonies in the
+interim-Church, but all ceremonies are held as having no essential
+function for salvation, and the believer is at liberty to make use of
+them or to abstain from using them as he prefers.[14]
+
+
+
+II
+
+Coornhert's proposed interim-Church, which at best was conceived as only
+a temporary substitute for the true apostolic Church, for which every
+spiritual Christian is a "waiter" or "seeker," found actual embodiment in
+a very interesting movement of the early seventeenth {114} century, known
+in Dutch history as the "Collegiants" or "Rynsburgers," which we shall
+now proceed to study.[15] The Collegiants had their origin in one of the
+stormiest of the many theological controversies which swept over the
+Netherlands in this critical period of religious history, a controversy
+arising over the views taught by Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609). The Dutch
+Protestants who accepted his views presented a "Remonstrance" to the
+States of Holland and Friesland in 1610, in which they formulated their
+departure from strict, orthodox Calvinism. The "Remonstrance" contained
+five main Articles: (1) that the divine decrees of predestination are
+conditioned and not absolute; (2) that the atonement is in intention
+universal; (3) that a man cannot of himself do anything good without
+regeneration; (4) that though the Grace of God is a necessary condition
+of human effort it does not act irresistibly in man; (5) that believers
+are able to resist sin, but are not beyond the possibility of falling
+from Grace. The opponents to these views, often called "Gomarists,"
+issued a counter-blast from which they received the name
+"counter-Remonstrants." The States-General passed an edict tolerating
+both parties and forbidding further dispute, but the conflict of views
+would not down. It spread like a prairie fire, became complicated with
+political issues, had its martyrdoms, and produced far-reaching results
+and consequences.[16] At the Synod of Dort, on April 24, 1619, the
+Remonstrants were declared guilty of falsifying religion and of
+destroying the unity of the Church, and were deposed from all their
+ecclesiastical and academic offices and positions. Two hundred were
+deposed from the ministerial office for life, and one hundred were
+banished.
+
+Among the number of deposed ministers was Christian {115} Sopingius, the
+pastor of Warmund, and the "Remonstrants," who formed an important part
+of his congregation, were left without the opportunity of hearing any
+ministry of which they approved. In this strait Giesbert Van der Kodde,
+an Elder in the Warmund church, took a bold step. He was the son of a
+prosperous farmer who had given his children, John, William, Adrian, and
+Giesbert, an unusually extended education. All the sons learned Latin,
+Italian, French, and English, while William (known in the scholarly world
+as Gulielmus Coddaeus) was a Hebrew and Oriental scholar of note, and at
+the age of twenty-six was made Professor of Hebrew in the University of
+Leyden. They owed the course of their religious development and their
+particular bent of mind to the writings of men like Sebastian Castellio;
+Coornhert, whose views have been given above; and Jacobus Acontius, the
+Italian humanist, who laid down the principles that no majority can make
+a binding law in matters of faith, that only God's Spirit in the hearts
+of men can certify what is the truth, and that "Confessions of Faith"
+have been the ruinous source of endless divisions in the Church. Deeply
+imbued with the ideas of these spiritual reformers, and in sympathy as
+they were with many of the views and practices of the Mennonites about
+them, the Van der Kodde brothers decided, under the leadership of the
+boldest and most conscientious of them, Giesbert, to come together
+without any minister and hold a meeting of a free congregational type.
+At first the meeting was probably held in Giesbert's house, and consisted
+of readings from the Scripture, prayers, and the public utterance of
+messages of edification by those who formed the group. A little later a
+"Remonstrant" preacher was sent to care for the orphaned Church in
+Warmund, but Giesbert had become satisfied with the new type of meeting,
+and now expressed himself emphatically against listening to preachers who
+lived without working and at the expense of the community, and who
+hindered the free exercise of "prophecy." Many of the members of the
+Church did not share these views, but {116} much preferred to have the
+comfort of a minister, so that a "separation" occurred, and Giesbert,
+with his brothers and fellow-believers, rented a house and perfected
+their new type of congregational meeting. They soon moved their meeting
+(called a "Collegium," _i.e._ gathering) to the neighbouring town of
+Rynsburg, where it received additions to its adherents, largely drawn
+from the Mennonites, many of whose ideas were strongly impressed upon the
+little "Society,"--for example, opposition to taking oaths, refusal to
+fight, or even to take measures of self-defence, and rejection of the
+right of magistrates and other political officers to inflict punishment.
+They also adopted, as the Mennonites did, the Sermon on the Mount as the
+basis of their ethical standard, which they applied with literalness and
+rigour. They insisted on simplicity of life, the denial of "worldly"
+occupations or professions, plainness of garb, rejection of the world's
+etiquette, absence of titles in addressing persons, and equality of men
+and women, even in public ministry. They introduced the practice of
+immersion ("Dompeldoop") as a mark of initiation into the Society, but
+they considered true Christian baptism to be with the Spirit and not with
+water, and they allowed their members a large range of liberty in the use
+or disuse of water baptism, as well as in the form of receiving it. They
+rejected the Supper as an ecclesiastical ceremony, but they highly prized
+it as an occasion of fellowship and of group worship. Every person might
+share the supper with them if he confessed his faith in Christ and were
+not living in unrepented sin, though they were inclined to exclude
+persons occupying offices which involved the violation of the Sermon on
+the Mount. The one essential mark of fellowship was brother-love, which
+was not to be confined to the narrow limits of the Society, but that
+person was regarded the truest disciple of Christ who practised the
+neighbour-spirit in the broadest and most effective manner. They cared
+for their own sick and poor, and they had a wide sympathy for all
+oppressed and suffering people. They pushed to the farthest limit {117}
+their opposition to war and all other forms of destroying human life.
+
+From the first there was a decided strain of "Enthusiasm" evident in the
+movement, and a pronounced tendency to encourage a ministry of "prophetic
+openings." One of the original members, John Van der Kodde, declared
+that he should fear the loss of his salvation if he failed in a meeting
+to give utterance to the Word of God revealed to him in his inner being.
+They encouraged the custom of silent waiting in their gatherings as a
+preparation for "openings." They proved from the fourteenth chapter of 1
+Corinthians that free prophecy is the highest form of ministry, and they
+held that God by His grace could pour out His Spirit upon men in the
+seventeenth century as well as in the days of the Apostles and
+Evangelists, who did their mighty work, not as Church officials, but as
+recipients of gifts from God. They felt that prayer accompanied by
+_tears_ was true prayer, "moved" from above. They, however, were persons
+of scholarship and refinement, and not tumultuous or strongly emotional,
+but, on the contrary, they highly valued dignity and propriety of
+behaviour.
+
+As the movement spread, _Collegia_, or societies, were formed in Leyden,
+Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and in other localities, essentially like the
+mother-society in Rynsburg, but with characteristic variations and with
+particular lines of local developments. Once every year they had a large
+yearly meeting in Rynsburg, to which the scattered members came from all
+parts of Holland where there were societies. As time went on, two marked
+lines of differentiation appeared in the movement, due to the trend of
+the influence of important leaders, one group emphasizing especially the
+_seeker-attitude_, and the other group receiving its formative influence
+from Cartesian philosophy. Daniel Van Breen, Adam Boreel, and Michael
+Comans were the early leaders and pillars of the Amsterdam _Collegium_,
+which was begun in 1645, and some years later the group was greatly
+strengthened by the "convincement" of the young Mennonite doctor and
+{118} teacher, Galenus Abrahams, who soon became the most prominent
+Collegiant leader in Holland.
+
+Adam Boreel gave the movement a strong impetus and did much toward
+putting the teachings of Coornhert into practice. He was born at
+Middleburg in 1603. He was a man of good scholarship, being especially
+learned in Hebrew, and he was thoroughly impregnated with the views of
+the spiritualistic Humanists of the former century, Franck, Castellio,
+and Coornhert, as well as with the views of the mystics, and he was
+himself a champion of individual religious freedom. He held that the
+visible Church since the apostolic age has been astray and apostate, that
+Confessions of faith, Church officers, and sacraments are without
+"authority," that the uncontaminated teaching of the Holy Scripture is
+the only safe norm of faith, and that until a true apostolic Church is
+again established in the world by divine commission, each faithful,
+believing Christian should maintain meantime the worship of God in his
+own way and wait in faith for a fuller revelation.[17] His mystical
+piety appears strongly in his hymns, which are preserved in his complete
+works. One of these hymns of Boreel has been very freely translated into
+English "by a Lover of the Life of our Lord Jesus," probably Henry More,
+the Platonist. More says that he finds the hymn "running much upon the
+mortification of our own wills and of our union and communion with God,"
+and he loves it as a deep expression of his own faith that "no man can
+really adhere to Christ, and unwaveringly, but by union to Him by His
+Spirit." I give a few extracts from More's free Translation:
+
+ 1. O Heavenly Light! my spirit to Thee draw,
+ With powerful touch my senses smite,
+ Thine arrows of Love into me throw
+ With flaming dart
+ Deep wound my heart,
+ And wounded seize for ever, as thy right.
+
+{119}
+
+ 3. Do thou my faculties all captivate
+ Unto thyself with strongest tye;
+ My will entirely regulate:
+ Make me thy slave,
+ Nought else I crave
+ For this I know is perfect Liberty.
+
+ 5. O endless good!
+ Break like a flood
+ Into my soul, and water my dry earth,
+
+ 6. That by this mighty power I being reft
+ Of everything that is not One,
+ To Thee alone I may be left
+ By a firm will
+ Fixt to Thee still
+ And inwardly united into one.
+
+ 11. So that at last, I being quite released
+ From this strait-laced Egoity
+ My soul will vastly be increased
+ Into that All
+ Which One we call,
+ And One in itself alone doth All imply.
+
+ 12. Here's Rest, here's Peace, here's Joy and Holy Love,
+ The heaven is here of true Content,
+ For those that seek the things above,
+ Here's the true light
+ Of Wisdom bright
+ And Prudence pure with no self-seeking blent.
+
+ 15. Thus shall you be united with that One,
+ That One where's no Duality,
+ For from that perfect Good alone
+ Ever doth spring
+ Each pleasant thing
+ The hungry soul to feed and satisfy.[18]
+
+
+Stoupe, in his _Religion of the Dutch_,[19] gives some interesting
+contemporary light on this branch of Collegiants whom he calls
+"Borellists," as follows: "The Borellists had their name from one
+Borrell, the Ringleader of their {120} sect, a man very learned,
+especially in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latine tongues. He was brother to
+Monsieur Borrell, ambassador from the States-General to his most
+Christian Majesty. These Borrellists do for the most part maintain the
+opinions of the Mennonites though they come not to their assemblies.
+They have made choice of a most austere kind of life, spending a
+considerable part of their Estates in almsgiving and a careful discharge
+of all the duties incumbent on a Christian. They have an aversion for
+all Churches, as also for the use of the Sacraments, publick prayers, and
+all other external functions of God's Service. They maintain that all
+Churches which are in the world and have been since the death of the
+apostles and their first subsequent successors have degenerated from the
+pure doctrine which they preached to the world; for this reason, that
+they have suffered the infallible Word of God contained in the Old and
+New Testaments to be expounded and corrupted by Doctors who are not
+infallible and would have their own confessions, their catechisms, and
+their Liturgies and their sermons, which are the works of men, to pass
+for what they really are not, to wit, for the pure Word of God. They
+hold also that men are not to read anything but the Word of God alone
+without any additional application of men."
+
+Abrahams (b. 1622) intensified the _seeker_ aspect of the Amsterdam
+group, emphasizing the view that the existing Church, even in its best
+form, is only an interim-Church with no saving sacraments and no
+compelling authority. His position is expressed in the highly important
+"Nineteen Articles" which he, and his fellow-believer, David Spruyt, drew
+up in 1658, and in the further Exposition _Nader Verklaringe_ of 1659.
+These documents present the apostolic pattern or model as the ideal of
+the visible Church for all ages. There neither is nor can be any other
+true Church. It is essentially a Church managed, maintained, and
+governed through "gifts" bestowed by the Holy Spirit, and in this Church
+each spiritual member takes his part according to the measure of his
+special "gift." This pattern Church, however, {121} _fell away_ and
+became corrupted after the death of the apostles, and instead of this
+glorious Church an external Church was established, claiming to possess
+authoritative officials, saving sacraments, and infallible doctrines, but
+really lacking the inward power of the apostolic Church, no longer
+following and imitating Christ, on the contrary adopting the world's way
+and the world's type of authority, and destitute of the very mark and
+essence of real Christianity, _the spirit of love_. Through all the
+apostasy of the visible Church, however, an invisible Church has survived
+and preserved the eternal ideal. It consists of all those, in whatever
+ages and lands, who have lived by their faith in Christ, have kept
+themselves pure and stainless in the midst of a sinful world, have
+practised love, even when they have received the buffets of hate, have
+lived above division and schism and sect, and have steadily believed that
+their names were written in heaven and that their Church was visible to
+God, even though none on earth called them brother, or recognized their
+membership in the body of Christ. Some time, in God's good time, that
+invisible Church, which no apostasy has annulled or destroyed, will
+become once again a visible Church, equipped with "gifted" teachers and
+with apostolic leaders as at the first, beautiful once more as a bride
+adorned for her husband, and powerful again as the irresistible sword of
+the Spirit.
+
+But the Reformers--Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and even Menno Simons--have
+taken an unwarranted course toward the reform and restoration of the
+Church. It was within their right and power to _improve_ the unbearable
+condition of the outward Church, by faithfully following the plain
+teaching of the New Testament, and without usurping authority. They,
+however, have not been satisfied to do what lay within the narrow limits
+of their commission. They have ambitiously undertaken to set up again an
+authoritative visible Church, even though they lacked the gifts of the
+Spirit for it, and were without the necessary apostolic commission. They
+insisted on their form of sacraments as essential to salvation; they
+{122} drew up their infallible creeds; they set up Church officials who
+were to rule over other men's faith, and they assumed a certain divine
+right to compel the consciences of their members. Most of the Reformers
+have even sanctioned the use of bonds and prisons to secure uniformity of
+faith! The primitive apostles claimed no such right and made use of no
+such unspiritual methods. Order is a good thing and is everywhere to be
+sought, but God nowhere has conferred upon the heads of His Church the
+authority to compel conscience or to force tender souls to submit to a
+system which reveals in itself no inherent evidences of divine origin.
+
+The writers of these Nineteen Articles fail to see anywhere in the world
+a divinely established and spiritually endowed Church of Jesus Christ.
+They are determined to live in purity and love, to avoid dissension and
+strife, to guard their membership in the invisible Church, and to wait in
+faith for the outpouring of the Spirit and the bestowal of miraculous
+gifts for the restoration of the Church in its pristine apostolic purity
+and power. We have thus, here in Holland, an almost exact parallel to
+the "Seekers" who were very numerous in England in the middle decades of
+the seventeenth century.
+
+We get a very interesting side-light on Galenus Abrahams in the _Journal_
+of George Fox. William Penn and George Keith held a "discussion" with
+this famous Collegiant leader in 1677, at which time the latter "asserted
+that nobody nowadays could be accepted as a messenger of God unless he
+confirmed his doctrine by miracle,"[20] and Fox says that Abrahams was
+"much confounded and truth gained ground."[21] Fox himself was not
+present at the "discussion," but he had a personal interview with
+Abrahams at about the same time as the "discussion." The interview was
+not very satisfactory. Fox says that he found this "notable teacher"
+"very high and shy, so that he would not let me touch him nor look upon
+him, but he bid me keep my eyes off him, for {123} he said they pierced
+him!"[22] But at a later visit, in 1684, Fox found the Collegiant
+doctor, now venerable with years, "very loving and tender." "He
+confessed in some measure to truth," Fox says, "and we parted very
+lovingly." At a meeting, held in Amsterdam a few weeks later, Abrahams
+was among the large group of attenders, and "was very attentive to the
+testimony of the truth," and, when the meeting was over, Fox says, "he
+came and got me by the hand very lovingly,"[23] and seemed no longer
+afraid of the Quaker's "piercing eyes." In spirit they were very near
+together, and with a little more insight on both sides the two movements
+might have joined in one single stream. For many years afterwards the
+common people, not given to nice distinctions, called the annual
+gathering of the Collegiants at Rynsburg "the meeting of the Quakers."[24]
+
+The other tendency in the movement, which received its fullest expression
+in the group of Collegiants at Rynsburg and their friends in Amsterdam,
+had a still greater parallelism with Quakerism, in fact, the most
+important book which came from a member of this group--_The Light on the
+Candlestick_--is indistinguishable in its body of ideas from Quaker
+teaching, and differs only in one point, that it reveals a more
+philosophically trained mind in the writer than does any early Quaker
+book with the single exception of Barclay's _Apology_. The author of
+_The Light on the Candlestick_--written originally in Dutch and published
+in 1662 under the title _Lucerna super candelabro_--was probably Peter
+Balling, though the book, with characteristic Collegiant modesty, was
+published anonymously. Peter Balling was one of an interesting group of
+scholarly Collegiants who became very intimate friends of Baruch Spinoza,
+and who received from the Jewish philosopher a strong impulse toward
+mystical religion. Before they became acquainted with the young Spinoza,
+however, they had already received through Descartes a powerful
+intellectual awakening, {124} and had discovered that consciousness
+itself, when fully sounded, has its own unescapable evidence of God. It
+is not possible here to turn aside and study adequately this
+extraordinary philosophical movement known as Cartesianism, beginning in
+Descartes (1596-1650) and culminating in Spinoza (1632-1677), but the
+distinct religious influence of it is so profoundly apparent, both in
+Peter Balling and in the Quaker apologist Robert Barclay (1648-1690),
+that a very brief review of the contribution from this source seems
+necessary.
+
+Rene Descartes, like almost every other supreme genius who has discovered
+a new way and has forever shifted the line of march for the race, passed
+through a momentous inward upheaval, amounting to a conversion
+experience, and emerged into a new moral and intellectual world.[25] It
+was on November 10, 1619, in the midst of a great campaign during the
+opening stages of the Thirty Years' War, in which at this time the young
+Frenchman was a soldier on the Roman Catholic side, that Descartes,
+sitting alone all day in a heated room of some German house, resolved to
+have done with outworn systems of thought and with tradition, and
+determined to make the search for truth the object of his life.[26] The
+new scientific method, which was the fruit of his reflections and
+experiments, and which has since been carried into every field of human
+research, does not now concern us. The feature of his philosophy which
+impressed these serious seekers after God was his fresh discovery of what
+is involved in the nature of self-consciousness. Beginning with the bold
+resolution to accept nothing untested, to doubt everything in the
+universe that can be doubted, and to receive as truth only that which
+successfully resists every attempt to doubt it, he found one absolutely
+solid point with which to start, in the self-existence of
+self-consciousness--"At least I who am doubting am thinking, and to think
+is to exist." {125} Pushing his search deeper down to see what is further
+involved in the constitution of this self-consciousness, he discovered a
+consciousness of God--the idea of an infinitely perfect Being--within
+himself, and this consciousness of God seemed to him to be the underlying
+condition of every kind of knowledge whatever. It turns out to be
+impossible, he believes, to think of the "finite" without contrasting it,
+in implication at least, with the "infinite" which is therefore in
+consciousness, just as it is impossible to talk of "spaces" without
+presupposing the one space of which given "spaces" are parts. That we
+are oppressed with our own littleness, that we "look before and after and
+sigh for what is not," that we are conscious of finiteness, means that we
+partake in some way of an infinite which reveals itself in us by an
+inherent necessity of self-consciousness. There are, then, some ideas
+within us--at least there is this one idea of an infinitely perfect
+reality--_implanted_ in the very structure of our thinking self, which
+could have come from no other source but from God, who is that infinitely
+perfect Reality. Other things may still be doubtful, and a tinge of
+uncertainty may rest upon everything external to the mind that perceives
+them, but _the soul and God are sure_, and, of these two certainties, God
+is as sure as the soul itself, because an idea of Him is native to the
+soul as a necessary part of its "furnishings," and is the condition of
+thinking anything at all.[27]
+
+Spinoza, though bringing to his philosophy elements which are foreign to
+Descartes, and though fusing his otherwise mathematical and logical
+system with the warmth and fervour of mystical experience that is wholly
+lacking in the French philosopher, carried Cartesianism to its logical
+culmination, and has given the world one of the most impressive
+presentations that ever has been given of the view that all things centre
+in God and are involved in His existence, that it belongs to the very
+nature of the {126} human mind to know God, and that all peace and
+felicity come from "the love of an infinite and eternal object which
+feeds the soul with changeless and unmingled joy." He, too, had his
+conversion-awakening which took him above the love of earthly things, and
+through it he found an unvarying centre for his heart's devotion, which
+made his life, outwardly extremely humble, inwardly one of the noblest
+and most saintly in the history of philosophy. "After experience had
+taught me," he writes in the opening of his early _Treatise on the
+Improvement of the Understanding_, "that all things which are ordinarily
+encountered in common life are vain and futile~.~.~. I at length
+determined to inquire if there were anything which was a TRUE GOOD,
+capable of imparting itself, and by which alone the mind could be
+affected to the exclusion of all else; whether, indeed, anything existed
+by the discovery and acquisition of which I might have continuous and
+supreme joy to all eternity," and the remainder of his life was
+penetrated by a noble passion for the Eternal, and dedicated to the
+interpretation of the Highest Good which he had discovered, and which
+henceforth no rival good was ever to eclipse. Dr. A. Wolf well says of
+him: "His moral ardour seems almost aglow with mystic fire, and if we may
+not call him a priest of the most high God, yet he was certainly a
+prophet of the power which makes for righteousness."[28] He is giving
+his own experience in the spiritual principle which he laid down early in
+his life: "So long as we have not such a clear idea of God as shall unite
+us with Him in such a way that it will not let us love anything beside
+Him, we cannot truly say that we are united with God, so as to depend
+immediately on Him."[29]
+
+It is Spinoza's primary principle that the only Reality in the universe
+is an all-inclusive Reality which is the origin, source, and explanation
+of all that is. All human experience, either of an inward or outward
+world, if it is to have any meaning and reality at all, involves the
+{127} existence of this inclusive Whole of Reality, that is of God. It
+belongs, thus, fundamentally to the nature of human consciousness to know
+God, for if we did not know Him we should not know anything else. The
+moment a "finite thing" or a "finite idea" is severed from the Whole in
+which it has its ground and meaning, it becomes _nothing_; it is "real"
+only so long as it is a part of a larger Reality, and so every attempt to
+understand a "flower in a crannied wall," or any other object in the
+universe, drives us higher up until we come at last to that which is the
+_prius_ of all being and knowledge, the explanation of all that is.
+
+But this ultimate Reality up to which all our experience carries us--if
+we take the pains to think out what is involved in the experience--is no
+mere sum of "finites," no bare aggregation of "parts," no heaped-up
+totality of separate "units." It is an Absolute Unity which binds all
+that is into one living, organic Whole, a Divine Nature,--_natura
+naturans_ Spinoza calls it,--and which lives and is manifested in all the
+finite "parts," in so far as they are real at all. And as soon as the
+mind finds itself in living unity with the eternal Nature of things, and
+views all things from their centre in God, and sees how all objects and
+events flow from the eternal Being of God, it is "led as by the hand to
+its highest blessedness."[30] The complications of Spinoza's system, and
+the difficulty of finding a "way down" from the Absolute Unity of God to
+the differentiation of the modes of a world--_natura naturata_--here, in
+space and time, do not now concern us.
+
+The point of contact between Spinoza and the spiritual movement which we
+are studying is found in his central principles that God is the _prius_
+of all finite reality, that to know things or to know one's own mind
+truly is to know God, and that a man who has formed a pure love for the
+eternal is above the variations of temporal fortune, is not disturbed in
+spirit by changes in the object of his love, but loves with a love which
+eternally feeds the soul with joy.
+
+{128}
+
+During the most important period of his intellectual and spiritual
+development, Spinoza spent three years (1660-1663) in the quiet village
+of Rynsburg, living in close and intimate contact with his Collegiant
+friends. It was here during these happiest years of his life, in this
+quiet retreat and surrounded with spiritually-minded men with whom he had
+much in common, that he wrote his _Short Treatise on God, Man and His
+Well-Being_, as well as his _Treatise on the Improvement of the
+Understanding_, which opens with his account of the birth of his own
+spiritual passion. These intellectual and high-minded Collegiants had
+their influence upon the philosopher, and he in turn had a deep influence
+upon them. Peter Balling translated into Dutch in 1664 Spinoza's version
+of Descartes' _Principia_, and Balling turned to his friend Spinoza for
+consolation in his great loss occasioned by the death of his child that
+same year,[31] while the philosopher at his death left all his
+unpublished manuscripts to another life-long intimate Collegiant friend
+of his, John Rieuwertsz.
+
+_The Light on the Candlestick_, to which we shall now turn for the ripest
+ideas of the little sect, was written while Spinoza was living among the
+Collegiants in Rynsburg. It was very quickly discovered by the Quakers,
+who immediately recognized it as "bone of their bone," and circulated it
+as a Quaker Tract. It was translated into English in 1663 by B. F.,[32]
+who published it with this curious title-page: "The Light upon the
+Candlestick. Serving for Observation of the Principal things in the Book
+called, _The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, &c. Against several
+Professors, Treated of, and written by Will Ames_. Printed in Low Dutch
+for the Author, 1662, and translated into English by B. F."
+
+The Collegiant author, quite in the spirit and style of Spinoza, urges
+the importance of discovering a central love for "things which are
+durable and incorruptible," "knowing thereby better things than those to
+which the {129} multitude are link't so fast with love." We have
+outgrown the "toyes with which we played as children," there is now "no
+desire or moving thereunto, because we have found better things for our
+minds"; so, too, "all those things in which men, even to old age, so much
+delight" would seem like "toyes" if they once discovered the true Light
+"which abides forever unchangeable," and if through it they got a sight
+of "those things which are alone worthy to be known." This "true and
+lasting change," from "toyes" to "the things which are durable and
+eternal," can come only through an inward conversion. When a new vision
+begins from within, then the outward action follows of itself, but no man
+will part with what he judges best till he sees something better, and
+then the weaker yields to the stronger without any forcing.[33] This
+whole work of conversion, of transformation, of "lasting change," must
+have its origin in something within ourselves. We cannot turn from
+baubles and "toyes" and our "desire for that which is high in the world"
+until a Light from some source plainly shows us an eternal reality for
+which we may "highly adventure the tryal." There is, our author insists,
+only one place where such a guiding Light could arise, and that is within
+the soul itself, as an inward and immediate knowledge: "'Tis not far to
+seek. We direct thee to within thyself. Thou oughtest to turn into, to
+mind and have regard unto, that which is within thee, to wit, the Light
+of Truth, the true Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into
+the world. Here 'tis that thou must be and not without thee. Here thou
+shalt find a Principle certain and infallible, through which increasing
+and going on into, thou mayest at length arrive unto a happy condition.
+Of this thou mayest highly adventure the tryal. And if thou happenest to
+be one of those that would know all things before thou dost begin~.~.~.
+know this, Thou dost therein just as those that would learn to read
+without knowing the Letters. He that will not adventure till he be fully
+satisfied, shall never begin, much less finish {130} his own salvation.
+We say then, that we exhort every one to turn unto the Light that's in
+him."[34]
+
+In true Cartesian fashion, he demonstrates why this Light must have its
+locus within the soul and not in some external means or medium. All
+knowledge that God is being revealed in external signs, or through
+external means, already presupposes a prior knowledge of God. We can
+judge no doctrine, no Book to be Divine except by some inward and
+immediate knowledge of what really is Divine. Without this Light the
+Scriptures are only Words and Letters. But "if we experience that the
+Book called the Bible in regard to the Divine doctrine therein comprised
+hath such a harmony with That [in us] by which God is known, that He must
+needs have been the Author of it, there cannot rationally be any more
+powerful demonstration."[35]
+
+The same principle is true with regard to every conceivable form of
+revelation which could be made to our outward senses, whether by words,
+or by miracles, or by any other visible "operations." No finite thing
+can bring us a knowledge of God unless we already have within us a
+sufficient knowledge of Him to make us able to appreciate and judge the
+Divine character of the particular revelation; that is to say, we must
+already have God in order either to seek Him or to find Him; or, as
+Balling puts it, "Unless the knowledge of God precedes, no man can
+discern Him." God is, therefore, the prius of all knowledge: "The
+knowledge of God must first be, before there can be knowledge of any
+particular things,"[36] and God must be assumed as present in the soul
+before any basis of truth or of religion can be found. "The Light is the
+first Principle of Religion; for, seeing there can be no true Religion
+without the knowledge of God, and no knowledge of God without this Light,
+Religion must necessarily have this Light for its first Principle."[37]
+"Without thyself, O Man," he concludes, "thou hast no {131} means to look
+for, by which thou mayest know God. Thou must abide within thyself; to
+the Light that is in thee thou must turn thee; there thou wilt find it
+and nowhere else. God is nearest unto thee and to every man. He that
+goes forth of himself to any creature, thereby to know God, departs from
+God. God is nearer unto every man than himself, because He penetrates
+the most inward and intimate parts of man and is the Life of the inmost
+spirit. Mind, therefore, the Light that is in thee."[38]
+
+This Light--the first Principle of all Religion--is also called in this
+little Book by many other names. It is "the living Word," "the Truth of
+God," "the Light of Truth"; it is "Christ"; it is the "Spirit."[39] As a
+Divine Light, it reproves man of sin, shows him that he has strayed from
+God, accuses him of the evil he commits. It leads man into Truth, "even
+though he has never heard or read of Scripture"; it shows him the way to
+God; it gives him peace of conscience in well-doing; and, if followed and
+obeyed, it brings him into union with God, "wherein all happiness and
+salvation doth consist."[40] It operates in all men, though in many men
+there are serious "impediments" which hinder its operations--"the lets to
+it are manifold"--but as soon as a man turns to it and cleanses his inner
+eye--removes the "lets"--he discovers "a firm foundation upon which he
+may build stable and enduring things: A Principle whereby he may, without
+ever erring, guide the whole course of his life, how he is to carry
+himself toward God, his Neighbour and himself."[41] The writer, having
+thus delivered his message, wishes to have it distinctly understood that
+he is not trying to draw his readers to any new sect, or to any outward
+and visible church. "Go to, then, O Man," he says, "whoever thou art, we
+will not draw thee off from one heap of men to carry thee over unto
+another, 'tis somewhat else we invite thee to! We invite thee to
+Something which may be a means to attain thy own {132} salvation and
+well-being membership in the invisible Church."
+
+Such is the teaching of this strange little book, written by the friend
+of Spinoza, and revealing the maturest expression of this slowly
+developing spiritual movement, which began with Hans Denck and flowed
+uninterruptedly through many lives and along many channels and burst out
+full flood in England in "the Children of the Light," who were known to
+the world as Quakers.
+
+
+
+[1] Three important books on this subject are C. B. Hylkema,
+_Reformateurs_ (Haarlem, 1902); Dr. Heinrich Heppe, _Geschichte des
+Pietismus und der Mystik in der reformirten Kirche, namentlich der
+Niederlande_ (Leiden, 1879); and Wilhelm Goeters, _Die Vorbereitung des
+Pietismus in der reformierten Kirche der Niederlande_ (Leipzig, 1911).
+
+[2] The biographical details of his life are given in a Preface to the
+three-volume edition of his collected works, published in Amsterdam in
+1631.
+
+[3] The title of this work is _Zedekunst, dat is, Wellevens Kunst,
+vermits waarheydts kennisse vanden Mensche, vande Zonden ende vande
+Deughden. Nu aldereerst beschreven in't Neerlandtsch_. Coornhert's
+_Wercken_ (1631), i. fol. 268-3353.
+
+[4] Two of his powerful pleas for the freedom of the mind are, _Epitome
+processus de occidendis haereticis et vi conscientiis inferenda_ (Gouda,
+1591), and _Defensio processus de non occidendis haereticis_ (Hannover,
+1593).
+
+[5] Gottfried Arnold, _Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historien_, ii. p. 378, sec. 3.
+
+[6] See Chap. VI.
+
+[7] _Zedekunst_, chaps. i. and ii.
+
+[8] _Zedekunst_, chaps. iv. and v.
+
+[9] Wercken, iii. fol. 413-427. See also "Hert-Spiegel godlycker
+Schrifturen," _Wercken_, i. fol. 1-44.
+
+[10] _Wercken_, iii. fol. 413-427.
+
+[11] See Arnold, _op. cit._ ii. p. 380, sec. 8.
+
+[12] His views in this particular are very similar to those of
+Schwenckfeld.
+
+[13] Arnold, _op. cit_. pp. 381-382.
+
+[14] _Wercken_, i. fol. 554 ff.
+
+[15] The best history of the Collegiants is J. C. Van Sloe's _De
+Rijnsburger Collegianten_ (Haarlem, 1895).
+
+[16] One of the most tragic consequences of the controversy was the
+martyrdom of John of Barneveldt, the political head of the Remonstrants.
+Hugo Grotius was thrown into prison, but escaped through the bold
+ingenuity of his wife.
+
+[17] Adam Boreel's teaching is set forth in his treatise, _Ad. legem et
+testimonium_ (Amsterdam, 1643). Information upon his life and teaching
+is given in Arnold, _op. cit._ ii. 386-387; in Hylkema, _Reformateurs_;
+and in Walter Schneider, _Adam Boreel_ (Giessen, 1911).
+
+[18] Henry More's _Annotations upon the Discourse of Truth_ (London,
+1682), pp. 271-276.
+
+[19] Stoupe, _La Religion des Hollandois_ (Paris, 1673), translated into
+English under the title _The Religion of the Dutch_ (London, 1680). The
+extract is from p. 82 of the French edition and pp. 26-28 of the English
+edition.
+
+[20] Sewel, _History of the People called Quakers_ (Phila. edition,
+1823), ii. p. 368.
+
+[21] _Journal_, (ed. 1901), ii. p. 310.
+
+[22] _Journal_, ii. p. 401.
+
+[23] _Ibid._ ii. pp. 401-402.
+
+[24] Simeon Friderich Rues, _Mennoniten und Collegianten_ (Jena, 1743),
+p. 244.
+
+[25] See E. S. Haldane, _Descartes, His Life and Times_ (1905), pp. 51-53.
+
+[26] The autobiographical account of this experience is given in the
+opening of part ii. of the _Discourse on Method_.
+
+[27] Descartes' famous argument is found in Meditations III. and IV. of
+his _Meditations on First Philosophy_, first published in 1641. For an
+illuminating interpretation of the entire movement, see Edward Caird's
+Essay on Cartesianism in _Essays on Literature and Philosophy_ (1892),
+ii. pp. 267-383.
+
+[28] Spinoza, _Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being_, Wolf's
+edition (London, 1910), p. 102.
+
+[29] _Ibid._ p. 40.
+
+[30] _Ethics_, part ii. Preface.
+
+[31] See Spinoza's _Correspondence_, Letter No. XXX.
+
+[32] Benjamin Furley, a Quaker merchant of Colchester, then living in
+Rotterdam.
+
+[33] _The Light upon the Candlestick_, p. 8, freely rendered.
+
+[34] _The Light upon the Candlestick_, pp. 3-4.
+
+[35] _Op. cit._ p. 10. He uses also the Cartesian argument that there
+must at least be as much reality in the cause as there is in the effect,
+p. 12.
+
+[36] _Op. cit._ p. 12.
+
+[37] _Ibid._ p. 6.
+
+[38] _The Light upon the Candlestick_, pp. 12-13.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ pp. 4 and 9.
+
+[40] _Ibid._ p. 5.
+
+[41] _Ibid._ p. 6.
+
+
+
+
+{133}
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+VALENTINE WEIGEL AND NATURE MYSTICISM
+
+It is a central idea of mysticism that there is a way to God through
+the human soul. The gate to Heaven is thus kept, not by St. Peter or
+by any other saint of the calendar; it is kept by each individual
+person himself as he opens or closes within himself the spiritual
+circuit of connection with God. The door into the Eternal swings
+within the circle of our own inner life, and all things are ours if we
+learn how to use the key that opens, for "to open" and "to find God"
+are one and the same thing. The emphasis in "Nature Mysticism" lies
+not so much on this direct pathway to God through the soul as upon the
+symbolic character of the world of Nature as a visible revelation of an
+invisible Universe, and upon the idea that man is a microcosm, a little
+world, reproducing in epitome, point for point, though in miniature,
+the great world, or macrocosm. On this line of thought, _everything is
+double_. The things that are seen are parables of other things which
+are not seen. They are like printed words which _mean_ something
+vastly more and deeper than what the eye sees as it scans mere letters.
+One indwelling Life, one animating Soul, lives in and moves through the
+whole mighty frame of things and expresses its Life through visible
+things in manifold ways, as the invisible human soul expresses itself
+through the visible body. Everything is thus, in a fragmentary way, a
+focus of revelation for the Divine Spirit, whose garment is this vast
+web of the visible world. But man in a very special way, as a complete
+microcosm, is a concentrated extract, a {134} comprehensive
+quintessence of the whole cosmos, visible and invisible--an image of
+God and a mirror of the Universe.
+
+These views have a very ancient history and unite many strands of
+historic thought. They came to light in the sixteenth century with the
+revival through Greek literature of Stoic, Neo-Platonic, and
+Neo-Pythagorean ideas. But the Greek stream of thought as it now
+reappeared was fused with streams of thought from many other
+sources--medieval mysticism, Persian astrology, Arabian philosophy, and
+the Jewish Cabala, which, in turn, was a fusing of many elements--and
+the mixture was honestly believed to be genuine, revived Christianity,
+and Christ, as the new Adam, is throughout the central Figure of these
+systems.
+
+Marsilius Ficino, the Italian Humanist, who translated Plato and the
+writings of the Neo-Platonists into Latin and so made them current for
+the readers of the sixteenth century, gave a profoundly mystical
+colouring to the revived classical philosophy and identified it with
+pure and unadulterated Christianity.[1] His contemporary, Pico of
+Mirandola (1463-94), joined the teachings of the Cabala with his
+Neo-Platonized Christianity and so produced a new blend. Johann
+Reuchlin (1455-1522), great German classical and Hebrew scholar, brave
+opponent of obscurantism, forerunner of the Reformation, introduced the
+Neo-Platonic and Cabalistic blend of ideas into German thought.
+
+The Cabala, it may be said briefly, in the primary meaning of the word,
+is the doctrine received by oral tradition as an important supplement
+to the written Jewish Scriptures, but the Cabala as we know it is an
+esoteric system which was formed under the influence of many streams of
+ancient thought-systems, and which came into vogue about the thirteenth
+century, though its devout adherents claimed that it had been orally
+transmitted through the intervening ages from Adam in Paradise.
+According to the teaching of the Cabala, the original Godhead, called
+_En-Soph_, the Infinite, is in essence {135} incomprehensible and
+immutable, and capable of description only in negations. God, the
+En-Soph, is above and beyond contact with anything finite, material, or
+imperfect. It would be blasphemous to suppose that God the infinitely
+perfect, God the absolutely immutable One, by direct act made a world
+of matter or created a realm of existence marked with evil as this
+lower realm of ours is. Instead of supposing a creative act,
+therefore, the Cabala supposes a series of emanations, or overflows of
+divine splendour, arranged in three groups of threes, called
+_Sephiroth_, which reveal all that is revealable in God, and by means
+of which invisible and visible worlds come into being. These
+_Sephiroth_, or orders of emanation, are _thoughts_ of the Wisdom of
+God become objectively and permanently real, just because He thought
+them; and though He is vastly, inexhaustibly more than they, yet He is
+actually immanent in them and the ground of their being. They are (1)
+the intelligible world, or world of creative ideas; (2) the world of
+spiritual forms, such as the hierarchies of angels, souls, and the
+entire universe of immaterial beings, the world of astral substance or
+of creative soul-matter; and (3) the natural world, in which the divine
+plan of Wisdom, the creative ideas, and the astral soul become visibly
+and concretely revealed. Man unites all the worlds in himself, and in
+his unfallen state as Adam-Cadmon combined all men in one ideal,
+undifferentiated Man. The visible world is full of hints and symbols
+of the invisible, and the initiated learn to read the _signs_ of things
+seen, the meanings of sacred letters, and so to discover the secrets
+and mysteries of the inner world. The Cabala is full of unrestrained
+oriental imagination, of fancies run riot, and of symbolisms ridden to
+death. Its confusion of style and thought and its predilection for
+magic unfortunately proved contagious, and played havoc with the
+productions of those who came under its spell. Its marvels, however,
+powerfully impressed the minds of its German readers. Through it they
+believed they were privileged to share in mysteries which had been hid
+from the creation of the world, and {136} they conceived the idea that
+they had at last discovered a clue that would eventually lead them into
+all the secrets of the universe.[2]
+
+Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1487-1535) by his writings increased
+the prevailing fascination for occult knowledge and pushed this
+particular line of speculation into an acute stage. He was a man of
+large learning and of heroic temper, and, possessed as he was of
+undoubted gifts, in a different period and in a different environment
+he would, no doubt, have played a notable part in the development of
+human thought. But he became enamoured in his youth with the
+adventurous quest for the discovery of Nature's stupendous secrets, and
+under the spell of the Cabala, and under the influence of eager
+expectations entertained in his day by men of rank and learning, that
+fresh light was about to dawn upon the ancient mysteries of the world,
+he took the false path of magic as the way to the conquest of the great
+secret. It was, however, not the crude, cheap magic of popular fancy,
+a magic of mad and lawless caprice, to which he was devoted; it was a
+magic grounded in the nature of the deeper inner world which he
+believed was the Soul of the world we see and touch. The English
+translator of Agrippa's _Occult Philosophy_ in 1651 very clearly
+apprehended and stated in his quaint "Preface to the Judicious Reader,"
+the foundation idea of Agrippa's magic: "This is," he says, "true and
+sublime Occult Philosophy--to understand the mysterious influence of
+the intellectual world upon the celestial world, and of both upon the
+terrestrial world, and to know how to dispose and fit ourselves so as
+to be capable of receiving the _superior operations of these worlds,
+whereby we may be enabled to operate wonderful things by a natural
+power_."[3] That saying precisely defines Agrippa's faith. There are,
+he thinks, {137} three worlds: (1) the Intellectual world; (2) the
+Celestial, or Astral, world; and (3) the Terrestrial world; and man,
+who is a microcosm embodying in himself all these worlds, may, in the
+innermost ground of his being, come upon a divine knowledge which will
+enable him to unlock the mysteries of all worlds and to "operate
+wonderful things." In quite other ways than Agrippa dreamed, science
+has found the keys to many of these mysteries, and has learned how to
+"operate wonderful things by a natural power." His enthusiasm and
+passion were right, but he had not learned the slow and patient and
+laborious way.
+
+A still greater figure in this field of occult knowledge and of nature
+mysticism was the far-travelled man and medical genius, Aureolus
+Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, generally known as Paracelsus. He
+was born in 1493 in the neighbourhood of Einsiedeln, not far from
+Zurich, the son of a physician of repute. He studied in the University
+of Basle, and later was instructed by Trithemius, Abbot of St. Jacobs
+at Wurtzburg, an adept in magic, alchemy, and astrology. He passed a
+long period--probably ten years--of his later youth in travel, studying
+humanity at close range, gathering all sorts of information, forming
+his theories of diseases and their cure, and learning to know Nature
+"by treading her Books, through land after land, with his feet," which,
+he once testified, is the only way of knowing her truly.[4]
+
+In 1525 he settled in Basle, and, on the recommendation of
+OEcolampadius was appointed professor of physic, medicine, and surgery
+in 1527, but his revolutionary teaching and practice, his scorn for
+traditional methods, his attacks on the ignorance and greed of
+apothecaries raised a storm which he could not weather, and he secretly
+left the city in 1528. Again he became a wanderer, having
+extraordinary experiences of success and defeat, treating all manner of
+diseases, writing books on medicine and on the fundamental nature of
+things, and finally died at Salzburg in Bavaria in 1541.
+
+Paracelsus is a strange and baffling character. He had {138} much of
+the spirit of the new age, tangled with many of the ideas and fancies
+of his time. His aspirations were lofty, his medical skill was unique
+for his day, he was in large measure liberated from tradition, and he
+was dedicated, as Browning truly represents him, to his mission, but he
+was still under the spell of "mystic" categories, and he still held the
+faith that Nature's secrets were to be suddenly surprised by an inward
+way and by an inward Light:
+
+ Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
+ From outward things, whate'er you may believe.
+ There is an inmost centre in us all,
+ Where truth abides in fulness; and around,
+ Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
+ This perfect, clear perception--which is truth,
+ A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
+ Binds it, and makes all error: and, to KNOW,
+ Rather consists in opening out a way
+ Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
+ Than in effecting entry for a light
+ Supposed to be without.[5]
+
+
+There are, again, in his Universe, as in the other occult systems,
+three elemental worlds--the spiritual or intellectual world, the astral
+world or universal Soul, and the terrestrial world; and all three
+worlds are man's "mothers." Man is a quintessence of all the elements,
+visible and invisible. He has a spiritual essence within him which is
+an emanation of God; he has an astral-soul essence, from the Soul of
+the world; and he partakes, too, of the material and earthly world.
+His supreme aim in life should be to establish, or rather re-establish,
+a harmony between his own little world and the great Universe, so that
+all the worlds have their right proportions in him, and so that through
+his highest essence he can win the secrets of the lower worlds--the
+astral and the material. To accomplish _that_ is to be spiritual, to
+become like Adam, {139} a paradisaical Man, or like Christ the new
+Adam. Even the lowest world is penetrated with the spiritual "seed" or
+"element." The very basic substances of which it is composed--sulphur,
+mercury, and salt--are in essence spiritual principles, elemental
+forces, rather than crude matter, and the lower world is written over,
+like a palimpsest, with "signatures" of the divine world to which it
+belongs. All doors into all the worlds of God open to faith and
+prayer, and he who subordinates lower elements in himself to higher has
+power and potency in all realms.
+
+But far more important for the development of spiritual religion, and
+far more important as a living link between Reformers like Denck,
+Schwenckfeld, and Franck of the sixteenth century, and Jacob Boehme and
+the spiritual interpreters of the English Commonwealth, was Valentine
+Weigel, Pastor of Zschopau. Like so many of the men who figure in
+these chapters, he is little known, seldom read, not a quick and
+powerful name in the world, but he is worth knowing, and he was the
+bearer of a burning and kindling torch of truth. He was born at
+Naundorf, a suburb of Grossenhain, District of Meissen, in 1533. He
+received the Bachelor's and Master's degree of the University of
+Leipzig, and he pursued his studies still further in the University of
+Wittenberg, his study-period having continued until 1567. In the
+autumn of that year he was ordained and called to be Pastor of
+Zschopau, where he passed as a minister his entire public life, which
+came to a peaceful end in 1588. He was an ideal pastor and true
+shepherd of his flock--loving them and being beloved by them. His
+ministry was fresh and vital, and made his hearers _feel_ the presence
+and the power of the Spirit of God.
+
+There was, so far as I can discover the facts, only one blemish on his
+really beautiful character. He lacked that robust, unswerving
+conscience which compels a man who sees a new vision of the truth to
+proclaim it, to champion it, and to suffer and even die for it when it
+comes into collision with views which his own soul has outgrown. {140}
+Weigel was resolved not to have his heart's deepest faith, his mind's
+most certain truth, known, at least during his lifetime, by the persons
+who were the guardians of orthodoxy. He signed the "Confessions" of
+his time as though they expressed his own convictions; he counted it a
+duty of the first importance to guard his pastoral flock from the
+distractions and assaults of heresy-hunters, and he left his matured
+and deeply meditated views for posterity to discover. How far he was
+personally timid cannot now be determined. It would seem, however,
+from his own words,[6] that he was especially concerned for the safety
+and welfare of his own flock, who would suffer if he were cried down as
+an enthusiast or a spiritual prophet. But even so, it is very doubtful
+if any man can rightly permit anything on earth to take precedence to
+his own loyalty to the vision of truth which his soul sees. As a
+result, however, of the course he took, he died in good odour of
+sanctity, and the epigones of that day had no suspicion of the ideas
+that were swarming in the mind of the quiet Pastor of Zschopau, or of
+the mass of manuscripts proclaiming his faith in the inner Word which
+he was leaving behind him, to fly over the world like the loose leaves
+of the Sibyl.
+
+His writings were not printed until 1609 and onwards, and as his
+disciples went on producing writings, somewhat in the style and spirit
+of the master who inspired them, the list of books in Weigel's name is
+considerably larger than the actual number of manuscripts extant at his
+death in 1588. It is not always easy to distinguish the
+pseudo-writings from the genuine ones, but there is a vividness and
+pregnancy of style, a spiritual depth and power in the earlier writings
+which are lacking in the later group, and there is an emphasis on the
+magical and occult in the secondary writings that is largely absent in
+the primary ones.[7] The most important of his books will be referred
+to and quoted from as I present his type of religion and his message,
+but I shall draw especially upon his little {141} book, _Von dem Leben
+Christi, das ist, vom wahren Glauben_ ("On the Life of Christ, or True
+Faith"), as it is the one of Weigel's writings which, in English
+translation, most deeply influenced kindred spirits in the English
+Commonwealth.[8]
+
+His spiritual conception of Christianity was formed and fed by the
+sermons of Tauler, and by that little book which was "the hidden Manna"
+for all the spiritual leaders of these two centuries--the _German
+Theology_. Weigel edited it with an introduction. He calls it "a
+precious little book," "a noble book"; but he tells his readers that
+they can understand it and find it fruitful only if they read it "with
+a pure eye" and with "the key of David," _i.e._ with a personal
+experience. But while he loved the golden book of mysticism and the
+sermons of the great Strasbourg preacher, and was led by the hand of
+these guides, he drew also from many other sources and finally arrived
+at a type of religion, still interior and personal, but less negative
+and abstract than that of the fourteenth-century mystics, and more
+penetrated and informed with the presence of the Christ of the Gospels.
+He insists always that in the last analysis it is Christ in us that
+saves us, but it was Christ in the flesh, the Christ of Galilee and
+Golgotha, that revealed to men the way to apprehend the inward and
+eternal Christ of God. "The indwelling Christ," he wrote, "is all in
+all. He saves thee. He is thy peace and thy comfort. The outward
+Christ, the Christ in the flesh, and according to the flesh, cannot
+save thee in an external way. He must be in thee and thou must abide
+in Him. Why then did He become man and suffer on the Cross? There are
+many reasons why, but it was especially that God by the death and
+suffering of Christ might take the wrath and hostility out of _our_
+hearts, on account of which we falsely conceive of God as a wrathful
+enemy to us. He had to deal that way with poor blind men like us and
+so reconcile us with Himself. {142} There was no need of it on His
+part. He was always Love and He always loved us, even when we were
+enemies to Him, but we should never have known it if God had not
+condescended to show Himself to us in His Son and had not suffered for
+us."[9]
+
+Weigel everywhere maintains Christ's double identity--an identity with
+God, so that in Christ we see God; and an equal identity with man, so
+that Christ is man revealed in his fulfilled possibilities. In Him God
+and man are _one_. In this deep-lying and fundamental idea of his
+entire Christianity he was undoubtedly influenced, profoundly
+influenced, by Schwenckfeld. He presents in chapter i. of his _Life of
+Christ_ the Schwenckfeldian view that Christ is God and Man in _one_.
+But He is Man not in the crass, crude and earthly form: He is not
+composed of mortal and earthly substance as our "Adamical bodies" are.
+He is wholly and absolutely composed of heavenly, spiritual, divine
+substance. His flesh and blood are as divine and spiritual in origin
+as is His spirit, so that His resurrection and ascension are the normal
+outcome of His nature. It was as natural for Him to rise into life and
+to ascend into glory as it is for heavy things to fall. But that
+divine, spiritual, heavenly nature, which appeared in Him, is the true,
+original, consummate nature of Man. Man, as we know him, is cloudy, or
+even muddy, with a vesture of decay, but that is not a feature of his
+_real_ nature--either in its original or its potential form--and all
+who "put on Christ," all who have "Christ in them," become one flesh
+with Him and gain an indestructible and permanent inward substance like
+His.
+
+Consistently with this view, Weigel declares that here lies the
+significance of Christ's saying, "I am Bread"; "I am Meat and Drink."
+The only adequate Supper of the Lord, he says, is real feeding upon His
+spiritual, life-giving flesh and blood, so that Salvation is not tied
+to external sacraments, but stands only in the faith that Christ feeds
+us with Himself.[10] There are, he proceeds to show, two radically
+diverse natures, the traits and {143} characteristics of which he
+arranges in opposing pairs, in two parallel columns as follows:
+
+ A. The Nature of Christ and B. The nature of Adam and
+ of those who live in Him those who live by him,
+ and by Him. _i.e._ those who live the
+ natural, earthly life.
+
+ 1. This Nature turns from 1. This nature turns from God
+ creatures to God. to creatures.
+
+ 2. This Nature hates itself and 2. This nature loves itself
+ loves others. more than it loves God or
+ others.
+
+ 3. This Nature abhors all it 3. This nature delights only
+ itself does or omits. in itself and in things of
+ self.
+
+ 4. This Nature seeks to lose 4. This nature seeks itself in
+ self. everything.
+
+ 5. This Nature denies self. 5. This nature cleaves to self.
+
+ 6. This Nature patiently bears 6. This nature thrusts the
+ the Cross. Cross away.
+
+
+ 15. This Nature desires to be 15. This nature desires to be
+ conformed to Christ and equal with God without
+ His Cross in all things. any humility at all.[11]
+
+
+Christ is thus for Weigel entirely a new order of Being--the Beginner
+of a new race. Adam had in himself all the possibilities which Christ
+realized, but the former failed and the latter succeeded and so has
+become the Head of a divine and heavenly type of humanity. By "a new
+nativity," a rebirth from above, any man in the world who wills it in
+living faith may be a recipient of the divine-principle, the
+Christ-Life, and may thereby be raised to membership in the Kingdom of
+the Christ-Humanity, which is as far above the Adam-Humanity as the
+flower is above the soil from which it first sprang. When Christ is
+formed within and the Humanity which He produces appears in the world,
+then a new way of living comes into operation. Love is the supreme
+"sign" of the new type or order. "The man who has the Christ-Life in
+him does not quarrel; he does not go to law for temporall goods; he
+does not kill; he lets his coat and cloke go rather than oppose
+another."[12] "If Christ were of the seed of Adam, He would have the
+{144} nature and inclinations of Adam. He would hang thieves, behead
+adulterers, rack murderers with the wheel, kill hereticks, and put
+corporeally to death all manner of sinners; but now He is tender, kind,
+loving. He kills no one. The Lamb kills no woolf."[13] Weigel goes
+the whole bold way in his revolt from legalism, and he accepts the
+principle of love as a structural principle of the society which Christ
+is forming in the world: "Where the Life of Christ is, there is no
+warre made with corporall weapons." "The world wars but Christ doth
+not so. His warfare is spiritual." "He that maketh warre is no
+Christian but a woolf, ana belongs not to the sheepfold nor hath he
+anything to expect of the Kingdom of God, nor may the warrs of the Old
+Testament, of the time of darknesse serve his turne, for Christians
+deal not after a Mosaicall, earthly fashion, but they walke in the Life
+of Christ, without all revenge." "We walk no longer under Moses but
+under Christ."[14]
+
+The Christian man, however, even with his new "nativity" and with his
+re-created spirit of love, differs in one respect from Christ. Christ
+is wholly heavenly, His Nature is woven throughout of spiritual and
+divine substance. There is no rent nor seam in it. Man, on the other
+hand, is double, and throughout his temporal period he remains double.
+By his new "nativity" man can become inwardly spirit though he remains
+outwardly composed of flesh.[15]
+
+Before the "fall" Adam was unsundered from God. It was sin which made
+the cleft or rent which separated God and man. Through Christ, the new
+and heavenly Adam, the _junction_ may be formed again in man's inner
+self, and once again God and man in us may be unsundered. The flesh is
+not destroyed, but it ceases to be the dominating factor. It serves
+now merely as the "habitation" of an invisible spirit, and it exists
+for the spirit, not the spirit for it.[16] Not only is the body a
+{145} "habitation" for the Christ-formed soul, but the world now
+becomes to the enlightened soul an Inn for a transient guest rather
+than a permanent abiding-place: "like as in an Inne there is meat set
+before the guest and bedding is allowed to him, even so Christians are
+in this world guests and their country is above." "It is not fitting
+for a guest that comes into an Inne, where nothing is his own, that he
+should appropriate things to himself and quarrel about them!"[17]
+
+As fast as Christ is formed within, as the Life of one's life, the
+believer attains thereby a peace and a power which make the "rent"
+between flesh and spirit ever less disturbing, though it still remains
+until the fleshly tabernacle dissolves. The goal of the spiritual life
+here on earth is the attainment of "the silent Sabbath of the soul," in
+which God becomes so completely the soul's sufficiency that the flesh
+has little scope or sway any more, and there is no longer need of
+furious struggle against it, "like a serpent between two rocks, trying
+to pull off his old skin!"[18] In his _Heavenly Jerusalem in Us_, he
+says: "It is an attribute of God that He is the Eternal Peace which is
+longed for by us men, but found by few because they do not _mind
+Christ_, who is the Way. God has not grounded either thy Peace or thy
+Salvation on thy running hither and yon, nor on thy works and thy
+creaturely activities, but on an inner calm and quiet, on a Sabbath of
+the soul, in which thou canst hear, with the simple and the
+tender-minded, what the Lord is saying and doing."[19]
+
+In close conformity to the teaching of Sebastian Franck,[20] Weigel
+thinks of the Church of God as an invisible Assembly of all true
+Believers in the entire world, united, not outwardly but inwardly, in
+the unity of the Spirit and by the bond of Love and Peace. There are
+for him, as for Franck and other "Spirituals," two kinds of churches:
+(1) The church composed of a visible group, {146} "to be pointed out
+with the finger," located in a definite country, allied with a temporal
+government, held together by a body of doctrine, "tied to" certain
+sacraments and possessed of force to constrain men, by "carnall
+perswasions," to conform.[21] Then there is (2) the real Church of
+God, "the upper Jerusalem," a body visible in no one locality, but
+dispersed over the earth like wheat in chaff, held together by no
+declarations of doctrine, tied to no sacraments, dependent on no
+earthly Lieutenant or Vice-gerent, and on no university-trained
+Doctors, which recognizes Prince and Ploughman alike, and secures its
+unity through Christ and through the invisible cement of Love. "To
+this Assembly," writes Weigel, "doe I stick; in this holy Church doe I
+rejoice to be. . . . Jesus Christ is my Head, my Teacher. He is
+everywhere with me and in me, and I in Him. Although the Protestants
+should chase me amongst Papists or Atheists, yet I should still be in
+the holy Church and should have all the heavenly Gifts common to all
+Believers, and although the Papists should banish me into Turkey, yet
+even there should I be in the holy Church."[22]
+
+No book appeared in England before 1648--the date of the translation of
+Weigel's _Life of Christ_--which more closely approached the Quaker
+position. That religion must have an inward seat and origin; that
+divine things must be learned of God, are taken as axiomatic truths
+throughout this book. If a man is to _see_, he must have eyes of his
+own; if he is to teach, he must have the Word of God within him.
+People say that "there can be no true Faith without outward preaching
+ministry." That is not so, Weigel declares. The way to heaven is open
+to hungry penitent souls everywhere, although, as is the case with
+infants, they may hear no sermons at all: "Faith comes by inward
+hearing. Good books, outward verbal ministry have their place, they
+testify to the real Treasure, they are witnesses to the inner Word
+within us, but Faith is not tied to books; it is a new nativity which
+{147} cannot be found in a book. He who hath the inward Schoolmaster
+loseth nothing of his Salvation although all preachers should be dead
+and all books burned."[23] Many take great pains to be baptized, and
+"to hear sermons of their hired priests," and to use the Lord's Supper,
+and to read theological books, who, nevertheless, show no "spiritual
+profit" therefrom. The reason is that "Truth runs into no one by a
+pipe!"[24] "In the Church of men--the man-made Church--the
+measuring-line," or standard, he says, is the written Scripture,
+according to one's own interpretation, or according to books, or
+according to University men; but in the true Church the measuring-reed
+is the inward Word, the Spirit of Christ, within the believer. Those
+who are in the Universities and Churches of men have Christ in their
+mouths, and they have a measuring-reed by their side--the inhabitants
+of God's Church on the other hand have the Life of Christ and the
+testing-standard within themselves.[25] Those who are "nominal
+professors" hang salvation on a literal knowledge of the merit secured
+by Christ's death; the true believer knows that salvation is never a
+purchase, is never outwardly effected, but is a new self, a new spirit,
+a new relation to God: "Man must cease to be what he is before he can
+come to be another kind of person."[26] Outward baptism and external
+supper may, if one wishes, be used as symbols of the soul's supreme
+events, but they cannot rightly be thought of as effecting any change
+of themselves in the real nature of the man; only Christ the
+Life-bringer, only the resident work of God within the soul, can
+produce the transformation from old self to new self. "Salvation is
+not tyed to sacraments."[27]
+
+It is a well-settled view of Weigel's that Heaven and Hell are
+primarily in the soul of man. He says, in _Know Thyself_, that both
+the Trees of Paradise are in us; and in his _Ort der Welt_ he declares
+that "the Eternal Hell of the lost will be their own Hell."[28] And in
+his _Christliches {148} Gespraech_ he insists that the holy Spirit, the
+present Christ, does not need to _come down_ from Heaven to meet with
+us, for when He is in our hearts there then is Heaven.[29] No person
+can ever be in Heaven until Heaven is in him.
+
+In _Der gueldene Griff_ and elsewhere Weigel works out a very
+interesting theory of knowledge, which fits well with the inwardness of
+his religious views. He holds that in sense perception the percipient
+brings forth his real _knowledge_ from within. The external "object,"
+or the outward stimulus, is the soliciting occasion, or suggestion, or
+the sign for the experience, but what we see is determined from within
+rather than from without. All real knowledge is in the knower. Both
+external world and written scriptures are in themselves _shadows_ until
+the inward spirit interprets them, and through them comes to the Word
+of God which they suggest and symbolize.
+
+Weigel plainly arrived at his ground ideas under the formative
+influence of Schwenckfeld and Franck, but he also reveals, especially
+in his conception of the deeper inner world and of the microcosmic
+character of man, the influence of Paracelsus and of the nature mystics
+of his time. He was himself, in turn, a most important influence in
+the development of the religious ideas of Jacob Boehme, and he is
+historically one of the most significant men of the entire spiritual
+group before the great Silesian mystic.[30]
+
+This chapter cannot come to a proper close without some consideration
+of a Weigelean book which was translated into English in 1649, under
+the title, "_Astrologie Theologized_: That the Inward man by the Light
+of Grace, through possession and practice of a holy life, is to be
+acknowledged and live in us: which is the only means to keep the true
+Sabbath in inward holinesse." {149} The anonymous translator ascribes
+the book to Weigel. It is, in fact. Part Two of [Greek] _Gnothi
+Seauton_, but it is uncertain whether it was written by Weigel himself.
+But whether written by Weigel or later by one of his school, it is a
+good illustration of the way in which mystically inclined Christians of
+that period endeavoured to make spiritual conquest of the prevailing
+Astrology and, through its help, to discover the nature of the inner,
+hidden universe. Astrology, this little book declares, is "conversant
+with the secrets of God which are hidden in the natural things of
+creation." It is the science of reading the unseen through the seen,
+for, according to the teaching of this book, everything visible is an
+unveiling of something invisible. Man--who is a centre of the whole
+universe, who has in himself elements of all the worlds, inner and
+outer--"is created to be a visible Paradise, Garden, Tabernacle,
+Mansion, House, Temple and Jerusalem of God." All the wisdom, power,
+virtue, and glory of God are hidden and are slumbering in man. There
+is nothing so near to man as God is--"He is nearer to us than we are to
+ourselves"[31]--and the only reason we do not find Him and know Him and
+open out our life _interiorly_, so that the true Sabbath comes to the
+soul, is due to our "vagabond and unquiet ways of keeping busy with our
+own will, outside our internal country." If I could desist from the
+things with which I vex and worry myself, and study to be at rest in my
+God who dwells with me; if I could accustom my mind to spiritual
+tranquillity and cease to wander in a maze of thoughts, cares, and
+affections; if I could be at leisure from the external things and
+creatures of this world, and chiefly from myself; if, in short, I might
+"come into a plenary dereliction of myself," I should at once "begin to
+see and know of the most present habitation of God in me and so I
+should eat of the Tree of Life in the midst of the Paradise, _which
+Paradise I myself am_, and be a Guest of God."[32] Adam, who was "the
+Protoplast" and begetter of all men, and who, like everything else in
+the universe, was "double," {150} allowed himself to live toward the
+outward instead of toward the inward, permitted the seed of the serpent
+to grow in him instead of the divine seed, and so came under the
+dominance of the natural, elemental world, with its "lesser light" of
+knowledge and with its "tree of death." But the Paradise, with its
+greater Light of Wisdom and with its Tree of Life, is always near to
+man and can be repossessed and regained by him. The outer elements,
+and the astral world with its visible stars, _rule_ no one, determine
+no one. Each man's "star" is in his own breast. It lies in his own
+power to "theologize his astrologie," to turn his universe into
+spiritual forces. By "a new nativity," initiated by obedient response
+to the inward Light--the spiritual Star, not of earth and not of the
+astral universe, but of God the indwelling Spirit--he may put on the
+new man, created after the likeness of God, and become the recipient of
+heavenly Wisdom springing up within him from the Life of the Spirit.[33]
+
+There can be no question in the mind of any one who is familiar with
+the literature and religious thought of seventeenth-century England,
+that the ideas set forth in this chapter exerted a wide and profound
+influence, and were a part of the psychological climate of the middle
+decades of that century. The channel here indicated was only one of
+the ways through which these ideas came in. In due time we shall
+discover other channels of this spiritual message.
+
+
+
+[1] Ficino is dealt with at greater length in Chapter XIII.
+
+[2] The Cabala was, as I have tried to make clear, only one of the
+influences which produced this new intellectual climate. The
+rediscovered "Hermes Trismegistus," the mystically coloured Platonism,
+as it came from Italy, the awakened interest in Nature and in man, and
+the powerful message of the German Mystics all played an important part
+toward the formation of the new _Weltanschauung_.
+
+[3] _Three Books of Occult Philosophy_, translated by J. F. (London,
+1651).
+
+[4] Stoddart's Life of Paracelsus (London, 1911), p. 76.
+
+[5] Browning, _Paracelsus_, B. i. This passage fairly represents
+Paracelsus' general position. "There is," he says in his
+_Philosophia sagax_, "a Light in the spirit of man which illuminates
+everything. . . . The quality of each thing created by God, whether
+it be visible or invisible to the senses, may be perceived and
+known. If man knows the essence of things, their attributes, their
+attractions, and the elements of which they consist, he will be a
+Master of nature, of the elements, and of the spirits."
+
+[6] _Christliches Gespraech_, chap. iii.
+
+[7] There is an excellent critical study of Weigel's writings by A.
+Israel, entitled, _Weigels Leben und Schriften nach den Quellen
+dargestellt_ (Zschopau, 1888).
+
+[8] "Of the Life of Christ, That is, Of True Faith which is the Rule,
+Square, Levell or Measuring Line of the Holy City of God and of the
+Inhabitants thereof here on Earth. Written in the German Language by
+Valentine Weigelus." (London, Giles Calvert, 1648.)
+
+[9] Quoted from Israel, _op. cit._ p. 107.
+
+[10] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. ii.
+
+[11] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. iii.
+
+[12] _Ibid._ part i. chap. viii.
+
+[13] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. ix.
+
+[14] _Ibid._ part ii. chap. ix.; part i. chap. x.; part ii. chap. x.;
+and part. i. chap. xiv.
+
+[15] _Ibid._ part ii. chaps. iii. and iv.
+
+[16] This is the view set forth in his [Greek] _Gnothi Seauton_ [Know
+Thyself].
+
+[17] _On the Life of Christ_, part ii. chaps. v. and vii.
+
+[18] _Ibid._ part i. chap. viii.
+
+[19] _Vom himmlischen Jerusalem in uns_, chap. viii.
+
+[20] Weigel enjoins his readers to read Franck's book on "the Tree of
+the Knowledge of Good and Evil." See _On the Life of Christ_, part ii.
+p. 57.
+
+[21] "Faith," he says, "cannot be forced into any person by gallows or
+pillory." _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chap. xv.
+
+[22] _Ibid._ part ii. chap. xiv. This is built on a passage in
+Franck's _Apologia_.
+
+[23] _On the Life of Christ_, part i. chaps. iv. and v.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ part i. chap. vi.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ part i. chaps. xii. and xiii.
+
+[26] Quoted from Tauler by Weigel, _ibid._ chap. vii. See also part
+iii. chap. i.
+
+[27] _Ibid._ part ii. chap. ii.
+
+[28] _Op. cit._ chap. xx.
+
+[29] _Christ. Gespraech_, chap. ii.
+
+[30] In his _Der gueldene Griff_, he tells of a personal spiritual
+"opening" which is very similar to the one which occurred later in the
+life of Boehme. He found himself astray in "a wilderness of darkness"
+and he cried to God for Light to enlighten his soul. "_Suddenly,_" he
+says, "_the Light came and my eyes were opened so that I saw more
+clearly than all the teachers in all the world with all their books
+could teach me._" Chap. xxiv.
+
+[31] _Astrologie Theologized_, p. 8.
+
+[32] _Ibid._ pp. 16-17.
+
+[33] This little book refers with much appreciation to Theophrastus
+Paracelsus. It uses his theory of "first matter" and his doctrine of
+"the seven governours of the world," which we shall meet in a new form
+in Boehme. Another book which carried astrological ideas into
+religious thought in a much cruder way was Andreas Tentzel's _De
+ratione naturali arboris vitae et scientiae boni et mali_, etc., which
+was Pars Secunda of his _Medicinii diastatica_ (Jena, 1629). It was
+translated into English in 1657 by N. Turner with the title: "The
+Mumial Treatise of Tentzelius, being a natural account of the Tree of
+Life and of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a mystical
+interpretation of that great Secret, to wit, the Cabalistical
+Concordance of the Tree of Life and Death, of Christ and Adam." Tentzel
+was a famous doctor and disciple of Paracelsus and "flourished" in
+Germany during the first half of the seventeenth century.
+
+
+
+
+{151}
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+JACOB BOEHME: HIS LIFE AND SPIRIT[1]
+
+Few men have ever made greater claim to be the bearer of a new
+revelation than did the humble shoemaker-prophet of Silesia, Jacob
+Boehme. "I am," he wrote in his earliest book, "only a very little
+spark of God's Light, but He is now pleased in this last time to reveal
+through me what has been partly concealed from the beginning of the
+World,"[2] and he admonished the reader, if he would understand what is
+written, to let go opinion {152} and conceit and heathenish wisdom, and
+read with the Light and Power of the Holy Spirit, "for this book comes
+not forth from Reason, but by the impulse of the Spirit."[3] "I have
+not dared," he wrote to a friend in 1620, "to write otherwise than was
+given and indited to me. I have continually written as the Spirit
+dictated and have not given place to Reason."[4] Again and again he
+warns the reader to let his book alone unless he is ready for a new
+dawning of divine Truth, for a fresh Light to break: "If thou art not a
+spiritual overcomer, then let my book alone. Do not meddle with it,
+but _stick to thy old matters_!"[5]
+
+Before the Spirit came upon him, he felt himself to be a "little
+stammering child," and he always declared that without this Spirit he
+could not comprehend even his own writings--"when He parteth from me, I
+know nothing but the elementary and earthly things of this
+world"[6]--but with this divine Spirit unfolding within him "the
+profoundest depth" of mysteries, he believed, though with much
+simplicity and generally with humility, that the true ground of things
+had "not been so fully revealed to any man from the beginning of the
+world"--"but," he adds, "seeing God will have it so, I submit to His
+will."[7] Nobody before him, he declares, no matter how learned he
+was, "has had the ax by the handle," but, with a sudden change of
+figure, he proclaims that now the Morning Glow is breaking and the Day
+Dawn is rising.[8] In his _Epistles_ he says: "I am only a layman, I
+have not studied, yet I bring to light things which all the High
+Schools and Universities have been unable to do. . . . The language of
+Nature is made known to me so that I can understand the greatest
+mysteries, in my own mother-tongue. Though I cannot say I have
+_learned_ or _comprehended_ these things, yet so long as the hand of
+God stayeth upon me I understand."[9]
+
+We shall be able to estimate the value of these lofty {153} claims
+after we have gathered up the substance of his teaching, but it may be
+well to say at the opening of this Study of Boehme that in my opinion
+no more remarkable religious message has come in modern centuries from
+an untrained and undisciplined mind than that which lies scattered
+through the voluminous and somewhat chaotic writings of this
+seventeenth-century prophet of the common people.[19]
+
+He frequently speaks of himself as "unlearned," and in the technical
+sense of the word he was unlearned. He had only a simple schooling,
+but he possessed extraordinary native capacity and he was well and
+widely read in the books which fitted the frame and temper of his mind,
+and he had very unusual powers of meditation and recollection so that
+he thought over and over again in his quiet hours of labour the ideas
+which he seized upon in the books he read.
+
+There are many strands of thought woven together in his writings, and
+everything he dealt with is given a {154} new aspect through the vivid
+insights which he always brings into play, the amazing visual power
+which he displays, and his profoundly penetrating moral and
+intellectual grasp. But, nevertheless, he plainly belongs in the
+direct line of these spiritual reformers whom we have been studying.
+He was deeply influenced, first of all, by Luther, especially in two
+directions. He got primarily from the great reformer his transforming
+insight of the immense importance of personal faith for salvation, and
+secondly he was impressed--almost overwhelmingly impressed in his early
+years--with the awful reality and range of the principle of positive
+evil in the universe, upon which Luther had insisted with intensity of
+emphasis. His feet, however, were set upon the track which seemed to
+him to lead to light by the help which he got from the other line of
+reformers. Schwenckfeld made him feel the impossibility of any scheme
+of salvation that rested on transactions and operations external to the
+human soul itself, and through that same noble Silesian reformer he
+discovered the central significance of the new birth through a creative
+work of Grace within. Sebastian Franck was clearly one of his
+spiritual masters. From him, directly or indirectly, he learned that
+the spirit must be freed from the letter, that external revelations are
+symbols which remain dead and inert until they are vivified and
+vitalized by the inwardly illuminated spirit. He was still more
+directly influenced by Valentine Weigel, the pastor of Zschopau, who
+united the spiritual-mystical views of Schwenckfeld, Franck, and the
+other teachers of his type with a nature mysticism or theosophy which
+had become, as we have seen, a powerful interest in the sixteenth
+century when a real science was struggling to be born, but had not yet
+seen the light. This nature mysticism came to him also in a crude and
+indigestible form through the writings of Paracelsus. Through him
+Boehme acquired a vocabulary of alchemistical terms which he was always
+labouring to turn to spiritual meaning, but which always baffled him.
+It has been customary to treat Boehme as a mystic, and he has not {155}
+usually been brought into this line of spiritual development where I am
+placing him, but his entire outlook and body of ideas are different
+from those of the great Roman Catholic mystics. He has read neither
+the classical nor the scholastic interpreters of mysticism. In so far
+as he knows of historical mysticism he knows it through Franck and
+Weigel and others, where it is profoundly transformed and subordinated
+to other aspects of religion and thought. Unlike the great mystics, he
+does not treat the visible and the finite as unreal and to be negated.
+The world is a positive reality and a divine revelation. Nor, again,
+are sin and evil negative in character for him. Evil is tremendously
+real and positive, in grim conflict with the good and to be conquered
+only through stern battle. A mystic, an illuminate, he undoubtedly was
+in his first-hand experience, but his message of salvation and his
+interpretation of life are of the wider, distinctively "spiritual" type.
+
+Jacob Boehme[11] was born in November 1575 in the little market-town of
+Alt Seidenberg, a few miles from Goerlitz. His father's name was Jacob
+and his mother's Ursula, both persons of good old German peasant stock,
+possessed of a strong strain of simple piety. The family religion was
+Lutheran, and Jacob the son was brought up both at home and at church
+in the Lutheran faith as it had shaped itself into definite form at the
+end of the sixteenth century. His early education was very limited,
+but he was possessed of unusual fundamental capacity and always
+exhibited a native mental power of very high order. He was always a
+keen observer; he looked through things, and whether he was in the
+fields, where much of his early life was spent as a watcher of cattle,
+or reading the Bible, which he knew as few persons have known it, he
+saw everything with a vivid and quickened imagination. He plainly
+began, while still very young, to revolt from the orthodox theology of
+his time, and his {156} years of reading and of silent meditation and
+reflection were the actual preparation for what seemed finally to come
+to him like a sudden revelation or, to use his own common figure, as "a
+flash."[12]
+
+His external appearance has been quaintly portrayed by his admiring
+friend and biographer, Abraham von Franckenberg, who, like a good
+portrait-painter, strives to let the body reveal the soul. "The
+external form of Jacob's body," he says, "was worn and very plain; his
+stature was small, his forehead low, his temples broad and prominent,
+his nose somewhat crooked, his eyes grey and rather of an azure-cast,
+lighting up like the windows of Solomon's Temple; his beard was short
+and thin; his voice was feeble, yet his conversation was mild and
+pleasant. He was gentle in manner, modest in his words, humble in
+conduct, patient in suffering and meek of heart. His spirit was highly
+illuminated of God beyond anything Nature could produce."[13]
+
+This youth, with "azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of
+Solomon's Temple," was from his childhood possessed of a most acutely
+sensitive and suggestible psychical disposition. He always felt that
+the real world was deeper than the one which he saw with his senses,
+and he was frequently swept from within by mighty currents which he
+could not trace to any well-mapped region of the domain of Nature. His
+vivid and pictorial imagination, his consciousness of inrushes from the
+unplumbed deeps within, and his inclination to solitude and meditation
+are well in evidence at an early age, and we have no difficulty at all
+in seeing that his psychological equilibrium was unstable, and that he
+was capable of sudden shifts of inward level.
+
+The first sign of his psychical peculiarity comes to light in an
+incident of his early childhood. While he was tending cattle in the
+fields one day he climbed alone a neighbouring {157} mountain-peak, and
+on the summit he espied among the great red sandstones a kind of
+aperture overgrown with bushes. Boy-like he entered the opening, and
+there within, in a strange vault, he descried a large portable vessel
+full of money. The sight of it made him shudder, and, without touching
+the treasure, he made his way out to the world again. To his surprise
+he was never able to find the aperture again, though, in company with
+the other less imaginative cowboys, he often hunted for it. His
+friend, von Franckenberg, who relates the story and says that he had it
+from Boehme's mouth, thinks that the experience was "a sort of
+emblematic omen or presage of his future spiritual admission to the
+sight of the hidden treasury of the wisdom and mysteries of God and
+Nature,"[14] but we are more interested in it as a revelation of the
+extraordinary psychical nature of the boy, with his tendency to
+hallucination.
+
+When he was in his fourteenth year he was apprenticed to a shoemaker in
+Seidenberg, and devoted himself diligently to the mastery of his trade.
+It was during this period of apprenticeship, which lasted three years,
+that there was granted to him "a kind of secret tinder and glimmer" of
+coming fame. One day a stranger, plain and mean in dress, but
+otherwise of good presence, came to the shop and asked to buy a pair of
+shoes. As the master shoemaker was absent, the uninitiated
+prentice-boy did not feel competent to sell the shoes, but the buyer
+would not be put off. Thereupon young Jacob set an enormous price upon
+them, hoping to stave off the trade. The man, however, without any
+demur paid the price, took the shoes, and went out. Just outside the
+door the stranger stopped, and in a serious tone called out, "Jacob,
+come hither to me!" The man, with shining eyes looking him full in the
+face, took his hand and said, "Jacob, thou art little but thou shalt
+become great--a man very different from the common cast, so that thou
+shalt be a wonder to the world. Be a good lad; fear God and reverence
+His Word." With a little more counsel, the {158} stranger pressed his
+hand and went his way, leaving the boy amazed.[15]
+
+He had, his intimate biographer tells us, lived from his very youth up
+in the fear of God, in all humility and simplicity, and had taken
+peculiar pleasure in hearing sermons, but from the opening of his
+apprenticeship he began to revolt from the endless controversies and
+"scholastic wranglings about religion," and he withdrew into himself,
+fervently and incessantly praying and seeking and knocking, until one
+day "he was translated into the holy Sabbath and glorious Day of Rest
+to the soul," and, according to his own words, was "enwrapt with the
+Divine Light for the space of seven days and stood possessed of the
+highest beatific wisdom of God, in the ecstatic joy of the
+Kingdom."[16] Boehme looked upon this "Sabbatic" experience as his
+spiritual call, and from this time on he increased his endeavours to
+live a pure life of godliness and virtue, refusing to listen to
+frivolous talk, reproving his fellows and even his shopmaster when they
+indulged in light and wanton conversation, until finally the master
+discharged him with the remark that he did not care to keep "a
+house-prophet" any longer.[17] Hereupon he went forth as a travelling
+cobbler, spending some years in his wanderings, discovering more and
+more, as he passed from place to place, how religion was being lost in
+the Babel of theological wrangling, and seeing, with those penetrating
+eyes of his, deeper into the meaning of life and the world. Near the
+end of the century--probably about 1599--he gave up his wanderings,
+married Catherine Kunchman, "a young woman of virtuous disposition,"
+and opened a shoemaker's shop for himself in the town of Goerlitz, where
+he soon established a reputation for honest, faithful work, and where
+he modestly prospered and was able to buy a home of his own, and where
+he reared the four sons and two daughters who came to the happy home.
+
+{159}
+
+The supreme experience of his life--and one of the most remarkable
+instances of "illumination" in the large literature of mystical
+experiences--occurred when Boehme was twenty-five years of age, some
+time in the year 1600. His eye fell by chance upon the surface of a
+polished pewter dish which reflected the bright sunlight, when suddenly
+he felt himself environed and penetrated by the Light of God, and
+admitted into the innermost ground and centre of the universe. His
+experience, instead of waning as he came back to normal consciousness,
+on the contrary deepened. He went to the public green in Goerlitz, near
+his house, and there it seemed to him that he could see into the very
+heart and secret of Nature, and that he could behold the innermost
+properties of things.[18] In his own account of his experience, Boehme
+plainly indicates that he had been going through a long and earnest
+travail of soul as a Seeker,[19] "striving to find the heart of Jesus
+Christ and to be freed and delivered from everything that turned him
+away from Christ." At last, he says, he resolved to "put his life to
+the utmost hazard" rather than miss his life-quest, when suddenly the
+"gate was opened." He continues his account as follows: "In one
+quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years
+together in a University. . . . I saw and knew the Being of Beings,
+the Byss and Abyss, the eternal generation of the Trinity, the origin
+and descent of this world, and of all creatures through Divine Wisdom.
+I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds--(1) the Divine,
+Angelical, or Paradisaical World; (2) the dark world, the origin of
+fire; and (3) the external, visible world as an outbreathing or
+expression of the internal and spiritual worlds. I saw, too, the
+essential nature of evil and of good, and how the {160} pregnant
+Mother--the eternal genetrix--brought them forth."[20]
+
+He has also vividly told his experience in the _Aurora_: "While I was
+in affliction and trouble, I elevated my spirit, and earnestly raised
+it up unto God, as with a great stress and onset, lifting up my whole
+heart and mind and will and resolution to wrestle with the love and
+mercy of God and not to give over unless He blessed me--then the Spirit
+did break through. When in my resolved zeal I made such an assault,
+storm, and onset upon God, as if I had more reserves of virtue and
+power ready, with a resolution to hazard my life upon it, suddenly my
+spirit did break through the Gate, not without the assistance of the
+Holy Spirit, and I reached to the innermost Birth of the Deity and
+there I was embraced with love as a bridegroom embraces his bride. My
+triumphing can be compared to nothing but the experience in which life
+is generated in the midst of death or like the resurrection from the
+dead. In this Light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in all
+created things, even in herbs and grass, I knew God--who He is, how He
+is, and what His will is--and suddenly in that Light my will was set
+upon by a mighty impulse to describe the being of God."[21]
+
+This experience was the momentous watershed of his life. He is
+constantly referring to it either directly or indirectly. "I teach,
+write, and speak," is his frequent testimony, "of what has been wrought
+in me. I have not scraped my teaching together out of histories and so
+made _opinions_. I have by God's grace obtained eyes of my own."[22]
+"There come moments," he writes, "when the soul sees God as in a flash
+of lightning,"[23] and he tells his readers that "when the Gate is
+opened" to them, they also "will understand."[24] "In my own
+faculties," he writes again, "I am as blind a man as {161} ever was,
+but in the Spirit of God my spirit sees through all."[25]
+
+During the ten quiet years which followed "the opening of the Gate" to
+him, Boehme meditated on what he had seen, and, though he does not say
+so, he almost certainly read much in the works of "the great masters,"
+as he calls them, who were trying to tell, often in confused language,
+the central secret of the universe. Instead of fading out, his "flash"
+of insight grew steadily clearer to him as he read and pondered, and
+little by little, as one comes to see in the dark, certain great ideas
+became defined. With his third "flash,"[26] which came to him in 1610,
+when he felt once more "overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and touched by
+God,"[27] he was moved to write down for his own use what he had seen.
+"It was," he says, "powerfully borne in upon my mind to write down
+these things for a memorial, however difficult they might be of
+apprehension to my outer self [intellect] and of expression through my
+pen. I felt compelled to begin at once, like a child going to school,
+to work upon this very great Mystery. Inwardly [in spirit] I saw it
+all well enough, as in a great depth; for I looked through as into a
+chaos where all things lie [undifferentiated] but the unravelling
+thereof seemed impossible. From time to time an opening took place
+within me, _as of a growth_.[28] I kept this to myself for twelve
+years [1600-12], being full of it and I experienced a vehement impulse
+before I could bring it out into expression; but at last it overwhelmed
+me like a cloud-burst which hits whatever it lights upon. And so it
+went with me: whatsoever I could grasp sufficiently to bring it out,
+that I wrote down."[29]
+
+This first book which thus grew out of his spiritual travails and
+"openings" Boehme called _Morning Glow_, to which later, through the
+suggestion of a friend, he gave {162} the title _Aurora_. It is a
+strange _melange_ of chaos where all things lie undifferentiated and of
+insight; dreary wastes of words that elude comprehension, with
+beautiful patches of spiritual oasis. He himself always felt that the
+book was dictated to him, and that he only passively held the pen which
+wrote it. "Art," he says, speaking of his writing, "has not written
+here, neither was there any time to consider how to set it down
+punctually, according to the understanding of the letters, but all was
+ordered according to the direction of the Spirit, which often went in
+haste, so that in many words letters may be wanting, and in some places
+a capital letter for a word; so that _the Penman's hand_, by reason
+that he was not accustomed to it, did often shake. And though I could
+have wrote in a more accurate, fair, and plain manner, yet the reason
+was this, that the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and
+the hand and pen must hasten directly after it; for it goes and comes
+like a sudden shower."[30] This is obviously an inside account of the
+production of inspirational script, amounting almost to automatic
+impulsion. Throughout his voluminous writings he often speaks of "this
+hand," or "this pen" as though they were owned and moved by a will far
+deeper than his own individual consciousness,[31] and his writings
+themselves frequently bear the marks of automatisms.
+
+His manuscript copy of _Morning Glow_ was freely lent to readers and
+circulated widely. Boehme himself kept no copy by him, but he tells us
+that during its wanderings the manuscript was copied out in full four
+times by strangers and brought to him.[32] One of the copies fell into
+the hands of Gregorius Richter, pastor primarius of Goerlitz, a violent
+guardian of orthodoxy and a man extremely jealous of any infringement
+of the dignity of his official position. He proceeded at
+once--"without sufficient examination or knowledge"--to {163} "vilify
+and condemn" the writing, and in a sermon on "False Prophets" he
+vigorously attacked the local prophet of Goerlitz, who meekly sat in
+Church and listened to the "fulminations" against him.[33] After the
+sermon, Boehme modestly asked the preacher to show him what was wrong
+with his teaching, but the only answer he received was that if he did
+not instantly leave the town the pastor would have him arrested; and
+the following day Richter had Boehme summoned before the magistrates,
+and succeeded by his influence and authority in overawing them so that
+they ordered the harmless prophet to leave the town forthwith without
+any time given him to see his family or to close up his affairs.
+Boehme quietly replied, "Yes, dear Sirs, it shall be done; since it
+cannot be otherwise I am content." The next day, however, the
+magistrates of Goerlitz held a meeting and recalled the banished prophet
+and offered him the privilege of remaining in his home and occupation
+on condition that he would cease from writing on theological matters.
+On this latter point we have Boehme's own testimony, though he does not
+refer the condition to the magistrates. "When I appeared before him"
+[Pastor Richter], Boehme says, "to defend myself and indicate my
+standpoint, the Rev. Primarius [Richter] exacted from me a promise to
+give up writing and to this I assented, since I did not then see
+clearly the divine way, nor did I understand what God would later do
+with me. . . . By his order I gave up for many years [1613-18] all
+writing or speaking about my knowledge of divine things, hoping vainly
+that the evil reports would at last come to an end, instead of which
+they only grew worse and more malignant."[34]
+
+Boehme's friend, Doctor Cornelius Weissner, in his account, which is
+none too accurate, endeavours to find an explanation of Richter's
+persistent hate and persecution {164} of the shoemaker-prophet in a
+gentle reproof which the latter administered to the former for having
+meanly treated a poor kinsman of Boehme in a small commercial
+transaction, but it is by no means necessary to bring up incidents of
+this sort to discover an adequate ground for Richter's fury. The
+_Aurora_ itself furnishes plenty of passages which would, if read,
+throw a jealous guardian of orthodoxy into fierce activity. One
+passage in which Boehme boldly attacks the popular doctrine of
+predestination and asserts that the writers and scribes who teach it
+are "masterbuilders of Lies" will be sufficient illustration of the
+theological provocation: "This present world doth dare to say that God
+hath decreed or concluded it so in His predestinate purpose and counsel
+that some men should be saved and some should be damned, as if hell and
+malice and evil had been from eternity and that it was in God's
+predestinate purpose that men should be and must be therein. Such
+persons pull and hale the Scriptures to prove it, though, indeed, they
+neither have the knowledge of the true God nor the understanding of
+Scripture. These justifiers and disputers assist the Devil steadfastly
+and pervert God's truth and change it into lies."[35] He closed his
+book with these daring words: "Should Peter or Paul seem to have
+written otherwise, then look to the essence, look to the heart [_i.e._
+to interior meaning]. If you lay hold of the heart of God you have
+ground enough."[36] His entire conception of salvation was, too, as we
+shall see, vastly different from the prevailing orthodox conception,
+and furthermore he was only a layman, innocent of the schools, and yet
+he was claiming to speak as an almost infallible instrument of a fresh
+revelation of God. Theologians of the type of the Primarius Richter
+need no other provocation to account for their relentless pursuit of
+local prophets that appear in the domain of their authority.
+
+Meantime Boehme's fame was slowly spreading, and he was drawing into
+sympathetic fellowship with himself a number of high-minded and serious
+men who were {165} dissatisfied with the current orthodox teaching. In
+this group of friends who found comfort in the fresh message of Boehme
+were Dr. Balthazar Walther, director of the Chemical Laboratory of
+Dresden, Dr. Tobias Kober, physician at Goerlitz, a disciple of
+Paracelsus, Abraham von Franckenberg, who calls Jacob "our God-taught
+man," Doctor Cornelius Weissner, who became intimate with him in 1618,
+and the nobleman Carl von Endern, who copied out the entire manuscript
+of the _Aurora_. These friends frequently encouraged Boehme to break
+his enforced silence, and he himself was restless and melancholy,
+feeling that he was "entrusted with a talent which he ought to put to
+usury and not return to God singly and without improvement, like the
+lazy servant." "It was with me," he writes, describing his years of
+silence, "as when a seed is hidden in the earth. It grows up in storm
+and rough weather, against all reason. In winter time, all is dead,
+and reason says: 'It is all over with it.' But the precious seed
+within me sprouted and grew green, oblivious of all storms, and amid
+disgrace and ridicule it has blossomed forth into a lily!"[37]
+
+Under the pressure, from without and from within, he resolved after
+five years of repression to break the seal of silence and give the
+world his message. Writing to a dear friend, whom he called "a plant
+of God," he says: "My very dear brother in the life of God, you are
+more acceptable to me in that it was you who awaked me out of my sleep,
+that I might go on to bring forth fruit in the life of God--and I want
+you to know that after I was awakened _a strong smell was given to me
+in the life of God_."[38] During the next six years (1618-24) he wrote
+almost incessantly, producing, from 1620 on, book after book in rapid
+succession.[39] In 1622, he informs a friend that he {166} has "laid
+aside his trade to serve God and his brothers,"[40] and in 1623, he
+says that he has written without ceasing during the autumn and winter.
+He felt throughout his life that the "illumination," which broke upon
+him in the year 1600, steadily increased with the years, and he came to
+look upon his first book as only the crude attempt of a child as
+compared with his later works. "The Day," he writes in 1620, "has now
+overtaken the _Aurora_ [the morning glow]; it has grown full daylight
+and the morning is extinguished."[41] He says, with artlessness, that
+when he wrote the _Aurora_, he was not yet accustomed to the Spirit.
+The heavenly joy, indeed, met him and he followed the Spirit's
+guidance, but much of his own wild and untamed nature still remained to
+mar his work. Each successive book marks a growth of "the spiritual
+lily" in him, he thinks: "Each book from the first is ten times
+deeper!"[42]
+
+Once again, the zeal of a friend brought Boehme into the storm-centre
+of persecution. Until 1623, his works circulated only in manuscript
+and were kept from the eye of his ecclesiastical enemy, but toward the
+end of that year, an admirer, Sigismund von Schweinitz, printed three
+of his little books--_True Repentance_; _True Resignation_; and _The
+Supersensual Life_--in one volume under the title _The Way to Christ_.
+Richter was immediately aroused and poured forth his feelings in some
+desperately bad verses:
+
+ Quot continentur lineae, blasphemiae
+ Tot continentur in libro sutorio,
+ Qui nil nisi picem redolet sutoriam,
+
+{167}
+
+ Atrum et colorem, quern vocant sutorium.
+ Pfuy! pfuy! teter sit fetor a nobis procul![43]
+
+
+But the Primarius was not content with this harmless weapon of
+ridicule. He stirred up the neighbouring clergymen to join him in the
+attack, and a complaint was lodged in Town Council against Boehme as a
+"rabid enthusiast," and he was warned to leave the town. Boehme was as
+sweet and gentle in spirit now as he had been ten years before. He
+wrote in 1624: "I pray for those who have reviled and condemned me.
+They curse me and I bless. I am standing the test ["Proba"] and have
+the mark of Christ on my forehead."[44] But he thought that it did not
+befit him as an instrument of God's revelation to let the false charges
+against him go unanswered. He accordingly replied to the accusations
+in an _Apology_, in which the whole depth and beauty of his spiritual
+nature breathes forth. His appeal was in vain and he was forced to
+leave Goerlitz. He went forth, however, in no discouraged mood. He saw
+that his message was "being sounded through Europe," and he predicts
+that "the nations will take up what his own native town is casting
+away. Already, he hears, his book has been read with interest in the
+Court of the Elector of Saxony, and he writes, March 15, 1624: "I am
+invited there to a conference with high people and I have consented to
+go at the end of the Leipzig fair. Soon the revelation of Jesus Christ
+shall break forth and destroy the works of the Devil."[45] The real
+trouble with the world, he thinks, is that the Christians in it are
+titular and verbal,"--they are only "opinion-peddlers,"[46] and that is
+why a man who insists upon a reproduction of the life of Christ is
+persecuted. The visit to the Elector's Court in Dresden came off well
+for the simple shoemaker. He spent two months in the home of the court
+physician, Dr. Hinkelmann, where many of the nobility and clergy came
+to see {168} him and to talk with him. Three professors of theology
+and other learned doctors were asked by the Elector to examine him.
+They reported that they did not yet quite succeed in understanding him,
+and that therefore they could not pronounce judgment. They hoped "His
+Highness would please to have patience and allow the man sufficient
+time to expound his ideas"--which were, in fact, already "expounded" in
+more than a score of volumes! One of the professors is reported to
+have said: "I would not for the world be a party to this man's
+condemnation," and another declared: "Nor would I, for who knows what
+lies at the bottom of it all!"[47]
+
+The end of the good man's life, however, was near. He was taken ill in
+November 1624, while staying with his old friend, von Schweinitz, and
+he hurried home to Goerlitz, where his family had remained during his
+absence, to die in the quiet of his own house. The night before he
+died, he spoke of hearing beautiful music, and asked to have the door
+opened that he might hear it better. In the morning--as the _Aurora_
+appeared--he bade farewell to his wife and children, committed his soul
+to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ, arranged a few simple matters, and,
+with a smile on his face, said, "Now I go to Paradise."
+
+His old enemy, Richter, had died a few months before him, but the new
+pastor was of the same temper and refused to preach his funeral sermon.
+The second pastor of the city was finally ordered by the Governor of
+Lausitz to preach the sermon, which he began with the words, "I had
+rather have walked a hundred and twenty miles than preach this
+sermon!"[48] The common people, however,--the shoemakers, tanners and
+a "great concourse of us his fast friends," as one of them
+writes,--were at the funeral, and a band of young shoemakers carried
+his body to its last resting-place, where a block of porphyry now
+informs the visitor that "Jacob Boehme, _philosophus Teutonicus_"
+sleeps beneath.
+
+Gruetzmacher holds that Boehme is an "isolated thinker," having little,
+if any, historical connection with {169} the past.[49] I do not agree
+with this view. I find in him rather the ripe fulfilment of the
+powerful protest against the dead letter, against a formal religion,
+and equally a fulfilment of a Christianity of inward life, which was
+voiced so vigorously in the writings of Denck, Buenderlin, Entfelder,
+Franck, and Weigel, neglecting for the moment another side of Boehme
+and another set of influences which appeared in him. The central note
+of his life-long prophet-cry was against a form of religion built upon
+the letter of Scripture and consisting of external ceremonies and
+practices, and this is the ground of Richter's bitter hostility and
+stubborn opposition.[50]
+
+The Church of his day seems to him a veritable Babel--"full of pride
+and wrangling, and jangling, and snarling about the letter of the
+written Word," lacking in true, real, effectual knowledge and power; a
+pitiably poor "substitute for the Temple of the holy Spirit where God's
+living Word is taught."[51] Through each of his books we hear of
+"verbal Christendom"; of "titular Christians"; of "historical feigned
+faith"; of "history religion"; of "an external forgiveness of sins"; of
+"the work of outward letters." "The builders of Babel," he says,
+"cannot endure that one should teach that Christ Himself must be the
+teacher in the human heart"--"they jangle instead about the mere husk,
+about the written word and letter while they miss the living Word."[52]
+
+The divisions of Christendom are due to the fact that its
+"master-builders" are of the Babel-type. They always follow the line
+of _opinion_; their basis is "the letter"; their method of approach is
+_external_. They build "stone houses in which they read the writings
+which the Apostles left behind them," while they themselves dispute and
+contend about "mental idols and {170} opinions."[53] The true Church
+of Christ, on the contrary, is the living Temple of the Spirit. It is
+built up of men made wholly new by the inward power of the Divine
+Spirit and made _one_ by an inward unity of heart and life with
+Christ--as "a living Twig of our Life-Tree Jesus Christ." Nobody can
+belong to this Church unless "he puts on the shirt of a little child,"
+dies to selfishness and hypocrisy, rises again in a new will and
+obedience, and forms his life in its inmost ground according to Christ,
+the Life.[54] "The wise world," he declares, "will not believe in the
+true inward work of Christ in the heart; it will have only an external
+washing away of sins in Grace," but the ABC of true religion is far
+different.[55] He only is a Christian in fact in whom Christ dwelleth,
+liveth and hath His being, in whom Christ hath arisen as the eternal
+ground of the soul. He only is a Christian who has this high title in
+himself, and has entered with mind and soul into that Eternal Word
+which has manifested itself as the life of our humanity.[56] He wrote
+near the end of his life to Balthazar Tilken: "If I had no other book
+except the book which I myself am, I should have books enough. The
+entire Bible lies in me if I have Christ's Spirit in me. What do I
+need of more books? Shall I quarrel over what is outside me before I
+have learned what is within me?"[57] "What would it profit me if I
+were continually quoting the Bible and knew the whole book by heart but
+did not know the Spirit that inspired the holy men who wrote that book,
+nor the source from which they received their knowledge? How can I
+expect to understand them in truth, if I have not the same Spirit they
+had?"[58]
+
+This insistence on personal, first-hand experience and practice of the
+Christ-Life, as the ground of true religion, {171} is the fundamental
+feature of Boehme's Christianity. He travels, as we shall see, through
+immense heights and deeps. Like Dante, who immeasurably surpasses him
+in power of expression, but not in prophetic power of vision, he saw
+the eternal realities of heaven and hell and the world between, and he
+told as well as he could what he _saw_, but his practical message which
+runs like a thread through all his writings is always simple--almost
+childlike in its simplicity--"Thou must thyself be the way. The
+spiritual understanding must be born in thee."[59] "A Christian is a
+new creature in the ground of the heart."[60] "The Kingdom of God is
+not from without, but it is a new man, who lives in love, in patience,
+in hope, in faith and in the Cross of Jesus Christ."[61]
+
+And this simple shoemaker of Goerlitz, with his amazing range of thought
+and depth of experience, practised and embodied the way of life which
+he recommended. He was a good man, and his life touches us even now
+with a kind of awe. "Life," he once said, "is a strange bath of thorns
+and thistles,"[62] and he himself experienced that "bath," but he went
+through the world hearing everywhere a divine music and "having a joy
+in his heart which made his whole being tremble and his soul triumph as
+if it were in God."[63]
+
+
+
+[1] I have used as primary source the German edition of Boehme's
+Works--_Theosophia revelata_--published in 1730 in 8 vols. All my
+references are to the English translations made by Sparrow, Ellistone,
+and Blunden, 1647-61. These translations were republished, 1764, in 4
+vols. in an edition which has incorrectly been called William Law's
+edition. Four volumes have been republished by John M. Watkins of
+London, as follows: _The Threefold Life of Man_, 1909; _The Three
+Principles_, 1910; _The Forty Questions_ and _The Clavis_, 1911; and
+_The Way to Christ_, 1911. The _Signatura rerum_, in English, has been
+published in "Everyman's Library." A valuable volume of selections
+from "Jacob Behmen's Theosophic Philosophy" was made by Edward Taylor,
+London, 1691. Many volumes of selections have been published in recent
+years. The books on Boehme which I have found most suggestive and
+helpful are the following: Franz von Baader's "Vorlesungen und
+Erlaeuterungen ueber J. Boehme's Lehre," _Werke_ (Leipzig, 1852), vol.
+iii. [edition of 1855, vol. xiii.]; Emile Boutroux, _Le Philosophe
+allemand_ (Paris, 1888): translated into English by Rothwell in
+Boutroux's _Historical Studies in Philosophy_ (London, 1912), pp.
+169-233; Hans Lassen Martensen's _Jacob Boehme_ (translated from the
+Danish by T. Rhys Evans, London, 1885); Franz Hartmann's _Life and
+Doctrine of Jacob Boehme_ (London, 1891); Von Harless' _Jacob Boehme
+und die Alchymisten_ (Leipzig, 1882); Ederheimer's _Jakob Boehme und
+die Romantiker_ (Heidelberg, 1901); Paul Deussen's _Jacob Boehme_--an
+Address delivered at Kiel, May 8, 1897--translated from the German by
+Mrs. D. S. Hehner and printed as Introduction to Watkin's edition of
+_The Three Principles_ (1910); Christopher Walton's _Notes and
+Materials for a Biography of William Law_ (London, 1854)--a volume of
+great value to the student of Boehme; Rudolph Steiner's _Mystics of the
+Renaissance_ (translated, London, 1911), pp. 223-245; A. J. Penny's
+_Studies in Jacob Boehme_ (London, 1912), uncritical and written from
+the theosophical point of view; Hegel's _History of philosophy_
+(translated by Haldane and Simson, London, 1895), iii. pp. 188-216.
+
+[2] Aurora, John Sparrow's translation (London, 1656), ii. 79-80.
+
+[3] _Aurora_, iii. 1-3.
+
+[4] _Third Epistle_, 15.
+
+[5] _Aurora_, xiii. 27.
+
+[6] _Ibid._ viii. 19.
+
+[7] _Ibid._ ix 90.
+
+[8] _Ibid._ xiii. 2-4.
+
+[9] _Third Epistle_, 22.
+
+[10] Many thinkers of prominent rank have borne testimony to the
+greatness of Boehme's genius. I shall mention only a few of these
+estimates:
+
+"I would recommend you to procure the writings of Boehme and diligently
+read them. For though I have studied philosophy and theology from my
+youth . . . yet I must acknowledge that the above writings have been to
+me of more service for the understanding of the Bible than all my
+University learning."--"J. G. Gictell, 1698.
+
+"Jacob Boehme, as a religious and philosophical genius, has not often
+had his equal in the world's history."--"Jacob Boehme: His Life and
+Philosophy." An Address by Dr. Paul Deussen.
+
+"Jacob Boehme est le seul, au moins dont on ait eu les ecrits jusqu'a
+lui, auquel Dieu ait decouvert le fond de la nature, tant des choses
+spirituelles, que des corporelles."--Peter Poiret, in a note at the end
+of his _Theologie germanique_, 1700.
+
+"As a chosen servant of God, Jacob Boehme must be placed among those
+who have received the highest measures of light, wisdom, and knowledge
+from above. . . . All that lay in religion and nature as a mystery
+unsearchable was in its deepest ground opened to this instrument of
+God."--William Law, _Works_ (ed. 1893), vi. p. 205.
+
+"To Jacob Boehme belongs the merit of having taught more profoundly
+than any one else before or after him the truth that back of and behind
+all that has come to appear of good and evil there is an immaterial
+World which is the essence and reality of all that is."--Franz von
+Baader, _Werke_ (Leipzig, 1852), iii. p. 382.
+
+Novalis wrote in a letter to Ludwig Tieck in 1800: "Man sieht durchaus
+in ihm [Jakob Boehme] den gewaltigen Fruehling mit seinen quellenden,
+treibenden, bildenden, und mischenden Kraeften, die von innen heraus die
+Welt gebaeren. Ein echtes Chaos voll dunkler Begier und wunderbarem
+Leben--einen wahren auseinandergehenden Mikrokosmos."--Quoted from
+Edgar Ederheimer's _Jakob Boehme und die Romantiker_ (1904), p. 57.
+
+[11] His English translators in the seventeenth century variously
+spelled his name Behm, Behme, and Behmen. This latter spelling was
+adopted in the so-called Law Edition of 1764, and has thus come into
+common use in England and America.
+
+[12] Boehme refers frequently to "the writings of high masters," whom
+he says he read (_Aurora_, x. 45), and he often names Schwenckfeld and
+Weigel in particular. See especially _The Second Epistle_, sec. 54-62
+
+[13] _Memoirs of the Life, Death and Burial, and Wonderful Writings of
+Jacob Behmen_, translated by Francis Okeley (1780), p. 22.
+
+[14] _Memoirs_, p. 2.
+
+[15] _Memoirs_, p. 6. Von Franckenberg says that Boehme himself told
+him this incident.
+
+[16] Ibid. pp. 4-5. The reader will have noted the long history of
+this phrase, "Sabbath of the soul."
+
+[17] _Ibid._ p. 7.
+
+[18] _Memoirs_, p. 8. Paracelsus taught that the inner nature of
+things might be seen by one who has become an organ of the Universal
+Mind. He says: "Hidden things which cannot be perceived by the
+physical senses may be found through the sidereal body, through whose
+organism we may look into nature in the same way as the sun shines
+through a glass. The inner nature of everything may be known through
+Magic [The Divine Magia] and the power of inner sight."--Hartmann's
+_Life of Paracelsus_ (1896), p. 53.
+
+[19] He uses this word _Seeker_ hundreds of times in his writings.
+
+[20] _Second Epistle_, sec. 6-8.
+
+[21] _Aurora_, xix. 10-13. He goes on in the following sections to
+describe how for twelve years this insight "grew in his soul like a
+young tree before the exact understanding of it all" was arrived at.
+
+[22] _The Fifth Epistle_, 50.
+
+[23] _Aurora_, xi. 146.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ xi. 6.
+
+[25] Aurora, xxii. 47.
+
+[26] In the _Aurora_ Boehme speaks of the Flash as an experience: "As
+the lightning flash appears and disappears again in a moment, so it is
+also with the soul. In its battle the soul suddenly penetrates through
+the clouds and sees God like a flash of Light."--Ibid. xi. 76.
+
+[27] _Memoirs_, p. 8.
+
+[28] Evidently the "flash" of the year 1610 was not the last one. In
+fact, he seems to have had frequent ecstasies.
+
+[29] _The Second Epistle_, 9-10.
+
+[30] _Third Epistle_, 35.
+
+[31] See especially _Signatura rerum_, ix. 63, and _Forty Questions_,
+xxvi. 2-3 and xxx. 3 and 5.
+
+[32] _Third Epistle_, 32. The _Memoirs_ describe how it was copied by
+"a Gentleman of some rank" [Carl von Endern].
+
+[33] _Memoirs_, p. 9.
+
+[34] Preserved in the Diary of Bartholomew Scultetus, then Mayor of
+Goerlitz (Ueberfeld's edition, 1730). This Diary does not record any
+actual banishment of Boehme. The data for our knowledge of the
+persecutions of Boehme are found in a personal narrative written by his
+friend Cornelius Weissner, M.D.--_Memoirs_, pp. 39-50.
+
+[35] _Aurora_, xiii. 7-10.
+
+[36] _Ibid._ xxxvi. 152.
+
+[37] _Third Epistle_, 7.
+
+[38] _Fifteenth Epistle_, 18.
+ This "new smell in the life of God" often occurs in
+Boehme's writings. Compare George Fox's testimony, "The whole creation
+had a new smell." For further comparisons see pp. 221-227.
+
+[39] The following is a complete list of his writings:
+
+1612. _The Aurora_.
+
+1619. _The Three Principles of the Divine Essence_.
+
+1620. _The Threefold Life of Man; Forty Questions; The Incarnation of
+Jesus Christ; The Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Christ; The Tree
+of Faith; Six Points; Heavenly and Earthly Mysterium; The Last Times_.
+
+1621. _De signatura rerum; The Four Complexions; Apology to Balthazar
+Tilken_ in 2 parts; _Consideration on Esaias Stiefel's Book_.
+
+1622. Sec. _Apology to Stiefel; Repentance; Resignation; Regeneration_.
+
+1623. _Predestination and Election of God; A Short Compendium of
+Repentance; The Mysterium magnum_.
+
+1624. _The Clavis; The Supersensual Life; Divine Contemplation;
+Baptism and the Supper; A Dialogue Between the Enlightened and
+Unenlightened Soul; An Apology on the Book of Repentance; 177
+Theosophic Questions; An Epitome of the Mysterium magnum; The Holy
+Week; An Exposition of the Threefold World_.
+
+Undated. _An Apology to Esaias Stiefel; The Last Judgment; Epistles_.
+
+[40] _Thirty-first Epistle_, 10.
+
+[41] _The Third Epistle_, 30.
+
+[42] _Ibid._ 29.
+
+[43] There are as many blasphemies in the shoemaker's book as there are
+lines. It smells of shoemaker's wax and filthy blacking. May this
+intolerable stench be far from us.
+
+[44] _Thirty-fourth Epistle_, 5.
+
+[45] _Thirty-third Epistle_.
+
+[46] _Thirty-fourth Epistle_, 16 and 21.
+
+[47] Weissner's Narrative, _Memoirs_, p. 49.
+
+[48] _Ibid._ p. 58.
+
+[49] _Wort und Geist_, p. 196 _seq._
+
+[50] What could be a bolder criticism of the existing Church of his day
+than this: "In place of the wolf [the Roman Church] there has grown up
+the fox [the Lutheran Church] another anti-Christ, never a whit better
+than the first. If he should come to be old enough how he would devour
+the poor people's hens!"--_The Three Principles of the Divine Essence_,
+xviii. 102.
+
+[51] _Mysterium magnum_, xxvii. 47.
+
+[52] _Ibid._ xxviii. 49-51.
+
+[53] _Mysterium magnum_, xxxvi. 34; xl. 98.
+
+[54] _Ibid._ lxiii. 47-51; _Twenty-first Epistle_, 1.
+
+[55] _Myst. mag._ xxv. 13.
+
+[56] _The First Epistle_, 3-5.
+
+[57] _Apology to Tilken_, ii. 298.
+
+[58] _Ibid._ 72. Compare George Fox's testimony: "All must come to
+that Spirit, if they would know God or Christ or the Scriptures aright,
+which they that gave them forth were led and taught by."--_Journal_
+(ed. 1901), i. 35 and _passim_.
+
+[59] _Sig. re._ xiv. i.
+
+[60] _Myst. mag._ lxx. 40.
+
+[61] _Fourth Epistle_, 27 and 32.
+
+[62] _The Three Princ._ xxii. 2.
+
+[63] _Aurora_, iii. 39.
+
+
+
+
+{172}
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+BOEHME'S UNIVERSE
+
+"If thou wilt be a philosopher or naturalist and search into God's
+being in Nature and discern how it all came to pass, then pray to God
+for the Holy Spirit to enlighten thee. In thy flesh and blood thou art
+not able to apprehend it, but dost read it as if a mist were before thy
+eyes. In the Holy Spirit alone, and in the whole Nature out of which
+all things were made, canst thou search into Nature."--_Aurora_, ii.
+15-17.
+
+
+One idea underlies everything which Boehme has written, namely, that
+nobody can successfully "search into visible Nature," or can say
+anything true about Man or about the problem of good and evil, until he
+has "apprehended _the whole Nature out of which all things were made_."
+It will not do, he thinks, to make the easy assumption that in the
+beginning the world was made out of nothing. "If God made all things
+out of nothing," he says, "then the visible world would be no
+revelation of Him, for it would have nothing of Him in it. He would
+still be off beyond and outside, and would not be known in this world.
+Persons however learned they may be, who hold such 'opinions' have
+never opened the Gates of God."[1]
+
+Behind the visible universe and in it there is an invisible universe;
+behind the material universe and in it there is an immaterial universe;
+behind the temporal universe and in it there is an eternal universe,
+and the first business of the philosopher or naturalist, as Boehme
+conceives it, is to discover the essential Nature of this invisible,
+immaterial, eternal universe out of which this fragment of a visible
+world has come forth.
+
+{173}
+
+ Need have we,
+ Sore need, of stars that set not in mid storm,
+ Lights that outlast the lightnings.[2]
+
+The visible fragment is never self-explanatory; all attempts to account
+for what occurs in it drive the serious observer deeper for his answer,
+and with a breathless boldness this meditative shoemaker of Goerlitz
+undertakes to tell of the nature of this deeper World within the world.
+As a boy he saw a vast treasury of wealth hidden in the inside of a
+mountain, though he could never make anybody else see it. As a man he
+believed that he saw an immeasurable wealth of reality hidden within
+the world of sense, and he tried, often with poor enough success, to
+make others see the inside world which he found. We must now endeavour
+to grasp what it was that he saw. There is no doubt at all that this
+inside world which he discovered within and behind visible Nature,
+within and behind man, is really there, nor is there any doubt in my
+mind that he, Jacob Boehme, got an insight into its nature and
+significance which is of real worth to the modern world, but he is
+seriously hampered by the poverty of his categories, by the
+difficulties of his symbolism and by his literary limitations, when he
+comes to the almost insuperable task of expressing what he has seen.
+He is himself perfectly conscious of his limitations. He is constantly
+amazed that God uses such "a mean instrument," he regrets again and
+again that he is "so difficult to be understood," and he often wishes
+that he could "impart his own soul" to his readers that they "might
+grasp his meaning,"[3] for he never for a moment doubts that "by God's
+grace he has eyes of his own."[4] He lived in an unscientific age,
+before our present exact terminology was coined. He was the inheritor
+of the vocabulary and symbolism of alchemy and astrology, and he was
+obliged to force his spiritual insight into a language which for us has
+become largely an antique rubbish heap.[5] If he {174} had possessed
+the marvellous power that Dante had to compel words to express what his
+soul saw, he might have fused these artificial symbolisms with the fire
+of his spirit, and given them an eternal value as the Florentine did
+with the equally dry and stubborn terminology of scholasticism, but
+that gift he did not have.[6] We must not blame him too much for his
+obscurities and for his large regions of rubbish and confusion, but be
+thankful for the luminous patches, and try to seize the meaning and the
+message where it breaks through and gets revealed.
+
+The outward, visible, temporal world, he declares, is "a spiration, or
+outbreathing, or egress" of an eternal spiritual World and this inner,
+spiritual World "couches within" our visible world and is its ground
+and mother, and the outward world is from husk to core a parable or
+figure of the inward and eternal World. "The whole outward visible
+world, with all its being, is a 'signature' or figure of the inward,
+spiritual World, and everything has a character that fits an internal
+reality and process, and the internal is in the external."[7] As he
+expresses the same idea in another book: "The visible world is a
+manifestation of the inward spiritual World, and it is an image or
+figure of eternity, whereby eternity has made itself visible."[8]
+
+But there is a still deeper Source of things than this inward spiritual
+World, which is after all a manifested and organized World, and Boehme
+begins his account with That which is before beginnings--the
+unoriginated Mother of all Worlds and of All that is, visible and
+invisible. This infinite Mother of all births, this eternal Matrix, he
+calls the _Ungrund_, "Abyss," or the "Great {175} Mystery,"[9] or the
+"Eternal Stillness." Here we are beyond beginnings, beyond time,
+beyond "nature," and we can say nothing in the language of reason that
+is true or adequate. The eternal divine Abyss is its own origin and
+explanation; it presupposes nothing but itself; there is nothing beyond
+it, nothing outside it--there is, in fact, no "beyond" and
+"outside"--it is "neither near nor far off."[10] It is an absolute
+Peace, an indivisible Unity, an undifferentiated One--an Abysmal Deep,
+which no Name can adequately name and which can be described in no
+words of time and space, of here and now.
+
+But we must not make the common blunder of supposing that Boehme means
+that _before_ God expressed Himself and unfolded Himself in the
+infinite processes of revelation and creation, He existed apart, as
+this undifferentiated One, this unknowable Abyss, this incomprehensible
+Matrix. There is no "before." Creation, revelation, manifestation is
+a dateless and eternal fact. God to be a personal God must go out of
+Himself and find Himself in something that mirrors Him. He must have a
+Son. He must pour His Life and Love through a universe. What Boehme
+means, then, is that no manifestation, no created universe, no
+expression, is the ultimate Reality itself. The manifested universe
+has come out of More than itself. The Abyss is more than anything, or
+all, that comes out of it, or can come out of it, and it lies with its
+infinite depth beneath everything which appears, as a man's entire
+life, conscious and unconscious, is in and yet lies behind every act of
+will, though we can "talk about" only what is voiced or expressed.
+
+Even within this Abysmal Depth, that underlies all that comes to being,
+there is eternal process--eternal movement toward Personality and
+Character: "God is the eternal Seeker and Finder of Himself."[11] "In
+the {176} Stillness an eternal Will arises, a longing desire for
+manifestation, the eye of eternity turns upon itself and discovers
+itself"[12]--in a word there is within the infinite Divine Deep an
+eternal process of self-consciousness and personality, which Boehme
+expresses in the words, "The Father eternally generates the Son." "God
+hath no beginning and there is nothing sooner than He, but His Word
+hath a bottomless, unfathomable origin in Him and an eternal end: which
+is not rightly called _end_, but Person, _i.e._ the Heart of the
+Father, for it is generated in the eternal Centre."[13] This inner
+process toward Personality is often called by Boehme "the eternal
+Virgin" who brings to birth God as Person, or sometimes "the Mirror,"
+in which God sees Himself revealed as will and wisdom and goodness.
+
+In the greatest artistic creation of the modern world--"The Sistine
+Madonna"--Raphael has with almost infinite pictorial power of genius
+tried to express in visible form this Birth of God. Behind curtains
+which hang suspended from nowhere and stretch across the universe,
+dividing the visible from the invisible, the world of Nature from the
+world of holy mystery, the infinite, immeasurable and abysmal God is
+pictured as defined and personal in the face and figure of a little
+Child, in which the artist suggests in symbolism the infinite depth and
+joy and potency of Divinity breaking forth out of mystery into form.
+It is precisely this birth of God into visibility that Boehme is
+endeavouring to tell. "The Son," however, Boehme says, "is not divided
+or sundered from the Father, as two persons side by side--there are not
+two Gods. The Son is the heart of the Father--God as Person--the
+outspringing Joy of the total triumphing Reality,[14] and through this
+eternal movement toward self-consciousness and Personality, God becomes
+Spirit, an out-going energy of purpose, a dynamic activity, bursting
+forth into infinite manifestation and differentiation--a forth-breathed
+or expressed Word.[15] Through {177} this eternal process of
+self-differentiation and outgoing activity, the inner spiritual
+universe comes into being--as an intermediate Nature or world, between
+the ineffable Abyss of God on the one hand, and our world of material,
+visible things on the other hand." "The process of the whole
+creation," he says, "is nothing else but a manifestation of the deep
+and unsearchable God, and yet creation is not God but rather like an
+apple which springs from the power of the tree and grows upon the tree,
+and yet is not the tree--even so all things have sprung forth out of
+the central divine Desire."[16]
+
+This entire manifested or out-breathed universe is, he says, the
+expression of the divine desire for holy sport and play. The Heart of
+God enjoys this myriad play of created beings, all tuned as the
+infinite strings of a harp for contributing to one mighty harmony, and
+all together uttering and voicing the infinite variety of the divine
+purpose. Each differentiated spirit or light or property or atom of
+creation has a part to play in the infinite sport or game or harmony,
+"so that in God there might be a holy play through the universe as a
+child plays with his mother, and that so the joy in the Heart of God
+might be increased,"[17] or again, "so that each being may be a true
+sounding string in God's harmonious concert."[18]
+
+This eternal, interior World--the Mirror in which the Spirit manifests
+Himself--is a double world of darkness and light, for there can be no
+manifestation except through opposites.[19] There must be yes and no.
+In order to have a play there must be opposing players. In order to
+have life and reality there must be conflict and conquest. As soon as
+the forth-going Word of God is differentiated into many concrete
+expressions and the fundamental Unity of the Abyss is broken up into
+particular desires and wills, there is bound to be a clash of
+opposites--will and contra-will, strain and tension, light and joy and
+beauty, and over against them pain and sorrow and evil. Evil must
+appear as soon as there is {178} process of separation,
+differentiation, variety, specialization and particularity.[20]
+Darkness appears as soon as there is a contraction or narrowing into
+concrete desire and will.
+
+Both worlds--the light world and the dark world--are made by desire and
+will. Narrowing desires for individual and particular aims, which
+sever a being from the total whole of divine goodness, make the kingdom
+of darkness, while death to self-will and a yearning desire and will
+for all that is expressed in the Heart and Light of God, in the Person
+of His Son, make the kingdom of Light. Lucifer--the awful example of
+the dark World--fell because he stood in pride and despised the Birth
+of the Heart of God and its gentle, universalizing love-spirit; and so
+his light went out into darkness. His climbing up into a severed will
+was his fall. The more he climbed toward the sundered aim of his own
+will and turned away from the Heart of God, the greater was his fall,
+for to turn away from the Heart of God is always to fall.[21] There is
+no darkness, no evil, in angel or devil or man, except the nature of
+that particular being's own will and desire--both darkness and light
+are born of desire. The origin of the fall of any creature, therefore,
+is not outside that creature, but within it.[22]
+
+The evil in the world is only a possible good spoiled. Beings created
+for a holy sport and play, for an ordered harmony, as infinite
+harp-strings for a celestial music, set their wilful desires upon
+sundered ends, broke the intended harmony, or "temperature," as Boehme
+calls it, introduced strife--the _turba magna_--and darkness, and so
+spoiled the actual material out of which the kingdoms of nature are
+made, for the attitude of will moulds the permanent structure of the
+being. Through the whole universe, visible and invisible, as a result,
+the dark lines run, and the drama of the whole process of the universe
+is the mighty issue between light and darkness, good and evil: Two
+universal qualities persist from {179} beginning to end and produce two
+kingdoms arrayed against each other--each within the other--one love,
+the other wrath; one light, the other darkness; one heavenly, the other
+hellish.[23]
+
+Now out of this inner spiritual universe--a double universe of light
+and darkness--this temporal, visible, more or less material, world has
+come forth, as an outer sheath of an inner world, and, like its Mother,
+it, too, is a double world of good and evil. "There is not," as
+William Law, interpreting Boehme, once said, "the smallest thing or the
+smallest quality of a thing in this world, but is a quality of heaven
+or hell discovered [_i.e._ revealed] under a temporal form. Every
+thing that is disagreeable to taste, to the sight, to our hearing,
+smelling or feeling has its root and ground and cause in and from hell
+[the dark kingdom], and is as surely in its degree the working and
+manifestation of hell in this world, as the most diabolical malice and
+wickedness is; the stink of weeds, of mire, of all poisonous, corrupted
+things; shrieks, horrible sounds; wrathful fire, rage of tempests and
+thick darkness, are all of them things that had no possibility of
+existence, till the fallen angels disordered their kingdom [_i.e._
+until the inner universe was spoiled by narrow, sundered desires].
+Therefore everything that is disagreeable and horrible in this life,
+everything that can afflict and terrify our senses, all the kinds of
+natural and moral evil, are only so much of the nature, effects and
+manifestation of hell, for hell and evil are only two words for one and
+the same thing. . . . On the other hand, all that is sweet, delightful
+and amiable in the world, in the serenity of air, the fineness of
+seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colours,
+the fragrance of smells, the splendour of precious stones, is nothing
+else but heaven breaking through the veil of this world, manifesting
+itself in such a degree and darting forth in such variety so much of
+its own nature."[24]
+
+I have spoken so far as though Boehme traced the {180} source of every
+thing to _will and desire_, as though, in fact, the visible universe
+were the manifold outer expression of some deep-lying personal will,
+and in the last analysis that is true, but his more usual form of
+interpretation is that of the working of great structural _tendencies_,
+or _energies_, or "_qualities_," as he calls them, which are common
+both to the inner and the outer universe. There are, he declares again
+and again with painful reiteration, but with little advance of
+lucidity, seven of these fundamental laws or energies or qualities,
+like the sevenfold colour-band of the rainbow, though they can never be
+untangled or sundered or thought of as standing side by side, for
+together in their unity and interprocesses they form the universe, with
+its warp and woof of light and darkness.[25]
+
+The first "quality" is a contracting, compacting tendency which runs
+through the entire universe, outer and inner. It is in its inmost
+essence _desire_, the egoistic tendency, the focusing of will upon a
+definite aim so that consciousness contracts from its universal and
+absolute possibilities to a definite, limited, concrete _something in
+particular_, and thus negates everything else. Desire always disturbs
+the "Quiet" and brings contraction, negation and darkness. In the
+outer world it appears as the property of cohesion which makes the
+particles of a particular thing hold and cling together and form one
+self-contained and separate thing. It is the individualizing tendency
+which permeates the universe and which may be expressed either as a
+material law in the outer world, or as personal will-tendency in the
+inner world.
+
+The second "quality" is the attractive, gravitating tendency which
+binds whole with whole as an organizing, universalizing energy. This,
+again, is both spiritual and physical--it has an outer and an inner
+aspect. It is a fundamental love-principle in the inner world--the
+{181} foundation, as Boehme says, of sweetness and warmth and
+mercy[26]--and at the same time is a structural, organizing law of
+nature, which tends out of many parts to make one universe.[27]
+
+These two diverse tendencies at work eternally in the same world
+produce strain and tension and _anguish_. The tension occasioned by
+these opposite forces gives rise to the third "quality," which is a
+tendency toward movement, oscillation, rotation--what Boehme often
+calls _the wheel of nature_, or the wheel of motion, or the wheel of
+life.[28] This, too, is both outer and inner; a law of the physical
+world and a tendency of spirit. There is nothing in nature that is not
+ceaselessly moved, and there is no life without its restlessness and
+anguish, its inward strain and stress, its tension and its problem, its
+dizzy wheel of life--the perpetual pursuit of a goal which ends at the
+starting-point as an endless circular process.
+
+The fourth "quality" is the _flash_, or ignition, due to collision
+between nature and spirit, in which a new principle of activity breaks
+through what before was mere play of _forces_, and reveals something
+that has activity in itself, the kindling, burning power of fire,
+though not yet fire which gives _light_. In the outer world it is the
+bursting forth of the elemental, fusing, consuming powers of Nature
+which may either construct or destroy. In the inner world it is the
+birth of self-consciousness on its lower levels, the awaking of the
+soul, the kindling of passion, and desire, and purpose. Any one of
+these four lower "qualities" may stay at its own level, remain in
+itself, out of "temperature" or balance with the rest, and so be only a
+"dark principle"; or it may go on and fulfil itself in one of the
+higher "qualities" next to be described, and so become a part of the
+triumphing "light principle." Fire may be only a "fire of anguish" or
+it may go up into a "fire of love"; it may be a harsh, {182}
+self-tormenting fire, or it may be a soft, light-bringing, purifying
+fire. Suffering may harden the spirit, or it may be the condition of
+joy. Crucifixion may be mere torture, or it may be the way of
+salvation. It is then here at the _great divide_ between the
+"qualities" that the universe reveals its differentiation into two
+kingdoms--"the dark" and "the light."
+
+The fifth "quality" is Light, springing out of the "flash" of fire and
+rising to the level of illumination and the revelation of beauty. It
+is at this stage of Light that the lower force-forms and fire-forms
+first stand revealed in their full meaning and come to their real
+fulfilment. On its inner or spiritual side this Light-quality is an
+"amiable and blessed Love." It is the dawn and beginning of the
+triumphing spirit of freedom which wills to draw all things back to one
+centre, one harmony, one unity, in which wild will and selfish passion
+and isolating pride, and all that springs from the dark fire-root are
+quenched, and instead the central principle of the spiritual
+world--Love--comes into play.
+
+Boehme calls his sixth "quality" voice or sound, but he means by it the
+entire range of intelligent expression through tone and melody, music
+and speech, everything in the world, in fact, that gives joy and beauty
+through purposeful utterance. He even widens his category of "sound"
+to include colours and smells and tastes, in short, all the
+sense-qualities by which the world gets revealed in its richness of
+beauty and harmony to our perception. He widens it, too, to include
+deeper and subtler tones than those of our earth-born sense--the
+heavenly sports and melodies and harmonies which the rightly attuned
+spirit may hear with a finer organ than the ear.
+
+The seventh, and final, "quality" is body or figure, by which he means
+the fundamental tendency or energy toward expression in actuality and
+concrete form. The final goal of intelligent purpose is the
+realization of wisdom, of idea, in actual Nature-forms and
+life-forms--the _incarnation of the spirit_. There is nothing real in
+the {183} universe but has its form, its "signature," its figure, its
+body-aspect: "There is not anything but has its soul and its body, and
+each soul is as it were an inner kernel, or seed, to a visible and
+comprehensible body,"[29] and, as we shall see, the supreme achievement
+of the universe is the visible appearance of the Word of God, the
+eternal Son, in flesh like ours--a visible realization in time of the
+eternal Heart of God. The glory of God appears in a kingdom of God, a
+visible vesture of the Spirit.
+
+All these seven qualities, or "fountain-spirits," or fundamental
+tendencies, are in every part and parcel of the universe, and each
+particular thing or being finds his true place in the vast drama or
+play of the universe, according to which "quality" is prepotent, and
+marks the thing or being with its "signature." They constitute in
+their eternal nature what Boehme calls _The Three Principles_ that
+underlie all reality of every order. The first principle is the
+substratum or essence of these first three "qualities," the
+nature-tendencies at the level of forces, which he generally calls the
+_fire-principle_, _i.e._ the dark fire, before the "flash" has come.
+The second principle is the substratum or essence of the last three
+"qualities"--the tendencies toward unity, harmony, order, love, which
+he calls the _light-principle_. The third principle produces the union
+or synthesis of the other two--the principle of realization in body and
+form, the triumph over opposition of these two opposing principles in
+the exhibition of the real, the actual, the living, the conscious,
+where dark and light are both joined, but are dominated by another
+irreducible principle. To these three fundamental principles
+correspond the three supreme divine aspects: Father, Son, and Holy
+Ghost.[30]
+
+We are here, of course, far from a scientific account of the processes
+and evolution of the universe. Boehme {184} is no scientific genius
+and he did not dream that every item and event of the world of
+phenomena could be causally explained, without reference to any deeper
+abysmal world of Spirit. His mission is rather that of the prophet who
+"has eyes of his own." He is endeavouring to tell us, often no doubt
+in very laborious fashion, sometimes as "one who is tunnelling through
+long tracts of darkness," that this outside world which we see and
+describe is a parable, a pictorial drama, suggesting, hinting,
+revealing an inside world of Spirit and Will; that every slightest
+fragment of the seen is big with significance as a revelation of an
+unseen realm, which again is an egress from the unimaginable Splendour
+of God. He believes, like Paracelsus, that everything in
+Nature--plants, metals, and stars--"can be fundamentally searched out
+and comprehended" by the inward way of approach, can be read like an
+open book by the children of the Spirit who have caught the secret clue
+that leads in, and who have the key that unlocks the inner realm.[31]
+
+Obviously his "inner way of approach" works more successfully when
+applied to _man_ than when applied to plants and metals and stars--and
+when he writes of man, whether in the first or in the third person, he
+does often seem to have "eyes of his own," and to "hold the key that
+unlocks."
+
+It is an elemental idea with him that man is "a little world"--a
+microcosm--and expresses in himself all the properties of the great
+world--the macrocosm.[32] "As you find man to be," he writes, "just so
+is eternity. Consider man in body and soul, in good and evil, in light
+and darkness, in joy and sorrow, in power and weakness, in life and
+death--all is in man, both heaven and earth, stars and elements.
+Nothing can be named that is not man."[33] Every man's life is
+inwardly bottomless and opens from within into all the immeasurable
+depth of God. Eternity springs through time and reveals itself in
+every person, for the foundation property of the soul {185} of every
+man is essentially eternal, spiritual, and abysmal--it is a little drop
+out of the Fountain of the Life of God, it is a little sparkle of the
+Divine Splendour.[34] God is spoken of again and again as "man's
+native country," his true "origin and home"--"The soul of man is always
+seeking after its native country, out of which it has wandered, seeking
+to return home again to its rest in God."[25] "The soul of man," he
+says again, "has come out from the eternal Father, out from the Divine
+Centre, but this soul--with this high origin and this noble
+mark--stands always at the opening of two gates."[36] Two worlds, two
+mighty cosmic principles, make their appeal to his will. Two kingdoms
+wrestle in him, two natures strive for the mastery in his life, and he
+makes his world, his nature, his life, his eternal destiny by his
+choices: "Whatsoever thou buildest and sowest here in thy spirit, be it
+words, works, or thought, that will be thy eternal house."[37] "The
+good or evil that men do, by acts of will, enters into and forms the
+soul and so moulds its permanent habitation."[38] Adam once, and every
+man after him also once, has belonged, in the centre of the soul, to
+God, and whether it be Adam or some far-off descendant of him, each is
+the creator of his own real world, and settles for himself the
+atmosphere in which he shall live and the inner "tincture" of his
+abiding nature. "Adam fell"--and any man's name can here be
+substituted for "Adam"--"because, though he was a spark of God's
+eternal essence, he broke himself off and sundered himself from the
+universal Will--by contraction--and withdrew into self-seeking, and
+centred himself in selfishness. He broke the perfect temperature--or
+harmonious balance of qualities--and turned his will toward the dark
+world and the light in him grew dim."[39] To follow the dark world is
+to be Lucifer or fallen Adam, to follow the light world completely is
+to be Christ[40]--and before every soul the two {186} gates stand
+open.[41] In a powerful and penetrating passage he says: "We should
+take heed and beget that which is good out of ourselves. If we make an
+angel of ourselves we are that; if we make a devil of ourselves, we are
+that."[42]
+
+This last sentence is a good introduction to Boehme's conception of
+"the next world"--"the great beyond." He was as completely free of the
+crude idea that heaven is a shining locality in the sky, and hell a
+yawning pit of fire below the earth, as the most exact scientific
+scholar of the modern world is likely to be. He had grasped the
+essential and enduring character of man's spiritual nature so firmly
+that he ceased to have any further interest in the mythological aspects
+in which vivid and pictorial imagination has invested the unseen world.
+"God's presence itself," he says, "is heaven, and if God did but put
+away the veiling shadows, which now curtain thy sight, thou wouldst
+see, even where thou now art, the Face of God and the heavenly gate.
+God is so near that at any moment a holy Birth [a Birth into the Life
+of God] may be accomplished in thy heart,"[43] and, again, in the same
+book he writes: "If man's eyes were opened he would see God everywhere,
+for heaven is everywhere for those who are in the innermost Birth.
+When Stephen saw heaven opened and Jesus at the right hand of God, his
+spirit did not swing itself aloft into some heaven in the sky, but it
+rather penetrated into the innermost Birth where heaven always is.
+Thou must not think that God is a Being who is off in an upper heaven,
+or that when the soul departs it goes many hundred thousands of miles
+aloft. It does not need to do that, for as soon as it has entered the
+innermost Birth it is in heaven already with God--_near and far in God
+is one thing_."[44]
+
+The "next world"--"the beyond"--therefore, must not be thought of in
+terms of space and time, of here and there, of now and then, as a place
+to which we shall journey at the momentous moment of death: "the soul
+{187} needeth no going forth."[45] As soon as the external veil of
+flesh dissolves, each person is in his own country and has all the time
+been in it. There is nothing nearer to you than heaven and hell. To
+whichever of them you _incline_ and toward whichever of them you
+tend--that is most near you, and every man has in himself the key.[46]
+Heaven and hell are everywhere throughout the whole world. You need
+not seek them far off.
+
+It is always the nature of "Anti-Christ" and "Babel" and
+"opinion-peddlers" to seek God and heaven and hell above the stars or
+under the deep. There is only one "place" to look for God and that is
+in one's own soul, there is only one "region" in which to find heaven
+or hell, and that is in the nature and character of the person's own
+desire and will: "Even though the devil should go many millions of
+miles, desiring to see heaven and enter into it, yet he would still be
+in hell and could not see heaven at all."[47] The soul, Boehme says in
+substance, hath heaven or hell in itself. Heaven is the turning of the
+will into God's love; hell is the turning of the will into hate. Now
+when the body falls away the heavenly soul is thoroughly penetrated
+with the Love and Light of God, even as fire penetrates and enlightens
+white-hot iron, whereby it loses its darkness--this is heaven and this
+is the right hand of God. The soul that dwells in falsehood, lust,
+pride, envy, and anger carries hell in itself and cannot reach the
+Light and Love of God. Though it should go a thousand miles or a
+thousand times ten thousand miles--even climb beyond the spaces of the
+stars and the bounds of the universe--it would still remain in the same
+property and source of darkness as before.[48] The "next world"--"the
+world beyond"--is {188} just _this_ world, as it is in each one of us,
+with its essential spirit and nature and character clearly revealed and
+fulfilled. God creates and maintains no hell of ever-lasting torture;
+He builds and supports no heaven of endless glory. They are both
+formed out of the soul's own substance as it turns toward light or
+darkness, toward love or hate--in short, as "it keeps house," to use
+one of his vivid words, with the eternal nature of things.
+
+Something like this, then, was the universe which Boehme--with those
+"azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of Solomon's
+Temple"--saw there in Goerlitz, as he pegged his shoes. "Open your
+eyes," he once said, "and the whole world is full of God."[49] But he
+is not a pantheist, in the usual sense of that word, blurring away the
+lines between good and evil, or the boundaries which mark off self from
+self, and self from God. There is forever, to be sure, a hidden
+essence or substance in the soul which is from God, and which remains
+to the end unlost and unspoiled--something to which God can speak and
+to which His Light and Grace can make appeal; but I am indestructibly a
+real I, and God is in His true nature no vague Abyss--He eternally
+utters Himself as Person: "The first Abysmal God without beginning
+begets a comprehensible will which is Son. Thus the Abyss which in
+itself is an indescribable Nothing [nothing in particular] forms itself
+into Something [definite] through the Birth of a Son, and so is
+Spirit."[50] In God Himself there is only Good, only triumphing
+eternal Joy,[51] but as soon as finite processes appear, as soon as
+anything is differentiated into actuality, the potentialities of
+darkness and light appear, the possibilities of good and evil are
+there: "_All things consist in Yes or No. In order to have anything
+definite made manifest there must be a contrary therein--a Yes and a
+No._"[52] The universe, therefore, though it came forth out of the
+eternal Mother and remains still, in its deepest origin and being,
+rooted in the substance of God, is a {189} battleground of strife, an
+endless Armageddon. Both within and without the world is woven of
+mixed strands, a warp of darkness and a woof of light, and all beings
+possessed of will are thus actors in a mighty drama of eternal
+significance, with exits, not only at the end of the Fifth Act but
+throughout the play, through two gates into two worlds which are both
+all the time present here and now.
+
+
+
+[1] _Aurora_, xxi. 60-62.
+
+[2] Swinburne, _Erechtheus_.
+
+[3] See _Fifteenth Epistle_, 25.
+
+[4] _Fifth Epistle_, 50.
+
+[5] Like Paracelsus, he uses "sulphur" in a symbolic way to represent
+an active energy of the universe and a form of will in man. In a
+similar way, "mercury" stands for intelligence and spirit, and "salt"
+is the symbol for substance. No one could find in a chemist's shop the
+salt or sulphur that Boehme talks about!
+
+[6] There is a fine saying about Dante in the Ottimo Commento: "I, the
+writer, heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other
+than he would, but that many a time and oft he had made words say for
+him what they were not wont to say for other poets."
+
+[7] _Sig. re._ ix. 1-3. Paracelsus said, "Everything is the product of
+one creative effort," and, "There is nothing corporeal that does not
+possess a soul."
+
+[8] _The Supersensual Life_, p. 44.
+
+[9] Paracelsus and others used the term _Mysterium magnum_ to denote
+the original, but unoriginated, matter out of which all things were
+made. "Mysterium" is anything out of which something germinally
+contained in it can be developed.
+
+[10] _Mysterium magnum_, xxix. 1-2.
+
+[11] _Forty Questions_, i. 57.
+
+[12] _Sig. re._ ii. 4-15, and iii. 1-10.
+
+[13] _The Threefold Life of Man_, iii. 2.
+
+[14] _Aurora_, iii. 35-39.
+
+[15] _Ibid._ vi. 6-8; _Clavis_, 18-29.
+
+[16] _Sig. re._ xvi. i.
+
+[17] _Aurora_, xiii. 48-57; _Myst. mag._ viii. 31; _The Three
+Principles_, iv. 66.
+
+[18] _Sig. re._ xv. 38.
+
+[19] _Myst. mag._ viii. 27.
+
+[20] _Myst. mag._ xxix. 1-10.
+
+[21] _The Three Principles_, iv. 68-74; _The Threefold Life_, iv. 33.
+
+[22] _Myst. mag._ ix. 3-8.
+
+[23] _Aurora_, Preface 84.
+
+[24] Christopher Walton, _Notes and Materials for a Biography of Wm.
+Law_ (London, 1854), 55.
+
+[25] The great passages in which Boehme expounds the seven qualities
+are found in the _Aurora_, chaps. viii.-xi.; _Sig. re._ chap. xiv.;
+_The Clavis_, 54-132; though they are more or less definitely stated or
+implied in nearly everything he wrote. Seven "qualities" or
+"principles" or "sources" appear and reappear in ever shifting forms
+throughout the entire literature of Gnosticism, alchemy, and
+nature-mysticism.
+
+[26] _Aurora_, viii. 32-35.
+
+[27] Some of Boehme's enthusiastic friends insist that Sir Isaac
+Newton, who was an admirer of Boehme, "ploughed with Boehme's heifer,"
+_i.e._ got his suggestion of the law of universal gravitation from the
+philosopher of Goerlitz. See Walton, _Notes_, p. 46 and _passim_.
+
+[28] _Sig. re._ iv. _passim_.
+
+[29] _Sig. re._ xiii.
+
+[30] For fuller treatment of this point see Boutroux, _Historical
+Studies in Philosophy_, chapter on "Jacob Boehme, the German
+Philosopher," pp. 199-201.
+
+[31] _Third Epistle_, 33.
+
+[32] _Twenty-fourth Epistle_, 7; _Sig. re._ i.
+
+[33] _The Threefold Life_, vi. 47.
+
+[34] _The Three Princ._ xiv. 89; _First Epistle_, 42.
+
+[35] _The Three Princ._ x. 26; xvi. 50.
+
+[36] _Ibid._ x. 13.
+
+[37] _Aurora_, xviii. 49.
+
+[38] _Myst. mag._ xxii. 41.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ xviii. 31-43, given in substance.
+
+[40] _Ibid._ xxvi. 19. The place of Christ in Boehme's system will be
+given in the next chapter.
+
+[41] _Myst. mag._ xxvi. 5.
+
+[42] _Incarnation_, part ii. ix. 12-14.
+
+[43] _Aurora_, x. 100-103.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ xix. 56-59.
+
+[45] _The Supersensual Life_, 36.
+
+[46] _The Three Princ._ ix. 25-27 and xix. 33.
+
+[47] _Myst. mag._ viii. 28.
+
+[48] _The Supersensual Life_, 38. Every reader will naturally be
+reminded of Milton's great lines:
+
+ "The mind is its own place, and in itself
+ Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
+
+There were no doubt many _sources_ in Milton's time for such a
+conception, but the poet surely would read the translations of Boehme
+which were coming from the press all through the period of his literary
+activity.
+
+[49] _The Threefold Life_, xi. 106.
+
+[50] _Election_, i. 10-17.
+
+[51] _Aurora_, ii. 63.
+
+[52] _Theosoph. Quest._ iii. 2-4.
+
+
+
+
+{190}
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+JACOB BOEHME'S "WAY OF SALVATION"
+
+"I will write a Process or Way which I myself have gone."[1] Most
+writers who have treated of Boehme have mainly dealt with his
+_Weltanschauung_--his theosophical view of the Abyss and the worlds of
+time and eternity,--or they have devoted themselves to descriptions of
+his type of mysticism.[2] His important permanent contribution to
+Christianity is, however, to be found in his interpretation of the way,
+or, as he calls it, the process of salvation. Very much that he wrote
+about the procession of the universe is capricious and subjective. His
+interpretations of Genesis, and of Old Testament Scripture in general,
+are thoroughly uncritical and of value only as they reveal his own mind
+and his occasional flashes of insight. But his accounts of his own
+_experience_ and his message of the way to God possess an elemental and
+universal value, and belong among the precious words of the prophets of
+the race. His Way of Salvation is in direct line with the central
+ideas of Denck, Buenderlin, Entfelder, Franck, Schwenckfeld, and Weigel;
+that is, his emphasis is always, as was theirs, upon the native divine
+possibilities of the soul, upon the fact of a spiritual environment in
+immediate correspondence and co-operation with the soul, and upon the
+necessity of personal and inward experience as the key to every gate of
+life; but he puts more stress even than Schwenckfeld did {191} upon the
+epoch-making new birth, and he sees more in the Person of Christ as the
+way of salvation than any of the spiritual Reformers of the sixteenth
+century had seen, while his own personal experience was so unique and
+illuminating, so profound and transforming, that he was able to speak
+on divine things with a grasp and insight and with a spiritual
+authority beyond that attained by any of the reformers in this group.
+He has given, I think, as profound and as simple, and at the same time
+as vital an interpretation of salvation through Christ as the
+Reformation movement produced before the nineteenth century, and much
+that he said touches the very core of what seems to us to-day to be the
+heart of the Gospel, the central fact of mature religion.[3]
+
+As we have seen, Boehme does not in the least blink the tragic depth of
+sin, while he goes as far as anybody in holding that "the centre of
+man's soul came out of eternity,"[4] that "as a mother bringeth forth a
+child out of her own substance and nourisheth it therewith, so doth God
+with man his child,"[5] and that the inward ground and centre of the
+soul, with its divine capacity of response to Grace and Light, is an
+inalienable possession of every man.[6] Yet, at the same time, he
+insists that there is in every soul "both a yes and a no," a vision of
+the good and a _contrarium_, a hunger for the universal will of God and
+a hunger for the particular will of self.[7] The form of hunger, the
+inclination of desire, the attitude of will shapes the destiny, forms
+the fundamental disposition, and builds the life of every man into
+heaven or into hell--"a man puts on a garment of light or a garment of
+wrath as he puts on clothes."[8] To consent to false desire, to turn
+toward objects that feed only the particular selfish will, to live in
+the lower "qualities" of dark-fire is to {192} form a soul _tinctured_
+with darkness and sundered from the eternal root of Life. Lucifer went
+the whole way in his consent to false and evil desire. He said, "Evil
+be thou my good!" and formed his entire nature out of the
+dark-principle, and "his Light went out." Adam and his offspring after
+him, however, only dimmed the native Light and deadened the original
+power that belongs to one who comes from God, to live in heavenly
+harmony and joy. Man has fallen indeed, but he is not hopelessly lost,
+he is "forever seeking his native country," and he forever bears within
+himself an immortal seed which may burst into Life--into a
+"Lily-blossom."[9] The way of salvation for Boehme is the _process_ by
+which this original Light and power, dimmed and deadened by sin, are
+restored to the soul.
+
+He never tires of insisting that the restoration can come only by a
+_process of Life_, not by a "scheme" of theology. Like the early
+prophets of Israel, in their sweeping attacks on the ritual and
+sacrificial systems that were being substituted for moral and spiritual
+life, Boehme flings himself with holy passion against the substitution
+of doctrines of salvation for a real life-process of salvation,
+personally experienced in the soul. "Cain" and "Babel" are his two
+favourite types of the prevailing substitute-religion which he calls
+"verbal," or "historical," or "titular" Christianity.[10] "Whatever
+Babel teaches," he says, "of external imputed righteousness, or of
+external assumed adoption is without foundation or footing."[11] He is
+still only a follower of "Cain" who tries to cover his old, evil,
+unchanged self "with the purple mantle of Christ's death."[12] The
+"opinion" that the old man of evil-will can be "covered" with Christ's
+merit, the "faith" that His death pays off for us the debt of our sin
+is only "a supposed religion."[13] "Christianity," he says again,
+"does not consist in the mere knowing of history and applying the
+history-knowledge to ourselves, {193} saying: 'Christ died for us; He
+hath paid the ransom for us, so that we need do nothing but comfort
+ourselves therewith and steadfastly believe that it is so.'"[14] The
+"doctors" and "the wise world" and "the makers of opinion" will have it
+that Christ has suffered on the Cross for all our sins, and that we can
+be justified and acquitted of all our transgressions by what He did for
+us, but it is no true, safe way for the soul. To stake faith upon a
+history that once was, to look for "satisfaction" through the
+sufferings which Christ endured before we were born is to be "the child
+of an assumed grace," is to possess a mere external and historical
+faith that leaves the dim, weak soul where it was before. All such
+"invented works" and "supposed schemes" are of Anti-Christ, they "avail
+nothing" whatever toward the real process of salvation.[15]
+
+The gravamen of his charge is not that the "opinions" are false, or
+that the "history" is unimportant, but that "opinions" and "history"
+are taken as substitutes for religion itself, which is and must always
+be an actual inward process constructing a new and victorious life in
+the person himself. "All fictions, I say, and devices which men
+contrive to come to God by are lost labour and vain endeavour _without
+a new mind_. Verbal forgiveness and outward imputation of
+righteousness are false and vain comforts--soft cushions for the evil
+soul--without the creation of a will wholly new, which loveth and
+willeth evil no more."[16] The whole problem, then, is the problem of
+the formation of a new vision, a new desire, a new will, and Boehme
+finds the solution of this deepest human problem in Christ. Christ is
+the Light-revelation of God--the shining forth of the Light and Love
+nature of the Eternal God. It must not be supposed for a moment that
+once--before satisfaction was made to Him--God was an angry God who had
+to be "reconciled" by a transaction, or that there was _a time in
+history_ when God began to reveal His Heart in a Christ-revelation, or
+{194} that when Christ became man, Deity divided itself into sundered
+Persons.[17] "No. You ought not to have such thoughts," Boehme says.
+The Heart and Light and Love of God are from eternity. Christ has
+never sundered or broken Himself away from God; they are not two but
+forever One. All the Light and Love and Joy of God have blossomed into
+the Christ-manifestation and become revealed in Him. Like everything
+else in the universe, Christ is both outward and inward. He belongs in
+the eternal inward world and He also has had His temporal manifestation
+in the visible world. The Heart of God became a human soul, brought
+the fulness of the Deity into humanity, and slew the spirit of the
+world.[18] The inward penetrated the outward and illuminated it with
+Light.[19] Christ entered into humanity and tinctured it with
+Deity.[20] In Him the Heart of God became man, and in the power of the
+heavenly Light He wrestled with our wild human nature and conquered
+it.[21] Eternity and time are united in Him.[22] He is the wedding
+chamber of God and man.[23] He is God and man in one undivided
+Person.[24] He is actual God; He is essential man--the God-man, the
+man-God, in whom the arms of everlasting Love are outstretched and
+through whom humanity is brought into the power of the Eternal God.[25]
+It was in this "dear Emmanuel," as he often calls Christ, that "Love
+became man and put on our human flesh and our human soul,"[26] and the
+full power of Eternal Love stood revealed in time, for "One who is Love
+itself was born of our own very birth."[27] The Cross was not a
+transaction. It was the culmination of this mighty Love, for "here on
+the cross hung God and man"--God's Love springing forth in a soul
+strong enough to show it in its full scope.[28]
+
+But let no person think that he can "cover himself with the purple
+mantle of Christ's sufferings and death," {195} and so win his
+salvation: "Thou thyself," he says, "must go through Christ's whole
+journey, and enter wholly into His process."[29] "We become children
+of God in Christ," he wrote in one of his Epistles, "not by an outward,
+adventitious show of appropriating Grace, not through some merit of
+Grace appropriated from without, or received in an historical
+apprehension of being justified by another, but through an inward,
+resident Grace, which regenerates us into childlikeness, so that Christ
+the conqueror of death arises in us and becomes a dominating operation
+in us."[30] This is the heart of his entire message. Every step must
+be experimental. Salvation is an inward process, and Christ is
+efficacious and effective because _He lives and operates in us_. "The
+suffering and death of Christ," he says, "avail only for those who die
+to their own will in and with Christ, and are buried with Him to a new
+will and obedience, and hate sin; who put on Christ in His suffering,
+reproach, and persecution, take His cross upon them and follow Him
+under His red banner; to those who put on Christ in His process and now
+become in the inward spiritual man Christ's members and the Temple of
+God who dwells in us. No one has a right to comfort himself with
+Christ's merits unless he desires wholly to put on Christ in himself.
+He is not a Christian until he has put Him on by true repentance and
+conversion to Him with absolute resignation and self-denial, so that
+Christ espouseth and betrotheth Himself with him. . . . For a
+Christian must be born of Christ and must die to the will of Adam. He
+must have Christ in him and be a member of His Life according to the
+spiritual man."[31]
+
+Faith, which is always the key-word in any person's interpretation of
+Christianity, is for Boehme a dynamic process of appropriating Christ,
+and of re-living Him. "Faith," he writes in his treatise on _The
+Incarnation_, {196} "is not historical knowledge for a man to make
+articles of it and to depend on them, but faith is one spirit with God,
+it is the activity of God; it is free, but only for the right and for
+pure Love, in which it draws the breath of its power and strength. It
+is, finally, itself the substance."[32] Faith is, thus, not knowledge,
+it is not believing facts of history, it is not accepting metaphysical
+dogma. It is, as he is never weary of saying, "strong earnestness of
+spirit," the earnest will to live in the inward and eternal, passionate
+hunger and thirst for God, and finally the act of receiving Christ into
+the soul as a present power and spirit to live by. "I must die," he
+wrote, "with my outward man [the man of self-centred will] in Christ's
+death and arise and live anew in Him. Therefore I live now by the will
+of faith in the spirit of Christ and receive Christ with His humanity
+into my will. He makes through me a manifestation of the spiritual
+world and introduces the true Love-sound into the harp-strings of my
+life. He became that which I am, and now He has made me that which He
+is!"[33]
+
+Another word for this efficacious and dynamic Faith is "Birth" or
+"innermost Birth," by which Boehme means the act of discovering the
+Gate to the Heart and Love and Light of God, and of entering it. "The
+Son of God, the Eternal Word of the Father, the Glance and Brightness
+and Power of Eternal Light must become man and _be born in you_;
+otherwise you are in the dark stable and go about groping."[34] "If
+thou art born of God, then within the circle of thy own life is the
+whole undivided Heart of God."[35] It is a transforming event by which
+one swings over from life in the outer to life in the inner world, from
+life in the dark world to life in the light world, and is born into the
+kingdom, or principle, which Christ revealed in His triumphant
+spiritual Life. The human spirit, by this innermost Birth, reaches the
+principle of Life by which Christ lived, and the gate into heaven is
+opened and paradise is in the soul. In a {197} beautiful passage he
+says: "This birth must be wrought within you. The Heart, or the Son of
+God must arise in the birth of your life, and then you are in Christ
+and He is in you, and all that He and the Father have is yours; and as
+the Son is one with the Father, so also the new man is one with the
+Father and with the Son, one virtue, one power, one light, one life,
+one eternal paradise, one enduring substance, one Father, Son, and Holy
+Ghost, and thou His child!"[36] God is no longer conceived as far
+away. He is now with His Love and Light as near as the soul is to
+itself, and the joy of being born in Christ is like the joy of parents
+when a little child is born to them.[37] God's will now becomes the
+man's will, he turns back into the unity from which he broke away, he
+sees now in one moment what all the doctors in the schools, on the mere
+level of reason, have never seen, and his inward eye is so opened that
+he knows God as soon as his eye turns toward Him.[38]
+
+This Faith-process, or innermost life-birth, is not the act of a moment
+that is over and done with. It means the progressive formation of a
+new man within the man, so that the real Christian becomes a living
+branch in a mighty Christ-Tree. Just as Adam was the trunk of a great
+race-tree of fallen humanity, Christ is to be the Eternal Life-Tree of
+the universe in whom all the new-born souls of men shall live as
+springing, flowering branches or twigs: God created only one Man; all
+other men are twigs of the One Stem.[39] "In Christ," he says, "we are
+all only one, as a tree in many boughs and branches," and, with a
+return to autobiography, Boehme adds, "His Life has been brought into
+mine, so that I am atoned with Him in His Love. The will of Christ has
+entered into humanity again in me, and now my will in me enters into
+His humanity."[40] He writes to one of his Silesian friends: "You are
+a growing branch in the Life-Tree of God in Christ, in whom all the
+children of God are also branches," and he adds that there is "no other
+faith {198} which saves except Christ in us," the Life of our
+lives.[41] Sometimes he calls this triumphant experience the birth of
+a new branch in Christ's Life-Tree, sometimes the birth of the Lily in
+Christ's garden of flowers, sometimes it is the birth of the immortal
+seed. Sometimes it is uniting in life and spirit with Him who is "the
+Treader on the Serpent," sometimes it is finding the noble Virgin,
+sometimes it is discovering the Philosopher's Stone, sometimes it is
+winning the precious Diadem, sometimes it is possessing the key which
+unlocks the Door, sometimes it is arriving at the Sabbath Quiet of the
+soul. These are only a variety of ways, many of them forgotten
+inheritances from alchemy and astrology, of saying that the soul finds
+its goal in an experience which binds it into one common corporate life
+with Christ and so into an elemental Love-Unity with God: whoever is
+born of Christ liveth and walketh in Him, puts Him on in His suffering,
+death, and resurrection, becomes a member of Christ's body, is
+"tinctured" with His spirit, and has his own human life rooted in the
+Love of God.[42] Here, then, in the creation and formation of this
+organic Life-Tree the universe attains its ultimate goal. It is wholly
+an achievement of free will, of holy choice. The dark Principle is not
+annihilated, is not suppressed, but the Heart of God moves ever on in a
+steadily growing triumph, binding soul after soul into the divine
+Igdrasil Tree of the Light Universe, in a unity that is not now the
+unity of negation and undifferentiation--an Abyss that swallows up all
+that is in it,--but a unity of many wills united in a spirit of concord
+and love, many persons formed by holy desire into one unbroken symphony
+as harps of God.
+
+With the change of _centre_ in the inner man corresponds also the outer
+life of word and deed, for the outer, here as everywhere, is only the
+"signature" of an inner which fits it: "A man must show the root of the
+tree out of which spirit and flesh have their origin."[43] When the
+will becomes new-born and the soul unites itself as a twig {199} in
+Christ's Life-Tree, then it ceases to love sin and will it. When God
+brings His will into birth in us, He gives us virtue and power to will
+what He wills, and to leave our sins behind.[44] The attitude of hate,
+the spirit of war are marks of the old unchanged nature, and are
+heathenish and not Christian. When Christ is formed in the inner
+ground of the soul, a man leaves the sword in the sheath and lives in
+the virtue and power of peace and love. "What will Christ say," he
+asks the ministers of the Church of his day, "when He sees your
+apostolic hearts covered with armor? When He gave you the sword of the
+Spirit, did He command you to fight and make war, or to instigate kings
+and princes to put on the sword and kill?"[45]
+
+Like the prophets of Israel, he feels intensely the sufferings of the
+poor and the oppressed, and he breaks out frequently into a biting
+satire on a kind of Christianity which not only neglects the true
+_cure_ of soul and body, but "consumes the sweat and blood of the
+needy," and feeds upon "the sighs and groans and tears of the
+poor."[46] The true idea of a _real_ Christianity is "fraternity in
+the Life of Christ"--"thy brother's soul," he says, "is a fellow-member
+with thy soul,"[47] and he insists, as though it were the mighty burden
+of his spirit, that all possessions, goods, and talents shall
+contribute to the common life of humanity and to the benefit of the
+social group.[48] It is much better for parents to labour to form good
+souls in their children than to strive to gather and to leave behind
+for them great riches and abundance of goods![49] Self-desire is a
+ground not only of personal disquiet but also of social disturbance,
+and Boehme feels that the way to spread peace and joy through the world
+is to cultivate the Love-spirit of Christ and to practice it in
+fellowship with men.
+
+Like his German predecessor, Sebastian Franck, he is {200} primarily
+concerned with the invisible Church, and he holds lightly to the
+empirical Church as he knows it. The Church to which his spirit is
+dedicated is the organic Life-Tree of which Christ is the living Stem.
+The holy Zion is not from without, he says, it is built up of those who
+are joined to Christ and who all live together in one city which is
+Christ in us.[50] A Christian in the life belongs to no sect, he
+ceases to wrangle over opinions and words, he dwells in the midst of
+sects and Babel-churches, but he keeps above the controversies and
+contentions, and "puts his knowing and willing into the Life of
+Christ," and works quietly on toward the formation and triumph of the
+one true Christian Church,[51] which will be, when its glory is
+complete, the visible expression of the Divine Life-Tree.
+
+He dislikes, as much as did the English Quaker, George Fox, the custom
+of calling "stone houses" churches, and he will not admit that a
+building is anything but a building: "Stone houses, called churches,
+have no greater holiness than other houses, for they are built of stone
+and other such material, as other houses are, and God is no more
+powerful in them than He is in other houses, but the Church [_i.e._ the
+Congregation] which meets there, if the members of it bind themselves
+by prayer into one body in Christ, is a holy Temple of Jesus
+Christ."[52]
+
+His attitude toward outward sacraments consistently fits in with all
+his central teachings. The outward, for Boehme, is never unimportant.
+It is always significant and can always be used as a parable or symbol
+of something inner and eternal. But the outward is at best only
+temporal, only symbolic, and it becomes a hindrance if it is taken for
+the real substance of which it is only the outward "signature": "The
+form shall be destroyed and shall cease with time, but the spirit
+remains forever."[53] The sacraments, he declares, do not take away
+sin, for men go to church all their lives and receive the sacraments
+{201} and remain as wicked and beastly as ever--while a holy man always
+has a Church within himself and an inward ministry.[54] Blessedness,
+therefore, lies not in the outward, but in the life and power of the
+inward spirit, and it is only a Babel-Church that claims the right to
+cast out those who have the real substance and neglect only the outward
+form.[55] In his _Treatise on the Holy Supper_, he wrote: "It is not
+enough for a man to hear sermons preached, and to be baptised in the
+name of Christ, and to go to the Supper. This maketh no Christian.
+For that, there must be _earnestness_. No person is a Christian unless
+Christ live and work in him."[56]
+
+The pith and heart of Christianity, the consummate goal of the way of
+Salvation, for Boehme is, as we have seen, not "history" and not any
+kind of outward "form" or "letter"--_buchstaebliches Wort_,--it is an
+experience in which the soul finds itself "at the top of Jacob's
+ladder," and feels its life in God and God's Life in it in an ineffable
+Love-union. He has himself given a very simple and penetrating account
+of this type of experience drawn from what he calls his own book of
+life: "Finding within myself a powerful _contrarium_, namely, the
+desires that belong to flesh and blood, I began to fight a hard battle
+against my corrupted nature, and with the aid of God I made up my mind
+to overcome the inherited evil will, to break it, and to enter wholly
+into the Love of God. . . . This, however, was not possible for me to
+accomplish, but I stood firmly by my _earnest resolution_, and fought a
+hard battle with myself. Now while I was wrestling and battling, being
+aided by God, a wonderful light arose within my soul. It was a light
+entirely foreign to my unruly nature, but in it I recognized the true
+nature of God and man, and the relation existing between them, a thing
+which heretofore I had never understood."[57] In one of his other
+autobiographical passages, he says that after much earnest seeking and
+desire and many a hard repulse, "the Gate was opened!" These are {202}
+characteristic accounts of a profound mystical experience. There had
+been long stress and inward battle, the tension of a divided self, and
+then a great ground swell of earnest will--a resolve, he says, to put
+my life in hazard rather than give over, when "a wonderful light arose
+within the soul" and "the Gate was opened." And "when this mighty
+light fell upon me, I saw," he says, in still another description, "in
+an effectual peculiar manner, and I knew in the spirit."[58]
+
+The central aspect of his experience was plainly an overmastering
+_conviction_ of contact with, an immersion into, a deeper world of
+spirit and of inner unity of life and spirit with this deeper world.
+His own personal spirit united, as he once put it, "with the innermost
+Birth in God and stood in the Light."[59] He discovered that "God goes
+clean another way to work" than by the way of reasoning or of sense
+experience[60]--instead of waiting for man to climb up to Him, He
+climbs up into man's soul.[61] By a new and inner way, to change the
+figure, the tides of the shoreless Divine Sea break in upon the life of
+a man and bathe his entire being. It seems to Boehme, at one time,
+like the rising of a mid-noon Sun, with illuminating rays, and he
+describes the experience in terms of Light and enlarged Vision, or,
+again, it appears like the bursting open of a secret door into a world
+of new dimensions, and he calls it the opening of the Gate, or now
+again he feels as though the elemental creative power of God had burst
+into operation within him and that a mighty birth-process had lifted
+him to a new kingdom, or to a new order of nature, or, finally, hushed
+and soothed and healed as though he had suddenly found the breast of an
+infinite Mother, he describes his state as "the innermost Quiet"--the
+return to "the soul's eternal native country and abiding Home."
+Descriptions here all fail and are only "stammering words of a child,"
+as Boehme himself says. But, as a matter of fact, descriptions fail
+and fall short in the case of all genuine life-experiences, {203} even
+those that are most universal and common to the race. How one feels
+when after nights of agony from watching over a child that is hovering
+between life and death, and seemingly certain to slip away from human
+reach, the doctor says, "He has passed the crisis and the danger is
+over!" one cannot describe. Whenever it is a matter that concerns the
+inner _quick_ of the soul, all words are the stammerings of a child.
+
+The true mystical experience is not primarily a knowledge-experience,
+it is not the apprehension of one more describable fact to be added to
+our total stock of information--what Boehme so often calls "opinions"
+and "history,"--it is a sudden plunge or immersion into the stream of
+Life itself, it is an interior appreciation of the higher meaning of
+life by the discovery of a way of entering the Life-process, or,
+better, of letting the Life-process enter you, on a higher level than
+is usual. Life always advances by a kind of leap, an _elan_, which
+would not have been predicted or anticipated, but which, now it is here
+revealed in a being with a novel function and a higher capacity of
+survival, will lift the whole scale of life henceforth to a new level.
+So, in some way which must for the present at least remain mysterious,
+the eternal Source of Life, when it finds a human door ready for its
+entrance, breaks in--or shall we say that the _earnest will_ climbs up
+and pushes open the door into new regions in this eternal Life
+Source?--and it seems then, as Boehme says, as though "the true nature
+of God and man and the true relation between God and man" had been
+found. The mystical experience is, thus, one way, perhaps the highest
+we have yet discovered, of entering the Life-process itself and of
+gaining an interior appreciation of Reality by living in the central
+stream and flow of it, so that the Spirit can "break through" and can
+"see into the Depth of Deity."
+
+Boehme appears to hold two inconsistent and seemingly contradictory
+views about the human attitude which is the psychological pre-condition
+for this epoch-making experience. In his own autobiographical {204}
+accounts, he always refers to the part that _earnest resolution_ has
+played in bringing success to his momentous quest. No great mystic
+since St. Augustine has made more of the will in spiritual matters than
+he does. We have seen how the doors to both world-kingdoms stand
+before the soul, and how "free-will," "earnest purpose," "decisive
+endeavour" settle for each soul which door shall open and which shall
+shut, and so determine its eternal destiny. "Election" is, for Boehme,
+a fiction of the false imagination, a "Babel-opinion," a perverse
+invention of "the Church of Cain." Christ never says "thou couldst
+not," but rather "thou wouldst not."[62]
+
+Not only does he, in a general way, thus make the will the decisive
+element in human destiny, he also implies that the creative "flash" of
+spiritual insight, "the innermost birth" which brings the soul into
+living union with its source is due, on the human side, to
+"resolution," to "earnestness," to "valiant wrestling," to a brave
+venture of faith that risks everything. It requires "mighty
+endurance," "hard labour," "stoutness of spirit," and "a great storm,
+assault, and onset" to open the Gate. In a word, the key to any
+important spiritual experience is _intention_, inward pre-perception,
+that holds the mind intently focussed in expectation, without which the
+"flash" of spiritual vision is not likely to come.
+
+But on the other hand Boehme is a powerful exponent of the idea that
+desire and will must utterly, absolutely die before God can come to
+birth in the soul--"Christ is born and lives in our Nothingness."[63] A
+man, he says, must die wholly to self-hood, forsake it and enter again
+into the original Nothing,--the eternal Unity in which nothing is
+willed in particular,--before God can have His way with him; all sin
+arises from self-hood, from desire.[64] "How," asks a disciple in one
+of Boehme's imaginary dialogues, "shall I come to the hidden centre
+where God dwelleth and not man? Tell me plainly, loving sir, how it is
+to be found and entered into?"
+
+{205}
+
+_The Master_: "There where the soul hath slain its own will and willeth
+no more anything of itself." . . .
+
+_The Disciple_: "But how shall I comprehend it?"
+
+_The Master_: "If thou goest about to comprehend in thy own will, it
+flieth from thee, but if thou dost surrender thyself wholly, then thou
+art dead to thy own will, and Love will be the Life of thy nature."[65]
+He seems to go as far in this direction toward the annihilation of
+desire, negation of the finite, and loss of self-hood as any of the
+pantheistic mystics. This sample passage will indicate his teaching:
+"When thou art wholly gone forth from the creature and become nothing
+to all that is nature and creature, then thou art in that Eternal One
+which is God Himself, and then thou shalt experience the supreme virtue
+of Love."[66]
+
+These two diverse statements are, however, not as inconsistent as they
+at first seem. The _will_, the _intention_ that is a psychological
+preparation for this mystical experience is a will washed and purged of
+selfish impulse and self-seeking aims. It is an _intention_ that
+cannot be described in terms of any finite "content." It is the
+intense heave of the whole undivided being toward God with no
+reservation, no calculation of return profits, no thought even of
+isolated and independent personality. A true account of consciousness,
+preceding the moment of bursting through the Gate, might emphasize with
+equal accuracy either the "earnest resolution," "the storm and onset of
+will," or "the annihilation of particular desire," "the surrender of
+individualistic self-hood," "death to own will in the Life and Virtue
+of Love."
+
+The effects of such an experience as that which came to Boehme, if we
+may take his case as typical, are (1) The birth of an inner conviction
+of God's immediate and environing Presence amounting to axiomatic
+certainty--faith through experience has become "the substance," and "is
+now one spirit with God"; (2) The radiation of the whole being with "a
+joy like that which parents have at the birth of their first-born
+child"--the joy now of the {206} soul crying, "Abba"; (3) A vastly
+heightened perception of what is involved in the eternal nature of the
+religious life and in the spiritual relation between the soul and God,
+_i.e._ increased ability to see what promotes and furthers the soul's
+health and development; (4) A unification, co-ordination, and
+centralizing of the inner faculties, so that there is an increment of
+power revealed in the entire personality; and (5) An increase of
+clarity and a sharpening of focus in the perception of moral
+distinctions together with a distinctly heightened moral and social
+passion.
+
+Boehme himself always believed, further, that his entire system of
+ideas, his philosophy of the universe, and his way of salvation were a
+"revelation" of the Spirit to him,--in a word, that his wisdom was
+"theosophy," a God-communicated knowledge. I have no desire to mark
+off dogmatically the scope and possible limits of "revelation," nor is
+it necessary here to discuss the abstract question whether "ideas" are
+ever "communicated" to a mind _ab extra_, and without the mediation of
+subjective processes, or not. In the concrete case of Jacob Boehme, I
+do not find any compelling evidence of the unmediated communication of
+ideas. He was a man of unusual native capacity, and, though untrained,
+his mind possessed a high order of range and quality, and swept, as he
+was, by a mighty transforming experience, he _found himself_ in novel
+fashion, and was the recipient of inspirations, which fired and fused
+his soul, gave him heightened insight into the significance of things
+old and new, and often enabled him to build better than he knew. He
+is, however, obviously using the stock of ideas which his generation
+and those early and late before it, had made "part of the necessary air
+men breathed." His terminology and symbolism were as old as mythology,
+and were the warp and woof of the nature philosophies and the alchemy
+of his day. His impressive and spiritual interpretation of
+Christianity is always deep and vital, and freighted with the weight of
+his own inward direct appreciation of God's revelation of Himself in
+Christ, {207} but even here he is walking on a road which many brave
+souls before him had helped to build, and we cannot with truth say that
+he supplies us with a new gospel which had been privately
+"communicated" to him. In fact, the portions of his voluminous
+writings which bear the mark of having been written as automatic
+script--by "this hand," as he often says--are the chaotic and confused
+portions, full of monotonous repetitions, of undigested and
+indigestible phrases and the dreary re-shufflings of sub-conscious
+wreckage. Boehme used to say that "in the time of the lily" his
+writings would be "much sought after." But I doubt if, even "in the
+time of the lily," most persons will have the patience to read this
+shoemaker-prophet's books in their present form, that is, if "in the
+time of the lily" men still enjoy and prize intelligence and lucidity;
+but there already is enough of "the lily-spirit" in the world to
+appreciate and to give thanks for the experience, the flashes of
+insight, the simple wisdom, the brave sincerity, the inner certainty of
+the true World within the world we see, and the spiritual message of
+"the way to the soul's native Country," which he has given us.
+
+
+
+[1] _True Repentance_, i.
+
+[2] I have given his _Weltanschauung_ in the previous chapter, and I
+shall discuss his mysticism at the end of this chapter.
+
+[3] Hegel says that Boehme's piety is "in the highest degree deep and
+inward."--_History of Philos._ iii. p. 216.
+
+[4] _True Resignation_, iii. 20.
+
+[5] _The Three Princ._, Preface, 4.
+
+[6] "There is in every man an incorporate ground of Grace, an inner
+Temple of Christ, the soul's immortal Dowry. No man can sell or pawn
+this ground of Grace, this habitation and dwelling-place of Christ. It
+remains unlost as the possession of God--an inward Ground and spiritual
+substance."--_Myst. mag._ lxxiv. 20-33, freely rendered.
+
+[7] _Sig. re._ xv. 45.
+
+[8] _Aurora_, xviii. 43.
+
+[9] _The Three Princ._, xiv. 3 and 12; also _ibid._ 85 and 88.
+
+[10] _Myst. mag._ xxvii. 41.
+
+[11] _Ninth Epistle_, 16.
+
+[12] _Myst. mag._ xxvii. _passim_; also _Seventh Epistle_, 11-14.
+
+[13] _Tenth Epistle_, 13-14.
+
+[14] _Regeneration_, 6.
+
+[15] For a sample passage see _Sig. re._ xv. 22-47.
+
+[16] _True Resignation_, 30-41. Freely rendered.
+
+[17] _The Three Princ._ xxxiii. 8-17.
+
+[18] _Ibid._ xix. 6.
+
+[19] _Sig. re._ ix. 67.
+
+[20] _Ibid._ xi. 88.
+
+[21] _Aurora_, Preface, 27.
+
+[22] _Sig. re._ xi. 80.
+
+[23] Prayer in _True Repentance_.
+
+[24] _Three Princ._ xxii. 81.
+
+[25] _Myst. mag._ lxx. 7-10; _Three Princ._ xviii. 80; and
+_Supersensual Life_, 27.
+
+[26] _Three. Princ._ xxv. 43.
+
+[27] _Ibid._ xxv. 6.
+
+[28] Read _Ibid._ xxv. 7-41.
+
+[29] _True Repentance_.
+
+[30] _First Epistle_, 6. Hegel well says of Boehme: "What marks him
+out and makes him noteworthy is the Protestant principle of placing the
+intellectual world within one's own mind and heart, and of experiencing
+and knowing and feeling in one's own self-consciousness all that was
+formerly conceived as a Beyond."--_History of Philos._ iii. p. 191.
+
+[31] _Tenth Epistle_, 16-19.
+
+[32] _Incarnation_, part iii. chap. i. 5-15.
+
+[33] _Sig. re._ xii. 10-13.
+
+[34] _The Threefold Life_, iii. 31.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ vi. 71.
+
+[36] _The Three Princ._ iv. 9.
+
+[37] _Aurora_, xix. 52-66.
+
+[38] _Myst. mag._ lxxii. 7-10.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ xxiv. 17.
+
+[40] _Sig. re._ ix. 63.
+
+[41] _Seventh Epistle_, 1.
+
+[42] _Ibid._, 6 and 12.
+
+[43] _Apology to Stiefel_, 23.
+
+[44] _True Resignation_, iii. 21.
+
+[45] _Myst. mag._ lxii. 25.
+
+[46] _The Three Principles_, xix. 47; xxi. 32.; _Sig. re._ viii. 27.
+
+[47] _Forty Questions_, xii. 39.
+
+[48] For an example of it, see _Myst. mag._ lxxiv. 46.
+
+[49] _Forty Questions_, x. 9.
+
+[50] _Fourth Epistle_, 32, and _True Repentance_.
+
+[51] _Regeneration_, 161-162.
+
+[52] _Myst. mag._ lxiii. 47. This theme constantly reappears.
+
+[53] _Sig. re._ xv. 37.
+
+[54] _Resignation_, vi. 134-151.
+
+[55] _Forty Questions_, xiv. 17-19.
+
+[56] _Op. cit._ iv. 16.
+
+[57] Von Hartmann's _Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme_, p. 50.
+
+[58] _Twenty-fifth Epistle_, 2.
+
+[59] _Aurora_, xix. 95.
+
+[60] _Twenty-sixth Epistle_, 7.
+
+[61] _Aurora_, xviii. 9.
+
+[62] _Sig. re._ xvi. 38.
+
+[63] _Ibid._ ix. 65.
+
+[64] _Ibid._ xiii. 27 and xv. 9.
+
+[65] _The Supersensual Life_, 29 and 30.
+
+[66] _Ibid._ 27.
+
+
+
+
+{208}
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+JACOB BOEHME'S INFLUENCE IN ENGLAND
+
+The first appearance in English of any of the writings of Jacob Boehme
+was in 1645, when a tiny volume was issued with the title: _Two
+Theosophical Epistles, Englished_.
+
+There had appeared a year earlier (1644) a seven-page biography of
+Boehme which was the first presentation of him to the English reader.
+This brief sketch contains the well-known incidents which became the
+stock material for the later accounts of his life.[1] It also contained
+the following quaint description of Boehme which was the model for all
+the portraits of the Teutonic philosopher in the English biographies of
+him: "The stature of his outward body was almost of no Personage; his
+person was little and leane, with browes somewhat inbowed; high
+Temples, somewhat hauk-nosed: His eyes were gray and somewhat heaven
+blew, and otherwise as the Windows in Solomon's Temple: He had a thin
+Beard; a small low Voyce. His Speech was lovely. He was modest in his
+Behaviour, humble in his conversation and meeke in his heart. His
+spirit was highly enlightened by God, as is to be seen and discerned in
+the Divine Light out of his writings."
+
+The slender volume of _Theosophical Epistles_ was followed by another
+little book issued a year later (1646), {209} consisting of a Discourse
+delivered in Latin in the Schools at Cambridge by Charles Hotham,
+Rector of Wigan. This Discourse was translated into English by the
+author's brother, Justice Durant Hotham, and was published under the
+title: _Introduction to Teutonic Philosophy, or A Determination
+concerning the Original of the Soul_, Englished by D. F. [Durant
+Frater], 1650. This interesting little volume, full of quaint phrase
+and strange speculation, reflects throughout its pages the profound
+influence of Boehme on these two brothers. The Preface to the
+Englished edition written by Justice Hotham not only shows specific
+marks of Boehme's influence upon a high-minded and scholarly man, but
+it also reveals in an impressive way a type of thought that was very
+prevalent in England at this period of commotion. "There are," Justice
+Hotham says, "two islands of exceeding danger, yet built upon and
+inhabited and defended as part of the main continent of Truth. The
+first is called: 'I believe as the Church believeth.' Happy man whom
+so easie labour hath set on the shore of wisdom! The other island is
+called: 'whatsoever the Church believes that will I not believe.'"
+Both these "islands" seem to him "exceeding dangerous." To adopt as
+truth what the Church has believed, solely because the Church has
+believed it, to forego the personal quest and to arrive at "the shores
+of wisdom" without the venturous voyage, is "too easie labour" for the
+soul. But, nevertheless, he feels that the opposite danger--the danger
+of negating a truth merely because the Church affirms it--is even more
+serious. It is wise to maintain an attitude of "much reverence" toward
+the "unanimous consent of good and pious men in sacred matters." He
+suggests that the way of wisdom consists in making the "I believe" of
+the Church "neither a fetter nor a scandel." "May I be," he says, "in
+the bed-route of those Seekers that, distrusting the known and
+experienced deceits of their own Reason, walk unfettered in the quest
+of truth, . . . not hunting those poor soules with Dogge and speare
+whose dimme sight hath led them into desert and unbeated {210} paths."
+This was in all probability the Justice Hotham of whom George Fox
+wrote: "He was a pretty tender man yt had had some experiences of God's
+workeinge in his hearte: & after yt I had some discourse with him off
+ye things of God hee tooke mee Into his Closett & saide _hee had knowne
+yt principle_ [of the Light] _this 10 yeere_: & hee was glad yt ye
+Lorde did now publish it abroade to ye people."[2]
+
+Like his Teutonic master, Justice Hotham distrusts Reason and Sense as
+spiritual guides. They are at best, he says, "but guides of the night,
+dim lights set up, far distant from Truth's stately mansion, to lead
+poor groping souls in this world's affairs." The surer Guide is within
+the soul itself, for the soul of man, he insists, has "a noble descent
+from eternal essences" and "our nobel Genealogy should mind us of our
+Father's House and make us weary of tutelage under hairy Faunes and
+cloven-footed Satyres."[3] He shows that he has lost all interest in
+theological speculations that assume a God remote in time and space, a
+God who once created a world and left it to go to ruin. He reminds his
+readers that the God in whom he believes is "yet alive and still
+speaks."[4] In the light of this Preface, in which he declares that he
+has "suckt in truth from divinest philosophy" from his childhood, it is
+not strange that he welcomed Fox, when the latter appeared in Yorkshire
+in 1651, proclaiming an inward Light and a present God near at hand,
+nor is it surprising that Hotham said to the young prophet of the
+inward Guide: "If God had not raised uppe this principle of light and
+life, ye nation had beene overspread with rantism . . . but this
+principle of truth overthrew ye roote & grounde of there [_i.e._ the
+Ranters'] principle."[5]
+
+The enthusiasm of Justice Hotham for his Teutonic master gets fervid
+expression at the end of his Preface as follows: "Whatever the thrice
+great Hermes [Hermes Trismegistus] delivered as oracles from his
+prophetical tripos, or Pythagoras spake by authority or {211} Socrates
+debated or Aristotle affirmed; yea, whatever divine Plato prophesied or
+Plotinus proved: this and all this, or a far higher and profounder
+philosophy is (I think) contained in the Teutonick's writings. And if
+there be any friendly medium which can possibly reconcile these ancient
+differences between the nobler wisdom which hath fixt her Palace in
+Holy Writ and her stubborn handmaid, Naturall Reason: this happy
+marriage of the Spirit and Soul, this wonderful consent of discords in
+one harmony, we owe in great measure to Teutonicus his skill!"
+
+The central problem of the _Discourse_, written by the brother, Charles
+Hotham, is the origin of the soul. After the manner of his German
+teacher, the English disciple finds the origin of man's soul in "the
+bottomless, immeasurable Abyss of the Godhead," in "the great deep of
+the perpetually eternal God." Man is an epitome of the universe. He
+unites in himself all the contrary principles of the worlds visible and
+invisible, he is a unity of body and soul, a centre of light and
+darkness, and in him is a "supreme region," or "Divine Principle," "by
+the mediation of which man has direct fellowship with God." In man,
+who thus epitomizes all the spheres and principles of the universe,
+"God, as in a glasse, hath a lively and delightful prospect of His own
+lovely visage and incomprehensible Beauty." Finally, again, the
+disciple reflects the constant teaching of Boehme that everything in
+the visible world is a symbol of a fundamental and eternal World.
+
+Durant Hotham showed the full measure of his devotion to his German
+master in the _Life of Jacob Behmen_ which he wrote in 1653.[6] It is,
+however, much more important for the insight which it gives of the
+inner life of the Yorkshire Justice than for any biographical
+information it furnishes of Boehme himself. Hotham thinks that in
+Boehme he has discovered a new type of Christian Saint--"one who led a
+saint-like life in much sweet communion {212} with God," while he
+declares that many of those who "get admission into the Calendar by the
+synodical jurisdiction of those who claim also to hold the bunch of
+keys to the bigger Heaven" are hardly ripe for canonization--"As for
+many who in these last ages have termed themselves saints--what shift
+God may make of them in heaven, I know not (He can do much)--but if I
+may speak unfeignedly, they are so unmortified and untrue of word and
+deed that they are found untoward members for a true Commonwealth and
+civil Society here on Earth."[7]
+
+The type of saint the Justice admires is one who refuses utterly to
+choose the path of least resistance, one who will not be "a messenger
+of eternal happiness at a cheap rate," but rather one who comes to
+challenge the easy world, to fight evil customs and entrenched systems
+and to win "the Land which the Devil holds in possession"; and, with
+the name of Jacob Boehme, he thinks he can "begin a new roll of Civil
+Saints," hoping, he says, that in these last generations "much company"
+may be added to the bead roll thus happily started.
+
+Two points stand out clearly as central ideas of Justice Hotham's
+Christianity. The first one is that religion is an inward affair.
+"God," he declares, "hath sent this last Generation a plain, uncouth
+Message, bidding man to fight, telling him that he shall have a Heaven,
+a Joy, a Paradise, a Land, a Territory, a Kingship--but that _all this
+is in himself, the Land to be won is himself_."[8] The second one is
+that religion is a progressive movement, an unfolding revelation of
+life. "What a height of Presumption is it," he says, "to believe that
+the Wisdom and fullness of God can ever be pent up in a Synodical
+Canon? How overweening are we to limit the successive manifestations
+of God to a present rule and light, persecuting all that comes not
+forth in its height and breadth!" It is through this "unnatural
+desire" to keep Christians in "a perpetual infancy" that "our dry
+nurses" in the Church have "brought us to such a dwarfish stature,"
+{213} and he prays that the merciful God may teach at least one nation
+a better way than that of "muzzling" the bringer of fresh light.
+
+Much more important, however, for the dissemination of Boehme's ideas
+in England was the patient and faithful work of John Sparrow who, in
+collaboration with his kinsman, John Ellistone, translated into English
+the entire body of Boehme's writings, between the years 1647 and
+1661.[9] Sparrow was born at Stambourne in Essex in 1615. He was
+admitted to the Inner Court in 1633 and subsequently called to the Bar.
+He was probably the author of a widely-read book, published in 1649,
+under the title of _Mercurius Teutonicus_, consisting of a series of
+"propheticall passages" from Boehme.[10] His outer life was
+uneventful; his inner life is revealed in his Introductions to the
+Boehme Translations. He begins his long series of Translations with
+the testimony that the writings of this author have "so very much
+satisfied" his own soul that he wants others to be partakers of the
+same source of light, though he warns his readers that their own souls
+must come by experience into the condition Boehme himself was in before
+they can fully understand him.[11] He is profoundly impressed, {214}
+as his great contemporary, Milton, was, with the strange birth of new
+sects "now sprung up in England," but he hopes that "goodness will get
+the upper hand and that the fruits of the spirit will prevail," and his
+mind "is led to think" that through Boehme's message, which has been
+very beneficial in other nations, "our troubled, doubting souls in
+England may receive much Comfort, leading to that inward Peace which
+passeth all understanding, and that all disturbing sects and
+heresies . . . will be made to vanish and cease."[12]
+
+Sparrow was deeply impressed with two of Boehme's central ideas, and he
+gives expression to them, in his own quaint and peculiar way, in almost
+every one of his Introductions--(1) the idea that the visible is a
+parable of the Invisible, and (2) the idea that God manifests Himself
+within men. In the very first of the Introductions both of these ideas
+appear: "This outward world," he says, "is the best outward
+looking-glasse to see whatever hath been, is, or shall be in Eternity,
+and our own minds are the best inward looking-glasse to see Eternity
+exactly in";[13] and he expresses the belief that any one who learns to
+read all the work of God in the world without, and in the mind of man
+within, will learn to know Him truly, will see Eternity manifested in
+time, will discover that the mind of man is a centre of all mysteries,
+and that heaven and hell are potentially in us, and he will be
+convinced that God is in all things and all things are in God; that we
+live in Him and that He lives in us.[14]
+
+This second idea--that God can be found in the depth of man's soul--is
+strongly emphasized in Sparrow's next Introduction, written in
+1648--"_The Ground of what hath ever been lieth in man_."[15] All that
+is in the Scriptures has come out of man's experience and therefore can
+now be grasped by us. All that was in Adam lies in the ground and
+depth of any man. When the Apostle John wrote that there is an unction
+which teacheth all things and leadeth into all truth, he did not
+confine this possibility {215} to apostles, but intended to include all
+men in the class of those who may be anointed, and all who know "what
+is in man" realize that it is possible to attain to this inward and
+apostolic guidance.[16] In a passage of great boldness Sparrow goes in
+his venturous faith in the inner Spirit as far as the young
+Leicestershire preacher did who was starting out, the very year this
+Introduction was written, to proclaim the message of the inward Light.
+"The ground," he says, "of all that was in Adam is in us; for whatever
+Ground lay in God, the same lieth in Christ and through Him it lieth in
+us, for He is in us all. And he that knoweth God in himself . . . may
+well be able to speak the word of God infallibly as the holy men that
+penned the Scriptures. And he that can understand these things in
+himself may well know who speaketh by the Spirit of God and who
+speaketh his own fancies and delusions."[17]
+
+In the Introduction to the _Mysterium magnum_, Sparrow returns to this
+idea of inward illumination, though he balances it better than he did
+in the former Introduction, with his estimation of "the antient Holy
+Scriptures," and he does not again suggest that present-day men speak
+"infallibly." He thinks that the same God who so eminently taught
+Moses by His Spirit that he could describe the processes of creation,
+must have also prepared the people by the instruction of the same
+Spirit, so that they could understand what was written, and so that the
+Spirit in one man could verify itself in the experience of many men.
+He declares that when the Scriptures instruct and perfect the man of
+God, they are effective, "not as a meer relation of things done," but
+as the medium of the living Word which reaches the inward Man, the
+hidden Man of the heart, the Christ in us, so that we pass beyond "the
+history of Christ" and rise to "the experience that Christ is born
+within us."[18]
+
+No other book, he says, but the Scriptures, teaches {216} man "with
+assured knowledge of all the things which concern the soule, the
+eternal part of man," for other writers have written from the
+observation of their outward senses, but these writers had "inward
+senses--their eyes saw, their ears heard, their hands handled the Word
+of Life." And yet for those in these days who can "look through the
+vayle or shell within which the Eternal Spirit works its Wonders," the
+visible things of the world prove to be "a glasse wherein the
+similitude of spirituall things are represented" and "the Minde of man
+is a most clear and undeceiving glasse wherein we may perceive the
+motions and activities of that Work-Master, the Spirit who hath created
+everything in the world."[12] In the most satisfactory of all his
+Introductions, the one to the _Aurora_ in 1656, he undertakes to show
+that "the Light within" which has now arisen in England is not a
+substitute for the Christ of history. On the contrary, he insists that
+the Christ within and the Christ of history is one and the same Person
+who is not divided. He was once manifested in the likeness of sinful
+flesh, suffering, dying, rising, ascending in glory, and now, in an
+inward and spiritual manner, He is actually present within men so that
+they may become conformable in soul and spirit to Him and share in His
+life, sufferings, death, resurrection and glory, or they may, by their
+own choice, crucify Him afresh within themselves.[20] The Word of Life
+calls loudly within every man, urging the soul to forsake that which it
+perceives to be evil and to embrace that which it perceives to be good
+and holy and divine. This, he says, is the Eternal Gospel, and it
+brings to all men everywhere the good news that we live and move and
+have our being in God, and that the soul that gropes in sincerity after
+God will find Him, for He is very nigh, even in the heart of the
+seeker.[21] He deals in an interesting way with the important
+contemporary problem--raised by the prevalence of the emphasis on an
+inward Divine Presence--whether human Perfection is possible in this
+life. His {217} conclusion is that the tendency to sin remains so long
+as "the mortal body" lasts. No person will ever reach a stage of
+earthly life in which the spur of the flesh is eradicated, and so no
+person can be infallibly certain that he is beyond sin, but when Christ
+is inwardly united to the soul and His Spirit dwells in us and reigns
+in us and we are risen in soul, spirit, and mind with Him, then we live
+no longer after the flesh, or according to its thrust and push, but
+share His life and partake of the conquering power of His Spirit; and
+thus, though "sown in imperfection we are raised in perfection."[22]
+The important matter, however, is not that one call himself a
+"Perfectist," but that he actually live "in this earthly pilgrimage and
+in this vale of sinfull flesh" in the power of Eternity and by the
+Light of Christ, whose fulness may be revealed in himself.[23]
+
+John Ellistone, Sparrow's kinsman and able helper in the work of
+bringing Boehme into English thought, holds the same fundamental ideas
+as his co-labourer, though he has his own peculiar style and his own
+unique way of uttering himself. The stress of his emphasis is always
+on first-hand experience--what he calls "an effectual, living,
+essential knowledge and real spiritual being of it in one's own
+soul";[24] and the brunt of his attack is {218} always against a
+religion of "notions"--what he calls "verball, high-flowne, contrived
+knowledge and vapouring Notions," constructed from "the mental idolls
+of approved masters."[25] Religion, he maintains, can no more consist
+of "the letter" or of "a talkative historicall account" than music can
+consist of a row of written notes. These things are only signs for the
+direction of the skilful musician who must himself _make_ the sounds on
+his instrument before there is any music. So, too, if there is to be
+any real religion in the world, we Christians must do more than read
+and approve "the deciphered writings of illuminated men," we must act
+by the same Spirit that inspired those men, we must be "practitioners
+of the Divine Light," we must give "living expression to Divine love
+and righteousness," we must "practice the way of regeneration in the
+Spirit of Christ and _divinitize our knowledge into an effectual
+working love and attaine the experimental and essential reality of it
+in our owne soules!_"[26] The way out of "the tedious Maze and
+wearisome laborinth of discussions and opinions concerning God, Christ,
+Faith, Election, the Ordinances and the Way of Worship" is "to know the
+Word of Life, Light and Love experimentally," to have "the fire of His
+love so enkindled in our own hearts that it may breake forth in our
+practice and conversation to the destroying of all Thornes and tearing
+Bryars of vaine contentions!"[27]
+
+Like his kinsman, he has endless faith in the possibility of man; he
+thinks that the entire Scripture directs us to the Word within us, and
+that the Book of all mysteries is within ourselves. "In our owne
+Book," he says, "which is the Image of God in us, Time and Eternity and
+all Mysteries are couched and contained, and they may be read in our
+owne soules by the illumination of the Divine Spirit. Our Minde is a
+true mysticall Mirror and Looking-glasse of Divine and Naturall
+Mysteries, and we shall receive more real knowledge from one effectuall
+innate essentiall beame or ray of Light arising from the New Birth
+within us than in reading many {219} hundreds of authors whereby we
+frame a Babel of knowledge in the Nation."[28]
+
+He goes so far with his faith in the soul's possibility to return into
+"the Original Centre of all Reality" that he declares that a man may
+sink deep enough into this Original Principle that binds his own soul
+into union with God so that he can penetrate by an inner Light and
+experience into the secret qualities and virtues hid in all visible and
+corporeal things, and may learn to discover the healing and curative
+powers of metals and plants, and may thus, by inward knowledge, advance
+all Arts and Sciences.[29]
+
+Ellistone returns to this inner way of arriving at a knowledge of
+outward things in his Preface to _Signatura rerum_ in 1651. Man, he
+declares, is a microcosm, or abridgment, of the whole universe, he is
+the emblem and hieroglyphic of Time and Eternity, and he who will take
+pains to push in beyond Solomon's Porch, or the Outer Court of sense
+and natural reason, to the Inner Court and Holy Place, where the
+immortal Seed abides and where man can become one again with that which
+he was in God before he became a creature, then he will have the key
+that opens all mysteries both inner and outer. Nature will be an open
+Book of Parables in which he can read the truth of Eternity, the world
+will be a clear mirror in which he can see the things of the Spirit and
+he will know what will cure both soul and body. The "Depth of God
+within the Soul," the Inner Light, is the precious Pearl, the
+never-failing Comfort, the Panacea for all diseases, the sure Antidote
+even against death itself, the unfailing Guide and Way of all
+Wisdom.[30]
+
+Here, then, were two very enthusiastic disciples of Boehme who took
+their master's teaching very seriously, who on the whole grasped its
+essential meaning, were possessed and penetrated by the _idea_ of a
+deeper eternal world manifesting itself in the temporal, and who gave
+their lives to the difficult task of making Boehme's message {220}
+available to their own people and to their own perplexed age. They
+were not "occultists." They did not run into enthusiastic vapourings,
+nor did they strain after psychic experiences which would relieve them
+of the stress and strain of achieving the goal of life through the
+formation of balanced character and the practice of social virtues,
+though, as we shall see, some of the readers of their translations took
+the risky course, and ended in the fog rather than in the clear light.
+
+The question has naturally been raised whether Boehme exercised any
+direct influence upon the early Quaker movement.[31] There is at
+present no way of proving that George Fox, the chief exponent of the
+movement, had actually read the writings of the Teutonic philosopher or
+had consciously absorbed the views of the latter, but there are so many
+marks of influence apparent in the _Journal_ that no careful student of
+both writers can doubt that there was some sort of influence, direct or
+indirect, conscious or unconscious. The works of Boehme were, as we
+have seen, all available in English, during the great formative period
+of Fox's life, from 1647 to 1661. There can be no question that they
+were read by the serious _Seekers_ in the period of the Commonwealth.
+Thomas Taylor, who was one of the finest fruits of the Seeker movement,
+bears in 1659 a positive testimony to the spiritual value of Jacob
+Bewman's (Behmen) writings. Taylor received a letter from Justice
+William Thornton of Hipswell in Yorkshire, warning him to beware of
+"the confused Notions and great words of Jacob Bewman and such like
+frothy scriblers." Taylor replies: "For thy light expressions of Jacob
+Bewman, I know in most things he speaks a Parable to thee yet, and so
+his writings may well be lightly esteemed of by thee; but there is that
+in his Writings which, if ever thy eye be opened, will appear to be a
+sweet unfolding of the Mystery of God and of Christ, in divers
+particulars, according to his Gift. And therefore beware of speaking
+Evil of that which thou {221} know'st not."[32] We have also seen how
+Boehme appealed to such noble Seekers as Charles and Durant Hotham,
+John Sparrow, and John Ellistone.[33] One Quaker of some importance,
+Francis Ellington, not only read the writings of Boehme, but regarded
+"that Faithful Servant Jacob Behme" as "a Prophet of the Lord."[34] He
+quotes from his German "Prophet" the words: "A Lilly blossometh to you
+ye Northern Countries; if you destroy it not with sectarian contention
+of the learned, then it will become a great Tree among you, but if you
+shall rather contend than to know the true God, then the Ray passeth by
+and hitteth only some; and then afterwards you shall be forced to draw
+water for the thirst of your souls among strange nations." Ellington
+regards Boehme as a genuine "prophet," and the "Lilly" that was to
+blossom in the North seems to Ellington plainly to be George Fox and
+his Quaker Society, which the learned have tried in vain to overthrow.
+He cites many passages from the Teutonic Prophet of the Lord to show
+the parallelism between the prophesied type of spiritual religion and
+the Children of the Light who have exactly fulfilled it.[35]
+
+It would be natural to expect that the young Quaker seeker, eager for
+any light on his dark path, would read the _Forty Questions_ and _The
+Three Principles of the Divine Essence_, or at least that he would hear
+them discussed by the people among whom he moved in these intense and
+eventful years. In any case there are ideas expressed and experiences
+described in the _Journal_ which look strangely like memories,
+conscious or subconscious, of ideas and experiences to be found in the
+Boehme writings. The most striking single passage is one which
+describes an experience which occurred to Fox in 1648. It is as
+follows: "Now was I come up in Spirit through the flaming sword into
+the paradise of God. All things were {222} 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 into the image of God by Jesus Christ, to the state of Adam
+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. I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practise
+physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtue of things
+were so opened to me by the Lord. . . . The admirable works of
+creation and the virtues thereof may be known through the openings of
+that divine Word of Wisdom and power by which they were made."[36]
+
+Jacob Boehme had, as we have seen, a similar experience of having "the
+nature and virtues of things opened" to him in the year 1600. The
+following account of it was given in Sparrow's Introduction to _Forty
+Questions_, printed in 1647: "He went forth into the fields and there
+perceived the wonderful or wonder works of the Creator in the
+signatures, shapes, figures, and qualities or properties of all created
+things very clearly and plainly laid open. Whereupon he was filled
+with exceeding joy." The same incident is told in a slightly different
+way in Justice Hotham's _Life of Behmen_: "Going abroad into the
+Fields, to a Green before Neys-Gate, at Gorlitts, he there sate down,
+and viewing the Herbs and Grass of the Field, in his Inward Light he
+saw into their essences, use and properties." It was, further, a
+fundamental idea of Boehme's that the outward and visible world is a
+parable and symbol of the spiritual world within, and that by a
+spiritual experience which carries the soul down to the inner, hidden,
+abysmal Centre, the secrets and mysteries of the outward creation may
+become revealed. Hotham says that Boehme, by his divine Light, "beheld
+the whole of creation, and from that Fountain of Revelation wrote his
+book _De signatura rerum_."[37] Ellistone, in the Introduction to
+Boehme's _Epistles_, printed in 1649, predicts {223} that an
+experience, like this one which Fox claimed, will come to those who
+receive the inner Divine Light. "This knowledge," he says, "must
+advance all Arts and Sciences and conduce to the attainment of the
+Universal Tincture and Signature, whereby the different secret
+qualities and vertues that are hid in all visible and corporeall
+things, as Metals, Minerals, Plants and Herbes, may be drawne forth and
+applied to their right naturall use _for the curing and healing_ of
+corrupt and decayed nature."[38]
+
+It was also a feature of Boehme's teaching that man must enter again
+into Paradise and return to the condition of the unfallen Adam. "The
+Noble Virgin" [_i.e._ Sophia or Spiritual Wisdom], Boehme writes,
+"showeth us the Gate and how we must enter again into Paradise through
+the sharpness of the sword," which, in a few lines previous, he calls
+"the flaming sword which God set to keep the Tree of Life."[39] Fox's
+experience of the "new smell" of creation is an even more striking
+parallel. Mystic awakenings and spiritual openings generally impress
+the recipient of them with a sense of new and fresh penetration into
+the meaning of things and leave them with a feeling of heightened
+powers, but cases in which the experience results in a new sense of
+_smell_ are fairly rare. Two persons might, no doubt, have such an
+experience quite independently, but one who has become familiar with
+the range of _suggestion_ in experiences of this type will note with
+interest the large place which "new Smells and Odours" occupy in
+Boehme's writings. For example, he says, in the _Signatura rerum_,
+where he describes the coming of the Paradise-experience: "When
+Paradise springs up, the paradisaical joy puts itself forth with a
+lovely smell,"[40] and in one of his Epistles he speaks of a spiritual
+awakening in his own life that was marked by a new smell--"A very
+strong Odour was given to me in the life of God."[41]
+
+There is another passage in Fox's _Journal_, a few lines {224} beyond
+this famous account of his Paradise-experience, that also bears the
+mark of Boehme's influence. In fact, it is difficult to believe that
+Fox could have got his phraseology anywhere else than from Boehme. The
+passage reads: "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_."[42] Everywhere in Boehme it is "Sophia,
+the Word of Wisdom," that "opens all things," and the goal of all
+spiritual experience and of all divine illumination for him consists in
+coming to "the hidden Unity in the Eternal Being, or the Eternal
+Essence." That is not a Biblical phrase, and it is not one which the
+Drayton youth would have heard from native English sources. It came to
+England with the Boehme literature. Further revelations along this
+same line of "opening" follow in the _Journal_. In the Vale of Beavor
+the Lord "opened" things to Fox, relating to "the three great
+professions in the world, physic, divinity and law." "He showed me,"
+Fox says, "that the physicians were out of the Wisdom of God by which
+the creatures were made, and so knew not their virtue because they were
+_out of the Word of Wisdom_." He saw that the priests were actuated by
+_the dark power_--a very suspicious phrase to one who knows what a
+place the "Dark Principle" holds in Boehme's writings--and he saw that
+the lawyers were out of the Wisdom of God. But it was opened to him
+that all these three professions might be "reformed" and "brought into
+the Wisdom of God by which all things were created," and "have a right
+understanding of the virtues of things through the Word of Wisdom"; for
+"in the Light all things may be seen both visible and invisible."[43]
+The extraordinary use of Old Testament figures, by which Fox
+illustrates the condition of the Church, in the section of the
+_Journal_ following the passages above quoted, is no less significant.
+The figures of Cain and Esau, of Korah and Balaam, and the types of
+Adam and Moses are given {225} quite in the style of _The Three
+Principles_, or of the _Mysterium magnum_.[44] One parallel is
+especially interesting. Fox says: "I saw plainly that none could read
+Moses aright without Moses' spirit, by which Moses saw how man was in
+the Image of God in Paradise, and how he fell and how death came over
+him, and how all men have been under this death."[45] The Preface to
+_Mysterium magnum_ says: "I cannot but think that the same God that
+taught Moses so eminently by His Spirit had so fitted the people for
+whom he wrote that they were capable to receive instruction by his
+words."[46] This idea, so frequently expressed in the writings of Fox,
+that no one can understand the Scriptures except by the Spirit that
+gave forth the Scriptures,[47] is equally a fundamental idea of Boehme
+and his English interpreters. In many passages of the _Mysterium
+magnum_ Boehme declares that the written word is only a witness to the
+living Word, which latter Word can be understood only by those who are
+in the Spirit that spoke in the Prophets and Apostles.[48] Sparrow, in
+his Introduction to the _Aurora_, declares that no person can
+understand the spiritual mystery of redemption, "though he reade of it
+in the Scriptures," unless the Holy Spirit in himself, the true Divine
+Light, enlighten him, and give him the word of faith in his heart;
+"neither," he adds, "can any understand the Holy Scriptures but by the
+same Gifts of the Holy Spirit in the Soul."[49]
+
+On one occasion the Lord showed Fox the nature of things that are in
+the human heart--"as the nature of dogs, swine, vipers, etc."[50] So,
+too, Boehme saw that there are many kinds of wild beast in man's
+nature--the lion, the wolf, the dog, the fox, and the serpent.[51] Fox
+frequently speaks of the two "seeds"--the Seed of God or the Seed of
+Christ and the seed of the serpent--and the victory of life in the
+Spirit consists in having the Seed of God conquer the seed of the
+serpent, or, as Fox {226} often expresses it, having "the Seed of God
+bruise the serpent's head," or having "the Seed of God atop of the
+devil and all his works"; or having "the Seed reign."[52] This
+phraseology runs throughout Boehme's writings. The two "seeds" are
+everywhere in evidence, and "the Treader on the serpent" is the
+frequent name for Christ and for the victorious soul. God showed Adam,
+Boehme says, how "the Treader on the serpent" should once again be
+brought with virtue and power up into the Paradise of God, and live
+anew by the Word of God.[53]
+
+Fox, in the account of his first great transforming opening in 1647,
+says: "I knew God by revelation as one who hath the key doth open."[54]
+This is a frequent figure in Boehme for a first-hand experience.
+"Where is Paradise to be found?" he asks. "Is it far away or is it
+near? One person cannot lend the key to another. Every one must
+unlock it with his own key or else he cannot enter,"[55] and again he
+describes that "surpassing joy of the new regeneration," when the soul
+"gets the keys of the kingdom of heaven and may open for itself."[56]
+
+Fox's "openings" about university-trained ministers and his references
+to "stone churches," or "churches of stone and mortar," have many
+parallels in Boehme. Dinah of the Old Testament, for example, is
+"nothing else but a figure of our stone churches and our colleges with
+their ministers!" and Jacob's concubine, again, "signifieth nothing
+else but the stone churches in which God's word and testament are
+handled."[57]
+
+Finally, Fox's great vision of an ocean of Darkness and an ocean of
+Light, while no doubt a real experience and expressed in his own words,
+is profoundly like Boehme's fundamental insight that there are two
+world-principles of Light and Darkness, and that Light is, in the end,
+victorious over Darkness.[58]
+
+No attempt has been made to gather an exhaustive set {227} of parallels
+between the experiences and ideas of these two religious teachers.
+Enough, however, is presented to show that this spiritual leader in
+England was distinctly a debtor to the Teutonic seer who died the same
+year in which the former was born. Fox himself never mentions Boehme
+by name, nor does he ever refer to the little sect of "Behmenists,"
+which, springing into existence contemporaneously with the birth of the
+Quaker movement, had an interesting, though short-lived, history; but a
+number of the followers of Fox went aggressively into the lists against
+their puny rival.
+
+The so-called "sect of Behmenists" is thus described by Richard Baxter:
+"The fifth sect are the Behmenists whose opinions go much toward the
+way of the former [the Quakers] for the sufficiency of the Light of
+Nature, Inward Light, the salvation of the Heathen as well as
+Christians, and a dependence on 'revelations.' But they are fewer in
+number, and seem to have attained to greater Meekness and conquest of
+passions than any of the rest. Their doctrines are to be seen in Jacob
+Behmen's Books, by him that hath nothing else to do, than to bestow a
+great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily
+understood!"[59]
+
+"The chiefest" of this "sect of Behmenists," Baxter says, was Dr. John
+Pordage. Pordage was born in 1607; was curate in 1644 of St.
+Lawrence's in Reading; was made rector of the Church in Bradfield late
+in 1646; was charged in 1651 with heresies, comprised in nine articles,
+consisting apparently of a sort of mystical pantheism. He was at first
+acquitted, but was later charged again with heresies on these nine
+counts, with fifty-six more, and was deprived of his rectory in 1655.
+He valiantly defended himself in a book with the title, _Truth
+appearing through the Clouds of Undeserved Scandel_, and in other
+publications, and after the Restoration he was reinstated. As the
+Behmenists were definitely attacked by the Quaker, John Anderdon, in
+1661, it is to be inferred that they existed as a society at least as
+early as the {228} Restoration, though the movement became much more
+prominent in the 'seventies, when Pordage discovered a remarkable woman
+named Jane Leade, and they "agreed to wait together in prayer and pure
+dedication." Jane Leade, whose maiden name was Jane Ward, was born of
+a good English family in 1623. She was a psychopathic child, and as a
+young girl "heard miraculous voices" which led her to devote herself to
+religion. She became profoundly impressed with the writings of Boehme,
+as Pordage had been still earlier, and under the _suggestion_ of
+Boehme's experiences she received many "prophetic visions," which are
+recorded in her spiritual Diary, _A Fountain of Gardens_.[60] A few
+instances of her experiences in the early stages will be of some value
+to the reader. She was visiting, she says, in April 1670, in a quiet,
+retired place, and was "contemplating the happy state of the angelical
+world, much exercised upon Solomon's choice, which was to find out the
+Noble Stone of Wisdom." "There came upon me an overshadowing bright
+cloud, and in the midst of it the Figure of a woman, most richly
+adorned with transparent gold, her hair hanging down, and her face as
+terrible as chrystal for brightness, but her countenance was sweet and
+mild. At which sight I was somewhat amazed, and immediately this Voice
+came, saying, Behold, I am God's Eternal Virgin, Wisdom, whom thou hast
+been enquiring after. I am to unseal the Treasures of God's deep
+Wisdom unto thee. . . . Wisdom shall be born in the inward parts of
+thy soul." Three days later, "the same Figure in greater Glory did
+appear, with a crown upon her head, full of majesty, saying, Behold me
+as thy Mother and know thou art to enter into covenant, to obey the
+New-Creation laws that shall be revealed unto thee."[61] In her
+account of the following extraordinary experience there are many marks
+of Boehme's influence: "I retained no strength, my Sun of Reason and
+the Moon of my outward sense were folded up and withdrew. I knew
+nothing by myself, as {229} to those working properties from Nature and
+Creature, and the wheel of the Motion standing still, another
+[influence] moved from a central Fire, so that I felt myself transmuted
+into one pure flame. Then came that Word to me, 'This is no other than
+the Gate to my Eternal Deep.'"[62]
+
+Pordage's main contribution to the exposition of "Behmenism" was a book
+published in 1683 and entitled, _Theologia Mystica, or the Mystic
+Divinitie of the Eternal Invisibles_. It is the work of a confused
+mind, and its spiritual penetration, as also its mastery of the English
+language, are of a low order. The marks of Boehme's influence appear
+everywhere in the book, though Pordage is quite incapable of
+comprehending the more profound and robust features of Boehme's
+philosophy. What he relates professes to be what he himself has _seen_
+in visions, or what he has heard from celestial visitants. It has, he
+says, been his privilege to taste much of that Tree of Life which grows
+in the midst of the Paradise of God; to smell the difference between
+heaven and hell; to have seen through the veil of nature into the
+spiritual glory of eternity, to have felt "the distillations of
+heavenly dew and secret touches of the Holy Ghost." Unlike his
+Teutonic master, he taught (and it was also the view of Jane Leade)
+that in the end Divine Love transmutes evil into good and even hell
+into Paradise. One passage in his book, written in his best style,
+will be sufficient to illustrate his glowing optimism: "Love is of a
+transmuting and transforming Nature. The great effect of Love is to
+turn all things into its own Nature, which is all goodness, sweetness,
+and perfection. This is that Divine Power which turns Water into Wine,
+Sorrow and Hellish Anguish into exulting and triumphing Joy; Curse into
+Blessing; where it meets with a barren heathy Desart it transmutes it
+into a Paradise of delights; yea, it changeth evil to good and all
+imperfection into perfection. It restores that which is fallen and
+degenerated to its primary Beauty, Excellence and Perfection. It is
+{230} the Divine Stone, the White Stone with a Name written on it,
+which none knows but him that hath it . . . the Divine Elixir whose
+transforming power and efficacy nothing can withstand."[63]
+
+His greater disciple, Jane Leade, "the enamoured woman-devotee of
+Pordage," the main exponent of the Behmenist movement of this period,
+was a far too voluminous writer.[64] She was a sincere, pure-minded
+woman, of intense devotion, but she was a strongly emotional type of
+person, and lived in a kind of permanent borderland of visions and
+revelations. Her language, like that also of Pordage, is
+ungrammatical, of involved style, and full of overwrought and fanciful
+imagination. Christopher Walton, who in many ways respected her, calls
+her writings "a huge mass of parabolicalism and idiocratic
+deformity!"[64] In her _Message to the Philadelphian Society_ she
+reports a curious vision from heaven which assures her that the Quakers
+are not God's chosen people. There pass in review before her
+illuminated sight the various claimants to the lofty title of the true
+Church, the real Bride of Christ. There are Anabaptists, Fifth
+Monarchy Men, and many others. "Then," she says, "did I see a body
+greater than any of these come up with great boldness, as deeming
+themselves to have arrived to Perfection and so visibly distinguishing
+themselves from all the rest, and I said, Now surely the anointed of
+the Lord is before Him. But a Voice said, Neither are these they; for
+the Lord seeth not as man seeth."[66]
+
+A third and intellectually far greater member of this group of
+"Behmenists" was Francis Lee, a Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, a
+student in Leyden University, and a man of splendid parts. He became
+acquainted with the movement while in Holland, and on his return home
+sought out Jane Leade, became her adopted son, and, later, on the
+strength of a "revelation" made to his {231} spiritual mother, he
+married her daughter. Until the time of Jane Leade's death in 1704, he
+was her devoted disciple, writing for her in the period of her
+blindness, and editing and publishing many of her books. He was the
+moving spirit in the formation of "the Philadelphian Society" for the
+propagation of the mystical ideas of the followers of Boehme--a Society
+which existed from 1697 to 1703, and which had a far-reaching influence
+not only in England but still more on the Continent of Europe.[67]
+
+John Anderdon, an interesting Quaker pamphleteer, born in 1624,
+convinced of the Truth of the Quaker Message by the preaching of
+Francis Howgil in 1658, and for many years a prisoner for his faith,
+for which he finally died in prison, furnishes in his attack on the
+"Behmenists" in 1661 the earliest data available for an estimate of
+their views and practices.[68] The writer has evidently read the works
+of Jacob Boehme, or at least some of them, and he contends that the
+"Behmenists" whom he is attacking have failed to understand the
+writings of their master and have never fathomed "the tendencie of his
+spirit": "The Conclusion which you have drawn to yourselves from his
+Writings will not profit you; neither doth it make you any jot the more
+excellent, that ye can talk much of him and his Books and Writings,
+being not come to the right Spirit in which is life, which brings men
+out of dead Forms."[69]
+
+His main criticism of the little sect is that its members make use of
+"Mediums and borrowed Instruments for the conveyance of God's Grace and
+Virtue into the Soul,"[70] and that they have "not come to the Light
+which gives {232} a true understanding of the things of God," though he
+admits that there "was sometime" in them "a hungering and thirsting
+after Righteousness."[71] These "Mediums" are evidently the Water of
+Baptism and the Bread and Wine of the Supper--"Ordinances," he says,
+"as you call them."[72] It would seem from this Quaker Pamphlet that
+the "Behmenists" under review were much like the followers of Fox,
+except only that they continued to use the sacraments. This use of
+"Mediums" seemed to him indicate that they were "out of the Light" and
+"trying to _cover_ the serpent's head," instead of stamping on it, but
+Anderdon would not have written his _Blow at Babel_ if he had not been
+impressed with the general marks of likeness in other respects between
+the "Behmenists" and his own people.
+
+Another interesting Quaker document furnishes a glimpse of the
+"Behmenists" a dozen years later--at about the period when John Pordage
+and Jane Leade were beginning to "wait together in prayer and pure
+meditation." It is a Minute adopted by the London "Morning Meeting" of
+Friends, "the 21st of ye 7th Month 1674." The occasion for action was
+the reception of "an Epistle to the Behminists," written by Ralph
+Frettwell of Barbadoes, at an earlier period "one of the Chief Judges
+of the Court of Common-pleas" in the island. He had been stirred to
+write for the same reason that impelled Anderdon, and his "Epistle"
+called these partly spiritualized people, as he believed, to the fuller
+Light, and warned them against the use of Baptism, and Bread and Wine,
+and "the Pater Noster." The Minute of the Morning Meeting, which opens
+with the words: "Deare freind R. F. in the Truth that never changeth
+but changeth all who believe and obey it," records the decision of the
+Meeting not to publish the Epistle, "wee haveing well weighed it in the
+feare of God and in tender Care of Truth." The reason given in the
+Minutes for not publishing the "Epistle" is, first, that "the writings
+of J. B. reveal {233} a great mixture of light and darkness," and
+indicate that he lived sometimes in the power of one and sometimes in
+the power of the other, that God Himself has tried and judged the
+Spirit of darkness, and that the Spirit of Light has already "come to
+its own Centre and flows forth again purely"--presumably in the Quaker
+movement.[73] As the Lord Himself has given judgment and has given
+victory to the Principle of the Light, the publication of the "Epistle"
+is unnecessary.
+
+And, secondly, Frettwell, in calling the "Behmenists" from "the use of
+Mediums," admits that at an earlier period of his life, before he
+received the full Light, he "received light and peace" through these
+external things. This seemed to the Meeting "too much giveing them
+encouragement" to dwell in things which give "only drynesse and
+barrenness," and they fear that "the ffoxes among them would take
+advantage" of this aid and comfort.[74] It would appear that the
+gravamen of the Quaker attack on the little sect was the failure of its
+members to dispense with sacraments. At a later period, when the
+"Philadelphian Society" was in full flower, an old-time pillar Quaker,
+George Keith, then become a Churchman and "an apostate" in the eyes of
+Friends, attacked the writings of Jane Leade on the ground that "she
+wrote derogatory to the Humanity of Christ," _i.e._ the historical
+Christ. Francis Lee took up vigorously the defence, and told George
+Keith that he himself had taught again and again the same principle of
+inward Light and inward Religion, that he had never yet publicly
+renounced these early ideas of his, and that he of all men ought to
+understand the meaning of a Christ within and of a "Still Eternity."[75]
+
+Traces of Boehme's influence appear in the terms and {234} ideas of
+many English writers during the period under consideration, besides
+those specifically mentioned. Sir Isaac Newton read Boehme's books
+with great appreciation and meditated upon those strange accounts of
+the invisible universe which underlies and is in the visible world, but
+we need not take too seriously the claim of the "Behmenists" that "he
+was ploughing with Behmen's heifer" when he discovered the law of
+universal gravitation![76] Milton, without any doubt, had read the
+German mystic's account of the eternal war between the Light Principle
+and the Dark Principle, of the fall of Lucifer, of the loss of
+Paradise, and of the return of man in Christ to Paradise, and there are
+many passages in the great poet which look decidedly like germinations
+from the seed which Boehme sowed, but we must observe caution in
+tracing the origin of verses written by a poet of Milton's genius and
+originality and range of knowledge. One great Englishman of a later
+period, William Law, unmistakably owed to Jacob Boehme the main
+influences which transformed his life, and through the pure and lucid
+style of this noble English mystic of the eighteenth century, Boehme's
+insights found a new interpretation and a clearer expression than he
+himself or any other interpreter had been able to give them.[77]
+
+
+
+[1] "The Life of one Jacob Boehmen, who although he was a meane man,
+yet wrote the most wonderful deepe knowledge in Naturall and Divine
+Things, that any hath been known to doe since the Apostles' Times, and
+yet never read them or learned them from any other man, as may be scene
+in that which followeth."--London, 1644, printed by L. N. for Richard
+Whitaker.
+
+[2] _Journal of George Fox_ (Cambridge edition, 1911), i. p. 18.
+
+[3] Preface, A. 4.
+
+[4] _Ibid._
+
+[5] _Journ._ i. p. 29.
+
+[6] _The Life of Jacob Behmen_, written by Durant Hotham, Esquire,
+November 7, 1653. Printed for H. Blunden, and sold at the Castle in
+Corn Hill, 1654.
+
+[7] _Life of Jacob Behmen_, B. 2.
+
+[8] _Op. cit._ B. 2.
+
+[9] The writings were translated in the following order: In 1647,
+_Forty Questions_ by Sparrow; _The Clavis_, by Sparrow. In 1648, _The
+Three Principles_, by Sparrow; _The Way to Christ_ (including the
+Treatises, _On True Repentance_; _On True Resignation_; _On
+Regeneration_; _The Supersensual Life_; and _On Illumination_), by
+Sparrow. In 1649, _Of the Last Times_, by Sparrow; _Epistles of Jacob
+Behmen_, by Ellistone. In 1650, _The Three-fold Life_, by Sparrow. In
+1651, _De signatura rerum_, by Ellistone. In 1652, _Christ's
+Testaments_--Baptism and Supper,--by Sparrow. In 1654, _The Mysterium
+magnum_, by Ellistone and Sparrow; _A Table of the Divine
+Manifestation_, by H. Blunden and Sparrow; _A Table of the Three
+Principles_, H. Blunden and Sparrow; _An Epitome of the Three
+Principles_, by Sparrow. In 1655, _On Predestination_, by Sparrow; _A
+Short Compendium on Repentance_, by Sparrow. In 1656, _The Aurora_, by
+Sparrow. In 1659, _The Treatise on the Incarnation_, by Sparrow. In
+1661, _The Great Six Points_; _The Earthly and Heavenly Mystery_; _The
+Four Complexions_; _Two Apologies to Tylcken_; _Considerations
+concerning Stiefel's Threefold State of Man_; _An Apology concerning
+Perfection_; _On Divine Contemplation_; _An Apology for the Books on
+True Repentance and True Resignation_; _177 Theosophic Questions_; _The
+Holy Week_; _25 Epistles_, by Sparrow.
+
+[10] Sparrow refers to this book in his Introduction to _The Three
+Principles_ as follows: "For a taste of the Spirit of prophecy which
+the author [Boehme] had, there is a little treatise of some prophecies
+concerning these latter times, collected out of his writings by a lover
+of the Teutonic philosophy and entitled Mercurius Teutonicus."
+
+[11] Introd. to _Forty Questions_.
+
+[12] Introd. to _Forty Questions_.
+
+[13] Ibid.
+
+[14] Ibid.
+
+[15] Introd. to _The Three Princ._
+
+[16] Introd. to _The Three Princ._
+
+[17] Ibid.
+
+[18] "To the Reader" in _Myst. mag._
+
+[19] "To the Reader" in _Myst. mag._
+
+[20] Preface to the Reader in _Aurora_.
+
+[21] Preface for the _Aurora_.
+
+[22] Preface for the _Aurora_.
+
+[23] A contemporary of Sparrow, probably Samuel Pordage, wrote an
+Encomium on Sparrow in the Introduction to a long Behmenite Poem called
+_Mundorum explicatio_ (London, 1661). The passage is as follows:
+
+ "And learned Sparrow we thy praises too
+ Will Sing; rewards too small for what is due,
+ The Gifts of Glory and of Praise we owe:
+ The English Behmen doth Thy Trophies show.
+ Whilst Englishmen that great saint's praise declare,
+ Thy Name shall join'd with his receive a share.
+ The Time shall come when his great Name shall rise,
+ Thy Glory also shall ascend the skies.
+ Thou mad'st him English speak, or else what Good
+ Had his works done us if not understood?
+ To Germany they beneficial prove
+ Alone: till we enjoyed them by thy Love.
+ Their German Robes thou took'st from them, that we
+ Their Beauties might in English Garments see.
+ Thus has thy Love a vast rich Treasure showen,
+ And made what was exotic now our own."
+
+[24] Preface to Boehme's _Epistles_ (1649).
+
+[25] Preface to Boehme's _Epistles_.
+
+[26] _Ibid._
+
+[27] _Ibid._
+
+[28] Preface to _Epistles_.
+
+[29] _Ibid._
+
+[30] Preface to _Sig. re._
+
+[31] This question was raised by Barclay in his _Inner Life of the
+Religious Societies of the Commonwealth_ (London, 1879), pp. 214-215.
+
+[32] Thomas Taylor's _Works_ (London, 1697), p. 86.
+
+[33] The writings themselves constantly use the word "Seeker," and the
+Introductions emphasize the Seeking attitude.
+
+[34] _Christian Information Concerning these Last Times_, by F. E.
+(London, 1664), pp. 10-11.
+
+[35] _Op. cit._ pp. 11-12.
+
+[36] _Journal_ (ed. 1901), 28. Unfortunately the Cambridge Journal
+does not contain any biographical incidents prior to 1652.
+
+[37] Hotham's _Life_, D. 4.
+
+[38] Preface to _Epistles_, p. 10.
+
+[39] The _Three Princ._, trans. 1648, xx. 40-41.
+
+[40] _Sig. re._ viii. 23.
+
+[41] _Ep._ xv. 18. For another passage on "the new smell," see _The
+Three Princ._ iv. 27.
+
+[42] _Journal_, i. p. 29.
+
+[43] _Ibid._ i. pp. 29-30.
+
+[44] See _Journal_, i. pp. 31-34.
+
+[45] _Ibid._ i. p. 33.
+
+[46] _Op. cit._ A.
+
+[47] See, for specimen passages, _Journal_, i. pp. 36 and 124.
+
+[48] See especially _Myst. mag._ xxxviii. sections 52-59.
+
+[49] Preface to _Aurora_, B.
+
+[50] _Journal_, i. p. 19.
+
+[51] _Three Princ._ xvi. 31-37.
+
+[52] See _Journal_, i. p. 13; pp. 190-191 and _passim_.
+
+[53] _Three Princ._ iv. 5. See also _ibid._ xv. 24; xvi. 42; and
+xviii. 24.
+
+[54] _Journal_, i. p. 12.
+
+[55] _Three Princ._ ix. 25-26.
+
+[56] _Ibid._ xix. 33.
+
+[57] _Myst. mag._ lxii. 17 and lxiii. 36.
+
+[58] See Fox's _Journal_, i. p. 19.
+
+[59] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_ (London, 1715), i. 77.
+
+[60] _A Fountain of Gardens_, 4 vols., London, 1696-1701.
+
+[61] _Op. cit._ i. pp. 17-19.
+
+[62] _A Fountain of Gardens_, p. 25.
+
+[63] _Theologia mystica_, p. 81.
+
+[64] Christopher Walton, in his _Notes and Materials_ (1854), gives a
+list of eighteen of her books.
+
+[65] _Ibid._ p. 238.
+
+[66] _Op. cit._ p. 9. Pordage disliked the Quakers and speaks
+slightingly of them in _Theologia mystica_. He also wrote a Treatise
+against them. See Walton, p. 203.
+
+[67] Important material on this subject may be found in Walton's _Notes
+and Materials_, especially pp. 188-258.
+
+[68] The full title-page of Anderdon's book is as follows: _One Blow at
+Babel_. In those of the Pepole called Behemnites, whose Foundation is
+not upon that of the Prophets and Apostles, which shall stand sure and
+firm forever; but upon their own carnal conceptions, begotten in their
+Imaginations upon Jacob Behmen's writings: They not knowing the better
+part, the Teachings of that Spirit that sometime opened some Mysteries
+of God's Kingdom in Jacob, have chosen the worser part in Esau,
+according to the predominancy of that Spirit which ruled in them when
+they made choice of their Religion, as it doth in others the hearts of
+the children of disobedience.--By John Anderdon. (London, printed in
+the year 1662, written in 1661).
+
+[69] _One Blow at Babel_, p. 3.
+
+[70] _Ibid._ pp. 1 and 6.
+
+[71] _One Blow at Babel_, pp. 1-2.
+
+[72] Jane Leade's writings give great importance to the outward
+sacraments.
+
+[73] The use of the phrase "its own Centre," which became an important
+Quaker term, is an interesting relic of Boehme's influence.
+
+[74] _Minutes of the Morning Meeting_, i. George Fox apparently asked
+to see Frattwell's MS., for in a Letter under date of eighth mo. 1st,
+1674, Alexander Parker writes to George Fox: "I likewise spoke to Edw.
+Man [Edward Mann] to send down Ralph ffrettwells Book, I suppose he
+intends to see thee shortly and if he can find ye Book to bring itt
+with him."--_Journal_ (Cambridge edition), ii. p. 305.
+
+[75] Walton's _Notes and Materials_, pp. 227 and 231.
+
+[76] See Walton's _Notes and Materials_, pp. 3, 46, 72, and 404.
+
+[77] William Law lies beyond the period to which this volume is
+devoted. It is customary to call the edition of Behmen's _Works_,
+published 1764-1781, "William Law's Edition." This is quite incorrect.
+This edition is in the main a reprint of the earlier Translations by
+Sparrow and Ellistone. It was edited by George Ward, assisted by
+Thomas Langcake, and printed at the expense of Mrs. Hutcheson, an
+intimate friend of William Law.
+
+
+
+
+{235}
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+EARLY ENGLISH INTERPRETERS OF SPIRITUAL RELIGION:
+ JOHN EVERARD, GILES RANDALL, AND OTHERS
+
+I
+
+The ideas developed by spiritual Reformers on the Continent were
+brought into England by a great variety of carriers and over many
+routes. Some of the routes were devious and are difficult to trace,
+but some of them, on the other hand, are obvious and easily found. One
+of the potent and pervasive intellectual influences for the formation
+of the "spiritual" type of thought in England was the Platonic
+influence which came to England through the Humanists. This strand of
+thought, inherited from the remote past, is woven into the inner
+structure of all these interpreters of the divine Life. The English
+revival of Greek philosophy is closely connected with the work of the
+early Italian Humanists, especially with that of the Florentine
+scholar, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), who was selected and educated by
+Cosimo de Medici to be the head of the new Academy in Florence. It was
+a fixed idea of Ficino that Philosophy and Religion are identical, and
+therefore that Religion, if it is true Religion, is rooted and grounded
+in Reason, since God is the source of all Truth and all that is
+rational. Plato, in Ficino's eyes, is Philosophy. He was the divine
+forerunner of Christ in the realm of intellect as John the Baptist was
+in the realm of the law. In his mind Plato's Philosophy is the
+greatest possible preparation for an adequate understanding of the
+world of Truth which Christ has unveiled and of the way {236} of Life
+which He has revealed. Ficino translated Plato's Dialogues into Latin,
+and gave his own interpretation of the great philosopher in a Treatise
+on _Plato's Doctrine of Immortality of Souls_. He also translated
+Plotinus and the writings falsely attributed to Dionysius the
+Areopagite, and put them anew into spiritual circulation.
+
+Ficino, though living in an age of corruption and debauchery, and
+though closely associated with Humanists who had hardly a thin veneer
+of Christianity, and who were bent on reviving paganism, yet himself
+maintained a positive Christian faith and a pure and simple life. He
+found it possible to be a priest in the Christian Church and at the
+same time to be a high-priest in the temple of Plato, because he found
+faith and reason to be indivisible and indissoluble. His influence was
+marked upon the early English Humanists, Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, and
+More, and he was a vital influence in the new revival, which occurred
+in the seventeenth century, of Plato and Plotinus as contributors to a
+virile religion based upon an inherent divine and human relationship.
+
+Still another influence, of a very different sort, came to England by
+way of Italy--the intense interpretation of Faith as the way of
+salvation, expressed in the writings of the Spanish reformer, Juan de
+Valdes, and in the powerful sermons of his two Italian disciples,
+Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564) and Pietro Martire Vermigli (1500-1562),
+generally known as Peter Martyr. Juan de Valdes, twin brother of the
+Humanist, Alfonso de Valdes, the friend of the Emperor Charles V., was
+born of a distinguished Castilian family toward the end of the
+fifteenth century. He was splendidly prepared in his youth, both
+mentally and religiously, for the great work of his life, which was to
+be a spiritual mover of other souls. As his views of the needed
+transformation of Christianity broadened and intensified he concluded
+that he would be safer in Italy than in Spain, and he thus took up his
+residence in Naples in 1529. Here he became the centre of a remarkable
+circle of spiritual men and women who were dedicating themselves to the
+reform of the Church and to the {237} propagation of a more vital
+religion. Ochino, the most powerful Italian preacher of the age; the
+fervent scholar, Vermigli; the papal secretary, Carnesecchi, later a
+martyr to the new faith; Vittoria Colonna, the friend of Michael Angelo
+Buonarotti, and the beautiful Giulia Gonzaga, were among those who
+kindled their torches from his burning flame. For the instruction of
+his friends--especially for Giulia Gonzaga--de Valdes translated St.
+Paul's Epistles to the Romans and Galatians and wrote commentaries on
+them, and contributed the penetrating original works, _The Christian
+Alphabet_ and _The Hundred and Ten Divine Considerations_.[1]
+
+These writings present in vivid and powerful style the way of salvation
+through Faith. The primary insight is Lutheran, but it is everywhere
+coloured and tempered by the author's Humanistic outlook. He insists,
+in all his interpretations of salvation, upon the vital interior work
+of the Holy Spirit and upon the necessity of re-living the Christ-life
+in all its heights and depths. All the truths of religion, he
+constantly urges, must be known and verified in experience, and those
+who are to be effective ministers of the Gospel in any age must know
+that they are divinely sent and must be taught by the inward Word of
+God rather than by human science. The attractive power of the Cross is
+rediscovered in his profound experience and makes itself felt as the
+dynamic principle of his entire moral activity.
+
+The _Divine Considerations_ was put into English by Nicholas Ferrar
+(1592-1637) of Little Gidding, and published at Oxford in 1638,
+together with the Introduction to the _Commentary on Romans_, under the
+name of "John Valdesso." The English translation was submitted by
+Ferrar to his friend, George Herbert, who wrote some interesting
+critical notes which were printed with the original edition. George
+Herbert expresses his great love for "Valdesso," whose eyes, he says,
+God has opened, even in the midst of Popery, "to understand and
+expresse so clearly {238} and excellently the intent of the Gospell in
+the acceptation of Christ's righteousness," but he "likes not" his
+slighting of Scripture and his use of the Word of God for inward
+revelation. He believed, though wrongly, that de Valdes was a
+"mystic," and that he was advocating a religion of "private enthusiasms
+and revelations." The fact was rather that de Valdes was presenting or
+was aiming to present a religion of universal validity, brought to
+birth by the discovery of God in Christ as revealed in the Gospel, and
+made continuously effective anew by personal experience of the same
+Christ as Divine Revealer in the lives of men.
+
+There is no question of the far-reaching influence of Ferrar's
+translation of this vital message of de Valdes, especially among
+scholars and literary men. It must also have had a popular influence,
+for Samuel Rutherford in 1648 declared it to be one of the "poysonable"
+sources of "Familisme, Antinomianisme, and Enthusiasme."[2] He charges
+that "Waldesso," as he calls him, teaches men that the Scriptures have
+been supplanted by the inner Light, in fact that "Scripture shines only
+as a light in a dark place until the Day-star arises in the heart, and
+that then man hath no more need to seeke that of the holy Scripture
+which departs of it selfe, as the light of a candle departs when the
+Sunne-beames enter, even as Moses departed at the presence of Christ
+and the Law at the presence of the Gospel."[3]
+
+Ochino and Vermigli spent six important years in England from 1547 to
+1553, when persecution under Mary forced them to flee. They were far
+more under the influence of Calvin at this period than under that of
+their former friend de Valdes, but they both with the fire and
+intensity of their Italian nature--especially Ochino in his
+sermons--drove home to the hearts and consciences of their hearers the
+way of salvation by faith and the absolute necessity of inner
+experience and interior religion.
+
+{239}
+
+II. JOHN EVERARD
+
+Dr. John Everard of Clare College, Cambridge, was clearly one of the
+earliest and one of the most interesting carriers of these ideas, and
+in his case it is not difficult to discover the influences which shaped
+the course of his thought and suggested the general lines of his
+message. He was born about 1575--the birth year of Jacob
+Boehme--though all early biographical details are lacking. He had a
+long student period at Clare College, receiving his degree of B.A. in
+1600, M.A. in 1607, and D.D. in 1619. He was deeply versed in the
+great mystics, and always reveals in his sermons the influence of
+Plotinus and Dionysius the Areopagite, and no less the influence of
+Eckhart, Tauler, and the _Theologia Germanica_. But at some period of
+his life he tapped a new source and came into possession of a fresh
+group of live and suggestive ideas which influenced all the thinking of
+his later stage. His translations, some of which are in MS. and some
+in printed form, furnish a clue to the main sources of his ideas, which
+present a striking parallelism with those held by the continental
+spiritual Reformers of the sixteenth century. He was possessed of
+original power and of penetrating insight, with "eyes of his own," but
+no one can fail to see that he had read and pondered the writings of
+these submerged Reformers, and that in a country remote from theirs he
+has become a reincarnation of their ideas and a new voice for their
+message.
+
+His public career, in the England of the first two Stuarts, was a
+stormy one. He was Rector of St. Martin-in-the-Field. In the early
+stage of his preaching he felt called upon to oppose the "Spanish
+Marriage" as "the great sin of matching with idolaters," and he
+underwent a series of imprisonments for his attacks upon this precious
+scheme of King James, who wittily suggested changing his name from Dr.
+Everard ["Ever-out"] to "Dr. Never-out." Some time before his fiftieth
+year--the date cannot be exactly fixed--he reached {240} his new and
+deeper insight, and henceforth became the bearer of a message which
+seemed to him and to his friends like the reopening of the treasury of
+the Gospels, and in this new light he felt ashamed of the barren period
+of his life when he walked in "the ignorance of litteral knowledge,"
+when he was "a bare, literal, University preacher," as he himself says,
+and had not found "the marrow and the true Word of God."[4] The great
+change which cleaves his public career into two well-defined parts is
+impressively indicated by his friend and disciple, Rapha Harford, in
+his "Dedicatory Epistle" to the Sermons and in his preface "to the
+Reader," though he nowhere gives any light upon the events and
+influences which initiated the transformation. "In a special and
+extraordinary manner God appeared to him in his latter days," Harford
+says, "and after that, he desired nothing more than to bring others to
+see what he saw and to enjoy what he enjoyed."[5] He was, we are told,
+"a man of presence and of princely behaviour" and was known "as a good
+philosopher, few or none exceeding him," "endowed with skill and depth
+of learning," but after his new experience, when he "came to know
+himself," and to "know Jesus Christ and the Scriptures _experimentally_
+rather than grammatically, literally or academically," he came to
+esteem lightly "notions and speculation," "letter-learning" and
+"University-knowledge," and he "_centred his spirit_ on union and
+communion with God" and turned his supreme interest from "forms,
+externals and generals" to the cultivation of "the inner man," and to
+"acting more than talking."[6]
+
+His new way of preaching--vivid, concrete, touched with subtle humour,
+grounded in experience and filling old texts with new meaning--appealed
+powerfully to the common people and to an elect few of the more highly
+privileged who had won a large enough freedom of spirit to go with him
+into new paths.[7] Like his Master, he loved {241} the common people,
+"thinking it no disparagement to accompany with the lowest of men,"
+"tinkers, coblers, weavers and poor beggarly fellows who came running"
+to hear him, and he poured out the best he had in his treasury to any,
+even the simplest and most ordinary, who cared to hear of this
+"spiritual, practical experiment of life." His preaching naturally
+brought him suffering and persecution. He was "often fetched into the
+High Commission," was forced to give "attendance from Court to Court
+and from Term to Term," was on one occasion fined a thousand pounds for
+his "heresies," and had many interviews with Archbishop Laud, but he
+always held that "Truth is strongest," and he declared that God had
+called him to be "a Sampson against Philistines and a David against the
+huge and mighty Goliath of his times,"[8] and he was ready to pay the
+cost of obedience to the Light. His friend, Harford, who had "much
+ado" to keep the manuscript of his sermons "out of the Bishop's
+fingers," declares that though Everard clearly "distinguished the
+outward and killing letter from the Life and Spirit of the Holy Word,"
+he was not an antinomian or in sympathy with ranterism. "Our author,"
+the Dedicatory Epistle says, and says truly, "missed both rocks against
+which many have split their vessels. He carries Truth amain with
+Topsail set. He cuts his way clear between the meer Rationalist who
+will square out God according to his Reason, and the Familist who lives
+above all ordinances and by degrees hath turned licencious Ranter."
+Thomas Brooks added to Harford's Testimony a brief "Approbation" to the
+Volume, on Behalf of the Publishers, recommending all readers to
+receive its "heaven-born truths" into their homes and into their
+hearts, assuring them that as they read and open their inner eyes they
+will find their own hearts in the book and the book in their own
+hearts, _i.e._ the book will "find them."
+
+Before turning to Everard's message, as it finds expression in the rare
+volume of his sermons--_The Gospel Treasures Opened_--we must consider
+the Translations {242} which he left unpublished. They are preserved
+in clearly written manuscripts in Cambridge University Library, under
+the title "Three Bookes Translated out of their Originall."[9] The
+first "Book" bears the following title-page: "The Tree of Knowledge of
+Good and Evil, And the Tree of Life in the Midst of the Paradise of
+God: Taken out of a Book called The Letter and the Life, or The Flesh
+and the Spirit. Translated by Dr. Everard." An interesting article on
+Dr. Everard in _Notes and Queries_[10] concludes that this first "Book"
+of Everard's is a free translation of the Second Part of Tentzel's
+_Medicina diastica_. This guess, however, proves to be incorrect,
+though there is a slight likeness between Tentzel's book and the
+English MS. Everard's book is, in reality, a translation of Sebastian
+Franck's _Von dem Baum des Wissens Gutes und Boeses_ ("Of the Tree of
+Knowledge of Good and Evil"). The translation is made from a Latin
+edition of Franck's little book, which was published in 1561. The
+entire message of this treatise, written by the wandering chronicler
+and spiritual prophet of Germany, and here reproduced in English, is
+the _inwardness_ of everything that concerns the religious life. The
+Tree of Life was in Adam's heart, and in that same inner region of the
+soul was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The story of
+Paradise is a graphic parable of the soul's experience. "That Tree
+which tested Adam was and is nothing else in truth but the Nature,
+Will, Knowledge, and Life of Adam, and every man is as much forbidden
+to eat of this Tree as Adam was." Franck's significant book contained
+passages from Hans Denck's _Widerruf_ ("Confession"), and Everard
+translated them as an appendix to his first manuscript book.[11] They
+hold the very heart of Denck's message and deal, with Denck's usual
+sincerity and boldness, with the fundamental nature of spiritual
+religion. He here declares the primacy of the Word of God in the soul
+over everything else that ministers to man's life: "I prefer the Holy
+Scriptures before all Humane {243} Treasure; yet I do not so much
+esteem them as I do the Word of God which is living, potent, and
+eternal, and which is free from all elements of this world: For that is
+God Himself, Spirit and no letter, written without pen or ink, so that
+it can never be obliterated. True Salvation is in the Word of God; it
+is not tied up to the Scriptures. They alone cannot make a bad heart
+good, though they may supply it with information. But a heart
+illumined with the Light of God is made better by everything." Franck
+declares, in comment on Denck's words: "I myself know at least twenty
+Christian Religions all of which claim to rest on the Holy Scriptures
+which they apply to themselves by far-fetched expositions and
+allegories, or from the dead letter of the text. . . . They can be
+understood rightly, however, only by the divine new-man, who is
+God-born, and who brings to them the Light of the Holy Spirit." There
+can be no doubt, I think, that Dr. Everard found in the writings of
+these two sixteenth-century prophets the body and filling of his own
+new conceptions of Christianity, and it was through his vigorous
+interpretations that this stream of thought first flowed into England.
+
+It will not be necessary to make extended comment on Everard's other
+translations. The second one was "The Golden Book of German
+Divinitie," rendered into English in 1628 from the Latin edition of
+"John Theophilus," who is Sebastian Castellio, and the third is a
+translation of Nicholas of Cusa's _De visione Dei_ ("The Vision of
+God"), which is a profound and impressive piece of mystical literature
+and deserves to be much better known than it is. Everard, further,
+translated the "Mystical Divinity" of Dionysius the Areopagite,
+selections from John Tauler and Meister Eckhart, and "The Divine
+Pymander [Poemander] of Hermes Trismegistus"--a book which nearly all
+the spiritual Humanists ranked in the very first list of religious
+literature.[12]
+
+We must now turn to Everard's message as it is {244} presented in his
+Sermons, and endeavour to discover what he told the throngs of people
+who came gladly to hear him in the Kensington Meetings and the
+gatherings at Islington. The central emphasis in every sermon is on
+personal experience, or, as we should phrase it to-day, on a religion
+of life and reality. He has had his own "scholastic" period, but he
+looks back on it as a passage across an arid desert, and he feels a
+mission laid upon him to call men everywhere away from a religion of
+"notions and words"[13] to a religion of first-hand experience and
+inwardly felt realities. Unless we know Christ, he says,
+experimentally so that "He lives within us spiritually, and so that all
+which is known of Him in the Letter and Historically is truly done and
+acted in our own souls--until we experimentally verify all we read of
+Him--the Gospel is a meer tale to us." It is not saving knowledge to
+know that Christ was born in Bethlehem but to know that He is born in
+us. It is vastly more important to know experimentally that we are
+crucified with Christ than to know historically that He died in
+Jerusalem many years ago, and to feel Jesus Christ risen again within
+you is far more operative than to have "a notional knowledge" that He
+rose on the third day. "When thou begins to finde and know not merely
+that He was conceived in the womb of a virgin, but that _thou_ art that
+virgin and that He is more truly and spiritually, and yet as really,
+conceived in thy heart so that thou feelest the Babe beginning to be
+conceived in thee by the power of the Holy Ghost and the Most High
+overshadowing thee; when thou feelest Jesus Christ stirring to be born
+and brought forth in thee; when thou beginnest to see and feel all
+those mighty, powerful actions done in thee which thou readest that He
+did in the flesh--here is a Christ indeed, a real Christ who will do
+thee some good."[14]
+
+{245}
+
+To have Christ born in the soul means also to "do the deeds of Christ,"
+to grow and increase toward perfection as His life is more fully
+manifested in us, to be able to say as we read of divine events, "This
+day is this Scripture fulfilled in me," and to see Christ work all His
+miracles before our eyes to-day. It is the "key of experience" which
+unlocks all the drawers and cabinets and hidden and secret doors of
+Scripture.[15] We can discover, as we read, that there are whole
+armies of Philistines in us to be overcome, that there are Goliaths to
+be slain, and that there are Promised Lands to be won.[16] "When thou
+hast seen God and found Him for thyself; then thou mayest say: Now I
+believe, not only because it is written in Genesis, but because I have
+felt it and seen it written and fulfilled in mine own soul."[17] "Men
+should not so much trouble themselves," he says to those who are
+expecting a "Fifth Monarchy," "about a personal reign of Christ here
+upon earth, if they saw that the chief and real fulfilling of the
+Scriptures were _in them_; and that, whatever is externally done in the
+world or expressed in the Scriptures, is but typical and
+representative, and points out a more spiritual _saving_, and a more
+divine fulfilling of them."[18]
+
+In almost the same figures used by Sebastian Franck he contrasts the
+letter and the Spirit, the outward and the inward, the word of the
+written Book and the living Word of God. This contrast is carefully
+worked out in four sermons, preached at Kensington, on "The Dead and
+Killing Letter, and the Spirit and the Life." Here he insists, often
+in quaint and curious phrases, that the Old Testament, "from the first
+of Genesis to the last of the Prophets," is an allegory, "woven like a
+beautiful tapestry" to picture forth to the eye a history whose real
+meaning is to be found within the soul; if you dwell upon it only as
+picture, only as history, it is a letter that kills; if you see your
+own selves in it and by it, then it gives life.[19] You may learn the
+whole Bible by heart and speak to any point in divinity according to
+text and letter, and yet know {246} nothing of God or of spiritual
+life.[20] "If you be always handling the letter of the Word, always
+licking the letter, always chewing upon that, what great thing do you?
+No marvel you are such starvelings!"[21] The letter is the husk; the
+Word, the Spirit, is the kernel; the letter is the earthen jar, the
+Spirit is the hidden manna; the letter is the outer court, the Spirit
+is the inner sanctuary; the letter is the shadow, the Spirit is the
+substance; the letter is the sheath, the Spirit is the sharp two-edged
+sword; the letter is the hard encasing bone that must be broken, the
+Spirit is inward marrow which nourishes the soul; the letter is
+temporal, the Word is eternal[22]--"if ye once know the truth
+experimentally after the Spirit ye will no longer make such a stir
+about Forms, Disciplines, and Externals as if that were the great and
+only Reformation!"[23] The real difficulty, the true cause of
+spiritual dryness, is that "men strive and contend so much for the
+letter and the external part of God's worship, that they neglect the
+inward and internal altogether; for where is the man who is so zealous
+and hot for the internal as he is for the external. If we press men to
+the inward before the outward, or do as I do, lift up that; either how
+cold and heartless they are, or else how quarrelsome and malicious they
+are!"[24] When once the inward core of things has been grasped and the
+transforming experience has occurred, making a new man--freed,
+illuminated, sin-delivered, with "God the Life of the life and the Soul
+of the soul"[25]--the outward forms and the external things will fall
+into the right perspective and will receive their proper emphasis.
+Imitating St. Augustine's great saying: "Love God absolutely and then
+you may do as you please," Everard says, "Turn the man loose who has
+found the living Guide within him, and then let him neglect the outward
+if he can; just as you would say to a man who loves his wife with all
+tenderness, 'you may beat her, hurt her or kill her, if you want
+to!'"[26]
+
+The conception of God which forms the foreground of {247} all Everard's
+teaching is one perfectly familiar to those that have studied the great
+mystics who have formed their ideas under the direct or indirect
+influence of Plotinus. The conception is, of course, not necessarily
+mystical--it is rather a recurring type of metaphysics--but it has
+peculiarly suited the mystical mind and is often regarded by Christian
+historians as synonymous with mysticism. God, for Everard as for
+Dionysius and for Eckhart, Tauler, and Franck, is unknowable,
+unspeakable, unnamable, abstracted from all that is created and
+visible, an absolute One, alone of all beings in the universe able to
+say "I am," since He alone is Perfect Reality; but just for that reason
+He is unrevealable in His inmost nature to finite beings and incapable
+of manifestation through anything that is finite.[27]
+
+He is a permanent and unchanging Substance; all things that are visible
+are but shadow and appearance, are like bubbles in the water which are
+now here and now gone.[28] Every created and finite thing,
+however--from a grain of sand to a radiant sun and from a blade of
+grass to the Seraph that is nearest God--is a beam or a ray or
+expression of that eternal Reality, is an angel or messenger that in
+some minute, or in some glorious fashion, reveals God in space and
+time; and all created things together, from the lowest to the highest,
+from the treble of the heavenly beings to the base of earthly things,
+form "one mighty sweet-tuned instrument," sending forth one harmonious
+hallelujah to the Creator and revealing a single organic universe,
+"acted and guided by one Spirit"--the Soul of all that is.[29] "Ask
+the craggy mountains what part they sing, and they will tell you that
+they sing the praise of the immutableness and unchangeableness of God;
+ask the flowers of the field what part they sing, and they will tell
+you they sing the wisdom and liberality of God who cloathes them beyond
+Solomon in all his glory; ask the sun, moon and stars what part they
+sing, and they will say the constancy of God's promises, that they hold
+their course and do not alter it; ask the poor received sinner {248}
+what part he sings, and he will tell you he sings the infinite free
+mercy of a most gracious Father; and ask the wicked, obstinate sinner
+what part he sings, and he will tell you he sings the praise of the
+patience and justice of God."[30]
+
+In a very striking passage, Everard points out how the beings nearest
+in order to God are most free of matter and imperfection, while those
+lower in hierarchical scale are increasingly more material: "God is a
+pure Spirit, only Form without any manner of matter; and all the
+Creatures, the further off from Him, the more matter [they have] and
+the nearer the less. For example, Angels are pictured with complete
+_bodies_; yet to show they are further off from matter than men,
+therefore they have always wings. And Arch-angels, they being nearer
+the Nature of God than Angels, are pictured _with bodies cut off by the
+middle with wings_. But Cherubims, having less matter and nearer God
+Himself than either, are pictured _only with heads and wings, without
+bodies_. But Seraphims, being farthest off from man and nearest of all
+to God, _have no bodies nor heads nor wings at all_ but [are] only
+represented _by a certain yellowish or fiery Colour_."[31]
+
+We ourselves, we men, are both finite and infinite. We have come from
+an infinite source, and even in our apparent finiteness and
+independence we still remain inwardly joined to that central Reality.
+
+He tells this in his parable of the water-drops: "Suppose two
+water-drops reasoning together, and one says to the other,
+
+'Whence are we? Canst thou conceive whence we are? Dost thou know
+either whence we come or to whom we belong, or whither we shall go?
+Something we are, but what will in a short time become of us, canst
+thou tell?' And the other drop might answer, 'Alas, poor fellow-drop,
+be assured we are nothing, for the sun may arise and draw us up and
+scatter us and so bring us to nothing.' Says the other again, 'Suppose
+it do, for all that, yet we are, we have a being, we are something.'
+
+'Why, what are we?' saith the other.
+
+{249}
+
+'Why, brother drop, dost thou not know? We, even we, as small and as
+contemptible as we are in ourselves, yet we are members of the Sea;
+poor drops though we be, yet let us not be discouraged: _We belong to
+the vast Ocean_.'"[32]
+
+The way back to this infinite Ocean from which we have come and in
+which we belong is through the tiny rivulet, the narrow inlet, of our
+own souls, for "the Sea flows into all the creeks and crannies of the
+World."[33] But to find Him--this original Ground and Reality--we must
+"leave the outcoasts" and go back into "the Abysse." Most of us are
+busy "playing with cockel-shells and pebble-stones that lie on the
+outcoasts of the Kingdom," and we do not put back to the infinite Sea
+itself, where we become united and made one with His Life.[34]
+
+The process of return is a process of denial and subtraction. The
+"cockel-shells and pebble-stones" must be left, and one finite thing
+after another must be dropped, and finally "all that thou callest I,
+all that self ness, all that propriety that thou hast taken to thyself,
+whatsoever creates in us Iness and selfness, must be brought to
+nothing."[35] If we would hear God, we must still the noises within
+ourselves. "All the Artillery in the World, were they all discharged
+together at one clap, could not more deaf the ears of our bodies than
+the clamorings of desires in the soul deaf its ears, so you see a man
+must go into silence or else he cannot hear God speak."[36] All "the
+minstrels" that are singing of self and self interests "must be cast
+out." If "the creature" is to be loved and used at all, it must be
+loved and used rightly and in balance, which is hard to do. "Thou must
+love it and use it as if thou loved it not and used it not, not
+appropriating it to thyself, and always being ready to leave it
+willingly and freely; so that thou sufferest no rending, no tearing in
+thy soul to part with it, and so thou usest it for God and in God and
+to ends appointed by God."[37]
+
+The result of this junction of finite and infinite in us is {250} that
+a Christian life is bound to be a strenuous contest: "you must expect
+to fight a great battel." "You are," Everard says again, "bidden to
+fight with your own selves, with your own desires, with your own
+affections, with your own reason, with your own will; and therefore if
+you will finde your enemies, never look without. If you will finde out
+the Devil and what he is and what his nature is, look within you.
+_There_ you may see him in his colours, in his nature, in his power, in
+his effects and in his working."[38]
+
+In a word, the way to God is the way of the Cross. Christ Himself is
+the pattern and His way of Life is the typical way for all who would
+find God--"Christ Jesus is He that all visions tend to; He is the
+substance of all the types, shadows, and sacrifices. He is the
+_business_ that the whole Word was ever about, and only is, and shall
+be about; He hath been, is, and shall be the business of all ages, in
+one kinde or other."[39] "The Book of God," he says in another sermon,
+"is a great Book, and many words are in it, and many large volumes have
+been drawn out of it, but Jesus Christ is the body of it; He is the
+Mark all these words shoot at."[40] It henceforth becomes our business
+to find Christ's life and Christ's death in us, to see that all His
+deeds are done in us. Christ's will must become our will, Christ's
+peace our peace, Christ's sufferings our sufferings, Christ's cross our
+cross, and then we may know "the eternal Sabbath," and keep "quiet,
+even if the whole fabrick of heaven and earth crack and the mountains
+tumble down."[41]
+
+Everard was always on the watch for those things which prevent the
+growth, progress, and advance of the soul into the deeper significance
+of religion. The true Christian continually "grows taller in Christ,"
+he does not stop at "the child's stature," his growth is "not stinted
+like a Dwarf."[42] He discovers one of the prevailing {251} causes of
+arrested development, the "stinting" of the soul, to lie in the wrong
+use of externals, in the subtle tendency to "rest" in the elements or
+beginnings of religion, as he calls them, in "the lowest things in
+Christianity." This is "to cover oneself with fig-leaves as Adam
+did."[43] Men "turn shadows into substance," and instead of using
+ordinances and sacraments, "as means, schoolmasters and tutors," "as
+steps and guides to Christ who is the Truth and Substance," they so use
+them that they stop the soul mid-way and hinder it from going on to
+Christ.[44] He cites the way in which St. Paul "burst out into a holy
+defiance" of everything which did not directly minister to the
+formation of a new creation within the person, whether it were Moses
+and the law or even Christ after the flesh, or any "outward Priviledges
+and Ordinances" whatever. Those who make these things "the top and
+quintessence of religion" miss the Apostle's "more excellent way."
+Those who "stick in externals" and "rest upon them as Crutches and
+Go-bies" [_i.e._ become arrested there] prevent growth in religion,
+"turn the ordinance into an Idol" and occasion disputes and
+differences, "like children who quarrel about triffles."[45] But
+Everard is, nevertheless, very cautious not to go too far in this
+direction and he always shows poise and balance. So long as the
+outward, whether letter or sacrament, is kept in its place and is used
+as means or medium for the attainment of a spiritual goal--the
+formation of Christ within--he approves of its use and warns against a
+too sudden transcendence of the outward helps to the soul.[46]
+
+Here in England, then, during the tumultuous years from 1625 to 1650 a
+solid scholar and a great preacher was teaching the people the same
+views which the spiritual Reformers of Germany had taught a century
+earlier. Like them, Everard taught that the book of the Bible, in so
+far as it consists of words, syllables, and letters, is not the Word of
+God, for God's Word is not ink and paper, but Life and Spirit, quick
+and powerful, illuminating the {252} soul immediately, and
+demonstrating itself by its creative work upon the inward man until he
+becomes like the Spirit that works within him.[47] Like them, he
+insisted that Christ becomes Saviour only as He becomes the Life of our
+lives and repeats in us in a spiritual way the events of His outward
+and historical life. Like them, too, he had discovered that God is not
+a being of wrath and anger, needing to be appeased. On the contrary he
+says: "Beloved, were you once to come to a true sight of God, you would
+see Him glorious and amiable, full of love and mercy and
+tenderness--all wrath and frowns blown clean away. We should see in
+Him not so much as any shadow of anger."[48] Like them, he found
+heaven not far away but in the redeemed soul: "Heaven is nothing but
+Grace perfected, 'tis of the same nature of that you enjoy here when
+you are united by faith to Christ."[49] "I remember," he once said,
+"how I was taught as a child, either by my nurse, or my mother, or my
+schoolmaster, that God was above in heaven, above the sun, moon and
+stars, and there, I thought, was His Court, and His Chamber of
+presence, and I thought it a great height to come to this knowledge;
+but I assure you I had more to do to unlearn this principle than ever I
+had to learn it."[50] He tries to call his hearers away from "the
+childish apprehensions" that heaven is a place of "visible and ocular
+glories," or that "it shall be only hereafter," or that its glory
+"consists in Thrones, and Crowns, and Scepters, in Music, Harps and
+Vyols, and such like carnal and poor things."[51]
+
+He was a man of beautiful spirit, of saintly life, "courageous and
+discerning," "concerned not so much over self-sufferings as that truth
+should not in any way be obstructed through him," and he belongs in the
+list of those who saw through the veil of the outward, through the
+parable of the letter, and found the inward and eternal Reality.[52]
+
+{253}
+
+III. GILES RANDALL AND HIS TRANSLATIONS
+
+Another seventeenth-century interpreter of religion as direct and
+immediate experience of God was Giles Randall, who, like John Everard,
+was a scholar, a translator of religious books, and a powerful popular
+preacher. If one knew him only through the accounts of the
+heresy-hunters of the period, one would suppose him to have been a
+disseminator of the most "virulent poyson" for the soul; but a careful
+examination of all the material available convinces me that he was a
+high-minded, sincere, and fearless bearer of the message of the
+present, living, inwardly-experienced Christ, as Eternal Spirit, Divine
+Light, and Word of God.
+
+It is extremely difficult, from the fragmentary details at hand, to
+construct a biographical account of Randall, but the following sketch
+of him seems fairly well supported by facts:
+
+He was the son of Edward Randall of Chipping Wycombe, Bucks, and
+received his B.A. from Lincoln College, Oxford, February 13,
+1625-6.[53] He was probably the nephew of John Randall, B.D.
+(1570-1622), an eminent Puritan divine, a man of good scholarship and
+of large means, who bequeathed by will his house and garden to his
+"loveing Nephewe Gyles Randall."[54] He seems to have been for some
+years a minister in good odour and repute, and to have given no
+occasion of complaint against his doctrine before 1643. He probably
+was the Giles Randall who was arrested in 1637 and tried in the Star
+Chamber for {254} preaching against "ship-money" as unjust and an
+offence against God, since it was, he declared in his sermon, "a way of
+taking burdens off rich men's shoulders and laying them on the necks of
+poor men."[55] He was again before the Star Chamber--this time it is
+certainly our Giles Randall--in 1643 charged with preaching
+"anabaptism," "familism," and "antinomianism," according to the usual
+labels of the time. He had been for some years preaching peaceably at
+"the Spital" in London with great multitudes of people nocking to hear
+him.[56] The charge of heresy was brought against Randall for a sermon
+which he was said to have preached in St. Martin Orgar's, a soundly
+orthodox church, in Candlewick ward, London--the charge being that he
+preached against "the mandatory and obligatory nature of the law as a
+Christian rule to walk by," and asserted that a child of God can live
+as sinless a life as Christ's was.[57] He was "removed" from the
+ministry "for his anabaptism" in the autumn of 1644, though he
+continued to preach after being "removed."[58] The famous drag-nets of
+heresy give us a few more details of Randall's "poysonous" doctrine.
+Edwards says that Randall taught that "our common food, ordinary eating
+and drinking, is a sacrament of Christ's death," and that "all
+creatures [_i.e._ everything in the visible creation] held forth God in
+Christ."[59] Samuel Rutherford charges him with teaching a possible
+perfection in this life: "Randall, the antinomian and Familist says,
+those persons are ever learning and never coming to knowledge who say
+that perfection is not attainable in this life."[60] He further
+charges that Randall in a sermon said that "Christ's Parables, from
+Sowing, a Draw-net, Leaven, etc., did prove that to expound the
+Scriptures by allegories was lawfull and that all the things of this
+life, as Seeds, the Wayside, a Rocke, the Sea, a {255} Net, the Leaven,
+etc., were sacraments of Christ . . . and that a spiritual minde might
+see the mysteries of the Gospel in all the things of nature and of this
+life. This man who preacheth most abomnable Familisme is suffered in
+and about London publickly, twise on the Lord's Day, to draw hundreds
+of Godly people after him!"[61]
+
+John Etherington throws a little more light upon the nature of this
+"abomnable Familism," which so many godly people liked. He says that
+Randall taught in his sermons that when a person is baptized with the
+Holy Ghost he knows all things, and has entered into the deep mystery
+which is "like the great ocean where there is no casting anchor nor
+sounding the bottome"; that perfection and the resurrection are
+attainable in the present time; that "those who have the Spirit have
+nothing to doe with the law nor with the baptism of repentance which
+John preached"; "he presumes to turn the holy writings of Moses, the
+Prophets, of Christ and His Apostles into Allegories," and gives "a
+spiritual meaning" to the same.[62] It is clear from the comments of
+these crumb-pickers of pernicious doctrine that Giles Randall, as a
+preacher, was teaching the views now quite familiar to us. He was
+teaching that the whole world is a revelation of God, that Christ is
+God fully revealed; that the Divine Spirit, incarnate in Him, comes
+upon men still and brings them into the bottomless, unsoundable deeps
+of Life with God, and makes it possible for them to attain a perfect
+life; that the Scriptures as outward and legal must be transcended, and
+that they must be spiritually discerned and experienced.
+
+Nearly everything connected with Randall's name presents an historical
+puzzle to us. His biography, as we have seen, lies hid in obscurity
+and his books present baffling problems. There are three translations
+of religious classics which bear his name on the title-page, and which
+are introduced to the reader in Prefaces written by him, but it is far
+from certain that he actually made the {256} translations. In 1646 he
+published a little book called the _Single Eye, or the Vision of God
+wherein is unfolded the Mystery of the Divine Presence_. Randall says
+that the book was written by "that learned Doctor Cusanus." It is in
+fact a translation of the _De visione Dei_ of Nicholas of Cusa, and it
+is word for word a printed copy of the Cambridge MS. ascribed to John
+Everard. The other book, published in 1648, is an English edition of
+_Theologia Germanica_, the translation being made from the Latin of
+"John Theophilus," that is, Sebastian Castellio. It is called "a
+Little Golden Manuall briefly discovering the mysteries, sublimity,
+perfection and simplicity of Christianity in Belief and Practice."
+Everard, it will be remembered, also translated this "little golden
+book," but in this case there are very great variations between
+Randall's printed copy and the Cambridge MS., and they probably did not
+come from the same hand.[63] The English translation was evidently
+made some time before the appearance of this edition of 1648, for
+Randall says in his Introduction that "This little Book was long veiled
+and obscured (by its unknown tongue) from the eye of the illiterate and
+inexpert, until some years since, through the desires and industries of
+some of our own countrymen, lovers of Truth, it was translated and made
+to speak to thee in thine own dialect and language. But the time of
+its Nativity being under the late wise and wary Hierarchic who had
+monopolized and engrossed the discovery of others . . . it walked up
+and down the city in MSS. at deer rates from hand to hand of some
+well-wishers to truth, in clandestine and private manner; like Moses in
+his Arke, or the little {257} Child fled and hid from Herod, never
+daring to crowd into the Presse, fearing the rude usuage of those then
+in authority."[64]
+
+Both Robert Baillie and Benjamin Bourne had seen the treatise before
+their respective books against heresy appeared in 1646, and they were
+deeply stirred against Randall for sowing what to their minds seemed
+such dangerous doctrines and such regard for "Popish writings."[65]
+His critics further connect Randall with other books. Baillie speaks
+of two books: "the one by a Dutch Frier [evidently the Theologia] and
+the other by an English Capuchine." Bourne writes against those
+dangerous books _Theologia Germanica, The Bright Star, Divinity and
+Philosophy Dissected_, and Edwards couples with _the Vision of God_
+(the treatise by Nicholas of Cusa) "the third part of the Rule of
+Perfection by a Cappuchian Friar."[66]
+
+John Goodwin, vicar of St. Stephen's in Coleman St., commenting on
+Edward's _Gangraena_, humorously says: "I marvaile how Mr. Edwards
+having (it seems) an authorized power to make errors and heresies at
+what rate and of what materialles he pleaseth, and hopes to live upon
+the trade, could stay his pen at so small a number as 180, and did not
+advance to that angelicall quotient in the Apocalypse, which is _ten
+thousand times ten thousand_," and he adds that if Edwards had
+consulted with a book "printed within the compasse of his foure years,
+intitled _Divinity and Philosophy Dissected, set out by a mad man_,
+with some few others . . . He shall be able to increase his roll of
+errors from 180 to 280, if not to 500."[67] Samuel {258} Rutherford
+says: "So hath _Randel_ the _Familist_ prefixed an Epistle to two
+Popish Tractates, furnishing to us excellent priviledges of Familisme,
+the one called _Theologia Germanica_, and the other _Bright Starre_,
+which both advance perfect Saints above Law, and Gospel". . .[68]
+
+This treatise, called _A Bright Starre_ (London, 1646), which so deeply
+disturbed the seventeenth-century guardians of orthodoxy, is a
+translation of "The Third Part of the Rule of Perfection," written by
+an English Capuchin Friar, and "faithfully done into the English
+tongue," apparently by Randall, "for the common good."[69] It is a
+profoundly mystical book, characterized by interior depth and insight.
+Its central aim is the exposition of a stage of spiritual life which
+transcends both "the active life" and "the contemplative life," a stage
+which the writer calls "the Life Supereminent." In this highest stage
+"the essential will of God is practiced," without strain or effort,
+because God Himself has now become the inner Life and Being of the
+person, the spring and power of the new-formed will.
+
+Randall's preface, or "Epistle to the Reader," as he calls it, is a
+further revelation of his religious views, and his Christian spirit.
+He pleads for freedom and for variety in religious life and thought.
+God does not want one fixed and unvarying Christian form or doctrine;
+He wants variety in the spiritual life as He has arranged for variety
+in the external world of nature: "As in the world all men are not of an
+equall height and stature of body, but some taller, some shorter; some
+weaker, some stronger: so neither are all of one just and even
+proportion in spiritual light and strength of faith in the kingdome of
+Christ, some are dwarfs of Zacheus his pitch, some {259} againe of
+Saul's port, taller by his head and shoulders than his brethren; so, in
+the kingdome of Christ, some are babes, some are young men, some are
+fathers, every one according to the measure of the gift of Christ."
+God has something in His kingdom that fits each spiritual stature,
+something suited to each intellectual capacity. He does not want one
+and the same note struck by all--"harping blindly on one string." He
+does not want men to be "tyed to one forme and kept forever to one
+lesson, unable to top up their work"--He wants men to "go from strength
+to strength, from faith to faith and from height to height."
+
+Randall declares that he has observed with deep sorrow "the
+_non-proficiency_ of many ingenuous spirits who through the policie of
+others and the too too much modesty and timerity of themselves" have
+failed to progress "to the top and pitch" of their possible
+perfection--"poore soules after many years travelling being found in
+the same place and going the same pace!" He hopes that this book on
+Perfection which he is now giving "common vulgar people in their own
+mother tongue," though it is a way that is "high and hard and almost
+unheard of amongst us," may help men to grow up into their full stature
+and to come to "the uttermost steps of Jacob's Ladder which reacheth
+into the heavens." The lower stages of the religious life consist (1)
+of external practices and exercises in conformity to the law of God,
+and (2) interior contemplation and meditation of a God thought of as
+outside and beyond the soul's real possession. But the true spiritual
+life, and "Sabbath rest of the soul," is reached only when God becomes
+the inner Life of our lives, when Christ is formed within and we see
+Light and have our wisdom through His divine anointing. At the highest
+stage of spiritual life man finds himself by ceasing to be himself.
+God can now reveal His beauty and glory through such a person and act
+and work in him and through him. This teaching, Randall admits, is
+only for "experienced Christians," but he believes that this book will
+have "good successe amongst _the Children of {260} the Light_, who are
+taught of God and who run and read the hidden and deepe things of
+God."[70]
+
+If we may judge Randall from his extant Prefaces he was a beautiful
+spirit and was, in fact, what he calls himself, "a lover of the Truth
+in the Truth."[71] He says that "Nothing is or ever was endeavored by
+most men, with more industry and less success than the true knowledge
+of God," but this perennial failure is due, he thinks, to the false
+ways which have been taken, especially to "the negative process of
+abstraction" by which men have tried in vain to find God. The only
+true way to Him is "the new and living way" through the concrete
+revelation of Him. "The sound and unerring knowledge of God standeth
+in your knowledge of your man Christ Jesus, and whoever hath seen Him
+hath seen the Father also, for He is not a dead image of Him, but a
+living Image of the invisible God, yea, the fulgor or brightness of His
+glory and character of His person. . . . He is an Immanuel, God with
+us, God in us. . . . But there is no true knowledge of God within us
+till He be in us formed in the face of Jesus Christ."[72] He declares
+that since "understanding" must be helped by "sense" and "sense is not
+available till it live in the light of the understanding," we must
+learn to find the infinite in the finite, the invisible in the visible,
+and thus in Christ we have God "finitely infinite and infinitely
+finite"--"He cloathes Himself with flesh, reason, sense and the form
+and nature of a servant, who yet is above all and Lord over all." "He
+that is infinitely above thee makes himselfe be to thee [visibly] what
+He is in thee."[73] Christ is the universal revealer of God to all who
+see Him, just as the portrait of a human face seems to fix and follow
+the beholder from any position in the room, while at the same time it
+does the same to all other beholders from whatever angle they may
+look.[75]
+
+_The Vision of God_, whether Englished by Randall or {261} by Everard,
+or by both working together, is translated into beautiful, often
+poetical and rhythmical English, and contains many vivid passages, such
+as the following: "Thou, O God, canst never forsake me so long as I am
+_capable of Thee_."[75] "I love my life exceedingly because Thou art
+the sweetness of my life."[76] "No man can turn to Thee except Thou be
+present, for except Thou wert present and diddest solicit me I should
+not know Thee at all."[77] "Restless is my heart, O Lord, because Thy
+love hath enflamed it with such a desire that it cannot rest but in
+Thee alone."[78] "In the Son of Man I see the Son of God, because Thou
+art so the Son of Man that Thou art the Son of God and in the finite
+attracted nature I see the Infinite Attracting Nature." "I see all
+things in thy human nature which I see in thy divine nature."[79] "To
+come to God is Paradise; to see God is to be in Paradise."[80] "The
+Word of God illuminateth the understanding as the light of the sun doth
+the world. I see the fountain of Light in the Word of God. . . .
+Christ is the Word of God humanified and man deified."[81] "What is
+more easie than to believe God, what is more sweet than to love
+Him. . . . Thy Spirit, O God, comes into the intellectual spirit of
+good men, and by the heat of divine love concocts the virtuall power
+which may be perfected in us. . . . All Scriptures labour for nothing
+but to show Thee, all intellectual spirits have no other exercise but
+to seek Thee and to reveal Thee. Above all things Thou hast given me
+Jesus for a Master, the Way of Life, and Truth, so that there might be
+nothing at all wanting to me."[82]
+
+The literary style of _Divinity and Philosophy Dissected_ is unlike
+that of Randall's known writings, and yet it is not impossible for him
+to have written it.[83] The ideas which fill the little book are quite
+similar to those which {262} Randall held and are in full accord with
+those which prevailed in this general group of Christian thinkers. The
+writer of the treatise, whoever he was, is fond of allegory and
+symbolic interpretation. He turns Adam into a figure and makes the
+Garden of Eden an allegory in quite modern fashion. "Doe you thinke,"
+he writes, "that there was a materiall garden or a tree whereon did
+grow the fruit of good and evill, or that the serpent did goe up in the
+same to speake to the woman? Sure it cannot stand with reason that it
+could be so, for it is said that all the creatures did come to Adam,
+and he gave them names according to their natures: now it is contrary
+to the Serpent's nature to speake after the manner of men, unlesse you
+will alleadge that she understood the language of the beasts, and
+thought them wiser than God, and resolved to be ruled by them, which to
+me seems altogether against reason, that the woman should be so
+ignorant and unrationall, who was created rationall after the image of
+God to be ruler of all creatures: for at this day if a Serpent went up
+into a tree, and did speake from thence to men and women, it would make
+them afraid in so much that they would not doe what he bid them: or
+dost thou thinke that in Mesopotamia (a great way off beyond the seas)
+that there is a materiall garden wherein standeth the tree of life, and
+the tree of knowledge of good and ill, both in one place, and an
+angell, standing with a flickering sword to keep the tree of life from
+the man!"[84]
+
+The book contains a very striking confession of Faith quite unlike that
+which Rutherford or Baillie or Edwards would have allowed as "sound,"
+but yet serious, honest, and marked with a clear note of experience.
+God is, for the writer, above everything a living God, a Spirit, "a
+perfect clear Light that reveals to man the Truth." God is, he says,
+Light, Life, and Love, and He is all these things to man. He instructs
+and convinces his conscience; He disciplines and corrects him; He
+raises condemnation in us for our sins, and "His Light persuades our
+hearts to have true sorrow and real repentance for our sins, with a
+{263} broken and contrite heart and sorrowful spirit, and so we begin
+to hate ourselves and our sins, and doe really forsake them."[85]
+"There is," he maintains, in words that sound strangely like the yet
+unborn Quakers, "an infallible Spirit, Jesus Christ, the power of God
+in us, which directs, corrects, instructs, perswades, and makes us wise
+unto salvation; for He is the holy Word of life unto us . . . and
+discovers all mysteries unto us, . . . if so be we are obedient unto
+Him; but if we are not obedient unto Him, this infallible Spirit, Jesus
+Christ in us, then we shall know nothing of God or of the Scriptures,
+but it shall be a _sealed book, a dead letter, a seeming contradiction_
+unto us."[86]
+
+Samuel Rutherford declares the little treatise to be "a rude, foolish
+and unlearned Pamphlet of late penned and changing, as Familists and
+Antinomians doe, Scripture and God and Christ into metaphores and vaine
+Allegories."[87] The comment of this good man is honest and sincere,
+but of value only as revealing the mental attitude of himself. Here
+the representative of the old system was speaking out of the past and
+condemning a dawning movement which with his apperceiving material he
+could not understand, but which was in a few years to have
+extraordinary expansion and which, when it should in time become
+defecated through discipline and spiritual travail, was destined to
+speak to the condition of many minds to whom Rutherford's "notions"
+have become only empty words.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A beautiful little anonymous book of this period, containing a similar
+conception of Christianity to that set forth in the writings of Everard
+and Randall, must be briefly considered here: _The Life and Light of a
+Man in Christ Jesus_ (London, 1646). The writer, who was a scholarly
+man, shows the profound influence of the _Theologia Germanica_, that
+universal book of religion which {264} fed so many souls in the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he has evidently found, either
+at home or abroad, spiritual guides who have brought him to the
+Day-star in his own heart.
+
+Religion, he says, is wholly a matter of the "operative manifestation
+of Christ in a man--the divine Spirit living in a man."[88] To miss
+that experience and to lack that inner life in God is to miss the very
+heart of religion. "There be many and diverse Religions and Baptisms
+among many and diverse peoples of the habitable world, but to be
+baptized as a man in Christ--that is to be baptized into the living,
+active God, so that the man has his salvation and eternal well-being
+wrought in him by the Spirit and life of his God--is the only
+best."[89] Those who lack "this real spiritual business" never attain
+"the true Sabbath-rest of the soul." They go to meeting on "Sunday,
+Sabbath or First day [_sic_] merely to hear such or such a rare divine
+preach or discourse, or to participate in such or such Ordinances."[90]
+They have "an artificiall, historicall Divinity [Theology] which they
+have attained by the eye, that is by reading books, or by the ears,
+that is, by hearing this or that man, or by gathering up
+expressions"--their religion rests on "knowledge" and not on Christ
+experienced within.[91] This external religion is not so much wrong as
+it is inadequate and immature. "It is," he says, "like unto young
+children, who with shells and little stones imitate a real
+building!"[92] The religion which carries a man beyond shadows to true
+realities and from the cockle-shell house to a permanent and eternal
+temple for the Spirit is the religion which finds Christ within as the
+Day-star in the man's own heart.[93]
+
+There is throughout this simple little book a noble appreciation of
+love as the "supream good" for the soul. "The God of infinite goodness
+and eternal love" is a kind of refrain which bursts forth in these
+pages again {265} and again. Love in _us_ is, he thinks, "a sparkle of
+that immense and infinite Love of the King and Lord of Love."[94]
+Salvation and eternal well-being consist for him in the formation of a
+life "consecrated and united unto the true Light and Love of Christ."
+The man who has this Life within him will always be willing and glad
+when the time comes "to returne againe into the bosome of his heavenly
+Father-God."[95] And not only is the man who has the Life of Christ in
+him harmonized in love upwardly toward God; he is also harmonized
+outwardly towards his fellows. "He is a member with all other men,
+with the good as a lowly-minded disciple to them; with those that are
+not in Christ, as a deare, sympathizing helper, doing his utmost to do
+them good."[96] He has written his "little Treatise," he says, "as a
+love-token from the Father" to help lead men out of the "darke pits of
+the world's darkness" into the full Light of the soul's day-dawn.
+
+The book lacks the robustness and depth that are so clearly in evidence
+in most of the writings that have been dealt with in this volume, but
+there is a beauty, a simplicity, a sweetness, a sincerity born of
+experience, which give this book an unusual flavour and perfume. The
+writer says that there is "an endless battle between the Seed of the
+woman and the seed of the serpent," but one feels that he has fought
+the battle through and won. He says that "a man should be unto God
+what a house is to a man," _i.e._ a man should be a habitation of the
+living God, and the reader feels that this man has made himself a
+habitation for the divine presence within. He says if you want
+spiritual help you must go to a "man who has skill in God," and one
+lays down his slender book feeling assured that, out of the experience
+of Christ in his own soul, he did have "skill in God," so that he could
+speak to the condition of others. There was at least one man in
+England in 1646 who knew that the true source and basis of religion was
+to be found in the experience of Christ within and not in theological
+notions of Him.
+
+
+
+[1] The Italian titles of these two books are _Alfabeto Christiana_
+(1546) and _Le Cento et dieci divine Considerationi_ (1550).
+
+[2] _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_ (1648), p. 164.
+
+[3] _Ibid._ p. 319.
+
+[4] Epistle Dedicatory to _Some Gospel Treasures Opened_ (London, 1653).
+
+[5] _Gospel Treas._, "To the Reader."
+
+[6] _Ibid._
+
+[7] Sometimes "Divers Earls and Lords and other great ones" were in his
+audience.
+
+[8] _Gospel Treas._, "To the Reader."
+
+[9] _Sig. Dd._ xii. p. 68.
+
+[10] Fourth series, i. p. 597.
+
+[11] Denck's name is used in its Latin form John Denqui, and he is
+called _magnus theologus_.
+
+[12] _Hermes Trismegistus_ was published in Everard's lifetime. Large
+extracts from his manuscript translations are given in the _Gospel
+Treasures Opened_ (1653). _The Vision of God_ was edited and published
+in full by Giles Randall in 1646, and it is very probable that Everard
+and Randall did this work together.
+
+[13] _Gospel Treasures Opened_, p. 393.
+
+[14] Sermon on "The Starre in the East," _Gospel Treas._ pp. 52-54.
+See also pp. 586-587. Compare the famous lines of Angelus Silesius:
+
+ "Had Christ a thousand times
+ Been born in Bethlehem
+ But not in thee, thy sin
+ Would still thy soul condemn."
+
+_Angelus Silesius_, edited by Paul Carus (Chicago, 1909), p. 103.
+
+[15] _Gospel Treas._ pp. 59, 72, and 98.
+
+[16] _Ibid._ pp. 270-271.
+
+[17] _Ibid._ p. 282.
+
+[18] _Ibid._ p. 92.
+
+[19] _Ibid._ p. 280
+
+[20] _Gospel Treas._ pp. 310-311.
+
+[21] _Ibid._ p. 286.
+
+[22] _Ibid._ p. 468.
+
+[23] _Ibid._ p. 343.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ p. 344.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ p. 341.
+
+[27] _Ibid._ p. 344.
+
+[27] _Gospel Treas._ p. 81.
+
+[28] _Ibid._ p. 630.
+
+[29] _Ibid._ pp. 637 and 658.
+
+[30] _Gospel Treas._ p. 411.
+
+[31] _Ibid._ 2nd ed. ii. p. 345.
+
+[32] _Gospel Treas._ p. 753.
+
+[33] _Ibid._ p. 418.
+
+[34] _Ibid._ pp. 423-425.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ p. 230.
+
+[36] _Ibid._ p. 600.
+
+[37] _Ibid._ p. 308.
+
+[38] _Gospel Treas._ p. 142.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ p. 648.
+
+[40] _Ibid._ p. 642.
+
+[41] _Ibid._ pp. 99 and 250. Everard's greater contemporary, Pascal,
+also held the view that what happened to Christ should take place in
+every Christian. He wrote to his sister, Madame Perier, Oct. 17, 1651,
+on the death of their father: "We know that what has been accomplished
+in Jesus Christ should be accomplished also in all His members."
+
+[42] _Ibid._ pp. 555-556.
+
+[43] _Gospel Treas._ p. 315.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ p. 558.
+
+[45] _Ibid._ pp. 561-562.
+
+[46] _Ibid._ pp. 563-565.
+
+[47] _Gospel Treas._ pp. 310-315.
+
+[48] _Ibid._ p. 361.
+
+[49] _Ibid._ p. 365.
+
+[50] _Ibid._ p. 736.
+
+[51] _Ibid._ p. 552.
+
+[52] It is not possible to tell whether the sermons of John Everard
+were generally known to the early Quakers or not. He held similar
+views to theirs on many points, and he reiterates, with as much vigour
+as does Fox, the inadequacy of University learning as a preparation for
+spiritual ministry. One Quaker at least of the early time read Everard
+and appreciated him. That was John Bellers. In his "Epistle to the
+Quarterly Meeting of London and Middlesex," written in 1718, Bellers
+quotes "the substance of an excellent Discourse of a poor man in
+Germany, above 300 years ago, then writ by John Taulerus, and since
+printed in John Everard's Works, who was a religious dissenter in King
+James the First's time." He thereupon gives the "Dialogue between a
+Learned Divine and a Beggar" (which Everard ascribed to Tauler) to add
+force to his own presentation of "the duty of propagating piety,
+charity, and industry among men."
+
+[53] Foster's _Alumni Oxonienses_ (1500-1714), vol. iii. Early Series,
+p. 1231.
+
+[54] 57, Savile, Probate Court of Canterbury, Somerset House.
+
+[55] Calendar of State Papers, Dom. Ser. Charles I.
+
+[56] Robert Baillie's _Anabaptisme, the true Fountains of Independency_
+(1646), p. 102,
+
+[57] Thomas Gataker's _God's Eye on His Israel_ (1645), Preface.
+
+[58] _Journal of Commons_, August 9, 1644, pp. 584-585.
+
+[59] _Gangraena_ (1646), part iii. p. 25.
+
+[60] _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_ (1647), chap. xi. p. 143.
+
+[61] _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_, chap. lxxvi. pp. 162-163.
+
+[62] _A Brief Discovery_, etc. (1645), pp. 1-5.
+
+[63] Contemporary writers held that the Giles Randall who preached in
+"the Spital" was the translator. Robert Baillie, Principal of Glasgow
+University, in his work on _Anabaptisme_, pp. 102-103, speaks of
+Randall who preached in "the Spital," and refers to his increasing
+temerity as shown by the fact that "he hath lately printed two very
+dangerous books and set his Preface before each of them, composed as he
+professes long ago by Popish Priests, the one by a Dutch Frier and the
+other by an English Capuchine." Baillie further refers to the "deadly
+poison" of these books as shown in Benjamin Bourne's _Description and
+Confutation of Mysticall Antichrist, the Familists_ (1646), where "the
+dangerous books" are named, as _Theologia Germanica, the Bright Star,
+Divinity and Philosophy Dissected_. Edward's _Gangraena_ also
+identifies Randall the preacher with the translator of "Popish Books
+written by Priests and Friers," citing as an example "The Vision of God
+by Cardinall Cusanus," _op. cit._ (1646), part iii.
+
+[64] Preface.
+
+[65] Bourne's _Description and Confutation_ and Baillie's
+_Anabaptisme_. It seems likely that there was an earlier edition of
+the Theologia than this of 1648, as the chapters and pages quoted by
+Bourne do not correspond with those of the 1648 edition, whose
+title-page has this clause: "Also a Treatise of the Soul and other
+additions not _before_ printed."
+
+[66] _Gangraena_, part iii.
+
+[67] Goodwin's _Cretensis_ (1646). The book, entitled _Divinity and
+Philosophy Dissected_, and attributed by implication to Randall, was
+published in Amsterdam in 1644, with the following title-page:
+
+ "Divinity & Philosophy Dissected, & set forth by a mad man.
+ "The first Book divided into 3 Chapters.
+ "Chap. I. The description of the World in man's heart with the
+ Articles of the Christian Faith.
+ "Chap. II. A description of one Spirit acting in all, which some
+ affirme is God.
+ "Chap. III. A description of the Scripture according to the
+ history and mystery thereof.
+ "Amsterdam, 1644."
+
+[68] _Survey_, etc., part ii. chap. xlvii. p. 53.
+
+[69] The only copy of Randall's _Bright Starre_ which I have been able
+to locate is in the Lambeth Palace Library. A copy of it formerly
+belonged to the learned Quaker, Benjamin Furly, and was sold with his
+remarkable collection of books in 1714.
+
+[70] This term, "Children of the Light," was the name by which Friends,
+or Quakers, first called themselves. It was plainly a term current at
+the time for a Christian who put the emphasis on inward life and
+personal experience.
+
+[71] Preface to _Theologia_.
+
+[72] Preface to _The Vision of God_.
+
+[73] _Ibid._
+
+[74] Nicholas' Preface to _De visione Dei_.
+
+[75] _The Vision of God_, p. 11.
+
+[76] _Ibid._ p. 13.
+
+[77] _Ibid._ p. 19. Compare this passage with Pascal's saying: "Thou
+wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not already found me."
+
+[78] _Ibid._ p. 37.
+
+[79] _Ibid._ p. 130.
+
+[80] _Ibid._ p. 138.
+
+[81] _Ibid._ pp. 151-152.
+
+[82] _Ibid._ pp. 170-176.
+
+[83] There is no author's name or initial in the book, only the
+statement that it is "put forth" by a "mad man," who "desires to be in
+my wits and right minde to God, although a fool and madman to the
+world."
+
+[84] _Divinity and Philosophy Dissected_, pp. 39-40.
+
+[85] _Divinity and Philosophy Dissected_, p. 17.
+
+[86] _Ibid._ p. 62.
+
+[87] _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_, chap. xiv. p. 163.
+
+[88] _Life and Light_, p. 3.
+
+[89] _Ibid._ pp. 99 and 101 quoted freely.
+
+[90] _Ibid._ p. 19. It should be noted that this use of "First-day"
+for Sunday antedates the Quaker practice.
+
+[91] _Ibid._ pp. 26-27.
+
+[92] _Ibid._ p. 35.
+
+[93] See _ibid._ p. 36.
+
+[94] _Life and Light_, p. 11.
+
+[95] _Ibid._ p. 38.
+
+[96] _Ibid._ p. 34.
+
+
+
+
+{266}
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HIGH PLACES--ROUS, VANE, AND STERRY
+
+The spiritual struggles which culminated in the great upheaval of the
+English Commonwealth were the normal fruit of the Reformation spirit,
+when once it had penetrated the life of the English _people_ and kindled
+the fire of personal conviction in their hearts. Beginning as it did
+with the simple substitution of royal for papal authority in the
+government of the Church, the English Reformation lacked at its inception
+the inward depth, the prophetic vision, the creative power, the vigorous
+articulation of newly awakened personal conscience, which formed such a
+commanding feature of the Reformation movement on the Continent. It took
+another hundred years in England to cultivate individual conscience, to
+ripen religious experience, to produce the body of dynamic _ideas_, and
+to create the necessary prophetic vision before an intense and popular
+spirit of Reform could find its voice and marching power. The contact of
+English exiles and chance visitors with the stream of thought in Germany,
+in Switzerland, and in Holland, and the filtering in of literature from
+the Continent, together with the occasional coming of living exponents,
+sowed the seeds that slowly ripened into that strange and interesting
+variety of religious thought and practice which forms the inner life of
+the Commonwealth. The policy of the throne had always opposed this
+steadily increasing tide of thought which refused to run in the well-worn
+channels, but, as usual, the opposition and hindrances only served to
+{267} deepen personal conviction, to sharpen the edge of conscience, to
+nourish great and daring spirits, to formulate the battle-ideas and to
+win popular support. The inner life and the varied tendencies of the
+Commonwealth are too rich and complicated to be adequately treated
+here.[1] The purpose of this chapter is to show how the type of inward
+and spiritual religion, which the Reformation in its kindling power
+everywhere produced, finds expression in the writings of three men who
+came to large public prominence in the period of the Commonwealth,
+Francis Rous, Sir Harry Vane, and Peter Sterry.
+
+
+
+I
+
+Francis Rous was born in Cornwall in 1579. He graduated B.A. at Oxford
+in 1597 and at the University of Leyden in 1599. He entered the Middle
+Temple in 1601, with the prospect of a legal and public career before
+him, but soon withdrew and retired to Cornwall, where in a quiet country
+retreat he became absorbed in theological studies. His later writings
+show an intimate acquaintance with the great Church Fathers, especially
+with St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and the
+two Gregorys, and with the mystics, especially with the writings of
+Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bernard, Thomas a Kempis, and John Tauler.
+He was intensely Puritan in temper and sympathies in his earlier period
+of life, and much of his writing at this stage was for the purpose of
+promoting the increase of a deeper and more adequate reform in the
+Church. He translated the Psalms into "English Meeter," and his version
+was approved by the Westminster Assembly, authorized for use by
+Parliament, and adopted by the estates in Scotland, "whose Psalms,"
+Carlyle says, "the Northern Kirks still sing."[2]
+
+He was a member of Charles I.'s first and second Parliaments, and again
+of the Short Parliament and of {268} the Long Parliament. He was also a
+member of the Little Parliament, often called "Barebones Parliament," of
+which he was Speaker, and of the Parliaments of 1654 and of 1656, and he
+was, too, a member of Oliver's Council of State. He was one of many
+thoughtful men of the time who passed with the rapid development of
+affairs from the Presbyterian position to Independency, and he served on
+the Committee for the propagation of the Gospel which framed a
+congregational plan for Church government. He was a voluminous writer,
+but his type of Christianity can be seen sufficiently in his three little
+books: _Mystical Marriage_ (1635), _The Heavenly Academy_ (1638), and
+_The Great Oracle_ (1641).[3]
+
+He, again, like so many before him, influenced by Plato as well as by the
+New Testament and Christian writers, made the discovery that there is
+something divine in the soul of man, and that this "something divine" in
+man is always within hail of an inner world of divine splendour. "I was
+first breathed forth from heaven," he says, "and came from God in my
+creation. I am divine and heavenly in my original, in my essence, in my
+character. . . . I am a spirit, though a low one, and God is a Spirit,
+even the highest one, and God is the fountaine of this spirit [of
+mine]."[4]
+
+The possession of this divine "original," unlost even in the mist and
+mystery of a world of time and sense, enables man, he holds, to live in
+that higher world even while he sojourns in this lower world. Human
+reason, _i.e._ reasoning, is sufficient to guide in the affairs of this
+life, but it is blind to the world of the Spirit from which we came.
+"The soule has two eyes--one human reason, the other far excelling that,
+a divine and spiritual Light. . . . By it the soule doth see spiritual
+things as truly as the corporall eye doth corporal things."[5] "Human
+reason acknowledges the sovereignty of this spiritual Light as a candle
+acknowledges the greater light of the sun," and, {269} by its in-shining,
+the soul passes "beyond a speculative and discoursing holiness, even
+beyond a forme of godliness and advances to _the power of it_."[6] But
+this inward Light does not make outward helps unnecessary. "The light of
+the outward word [the Scriptures] and the Light in our soules are twinnes
+and agree together like brothers,"[7] and again he says, "It is an
+invaluable [inestimable] Loss that men do so much divide the outward
+Teacher from the Inward," though he insists that the ministry of the
+Spirit is above any ministry of the letter.[8]
+
+This eye of the soul which is a part of its original structure and is
+responsive to the Light of the spiritual world, so that "soule and Light
+become knit together into one," is also called by Rous, as by his
+predecessors, "Seed" or "Word." Sometimes this divine Seed is thought of
+as an original part of the soul, and sometimes, under the assumption that
+"man has grown wild by the fall of Adam" and is "run to weeds," it is
+conceived, as by Schwenckfeld, as a saving remedy supernaturally supplied
+to the soul--"Christ entering into our spirits lays in them an immortal
+seed."[9] In any case, whether the Seed be original, as is often implied
+and stated, or whether it be a supernatural gift of divine Grace in
+Christ, as is sometimes implied, it is, in Rous' conception, essential
+for the attainment of a religious experience or a Christian life: "A
+Christian man hath as much need of Christ's Spirit [called in other
+passages Seed or Word] to be a Christian and to live eternally, as a
+natural man hath of a spirit [principle of intelligence] to be a man and
+to live temporally, so Christ's Spirit and a man together are a
+Christian, which is a holy, eternal and happy thing."[10] He shows, as
+do so many of those who emphasize the inner experience of Christ as a
+living presence, an exalted appreciation of the historical revelation in
+Christ. Christ is, he says, both God and man, and thus being the perfect
+union of divinity and humanity {270} can be our Saviour.[11] Here in the
+full light of His Life and Love we may discover the true nature of God,
+who was "great with love before we loved Him."[12] The outer word
+answers to the inner Light as deep calls unto deep, and the two are "knit
+together" not to be sundered. The eye must be on Christ the Light, and
+the wise soul "must watch the winde and tide of the Spirit, as the seaman
+watcheth the naturall winde and tide. When the tide of the Spirit
+floweth then put thy hand to the oar, for then if thou row strongly thou
+maiest advance mightily."[13]
+
+He quaintly says that he has written about these spiritual things, about
+the world of divine splendour and the "soule's inner eye," because he
+wants to exhibit "some bunches of grapes brought from the land of promise
+to show that this land is not a meere imagination, but some have seene it
+and have brought away parcels, pledges and ernests of it. In these
+appears a world above the world, a love that passeth human love, a peace
+that passeth naturall understanding, a joy unspeakable and glorious, a
+taste of the chiefe and soveraigne good." He has, further, written
+because he wanted to "provoke others of this nation to bring forth more
+boxes of this precious ointment."[14]
+
+His little books are saturated with a devotional spirit rising into words
+like these: "Let my love rest in nothing short of thee, O God!" "Kindle
+and enflame and enlarge my love. Enlarge the arteries and conduit pipes
+by which Thou the head and fountaine of love flows in thy members, that
+being abundantly quickened and watered with the Spirit I may abundantly
+love Thee."[15] They contain bursts of intense prayer--"Put thy owne
+image and beauty more and more on my soule." He went through all the
+Parliamentary storms of that great epoch; he was Provost of Eton College;
+he was Cromwell's friend; but his main ambition seems to have been to be
+"knit to God by a personal union," to have "the {271} dayspring in his
+own heart," and to be taught in "the heavenly Academy--the High School of
+Experience."[16]
+
+
+
+II
+
+The story of Sir Harry Vane's life, adequately told, would involve the
+entire history of the great epoch of the Commonwealth. Next to Cromwell,
+he was the most influential shaper of events from the time of the meeting
+of the Long Parliament in 1640 until his "retirement" on the occasion of
+the expulsion of the members of Parliament in 1653. In his views of
+constitutional government and of human liberty he was one of the most
+original and one of the most modern men of the seventeenth century.
+Richard Baxter, who had no love for Vane, is only stating an actual fact
+when he says: "To most of our changes he was that within the House that
+Cromwell was without."[17] Clarendon, who loved him still less, said of
+him: "He was indeed a man of extraordinary parts, a pleasant wit, a great
+understanding which pierced into and discerned the purposes of men with
+wonderful sagacity."[18] What Milton thought of him he has told in one
+of the noblest sonnets that a poet ever wrote on a great statesman:
+
+ Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old,
+ Than whom a better senator ne'er held
+ The helm of Rome, when gowns not arms repelled
+ The fierce Epirot and the African bold:
+ Whether to settle peace, or to unfold
+ The drift of hollow states hard to be spelled,
+ Then to advise how war may best upheld
+ Move by her two main nerves, iron and gold,
+ In all her equipage; besides to know
+ Both spiritual power and civil, what each means,
+ What severs each, thou hast learned, which few have done:
+ The bounds of either sword to thee we owe;
+ Therefore on thy firm hand religion leans
+ In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son.[19]
+
+
+{272}
+
+Vane was quite naturally selected at the Restoration as one of the actors
+in the historical drama who could not be allowed to live any longer. The
+day after Vane's trial began, Charles II. wrote to Clarendon: "He is too
+dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the
+way."[20] His death brought out the loftiest traits of his character,
+and gave him a touch of beauty and glory of character which for posterity
+has done much to cover the flaws and defects which were not lacking in
+him. "In all things," writes Pepys, who saw everything in those days,
+"he appeared the most resolved man that ever died in that manner."[21]
+
+It is, however, not Vane the statesman, the maker of covenants with
+Scotch armies, the creator of sinews of war for the battles of Marston
+Moor and Naseby, the organizer of a conquering navy, the man who dared
+withstand his old friend Cromwell in the day of the great soldier's
+power, that concerns us in this chapter; it is Vane, the religious
+Independent, the exponent of inward religion; the man whom Milton calls
+"religion's eldest son." Even in his early youth he passed through a
+decisive experience which altered his entire after-life. "About the
+fourteenth or fifteenth year of my age," he said in his dying speech,
+"God was pleased to lay the foundation or ground-work of repentance in
+me, for the bringing me home to Himself, by His wonderful rich and free
+grace, revealing His Son in me, that by the knowledge of the only true
+God and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent, I might, even whilst here in
+the body, be made a partaker of eternal life, in the first fruits of
+it. . . . Since that foundation of repentance was laid in me, through
+grace I have been kept steadfast, desiring to walk in all good
+conscience toward God and toward men, according to the best light and
+understanding God gave me." From this early period on through his life,
+he always emphasized the importance of first-hand experience, of inward
+revelation, and of Christ's reign in the kingdom of the {273} human soul.
+He was still a very young man, when, under the impelling guidance of his
+conscience, he felt himself called to intermit, as Schwenckfeld and
+others had done, the practice of the sacraments of the Church. His
+attitude toward the sacraments at this time, and, apparently ever
+afterwards, was that of the "Seekers." He had reached the insight that
+religion is a spiritual relationship with a spiritual God, and on the
+basis of this position he questioned the divine "commission" of those who
+administered the external ceremonies of the Church. It is, however,
+perfectly clear that these views were not "original" with him, but that
+he had come under the influence of the teachings of the men whom I am
+calling "spiritual Reformers."
+
+How inward and mystical his type of Christianity really was, may be
+gathered from a short passage of an _Epistle_ which he wrote in 1661:
+"The Kingdom of God is within you and is the dominion of God in the
+conscience and spirit of the mind. . . . This Kingdom of Christ is
+capable of subsisting and being managed inwardly in the minds of His
+people, in a hidden state concealed from the world. By the power
+thereof, the inward senses, or eyes of the mind are opened and awakened
+to the drawing of them up to a heavenly converse, catching and carrying
+up the soul to the throne of God and to the knowledge of the life that is
+hid with Christ in God. Those that are in this Kingdom, and in whom the
+power of it is, _are fitted to fly with the Church into the wilderness,
+and to continue in such a solitary, dispersed, desolate condition till
+God call them out of it. They have wells and springs opened to them in
+this wilderness, whence they draw the waters of salvation, without being
+in bondage to the life of sense_."[22]
+
+He was only twenty-two years of age when, "for conscience' sake" and "in
+the sweete peace of God," he left England and threw in his lot with the
+young colony in Massachusetts Bay. At twenty-three he was {274} Governor
+of the Colony and found himself plunged into a maelstrom of politics,
+Indian wars, and ecclesiastical quarrels which would have tried even a
+veteran like John Winthrop. It was here in Massachusetts that the lines
+of his religious thought first come clearly into view, if any of Vane's
+religious ideas can ever properly be called "clear." The controversy in
+the Massachusetts Colony (1636-1638) was initiated and led by Anne
+Hutchinson, and was, in the phraseology of that period, an issue between
+"a Covenant of Works" and "a Covenant of Grace," which was a
+seventeenth-century way of stating the contrast between a religion
+historically revealed and completely expressed in an infallible Book on
+the one hand, and, on the other, a religion primarily based on the
+eternal nature of God and man, and on the fact of immediate revelation
+and communication between the God of Grace and the needy soul.[23]
+Governor Vane aligned himself with the Hutchinson party and was in
+sympathy with this second type of religion, the religion of inward
+experience, the immediate conscious realization of God, which, in the
+terminology of the times, was called "the Covenant of Grace."[24]
+Absorbed as he was for the next fifteen years after his return from
+America in momentous public affairs, he had no opportunity to give
+expression to the religious ideas which were forming in his mind. During
+his "retirement" after his break with Cromwell, he wrote two books which
+give us the best light we can hope to get on his religious views--_The
+Retired Man's Meditations_ (1655), and _A Pilgrimage into the Land of
+Promise_ (1664), written in prison in 1662.
+
+Baxter complained that his Doctrines were "so clowdily formed and
+expressed that few could understand them,"[25] and the modern reader,
+however much time and patience he bestows upon Vane's books, is forced to
+agree with Baxter. Vane acknowledges himself that his {275} thought is
+"knotty and abstruce." In religious matters his mind was always
+labouring, without success, to find a clear guiding clue through a maze
+and confusion of ideas, which fascinated him, and he allowed his mind to
+get lost in what Sir Thomas Browne calls "wingy mysteries." He had no
+sound principle of Scripture interpretation, but allowed his untrained
+and unformed imagination to run wild. Texts in profusion from Genesis to
+Revelation lie in undigested masses in his books. He had evidently read
+Jacob Boehme, but, if so, he had only become more "dowdy" by the reading,
+for he has not seized and appreciated Boehme's constructive thoughts,
+and, at least in his later period and in his last book, he is floundering
+under the heavy weight of millenarian ideas, which do not harmonize well
+with his occasional spiritual insights of an ever-growing revelation to
+man through the eternal Word who in all ages voices Himself within the
+soul. He was an extraordinary complex of vague mysticism and astute
+statesmanship.
+
+In one matter he was throughout his life both consistent and clear,
+namely, in the advocacy of freedom of conscience in religion. He put
+himself squarely on a platform of toleration in his early controversy
+with Winthrop.[26] His friend Roger Williams in later life heard him
+make "a heavenly speech" in Parliament in which he said: "Why should the
+labours of any be suppressed, if sober, though never so different? We
+now profess to seek God, we desire to see light!"[27] Throughout his
+parliamentary career he stood side by side with Cromwell in the difficult
+effort, which only partly succeeded, to secure scope for all honest
+religious opinion. Finally, in _The Retired Man's Meditations_, he
+wrote: "We are bound to understand by this terme [the Rule of Magistracy]
+the proper sphere, bounds and limits of that office _which is not to
+intrude itself into the office and proper concerns of Christ's inward
+government and rule in the {276} conscience_." After defining the
+magistrate's proper functions in the affairs of the external life, he
+then adds: "The more illuminated the Magistrate's conscience and judgment
+is, as to natural justice and right, by the knowledge of God and
+communications of Light from Christ, the better qualified he is to
+execute his office."[28]
+
+The central idea of his religious thought--though it never completely
+penetrated the fringes of his mind--was the reality of the living Word of
+God, the self-revealing character of God, who is an immediate, inward
+Teacher, who is His own evidence and demonstration, and who has, Vane
+testifies, "experimentally obtained a large entrance and reception in my
+heart as a seed there sown."[29] This living Word is not to be confused
+with the Scriptures, which are an outward testimony to the inner Word--an
+external way to the "unveiled and naked beauty of the Word itself," who
+is Spirit and Life.[30] In the long process of self-revelation through
+the living Word a temporal universe has been created by emanations in
+time, a universe double in its nature, first a deeper, invisible universe
+of light, of angels and exalted spirits, then a visible and material and
+"animalish" world, a shadow of the invisible world.[31] At the top of
+the order, man was created, uniting both the visible and the invisible
+worlds in one being. Man thus in himself is in miniature a double world,
+a world of light and spirit and a world of shadow. Two seeds, as Boehme
+had already taught, are always working in man, and his native free-will
+determines the course of his destiny. In his first test, man fell,
+though "the tree of life," which was a visible type of Christ, was before
+his eyes in Paradise, but this event was only the beginning of the long
+human drama, and the real history of the race is the story of the stages
+and dispensations of the living Word of God, educating, regenerating, and
+spiritualizing man, and bringing him to the height of his spiritual
+possibilities.
+
+{277}
+
+In the first stage of this divine pedagogy, man has the Word of God
+within himself "as a lampe or light in his mind, manifesting itself to
+inward senses, assisted by the ministry of angels." This is the period
+of "conditional covenant," under which man's spiritual life depends on
+"obedience to the inward operations of this Word," and those that obey
+are made "Children of the Light," and attain a forward-looking
+apprehension of the coming Son.[32]
+
+The second degree of glory--"a more excellent and near approach to the
+sight of the Son Himself"--is the training stage under the written word,
+which makes wise unto salvation. This is a dispensation of discipline,
+reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness, and it culminates in
+the manifestation of Grace in Jesus Christ, who is the Root of a new
+race. There are two ways of using the ministry of Grace in Jesus
+Christ--on the lower level as mere "restoration-work" and on the higher
+level as "re-creation into new life." Those who apprehend Christ on the
+lower level, as simply a new law-giver, do not get beyond the spirit of
+bondage and do not succeed in attaining an immutable and incorruptible
+nature. Those, however, who are born from within by the immortal and
+incorruptible Seed of God are "changed from their wavering unstable
+power" into an inward likeness to God, into a love that binds man's
+spirit into union with God's Spirit, into "steadfast and unmoveable
+delight in goodness" and "fixed and unshaken averseness to sin and
+evil."[33]
+
+The third and final stage of glory, the full dispensation of the
+Spirit--when "the whole creation will be restored to its primitive purity
+and to the glorious liberty of sons of God"--will be the thousand years'
+reign of Christ to which, Vane believed, both the outward and inward Word
+testify.[34]
+
+It is not easy to see how a man of Vane's mental and moral calibre, who
+had himself, as he tells us in his scaffold speech, been "brought home to
+himself by {278} God's wonderful, rich and free Grace, revealing His Son
+in me that I might be a partaker of eternal life," and who had all his
+life held that there is an eternal Word and Seed of God working both
+without and within to bring men to their complete spiritual stature,
+should be unwilling to trust the operation of this divine Word to finish
+what He had begun, and should resort to a cataclysmic event of a new
+order for the final stage. We of this later and more scientific age
+must, however, speak with some caution of the idealistic dreams and
+visions and glowing expectations of men, who in their deepest souls
+believed that God was a living, acting God who, in ways past finding out,
+intervened in the affairs of men and fulfilled His purposes of good.
+"God is almighty," Vane said once in a Parliamentary speech. "Will you
+not trust Him with the consequences? He that has unsettled a monarchy of
+so many descents, in peaceable times, and brought you to the top of your
+liberties, though He drive you for a while into the wilderness, He will
+bring you back. He is a wiser workman than to reject His work."
+
+George Fox, in 1657, was "moved of ye Lord to speake to him of ye true
+Light," having heard that "Henery Vane has much enquired after mee." Fox
+told him, in his usual fashion, "howe yt Christ had promised to his
+disciples to sende ym ye holy ghoast, ye spiritt of truth which shoulde
+leade ym into all truth which wee [Friends] witnessed and howe yt ye
+grace of God which brought salvation had appeared unto all men and was ye
+saintes teacher in ye Apostles days & soe it was nowe." Vane's comment
+on the Quaker's message was: "None of all this doth reach to my
+experiens," and Fox, in his plain straightforward manner, said: "Thou
+hast knowne somethinge formerly; but now there is a mountaine of earth &
+imaginations uppe in thee & from that rises a smoake which has darkened
+thy braine: & thou art not ye man as thou wert formerly. . . . I was
+moved of ye Lord to sett ye Seede Christ Jesus over his heade!"[35]
+
+{279}
+
+Clarendon was more charitable toward Vane than was Fox, who never deals
+gently with persons who approach his point of view and yet miss it. The
+former, declaring that Vane's writings lack "his usual clearness and
+ratiocination," and that "in a crowd of very easy words the sense was too
+hard to find out," yet concludes to give the furnace-tried statesman the
+benefit of the doubt: "I was of opinion that the subject was of so
+delicate a nature that it required another kind of preparation of mind,
+and perhaps another kind of diet, than men are ordinarily supplied
+with!"[36]
+
+There can, at any rate, be no doubt of Vane's honesty or of his loyalty
+to the Light within him. Standing face to face with death, he told his
+strange audience that he had put everything that he prized in the world
+to hazard for the sake of obeying the best Light which God had granted
+him, and he added these impressive words: "I do earnestly persuade all
+people rather to suffer the highest contradiction from men, than disobey
+God by contradicting the Light of God in their own conscience."
+
+
+
+III
+
+Peter Sterry was born in Surrey, early in the seventeenth century, and
+entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1629, graduating B.A. in 1633 and
+M.A. in 1637. Emmanuel College had been founded during Elizabeth's reign
+(1584) by one of her statesmen, Sir Walter Mildmay, for the especial
+encouragement of Calvinistic theology, and it was the most important
+intellectual nursery of the great Puritan movement in England. During
+Sterry's University period there was a remarkable group of tutors and
+fellows gathered in Emmanuel College. Foremost among them was Tuckney,
+who was tutor to Benjamin Whichcote the founder of the school of
+Cambridge Platonists, or "Latitude-Men," and Whichcote himself was at
+Emmanuel College {280} throughout Sterry's period, graduating M.A. the
+same year that Sterry graduated B.A.
+
+Sterry was a thorough-going Platonist in his type of thought and had much
+in common with Henry More, whose writings were "divinely pleasant" to him
+and whom he calls "a prophet" of the spiritual unity of the universe, and
+with Ralph Cudworth, the spiritual philosopher, though he finds "somewhat
+to regret" in the work of both these contemporary Cambridge
+Platonists.[37] Sterry is not usually reckoned among the Cambridge
+Platonists, but there is no reason why he should not be included in that
+group. He was trained in the University which was the natural home of
+the movement, he read the authors most approved by the members of this
+school, and his own message is penetrated with the spirit and ideals of
+these seventeenth-century Platonists. His writings abound with
+references to Plato and Plotinus, with occasional references to Proclus
+and Dionysius the Areopagite; and the world-conceptions of this composite
+school of philosophers, as they were revived by the Renaissance, are
+fundamental to his thought. He was thoroughly acquainted with the
+writings of Ficino, and quotes him among his approved masters. He had
+also profoundly studied the great mystics and was admirably equipped
+intellectually to be the interpreter of a far different type of
+Christianity from that of the current theologies.
+
+He became intimate in his public career with Sir Harry Vane, and there
+are signs of mutual influence in their writings, which gave occasion for
+Richard Baxter's pun on their names: "Vanity and sterility were never
+more happily conjoined."[38] Upon the execution of Charles I., Sterry
+was voted a preacher to the Council of State with a salary of one hundred
+pounds a year, which was soon after doubled and lodgings at Whitehall
+added. He generally preached before Cromwell on Sundays, and on every
+other Thursday at Whitehall, frequently before {281} the Lords and
+Commons. A number of his sermons were printed "by Order of the House,"
+and enjoyed a wide popularity, though their great length would make them
+impossible sermons to-day. Cromwell evidently appreciated his preaching
+very highly and felt no objection to the mystical strain that runs
+through all his sermons. He had many points of contact with Milton, and
+may have been for a period his assistant as Latin Secretary.[39] He was
+devotedly fond of music, art, and poetry, and he held similar views to
+Milton regarding the Presbyterian system. He naturally fell out of
+public notice after the Restoration, and quietly occupied himself with
+literary work, until his death in 1672. The main material for a study of
+his "message" will be found in his three posthumous Books: _A Discourse
+of the Freedom of the Will_ (1675); _Rise, Race and Royalty of the
+Kingdom of God in the Soul of Man_ (1683), and _Appearance of God to Man
+in the Gospel_ (1710).[40] His prose style is lofty and often marked
+with singular beauty, though he is almost always too prolix for our
+generation, and too prone to divide his discourse into heads and
+sub-heads, and sub-divisions of sub-heads. Here is a specimen passage of
+his dealing with a topic which Plato and the great poets have often
+handled: "Imagine this Life as an Island, surrounded by a Sea of
+Darkness, beyond which lies the main Land of Eternity. Blessed is he who
+can raise himself to such a Pitch as to look off this Island, beyond that
+Darkness to the utmost bound of things. He thus sees his way before and
+behind him. What shall trouble him on his Twig of Life, on which he is
+like a bird but now alighted, from a far Region, from whence again he
+shall immediately take his flight. Thou cam'st through a Darkness hither
+but yesterday when thou wert born. Why then shouldst thou not readily
+and cheerfully return through the same Darkness back again to those
+everlasting Hills?"[41] I will give one more {282} specimen passage
+touching the divine origin and return of the soul: "At our Birth, which
+is the morning of life, our Soul and Body are joined to this fleshly
+Image as Horses are put into a Waggon, to which they are fastened by
+their Harnes and Traces.[42] The Body is as the forehorse, but the Soul
+is the filly which draws most and bears the chief weight. All the day
+long of this life we draw this Waggon heavy laden with all sorts of
+temptations and troubles thorow deep ways of mire and sand. This only is
+our comfort that the Divine Will, which is Love itself in its perfection,
+as a Hand put forth from Heaven thorow a Cloud, at our Birth put us into
+this Waggon and governs us all the day. In the evening of our life, at
+the end of the day, Death is the same Divine Will as a naked Hand of pure
+Love, shining forth from an open Heaven of clear light and glory, taking
+our Soul and Body out of the Waggon and Traces of this fleshly Image and
+leading them immediately into their Inn."[43]
+
+Everything in the universe, he believes, is double. The things that are
+seen are copies--often faint and shadowy--of That which is. Every
+particular thing "below" corresponds to an eternal reality "above." Even
+those things which appear thin and shallow possess an infinite depth, or
+we may just as well say an infinite height. "Didst thou ever descry," he
+asks, "a glorious eternity in a winged moment of Time? Didst thou ever
+see a bright Infinite in the narrow point of an Object? Then thou
+knowest what Spirit means--that spire-top whither all things ascend
+harmoniously, where they meet and sit connected in an unfathomed Depth of
+Life."[44] And the immense congeries of things and events, even "the
+jarring and tumultuous contrarieties," "through the whole world, through
+the whole compass of time, through both the bright and the black Regions
+of Life and Death," consent and melodize in one celestial music {283} and
+perfect harmony of Divine purpose.[45] "The stops and shakes make music
+as well as the stroaks and sounds," even Death and Hell "are bound by a
+gold chain with shining links of Love" to the throne of God.[46]
+
+He outdoes even the "pillar" Quakers, his contemporaries in later life,
+in his proclamation of a Divine Root and Seed in the soul of man. In
+words almost precisely like those which Barclay used later in his
+_Apology_, he says: "There is a spiritual man that lies hid under the
+natural man as seed under the ground,"[47] or, again, "go into thyself
+beyond thy natural man, and thou shalt meet the Spirit of God."[48]
+There is "something eternal," "a seminal infiniteness," in the soul, its
+native Root and Bottom, consubstantial with it and inseparable from it.
+"It lasts on through all forms, wearing them out, casting them off for
+new forms, through which it manifests itself, until it finally brings us
+back into Itself and becomes our only clothing."[49] But though
+"native," it is not a part or function of the natural, psychical man, it
+is not of the "finite creature." It is from above, a transcendent
+Reality; it belongs to the eternal world and yet it is a Root of God
+within, a point in the soul's abyss (or apex) unsevered from God, so that
+one who knew the soul to its depths would know God.[50] Beneath all the
+wreck and ruin and havoc of sin it is still there, with its "glimpses of
+immortal Beauty." The prodigal who would return "home" must first return
+to himself, to that divine Seed, "hid deep beneath the soil and dung,
+beneath the darkness, deformity and deadness of its Winter-Season and
+rise up in its proper Spring into pleasant flowers and fruits, as a
+Garden of God."[51] There is thus "a golden thread" which is always
+there to guide the soul back home, through all the mazes of the world,
+or, to use another of his figures, "Thou hast but to follow the stream of
+Love, the Fountain of the Soul, if thou {284} wouldst be led to that Sea
+which is the confluence of all the waters of Life, of all Truth, of all
+Goodness, of all Joy, of all Beauty and Blessedness."[52]
+
+The _Fullness_ of the juncture of God and Man is seen only in Christ. In
+Him, "God and Man are one, one Love, one Life, one Likeness."[53] He is
+the Pattern, the unspoiled Image, the Eternal Word, and He is, too, the
+Head of our race. In Him the Divine Spirit and the human spirit "are
+twined into one." "If you want to see God, then see Christ."[54] If you
+want to see what the Seed in us can blossom into when it is unhampered by
+sin, again, see Christ.[55] He is a Life-giving Spirit who can penetrate
+other spirits, who broods over the soul as the creative Spirit brooded
+over the waters, and who, when received, makes us radiant with _Love,
+which is the only truth of religion_.
+
+Sin is the mark and brand of our failure--it is our aberration from the
+normal type as it is fully revealed in Christ. "Nothing is so unnatural
+as sin,"[56] nothing is so irrational, nothing so abnormal--it is always
+a break from the unity of the divine Life, a movement towards isolation
+and self-solitariness, a pursuit of narrowing desires, a missing of the
+potential beauty and harmony of the Soul.[57] But in every case, whether
+it be Adam's or that of the last man who sinned, it is always an act of
+free-will--"even in its most haggish shapes sin is the act of free-will."
+Some strange contrary principle in us, something from a root alien to the
+divine Root, makes civil war within us,[58] and though the Word of God's
+eternal Love is ringing in our ears and though the gleams of divine
+Beauty are shining in our eyes, we still walk away into "the barren
+dessert of the world and forsake our proper habitation in the paradise of
+God."[59] There is no way back from the "barren dessert," without a
+complete reversal of direction, a conversion: "He that will pass {285}
+from the dismal depths of sin to the heights of strength and holiness
+must make his first motion a conversion, a change from a descent to an
+ascent, from going outward toward the circle to go inward towards the
+centre"; there must be an _awakening_ so that the soul comes to see all
+things in the light of their first Principle; a Birth through the Spirit
+and a newness of life through the bubbling of the eternal Spring.[60]
+
+The mighty event of re-birth is described by Sterry very much after the
+manner of Schwenckfeld. The new Seed, Christ Jesus, the divine Life
+itself, comes into operation within the man, and the new-made man, raised
+with Christ, is joined in Spirit with Him and lives henceforth not after
+Adam but after Christ the Head of the spiritual Race.[61] The shift of
+direction, the complete reversal, however, does not mean "parting with
+delights," or "putting on a sad and sour conversation"--on the contrary,
+it means enlargement of soul and "a gainful addition of joy," the
+discovery within of another world and a new kingdom.[62]
+
+Like all this group of thinkers to whom he is kindred, Sterry makes a
+sharp contrast between the Spirit and the letter, between what happens
+within the soul and what is external to it. The early stage of religion
+is characterized by externals, and only after long processes of tutorship
+and discipline does the soul learn how to live by the Seed of life and
+Light of truth within. The early stage is legalistic, during which the
+person is "hedged about" with promises and threats, "walled in" with laws
+and ordinances, "living in a perpetual alarm of fears," "shut up to
+rules, retirements and forms"--but it is far better to serve God from
+fear and by outward rules than not to serve Him at all. The true way of
+progress is to move up from fear and law to love and freedom, and from
+outward rules to the discovery of a central Light of God, a Heavenly
+Image, in the deeps of {286} one's own spirit--"real knowledge comes when
+the Day Star rises in the heart."[63] We pass from "notions" and "words"
+to an inward power and a bubbling joy. He calls the period of law and
+letter a "baby-stage," "when we see truth as blear-eyed beholders."
+Legal religion compared with the religion of the Spirit is "like a spark
+struck from flint at midnight" compared with the sun; it is like "drawing
+the waters of Grace, a bucketful at a time," when we might have "the
+Spirit gushing as a living and perpetual Fountain."[64] But God is so
+good that He speaks to us in a variety of ways, and He lets us "spell His
+name" with the alphabet, until we learn to know His own Voice. Nature,
+in the elements of visible creation, tells us of Him; Reason compels us
+to recognize One who is First and Best, the All in all; the written word
+cries in our ears that God is Love; but above these voices there is a
+Principle within our own souls by which "God propagates His Life" in us,
+and he who, in this love-way, has become a son knows God as
+_Abba-Father_.[65] We pray now with power, when this new Life of the
+Spirit has come into us, and we pour our spirits out in
+self-forgetfulness, "as a River pours itself into the sea, where it
+loseth its own name and is known only as the waters of the Sea."[66]
+
+He is always gentle in his account of other religions and other stages of
+faith, and he sees good in all types, if only they help the soul to
+hunger for the Eternal and do not cramp it. "O that I had a hundred
+mouths," he writes, "an hundred tongues, a Voice like the Voice of God
+that rends Rocks, to cry to all sorts of Persons and Spirits in this Land
+and in all the Christian World through the whole creation: 'Let all that
+differ in Principles, Professions, Opinions and Forms, see the good there
+is in each other'!"[67]
+
+The world, busy with action and choosing for its historical study the men
+who did things, has allowed {287} Peter Sterry to drop into oblivion and
+his books to gather dust and cobwebs, but there was, I think, a Seed of
+God in him, and he had a message for his age. He sincerely endeavoured
+to hand on the torch which in his youth at Cambridge had been kindled in
+him by some other flame. "When one candle is lighted," he beautifully
+says, "we light many by it, and when God hath kindled the Life of His
+glory in one man's Heart he often enkindles many by the flame of
+that."[68]
+
+
+
+[1] I have studied the "Familists," the "Anabaptists," the "Seekers," and
+"Ranters," and some of the interesting religious characters, such as John
+Saltmarsh, William Dell, and Gerard Winstanley, in my _Studies in
+Mystical Religion_ (London, 1908).
+
+[2] Oliver Cromwell's _Letters and Speeches_ (New York, 1900), i. p. 103.
+
+[3] These three books were issued together in Latin under the title,
+_Interiora Regni Dei_, in 1655 and in 1674, and in an English Collection
+of Rous' Works under the title, _Treatises and Meditations_ (1657).
+
+[4] _Mystical Marriage_, pp. 1-2.
+
+[5] _Treatises and Meditations_, pp. 230-231.
+
+[6] _Treatises and Meditations_, pp. 240 and 258.
+
+[7] _Ibid._ p. 235.
+
+[8] _The Heavenly Academy_, pp. 110-111.
+
+[9] _Mystical Marriage_, p. 10.
+
+[10] _Treatises and Meditations_, p. 496.
+
+[11] _Mystical Marriage_, p. 10.
+
+[12] _Ibid._ p. 16.
+
+[13] _Ibid._ p. 193.
+
+[14] Preface to _Mystical Marriage_.
+
+[15] _Mystical Marriage_, p. 322.
+
+[16] _The Heavenly Academy_, Preface, and _ibid._ p. 57.
+
+[17] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_, i. p. 75.
+
+[18] Clarendon, _History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars_ (Oxford, 1827),
+p. 1581.
+
+[19] Milton's sonnet _To Sir Henry Vane the Younger_.
+
+[20] Burnet, _History of his Own Times_ (Airy ed.), i. p. 286.
+
+[21] Pepys, _Diary_ (ed. by H. B. Wheatley, London, 1893), ii. p. 242.
+
+[22] An Epistle to the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth. The lines which
+I have put in italics in the text clearly show the "seeker"-attitude.
+
+[23] See my _Quakers in the American Colonies_ (1911), pp. 1-25.
+
+[24] In his _Retired Man's Meditations_ he speaks of "Christ's rule in
+the legal conscience" and "Christ's rule in the evangelical conscience,"
+by which he means to contrast a religion founded on external performances
+or historical events, and a religion founded on _events transacted in the
+soul of the man himself_.
+
+[25] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_, i. p. 75.
+
+[26] See Vane's _A Brief Answer to a certain Declaration made of the
+Intent and Equity of the Order of Court_, etc., in Hutchinson's
+Collection of Original Papers.
+
+[27] Preface to Williams' _Bloudy Tenet_.
+
+[28] _The Retired Man's Meditations_, p. 388. Italics mine.
+
+[29] _Ibid._ Preface
+
+[30] _Ibid._ chap. ii.
+
+[31] _Ibid._ ii. chaps. iii. and iv. See also _A Pilgrimage into the
+Land of Promise_, pp. 1-3.
+
+[32] _A Pilgrimage into the Land of Promise_, pp. 51-52.
+
+[33] _Ibid._ pp. 55-56.
+
+[34] _Retired Man's Meditations_, chap. xxvi.
+
+[35] _Journal of George Fox_ (Cambridge ed.), i. pp. 313-314.
+
+[36] _Animadversions on Cressy's Answer to Stillingfleet_ (1673), p. 59.
+
+[37] See _A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will_ (1675), pp. 31-32.
+
+[38] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_, i. p. 75.
+
+[39] A Mr. Sterry was appointed Sept. 8, 1657, to assist Milton as Latin
+Secretary (_Nat. Dict. of Biog. Art._ "Sterry").
+
+[40] Besides the above named I have also used his Sermons on _The Clouds
+in which Christ Comes_ (1648) and _The Spirits' Conviction of Sinne_
+(1645).
+
+[41] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 8.
+
+[42] There is, he thinks, an inner "body" which is as immortal as the
+soul and which together with the soul is united to the body of
+flesh--"the fleshly Image."
+
+[43] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 435.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ p. 24. See also _ibid._ p. 5, and _Discourse_, p. 55.
+
+[45] _Discourse_, pp. 30-35. Also p. 161.
+
+[46] _Ibid_. Preface, p. c 8, and _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 164.
+
+[47] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 126.
+
+[48] _Ibid._ p. 96.
+
+[49] _Ibid._ pp. 4, 5, 6, 18-19.
+
+[50] _Discourse_, pp. 67 and 77.
+
+[51] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, Preface, p. b 2. See also pp. 362 and
+512-513.
+
+[52] _Discourse_, Preface, pp. a and c 6, and _Rise, Race and Royalty_,
+p. 101.
+
+[53] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 78.
+
+[54] _Ibid._ p. 68.
+
+[55] _Ibid._ pp. 95 and 184. Also _Appearance of God_, pp. 239 and 251.
+
+[56] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 73.
+
+[57] _Ibid._ pp. 16-18 and 141, and _Discourse_, pp. 141-142.
+
+[58] _Appearance of God_, p. 91.
+
+[59] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 359.
+
+[60] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, pp. 2, 23, and 466.
+
+[61] See especially _Appearance of God_, pp. 74-75 and 480.
+
+[62] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, pp. 107-109.
+
+[63] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, pp. 46-47 and 467.
+
+[64] _Ibid._ pp. 56-60.
+
+[65] _Ibid._ pp. 63-67.
+
+[66] _Appearance of God_, pp. 130-131.
+
+[67] _Discourse_, Preface, p. a 6.
+
+[68] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 39.
+
+
+
+
+{288}
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, THE FIRST OF THE "LATITUDE-MEN"[1]
+
+The type of Christianity which I have been calling "spiritual religion,"
+that is, religion grounded in the nature of Reason, finds, at least in
+England, its noblest expression in the group of men, sometimes called
+"Cambridge Platonists," and sometimes "Latitude-Men," or simply
+"Latitudinarians." These labels were all given them by their critics and
+opponents, and were used to give the impression that the members of this
+group or school were introducing and advancing a type of Christianity too
+broad and humanistic to be safe, and one grounded on Greek philosophy
+rather than on Scripture and historical Revelation.[2]
+
+They were, however, undertaking to do in their generation precisely what
+the long line of spiritual interpreters had for more than a century been
+endeavouring, through pain and suffering, misunderstanding and fierce
+persecution, to work out for humanity--a religion of life and reality, a
+religion rooted in the eternal nature of the Spirit of God and the spirit
+of man, a religion as authoritative and unescapable "as mathematical
+demonstration."[3]
+
+It is not possible to establish direct connection between the leaders of
+this school and the writings of the successive {289} spiritual Reformers
+on the Continent whom we have been studying in this volume, though the
+parallelism of ideas and of spirit is very striking. Both groups were
+powerfully influenced by the humanistic movement, both groups drew upon
+that profound searching of the soul which they found in the works of
+Plato and Plotinus, and both groups read the same mystical writers.
+These things would partly account for the similarities, but there was
+almost certainly a closer and more direct connection, though we cannot
+trace it in the case of Whichcote as we can in that of John Everard of
+Clare College. There has been a tendency to explain Whichcote's views
+through the influence of Arminius and Arminians; but he himself denied
+that he had been influenced by Arminius,[4] while his disciple, Nathaniel
+Culverwel, speaks disapprovingly of Arminianism.[5] There are no
+distinct allusions in Whichcote to Jacob Boehme, and the former's
+conception of the Universe is vastly different from the latter's, but
+their vital and ethical view of the way of salvation is almost exactly
+the same, and the constant insistence of Whichcote and his disciples that
+Heaven and Hell are primarily conditions of life in the person himself
+has, as we know, a perfect parallel in Boehme.
+
+The Cambridge scholars were much better equipped for their task than any
+of the men whom we have so far studied, their gravest difficulty being an
+overweighting of learning which they sometimes failed to fuse with their
+spiritual vision and to transmute into power. But with all their
+propension to learning and their love of philosophy, they were primarily
+and fundamentally _religious_--they were disciples of Christ rather than
+disciples of Plato and Plotinus. Bishop Burnet's testimony to the
+positive spiritual contribution of this movement, now under
+consideration, and to the genuineness of the religious life of these men
+is well worth quoting. After describing the arid condition of his time,
+the prevailing tendency of ministers to seek pomp and luxury, and the
+apparent thinness of the preaching of the day, he adds: "Some {290} few
+exceptions are to be made; but so few, that if _a new set of men had not
+appeared of another stamp_, the Church had quite lost her esteem over the
+nation." He then designates this group of Cambridge scholars. Speaking
+particularly of Whichcote, he says: "Being disgusted with the dry
+systematical way of those times, he studied to raise those who conversed
+with him to a nobler set of thoughts, and to consider religion as _a seed
+of a deiform nature_ (to use one of his own phrases). In order to this,
+he set young students much on reading the ancient philosophers, chiefly
+Plato, Tully and Plotin, and on considering the Christian religion as a
+doctrine sent from God, both to elevate and sweeten human nature, in
+which he was a great example, as well as a wise and kind instructor.
+Cudworth carried this on with a great strength of genius and a vast
+compass of learning."[6]
+
+These "Latitude-Men" were Puritan in temper and in intensity of
+conviction; they were all trained in the great nursery of Puritan faith,
+Emmanuel College, and they were on intimate terms with many of the men
+who were the creators of the outer and inner life of the Commonwealth,
+but in their intellectual sympathies they went neither with the sectaries
+of the time--"the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles," as S. P.
+puts it--nor with the prevailing Puritan theology. They read Calvin and
+Beza with diligence, at least Whichcote did, but their thought did not
+move along the track which the great Genevan had constructed. They
+discovered another way of approach which made the old way and the old
+battles seem to them futile. Instead of beginning with the eternal
+mysteries of the inscrutable divine Will, they began with the fundamental
+nature of man, always deep and difficult to fathom, but for ever the
+ground and basis of all that can be known in the field of religion.
+Their interest was thus psychological rather than theological. It is
+their constant assertion that nothing is more intrinsically rational than
+religion, and they focus all their energies to make this point clear and
+evident.
+
+{291}
+
+They came to their intellectual development in the period when Hobbes was
+formulating one of the most powerful and subtle types of materialism that
+has ever been presented. They were, too, contemporaries of Descartes,
+and they followed with intense interest the attempt of the great
+Frenchman to put philosophy in possession of a method as adequate for its
+problems as the method of geometry was for the mathematical sciences.
+None of the "Platonists" was possessed of the same rare quality of genius
+as either of these two great philosophers, but they saw with clear
+insight the full bearing of both systems. They heartily disapproved of
+Hobbes' materialism and shuddered at its nakedness. They were too much
+committed to the ideals of Humanism to be positive opponents of
+Descartes' rational formulation of all things outer and inner, but they
+never felt at home with the vast clock-like mechanism to which his system
+reduced the universe, and they set themselves, in contrast, to produce a
+religious philosophy which would guarantee freedom, would give wider
+scope for the inner life, would show the kinship of God and man and put
+morality and religion--to their mind for ever one and inseparable--on a
+foundation as immovable as the pillars of the universe.
+
+The first of this group, the pathbreaker of the movement, was Benjamin
+Whichcote, though it must not be forgotten that he had noble forerunners
+in John Hales, William Chillingworth, and Jeremy Taylor. The
+biographical details which have survived him are very limited. A great
+teacher's life is so largely interior and so devoid of outward events
+that there is usually not much to record.[7] He was descended from "an
+ancient and honourable family," and was born at Whichcote-Hall, in the
+parish of Stoke, the 11th of March, 1609. He was admitted in 1626 to
+Emmanuel College--"which was looked on from its first foundation as a
+Seminary of Puritans"--and was there under the tutorship of two great
+Puritan teachers. Dr. Anthony Tuckney and Thomas Hill, {292} both of
+whom were for a time associated with John Cotton, afterwards the famous
+preacher of colonial Boston. He was ordained both deacon and priest in
+1636, was made Provost of King's College, Cambridge, in 1644, "went-out"
+Doctor of Divinity in 1649, and for twenty years gave the afternoon
+Lecture on Sundays at Trinity Church, Cambridge. At the Restoration he
+was deprived of the Provostship by order of the King, which brought his
+university career to an end. He was made curate of St. Anne's,
+Blackfriars, in 1662, and later received from the Crown the vicarage of
+St. Laurence Jewry, where he preached twice each week until his death in
+1683.
+
+He once said in one of his sermons: "Had we a man among us, that we could
+produce, that did live an exact Gospel life; had we a man that was really
+gospelized; were the Gospel a life, a soul, and a spirit to him . . . he
+would be the most lovely and useful person under heaven. Christianity
+would be recommended to the world by his spirit and conversation."[8]
+Dr. Whichcote himself was, as far as one can judge from the impression
+which he made on his contemporaries, such a "gospelized" man. He
+"recommended religion," as Dr. Salter says, by his life and writings, and
+showed it "in its fairest and truest light as the highest perfection of
+human nature."[9] He seemed to be "emancipated" when he came back to
+Cambridge as Provost of King's College, and he devoted himself to
+"spreading and propagating a more generous sett of opinions" than those
+which were generally proclaimed in the sermons of the time, and "the
+young Masters of Arts soon cordially embraced" his message.[10]
+
+This "new sett of opinions," proclaimed in Trinity Church with vision and
+power, soon disturbed those who were of the older and sterner schools of
+thought. "My heart hath bin much exercised about you," his old friend
+and tutor, Dr. Tuckney, wrote to him in 1651, "especially since your
+being Vice-Chancellour, I have seldom heard you preach, but that
+something hath bin delivered {293} by you, and that so authoritatively
+and with big words, sometimes of 'divinest reason' and sometimes of 'more
+than mathematical demonstration,' that hath much grieved me."[11] The
+novelty of Dr. Whichcote's "opinions" comes more clearly into view as the
+letter proceeds: "Your Discourse about Reconciliation that 'it doth not
+operate on God, but on us' is Divinity [theology] that my heart riseth
+against. . . . To say that the ground of God's reconciliation is from
+anything in us; and not from His free grace, freely justifying the
+ungodly, is to deny one of the fundamental truths of the Gospel that
+derives from heaven."[12]
+
+The correspondence which followed this frank letter supplies us with the
+clearest light we possess, or can possess, upon Whichcote's inner life
+and type of religion. He replied to his old friend, whom he had always
+held "in love, reverence and esteem," that he had noticed of late that
+"our hearts have not seemed to be together when our persons have
+bin,"[13] "but," he adds, "your letter meets with no guilt in my
+conscience." "My head hath bin possessed with this truth [which I am
+preaching] these manie years--I am not late nor newe in this
+persuasion."[14] He then proceeds to quote from his notes exactly what
+he had said on the subject of reconciliation in his recent Discourse. It
+was as follows: "Christ doth not save us by onely doing for us _without_
+us [_i.e._ historically]: yea, we come at that which Christ hath done for
+us with God, by what He hath done for us _within_ us. . . . With God
+there cannot be reconciliation without our becoming God-like. . . . They
+deceeve and flatter themselves extreamly; who think of reconciliation
+with God by means of a Saviour acting upon God in their behalfe and _not
+also working in or upon them to make them God-like_," and he says that he
+added in the spoken sermon, what was not in his notes, that a theology
+which taught a salvation without inward moral transformation was
+"Divinity minted in Hell."[15]
+
+{294}
+
+Dr. Tuckney in his second letter becomes still more specific. He admits
+that Whichcote's "persuasion of truth" is not "late or newe"; he
+remembers, on the latter's first coming to Cambridge, "I thought you then
+somwhat cloudie and obscure in your expressions." What he now notices
+with regret is the tendency in his old pupil to "cry-up reason rather
+than faith"; to be "too much immersed in Philosophy and Metaphysics"; to
+be devoted to "other authours more than Scripture, and Plato and his
+schollars above others"; to be producing "a kinde of moral Divinitie,
+onlie with a little tincture of Christ added"; to put "inherent
+righteousness above imputed righteousness" and "love above faith," and to
+use "some broad expressions as though in this life wee may be above
+ordinances"; and finally he notices that since Whichcote has "cast his
+sermons in this mould," they have become "less edifying" and "less
+affecting the heart."[16] He thinks, too, that he has discovered the
+foreign source of the infection: "Sir, those whose footsteppes I have
+observed [in your sermons] were the Socinians and Arminians; the latter
+whereof, I conceive, you have bin everie where reading in their workes
+and most largely in their Apologie."[17]
+
+"In a thousand guesses," Whichcote answers this last charge, in his
+second letter, "you could not have bin farther off from the truth of the
+thing." "What is added of Socinians and Arminians, in respect of mee, is
+groundless. I may as well be called a Papist, or Mahometan; Pagan or
+Atheist. And trulie, Sir, you are wholly mistaken in the whole course of
+my studies. You say you find me largelie in their _Apologia_; to my
+knowledge I never saw or heard of the book before! . . . I have not read
+manie bookes; but I have studied a fewe: meditation and invention hath
+bin my life rather than reading; and trulie I have more read Calvine and
+Perkins and Beza than all the bookes, authors and names you mention. _I
+have alwaies expected reason for what men say_, less valuing persons and
+authorities in the stating and {295} resolving of truth, therefore have
+read them most where I have found itt. I have not looked at anie thing
+as more than an opinion which hath not bin underpropt by convincing
+reason or plaine and satisfactorie Scripture."[18]
+
+As to the charge that he has become immersed in philosophy, Whichcote
+modestly replies: "I find the Philosophers that I read good as farre as
+they go: and it makes me secretlie blush before God when I find eyther my
+head, heart or life challenged by them, which I must confess, I often
+find." To the criticism that he "cries-up reason," he answers that he
+has always found in his own experience that "that preaching has most
+commanded my heart which has most illuminated my head." "Everie
+Christian," he insists, "must think and believe as he finds cause. Shall
+he speak in religion otherwise than he thinks? Truth is truth, whoever
+hath spoken itt or howsoever itt hath bin abused. If this libertie be
+not allowed to the Universitie wherefore do wee study? We have nothing
+to do butt to get good memories and to learn by heart."[19] Finally, to
+the impression expressed by Dr. Tuckney that his sermons are less
+edifying and heart-searching, he replies with dignity and evidently with
+truth: "I am sure I have bin all along well understood by persons of
+honest heartes, but of mean place and education: and I have had the
+blessing of the soules of such at their departure out of this world. I
+thanke God, my conscience tells me, that I have not herein affected
+worldlie shewe, but the real service of truth."[20]
+
+We need not follow further this voluminous correspondence in which two
+high-minded and absolutely honest men reveal the two diverging lines of
+their religious faith. To the man whose mind found its spiritual footing
+alone on the solid ground of Calvin's unmodified system, the new
+"persuasion" was sure to seem "cloudie and obscure"; and no number of
+letters could convince him that the new message presented a safe way of
+faith and life. And no amount of criticism or advice could change the
+other man who found it necessary for him to have {296} reasonable cause
+for what he was to believe and live by. Whichcote closes the friendly
+debate with some very positive announcements that for him religion must
+be, and must remain, something which guarantees its reality in the soul
+itself: "Christ must be inwardlie felt as a principle of divine life
+within us."[21] "What is there in man," again he says, "more
+considerable than that which declares God's law to him, pleads for the
+observation of it, accuseth for the breach and excuseth upon the
+performance of it?"[22] And finally he informs his friend that each of
+them must be left free to follow his own light: "If we differ there is no
+help for it: Wee must forbear one another. . . . If you conceeve
+otherwise of me than as a lover and pursuer after truth, you think
+amisse. . . . Wherein I fall short of your expectation, I fail for
+truth's sake."[23]
+
+The central idea in Whichcote's teaching, which runs like a gulf-stream
+through all his writings, is his absolute certainty that there is
+something in the "very make of man"[24] which links the human spirit to
+the Divine Spirit and which thus makes it as natural for man to be
+religious as it is for him to seek food for his body. There is a
+"seminal principle," "a seed of God," "something that comes immediately
+from God," in the very structure of man's inner nature,[25] and this
+structural possession makes it as natural and proper for man's mind to
+tend toward God, "the centre of immortal souls," as it is for heavy
+things to tend toward their centre.[26] "God," he elsewhere says, "is
+more inward to us than our own souls," and we are more closely "related
+to God than to anything in the world."[27] The soul is to God as the
+flower is to the sun, which opens when the sun is there and shuts when
+the sun is absent,[28] though this figure breaks down, because, in
+Whichcote's view, God never withdraws and is never absent. This idea
+that the spiritual life is absolutely rational--a normal function {297}
+of man's truest nature--receives manifold expression in Whichcote's
+_Aphorisms_, which constitute a sort of seventeenth-century Book of
+Proverbs, or collection of Wisdom-sayings. He had absorbed one great
+saying from the original Book of Proverbs, which he uses again and again,
+and which became the sacred text for all the members of the school--"the
+spirit of man is a candle of the Lord."[29] This Proverb is for
+Whichcote a key that fits every door of life, and the truth which it
+expresses is for him the basal truth of religion, as the following
+Aphorisms will sufficiently illustrate:
+
+"Were it not for light we should not know we had such a sense as sight:
+Were it not for God we should not know the Powers of our souls which have
+an appropriation to God."[30]
+
+"God's image is in us and we belong to Him."[31]
+
+"There is a capacity in man's soul, larger than can be answered by
+anything of his own, or of any fellow-creature."[32]
+
+"There is nothing so intrinsically rational as Religion is."[33]
+
+"The Truths of God are connatural to the soul of man, and the soul of man
+makes no more resistance to them than the air does to light."[34]
+
+"Religion makes us live like men."[35]
+
+"We worship God best when we resemble Him most."[36]
+
+"Religion is intelligible, rational and accountable: It is not our burden
+but our privilege."[37]
+
+Something is always wrong, he thinks, if Religion becomes a burden: "It
+is imperfection in Religion to _drudge_ in it, and every man drudges in
+Religion if he takes it up as a task and carries it as a burden."[38]
+The moment we follow "the divine frame and temper" of our inmost nature
+we find our freedom, our health, our power, and our joy; as one of the
+Aphorisms puts it: {298} "When we make nearer approaches to God, we have
+more use of ourselves."[39]
+
+This view is beautifully expressed in Whichcote's Prayer printed at the
+end of the _Aphorisms_: "Most Blessed God, the Creator and Governor of
+the World; the only true God, and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We
+thy Creatures were made to seek and find, to know and reverence, to serve
+and obey, to honour and glorify, to imitate and enjoy Thee; who art the
+Original of our Beings, and the Centre of our Rest. Our Reasonable
+Nature hath a peculiar Reservation for Thee; and our Happiness consists
+in our Assimilation to, and Employment about, Thee. The nearer we
+approach unto Thee, the more free we are from Error, Sin, and Misery; and
+the farther off we are from Thee, the farther off we are from Truth,
+Holiness, and Felicity. Without Thee, we are sure of nothing; we are not
+sure of ourselves: but through Thee, there is Self-Enjoyment in the mind,
+when there is nothing but Confusion, and no Enjoyment of the World."
+
+Religion is thus thought of as the normal way of life, as the true
+fulfilment of human nature and as complete inward health. "Holiness," he
+says, "is our right constitution and temper, our inward health and
+strength."[40] Sin and selfishness carry a man below the noble Creation
+which God made in him, and Religion is the return to the true nature and
+capacity of God's Creation in man: "The Gospel, inwardly received, dyes
+and colours the soul, settles the Temper and Constitution of it and is
+restorative of our Nature. . . . It is the restitution of us to the
+state of our Creation, to the use of our Principles, to our healthful
+Constitution and to Acts that are connatural to us."[41]
+
+As soon as man returns to "his own healthful Constitution" and to "the
+state of his Creation," he finds that Religion has its evidence and
+assurance in itself. God made man for moral truths, "before He declared
+{299} them on Sinai," or "writ them in the Bible,"[42] and so soon as the
+soul comes into "conformity to its original,"[43] that is "into
+conformity to God according to its inward measure and capacity,"[44] and
+lives a kind of life that is "self-same with its own Reason,"[45] the
+Divine Life manifests itself in that man and kindles his spirit into a
+blazing candle of the Lord. Those who are spiritual "find and feel
+within themselves Divine Suggestions, Motions and Inspirations; . . . a
+light comes into the Mind, a still Voice."[46]
+
+This direct and inward revelation is, however, for Whichcote never "a
+revelation of new matter," never a way to the discovery of truths of a
+private nature. The revelations which the guidance of the Divine Spirit
+breathes forth within our souls are always truths of universal
+significance, truths that are already implicitly revealed in the Bible,
+truths that carry their own self-evidence to any rational mind. But
+these revelations, these discoveries of what God means and what life may
+become, are possible only to those who prepare themselves for inward
+converse and who centre down to the deeper Roots of their being: "Unless
+a man takes himself sometimes out of the world, by retirement and
+self-reflection, he will be in danger of losing _himself_ in the
+world."[47] Where God is not discovered, something is always at fault
+with man. "As soon as he is abstracted from the noise of the world,
+withdrawn from the call of the Body, having the doors of the senses shut,
+the Divine Life readily enters and reveals Itself to the inward Eye that
+is prepared for it."[48] "Things that are connatural in the way of
+Religion," he once said, "the Illapses and Breakings in of God upon us,
+require a mind that is not subject to Passion but is in a serene and
+quiet Posture, where there is no tumult of Imagination. . . . There is
+no genuine and proper effect of Religion where the Mind is not composed,
+sedate and calm."[49]
+
+{300}
+
+There is no tendency in Whichcote to undervalue Scripture. Inward
+revelations are for him not a substitute for the Bible nor an appendix to
+it. Through the Divine Light in the soul and through Scripture, Divine
+communications are imparted to men. These he calls respectively "truth
+of first inscription" and "truth of after-revelation,"[50] and they no
+more conflict than two luminaries in the physical world conflict.
+"Morals," he says, "are inforced by Scripture, but they were before
+Scripture: they were according to the nature of God,"[51] and, as he
+always claims, according to the deiform nature in man's reason.[52] As
+soon as a person interprets the Light within him--the candle of the Lord
+in his own heart--by the Light of revelation his inward illumination
+becomes clearer; and contrariwise, as soon as one brings an enlightened
+spirit to the Bible its message becomes clarified--"the Spirit within
+leads to a right apprehension of those things which God hath
+declared."[53] But Truth is always vastly more than "Notions," or
+conceptual formulation of doctrine. "Religion," as he says in his
+wisdom-proverbs, "is not a System of Doctrine, an observance of Modes or
+a Form of Words"--it is "a frame and temper of mind; it shows itself in a
+Life and Action conformable to the Divine Will"; it is "our resemblance
+to God."[54] Bare knowledge does not sanctify any man; "Men of holy
+Hearts and Lives best understand holy Doctrines."[55] We always deceive
+ourselves if we do not get beyond even such high-sounding words as
+conversion, regeneration, divine illumination, and mortification; if we
+do not get beyond names and notions of every sort, into a real holiness
+of life that is a conformity of nature to our original. His most
+important passage on this point is one which is found in his Sermon on
+the text: "Of this man's seed hath God, according to His promise, raised
+up unto {301} Israel a Saviour, Jesus" (Acts xiii. 23). "Religion," he
+says in this passage, "is not satisfied in Notions; but doth, in deed and
+in reality, come to nothing unless it be in us not only matter of
+Knowledge and Speculation, but doth establish in us a Frame and Temper of
+Mind and is productive of a holy and vertuous Life. Therefore let these
+things take effect in us; in our Spirituality and Heavenly-mindedness; in
+our Conformity to the Divine Nature and _Nativity from above_. For
+whoever professes that he believes the Truth of these things and wants
+the Operation of them upon his Spirit and Life doth, in fact, make void
+and frustrate what he doth declare as his Belief. He doth receive the
+Grace of God in vain unless this Principle and Belief doth descend in his
+Heart and establish a good Frame and Temper of Mind and govern in all
+Actions of his Life and Conversation."[56] This translation of Light and
+Truth and Insight into the flesh and blood of action is a necessary law
+of the spiritual life: "Good men spiritualize their bodies; bad men
+incarnate their souls";[57] or, as he expresses it in one of his Sermons:
+"To be [spiritually] well and unactive do not consist together. No man
+is well without action."[58]
+
+Religion is, thus, with him always a dynamic principle of Life, working
+itself out in the frame and temper of the man and producing its
+characteristic effects in his actions. It does not operate "like a charm
+or spell"--it operates only as a vital principle[59] and we become
+eternally the self which we ourselves form. "We naturalize ourselves,"
+to use his striking phrase, "to the employment of eternity."[60] We are
+lost, not by Adam's sin, but by our own; and we are saved, not by
+Christ's historical death, but by our own obedience to the law of the
+Spirit of Life revealed in Him and by our own death to sin;[61] and the
+beginning of Heaven is one with the beginning of conformity to the will
+of God and to our nativity from above. "Heaven is a temper of spirit,
+before it is a place."[62] {302} There is a Heaven this side of Heaven
+and there is as certainly a Hell this side of Hell. The most impressive
+expression of this truth is given in one of his Sermons: "All misery
+arises out of _ourselves_. It is a most gross mistake, and men are of
+dull and stupid spirits who think that the state which we call Hell is an
+incommodious place only; and that God by His sovereignty throws men
+therein. Hell ariseth out of a man's self. And Hell's fewel is the
+guilt of a man's conscience. It is impossible that any should be so
+miserable as Hell makes a man and as there a man is miserable by his own
+condemning of himself: And on the other side, when they think that Heaven
+arises from any place, or any nearness to God or Angels, that is not
+principally so; but Heaven lies in a refined Temper, in an inward
+Reconciliation to the Nature of God. So that both Hell and Heaven have
+their Foundation within Men."[63] The evil and punishment which follow
+sin are "consequential" and inseparable from sin, and so, too, eternal
+life is nothing but spiritual life fulfilling itself in ways that are
+consequential and necessary in the deepest nature of things: "That which
+is our best employment here will be our only employment in eternity."[64]
+
+The good old Puritan, Tuckney, suspected that Whichcote was promulgating
+a type of Christianity which could dispense with ordinances--"as though
+in this life wee may be above ordinances,"--and it must be confessed that
+there was some ground for this suspicion. He was no "enthusiast" and he
+in no way shared the radical anti-sacramentarian spirit of the small
+sects of the Commonwealth, but it belonged to the very essence of this
+type of religion, as we have seen in every varied instance of it, to hold
+lightly to externals. "The Spirit," as Whichcote once said, "makes men
+consider the Inwards of things,"[65] and almost of necessity the grasp
+slackens on outward {303} forms, as the vision focusses more intently
+upon inward and eternal realities. It is one of his foundation
+principles that "we worship God best when we resemble Him most,"[66] and
+if that is true, then the whole energy of one's being should concentrate
+upon the cultivation of "the deiform nature," "the nativity from Above."
+The real matters of religion, as he keeps insisting, are matters of life
+and inner being, the formation of disposition and the right set of will.
+But these vital things have been notoriously slighted, and "men's zeal is
+employed in usages, modes and rites of parties"; in matters that are
+divisive and controversial rather than in "things that are lovely in the
+eyes of all who have the Principles of Reason for their rule."[67] The
+great differences in religion have never been over necessary and
+indispensable Truth; on the contrary the disturbing differences have
+always been and still are "either over Points of curious and nice
+Speculation, or about arbitrary modes of worship."[68] Just as fast as
+men see that religion is a way to fullness of life, a method of attaining
+likeness to God, and just as soon as they realize that God can be truly
+worshipped only by acts and attitudes that are moral and spiritual,
+_i.e._ acts and attitudes that attach to the deliberate consent of the
+inner spirit, Whichcote thinks that "rites and types and ceremonies,
+which are all veils," will drop away and religion will become one with a
+rich and intelligent life.[69]
+
+We can well understand how this presentation of Christianity as "a
+culture and discipline of the whole man--an education and consecration of
+all his higher activities"[70]--would seem, to those accustomed to
+dualistic theologies, "clowdie and obscure." It was, however, "no newe
+persuasion." In all essential particulars it is four-square with the
+type of religion with which the spiritual Reformers of Germany and
+Holland had for more than a century made the world acquainted. But,
+{304} in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, somewhat adapted: "all
+these, having had the witness borne to them through their faith, received
+not the promise in full, God having provided some better, _i.e._ fuller,
+thing, that they should not be made complete, apart from those who
+succeeded them and fulfilled their hopes."
+
+
+
+[1] This interesting phrase occurs in _A Brief Account of the New Sect of
+Latitude-Men_, by S. P. (probably Simon Patrick), 1662.
+
+[2] S. P. in his _Sect of Latitude-Men_ says: "A Latitude-Man is an image
+of Clouts [a man of straw] that men set up to encounter with, for want of
+a real enemy; it is a convenient name to reproach a man that you owe a
+spite to."
+
+[3] Letters of Tuckney and Whichcote in the Appendix to Whichcote's
+_Aphorisms_ (London, 1753), p. 2.
+
+[4] _Aphorisms_, Appendix, p. 53.
+
+[5] Culverwel, _Elegant Discourses_ (1654), p. 6.
+
+[6] Burnet, _History of His Own Times_ (London, 1850), p. 127.
+
+[7] We are dependent, for the few facts which we possess concerning
+Whichcote's life, on the Sketch of him written by Dr. Samuel Salter, as a
+Preface to his edition of Whichcote's _Aphorisms_, published in 1753.
+
+[8] _Select Sermons_ (1698), p. 30.
+
+[9] Salter's Preface, pp. xxii-xxiii.
+
+[10] _Ibid._ p. xx.
+
+[11] Appendix to _Aphorisms_ (1753), p. 2.
+
+[12] Ibid. p. 4.
+
+[13] Ibid. p. 7.
+
+[14] Ibid. pp. 8 and 13.
+
+[15] Ibid. pp. 13 and 14.
+
+[16] Appendix to _Aphorisms_, pp. 37-38.
+
+[17] _Ibid._ p. 27.
+
+[18] Appendix to _Aphorisms_, pp. 53-54.
+
+[19] _Ibid._ p. 57.
+
+[20] _Ibid._ p. 60.
+
+[21] Appendix to _Aphorisms_, p. 125.
+
+[22] _Ibid._ p. 127.
+
+[23] _Ibid._ pp. 133-134.
+
+[24] _Select Sermons_ (1698), p. 149.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ pp. 131-133.
+
+[26] _Ibid._ p. 88.
+
+[27] _Ibid._ p. 109.
+
+[28] _Ibid._ p. 74.
+
+[29] Proverbs xx. 27.
+
+[30] _Aphorism_ 861.
+
+[31] _Aphorism_ 934.
+
+[32] _Aphorism_ 847.
+
+[33] _Aphorism_ 457.
+
+[34] _Aphorism_ 444.
+
+[35] _Aphorism_ 87.
+
+[36] _Aphorism_ 248.
+
+[37] _Aphorism_ 220.
+
+[38] _Several Discourses_ (1707), iv. p. 259.
+
+[39] _Aphorism_ 709.
+
+[40] _Several Discourses_, iv. p. 192.
+
+[41] _Select Sermons_, pp. 55 and 62
+
+[42] _Select Sermons_, p. 7.
+
+[43] _Discourses_, iv. p. 191.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ p. 171.
+
+[45] _Ibid._ p. 259.
+
+[46] _Select Sermons_, p. in
+
+[47] _Aphorism_ 302.
+
+[48] Quoted almost literally from _Select Sermons_, p. 72.
+
+[49] _Ibid._ pp. 32-33.
+
+[50] _Select Sermons_, p. 6. He also says in Aphorism No. 109, "God hath
+set up two Lights to enlighten us in our Way: the Light of Reason, which
+is the Light of His Creation; and the Light of Scripture which is
+After-Revelation from Him."
+
+[51] _Aphorism_ 587.
+
+[52] See _Several Discourses_, iv. p. 173.
+
+[53] _Ibid._ ii. p. 275.
+
+[54] _Aphorisms_ 1127, 853, and 1028.
+
+[55] _Select Sermons_, p. 79; and _Aphorism_ 285.
+
+[56] _Select Sermons_, p. 350.
+
+[57] _Aphorism_ 367.
+
+[58] _Select Sermons_, p. 71.
+
+[59] _Aphorisms_ 243 and 625.
+
+[60] _Aphorism_ 290.
+
+[61] _Aphorisms_ 525, 612.
+
+[62] _Aphorism_ 464.
+
+[63] _Select Sermons_, p. 86. This will be recognized as in perfect
+parallelism with Jacob Boehme's teaching, and the parallel is even more
+striking in the passage where Whichcote says that "Religion must inform
+the Judgment with Truth and reform the Heart and Life by the _Tincture_
+of it." (_Select Sermons_, p. 157).
+
+[64] _Aphorism_ 51.
+
+[65] _Select Sermons_, p. 42.
+
+[66] _Aphorism_ 248.
+
+[67] _Select Sermons_, p. 153.
+
+[68] _Ibid._ p. 21.
+
+[69] _Several Discourses_, ii. p. 329.
+
+[70] John Tulloch's _Rational Theology in the Seventeenth Century_, ii.
+p. 115.
+
+
+
+
+{305}
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+JOHN SMITH, PLATONIST--"AN INTERPRETER OF THE SPIRIT"[1]
+
+Principal Tulloch, in his admirable study of the Cambridge Platonists,
+declares that John Smith was "the richest and most beautiful mind and
+certainly by far the best writer of them all."[2]
+
+There can be no doubt, in the thought of any one who has come into
+close contact with him, of the richness and beauty of his spirit. He
+leaves the impression, even after the lapse of more than two hundred
+and fifty years, of having been a saint of a rare type. Those who were
+nearest to him in fellowship called him "a good man," "a Godlike man,"
+"a servant and friend of God," "a serious practicer of the Sermon on
+the Mount"; and we who know him only afar off and at second hand feel
+sure nevertheless that these lofty words were rightly given to him.
+His scholarship was wide--he had "a vastness of learning," as Patrick
+says; but his main contribution was not to philosophy nor to theology,
+it consisted rather of an exhibition of religion wrought out in the
+attractive form of a beautiful spiritual life: "He was an Exemplar of
+true Christian Vertue of so poized and even a life that by his Wisdom
+and Conscience one might live almost at a venture, walking blindfold
+through the world."[3]
+
+The details of his life are very meagre. We are in the {306} main
+dependent on the literary portraits of him drawn by two of his
+affectionate friends--John Worthington who edited his Discourses, and
+Simon Patrick who delivered the remarkable sermon on the occasion of
+his funeral.[4] From these sources we learn that John Smith was born
+at Achurch near Oundle about the year 1618, "of parents who had long
+been childless and were grown aged." It appears incidentally that his
+parents were poor, and that Benjamin Whichcote, who was Smith's college
+Tutor, made "provision for his support and maintenance" in his early
+student days.[5] He entered Emmanuel College in 1636, and here he came
+under the profound religious and intellectual influence of Whichcote,
+for whom "he did ever express a great and singular regard." He became
+a Master of Arts in 1644, and that same year was elected Fellow of
+Queens' College. It was about this time that Whichcote returned to
+Cambridge, "spreading and propagating a nobler, freer and more generous
+sett of opinions," which "the young Masters of Arts soon cordially
+embraced." Among those who formed this group of awakened and kindled
+students Smith was an enthusiastic member, and he himself soon became a
+powerful exponent in the Chapel of Queens' College of a similar
+message, which, a contemporary writer says, "contributed to raise new
+thoughts and a sublime style in the members of the University." He was
+smitten, while still young, with a painful lingering illness, which he
+bore "without murmuring or complaining," "resting quietly satisfied in
+the Infinite, Unbounded Goodness and Tenderness of his Father," hoping
+only that he might "learn that for which God sent the suffering,"[6]
+and he died August 7, 1652, "after God had lent him to the world for
+about five and thirty years."[7] "I was desirous," his friend Patrick
+says at the opening of his funeral sermon, "that I might have stai'd
+the wheels of that Triumphant Chariot wherein he seemed to be carried;
+that we might have {307} kept him a little longer in this world, till
+by his holy breathing into our souls, and the Grace of God, we had been
+made meet to have some share in that inheritance of the saints in
+light"; but now, he adds, "we are orphans, left without a father."[8]
+Patrick adapts to his own departed teacher the beautiful words which
+Gregory Thaumaturgus used of his great instructor, Origen: "He hath
+entangled and bound up my soul in such fetters of love, he hath so tyed
+and knit me to him, that if I would be disengaged, I cannot quit
+myself. No, though I depart out of the world, our love cannot die, for
+I love him even as my own soul, and so my affection must remain
+forever."[9] The whole sermon throbs with intense love, and while it
+is somewhat overweighted with quotations and learned allusions, it yet
+expresses in an impressive way the sincere affection of a disciple for
+a noble master who has "begot another shape in his scholar and has made
+another man of him."[10] "Such men," he says, "God hath alwaies in the
+world, men of greater height and stature than others, whom He sets up
+as torches on an hill to give light to all the regions round
+about."[11] Such men "are the guard and defense of the towns where
+they reside, yea of the country whereof they are members; they are the
+keepers and life-guards of the world; the walls and bulwarks of the
+Nation,"[12] and when they leave the world everybody soon feels that a
+glory has departed--"when Elijah goes away you shall have fifty men go
+three days to seek him!"[13]
+
+This disciple, who declared that whatever "heavenly life" there was in
+himself had been "hatched" by the fostering care, the nurturing love
+and the brave conduct of his teacher, has left a few very clear traits
+for the creation of a true portrait of this saintly interpreter of the
+Spirit: He was a Fountain running over, Worthington says, "an ever
+bountifull and bubbling Fountain."[14] Love was bubbling and springing
+up in his soul and flowing out to all. He would have emptied his soul
+into others. He {308} was dipped into Justice as it were over head and
+ears; he had not a slight tincture but was dyed and coloured quite
+through with it. He cared only for those substantial and solid things
+of a Divine and Immortal Nature, which he might carry out of the world
+with him. He was a living library, a walking study, a whole college in
+himself, that carried his learning about with him; a man of great
+industry, indefatigable pains, and herculean labours. His learning was
+so concocted that it lay not in notions in his head, but was wrought
+out and formed in his very soul so that a man came away always better
+after converse with him. His faith did not busy itself about fine
+notions, subtilties, and curiosities, but it was firmly set and fixed
+in an experience of the mercy and goodness of God, seen in Jesus
+Christ. He lived in a continuous enjoyment of God and perpetually drew
+nearer to the Centre of his soul's rest and always stayed God's time of
+advancement. His spirit was absorbed in the business and employment of
+becoming perfect in his art and profession--which was the art _of being
+a good man_.[15] The devoted scholar's highest wish, as he closes his
+glowing account of his beloved master, who "enshrined so much Divinity
+that everything about him had a kind of sacredness," was that those who
+had enjoyed his presence and inspiration and had formed their lives
+under his instruction might "so express his life" in theirs, that men
+would say as they saw these disciples of his, "There walks at least a
+shadow of Mr. Smith!"[16]
+
+It would be difficult to find any one, in the long list of those who
+have interpreted Christianity, who has been more insistent than was
+John Smith that religion is the normal function of the soul and the
+surest evidence of its health and sanity. But religion of this normal
+and spiritual type must be sharply differentiated both from
+superstition and from legalistic religion. The mark of superstition in
+his mind is the apprehension of God as capricious, a hard Master, and
+of such a character that his {309} favour can be gained only by servile
+flattery or bribery or by spells of magic. Superstition is "a brat of
+darkness" born in a heart of fear and consternation. It produces
+invariably "a forced and jejune devotion"; it makes "forms of worship
+which are grievous and burdensome" to the life; it chills or destroys
+all free and joyous converse with God; it kills out love and inward
+peace, and instead of inspiring, heightening, and purifying man's soul,
+it bends all its energies in the vain attempt to alter the capricious
+attitude of the superior Being who scares and terrifies men. It is,
+however, a very subtle spirit and one hard to eradicate. It invades
+our religion even when we are least aware of it: "it enters into our
+chambers, creeps into our clothes, twines about our secret devotions,
+and actuates our forms of belief and orthodox opinions."[17]
+
+Legalistic religion, or the "covenant of works," is much of a piece
+with superstition. It, again, is always a burden to be borne. Its
+mark is "drudgery and servility." It is a "lean and lifeless form of
+external performances." Its "law" is always something outside the soul
+itself. It is a way of acquiring "merit," of getting reckoned among
+"heaven's darlings," but it is not a way of life or expansion or power
+or joy.[18]
+
+This "dead" legalistic form of religion is, however, not merely a thing
+of antiquity, of some early "dispensation" in the long stretch of years
+called "B.C." Like superstition, legalistic religion also has "crept
+into our clothes" and "twined about our secret devotions." The
+"gospel" can be made, and has often enough been made, "as legal as ever
+the religion of the Jews was." The gospel becomes legal, in Smith's
+sense, wherever it is treated "as something onely without us," "as a
+meer historical story or account," or as a collection of book-facts, or
+"as _credenda_ propounded for us to believe," or when we attempt to
+"make Christ's righteousness serve onely as our outward
+_covering_."[19] "Some of our {310} _Dogmata_," he thinks, "and
+Notions of Justification puff us up in far higher and goodlier conceits
+of ourselves than God hath of us; and we _profanely_ make the unspotted
+righteousness of Christ serve only as a _covering_ to wrap up our foul
+deformities and filthy vices in."[20] This tendency, wherever it
+appears, is but legal religion. Men adopt it because it does not
+"pinch their sins." It gives them a "sluggish and drowsie Belief, a
+lazy Lethargy to hugg their supposed acceptation with God"; it enables
+them "to grow big and swell with a mighty bulk with airy fancies and
+presumptions of being in favour with Heaven," and it fans up "a
+pertinacious Imagination that their Names are enrolled in the Book of
+Life, or crossed off in the Debt-Book of Heaven." But it is all "a
+meer Conceit or Opinion," for such men are "never the better in reality
+in themselves and God judges all things as they are." "While men
+continue in their wickedness, they do but vainly dream of a device to
+tie the hands of Almighty Vengeance."[21]
+
+True religion, on the other hand, is absolutely another thing, sundered
+by the width of the sky from either superstition or legalistic
+religion. It is a reception and assimilation of the Life of God within
+the soul of man which is predisposed by its fundamental nature to the
+influx and formative influence of the Spirit of God, who is the
+environing Life and inner atmosphere of all human spirits: "_Spiritual
+Life comes from God's breath within us and from the formation of Christ
+within the soul_."[22]
+
+Like all of his kind, Smith begins with what to him is an axiomatic
+fact, that the human soul has a "royal pedigree and noble extraction,"
+that, "as the best philosophers have alwaies taught, we must enquire
+for God within ourselves," that "Principles of Divine Truth have been
+engraven on man's Heart by the finger of God," that we can find "a
+clear impression of some Eternal Nature and Perfect Being stamped upon
+our own souls," that there are "Radical Principles of Divine Knowledge"
+{311} and "Seeds of Divine Nature" hidden within us and that a Divine
+Spirit blows and breathes upon men's hearts, assisting the soul to
+participate in the Life of God.[23] In one of his bold sayings this
+position is summed up as follows: "Religion is a Heaven-born thing, the
+Seed of God in the spirits of men, whereby they are formed to a
+similitude and likeness of Himself. A true Christian is every way of a
+most noble extraction, of an heavenly and divine pedigree."[24]
+
+He finds the mark of man's excelling dignity in the inexhaustible depth
+of his nature and in his noble discontent with every finite and mutable
+thing. The soul of man is "too big for earthly designs and interests."
+There is forever a restless appetite within man for some infinite Good
+without which he can never be satisfied. Everything which he attains
+or achieves still leaves him in "pinching penury," unsatiated with
+"the thin and spare diet which he finds in his finite home." His
+soul, "like the daughters of the Horseleach is always crying: 'Give,
+give.'" No happiness worth having ever arises, nor through a whole
+eternity could arise, for any soul sequestered like a hermit in
+the narrow confines of its own private cell, sundered from "the
+Fountain-Goodness," for which it was created. The immortal Principle
+within forever drives it to seek its Original, and it lives only when
+it "lives above itself," and follows "its own proper motion upward."[25]
+
+The real Gospel in contrast to the "legal gospel," is "the formation of
+a Christlike Nature in a man's soul by the mighty power of the Divine
+Spirit."[26] It is no new set of opinions; no body of Notions about
+Truth; "no system of saving Divinity, cast in a Pedagogical mould"; it
+is, from its Alpha to its Omega, Spirit and Life, or, to put it in
+Smith's own words, it is "a vital or energetical Spirit or Power of
+Righteousness," "a Principle of Life working in man's spirit," "a
+quickening ministration," "a Seed of God," "a vital Influx, spreading
+through all {312} the powers of the soul and bringing it into a Divine
+Life."[27] There are many close imitations of this real Gospel which
+on the outside look exactly like it, but they only assume "the garish
+dress and attire of religion," they put on "the specious and
+seemingly-spiritual Forms" without the inward Life and Power which are
+always the mark of true religion. These "mimical Christians" reform
+their looks, instruct their tongues, take up the fitting set of duties
+and system of opinions, underprop their religion with sacred
+performances; "chameleon-like, they even turn their insides to whatever
+hue and colour" is demanded of religion; they "furnish this domestick
+Scene of theirs with any kind of matter which the history of religion
+affords them"--only, however they "cunningly fashion out their religion
+by Book-skill," they cannot get "the true and living thing," which
+creates a new spirit and produces a new inward joy: "True Religion is
+no piece of artifice; it is no boiling up of our Imaginative powers nor
+the glowing heats of Passion; though these are too often mistaken for
+it, when in our jugglings in Religion we cast a mist before our eyes.
+But it is a new Nature informing the souls of Men; it is a Godlike
+frame of Spirit, discovering it self most of all in serene and clear
+Minds, in deep Humility, Meekness, Self-denial, Universal Love of God
+and all true Goodness, without Partiality and without Hypocrisie;
+whereby we are taught to know God, and knowing Him to love Him and
+conform ourselves as much as may be to all that Perfection which shines
+forth in Him."[28]
+
+Heaven and Hell for John Smith, as for Boehme and for Whichcote, "have
+their foundation laid in Men's own souls."[29] They are rather
+something within us than something without us. Sin and hell have the
+same origin, "the same lineage and descent." "The Devil is not only
+the name of one particular thing, but a _nature_. He is not so much a
+particular Being designed to torture wicked men in the world to come as
+a hellish and diabolical {313} nature seated in the minds of men. . . .
+Could the Devil change his foul and impure nature, he would neither be
+a Devil nor miserable. . . . All Sin and Wickedness in man's spirit
+hath the Central force and energy of Hell in it, and is perpetually
+pressing down towards it as towards its own place. There needs no
+fatal necessity or Astral influences to tumble wicked men down forcibly
+into Hell: No, Sin itself, hastened by the mighty weight of its own
+nature, carries them down thither with the most swift and headlong
+motion."[30] "Would wicked men dwell a little more at home, and
+_descend into the bottom of their own Hearts_ they would soon find Hell
+opening her mouth wide upon them, and those secret fires of inward fury
+and displeasure breaking out upon them."[31] So, too, the Kingdom of
+Heaven is within. It lies not so much in external things, golden
+streets and crowns, as in the quality and disposition of a man's mind.
+The enjoying of God consists not so much in a change of place as in
+participation in the nature of God and in assimilation to God. Nothing
+can stand firm and sure, nothing can have eternal establishment and
+abiding permanence that "hath not the everlasting arms of true Goodness
+under it."[32]
+
+In a very fine passage, in the noble discourse on "True Religion,"
+Smith says: "I wish there be not among some such a light and poor
+esteem of Heaven, as makes them more to seek after _Assurance of Heaven
+onely in the Idea of it as a thing to come than after Heaven it self_;
+which indeed we can never be well assured of untill we find it rising
+up within ourselves and glorifying our own souls. When true Assurance
+comes, Heaven it self will appear upon the Horizon of our souls, like a
+morning light chasing away all our dark and gloomy doublings before it.
+We shall not then need to light up our Candles to seek for it in
+corners; no, it will display its own lustre and brightness so before us
+that we may see it in its own light, and our souls the true possessours
+of it." "Should a man hear a Voice from Heaven or see a Vision from
+the Almighty to testifie unto him the Love of God towards him [and the
+{314} Assurance of his Salvation]; yet methinks it were more desirable
+to find a Revelation of all _from within_, arising up from the Bottome
+and centre of a man's own soul, in the Reall and Internal impressions
+of a Godlike nature upon his own spirit; and thus to find the
+Foundation and Beginning of Heaven and Happiness within himself; it
+were more desirable to see the crucifying of our own Will, the
+mortifying of the meer Animal life and to see a Divine life rising up
+in the room of it, as a sure Pledge and Inchoation of Immortality and
+Happiness, the very Essence of which consists in a perfect conformity
+and cheerful compliance of all the Powers of our Souls with the Will of
+God."[33]
+
+The consciousness of Immortality rises or falls with the moral and
+spiritual height of the soul. Nothing makes men doubt or question the
+Immortality of their souls so much as their own "base and earthly
+loves," and so, too, inward goodness "breeds a sense of the Soul's
+Immortality": "Goodness and vertue make men know and love, believe and
+delight in their Immortality. When the soul is purged and enlightened
+by true sanctity it is more capable of those Divine irradiations
+whereby it feels it self in conjunction with God. It knows that
+Almighty Love, by which it lives, is stronger than death. It knows
+that God will never forsake His own life which He has quickened in the
+soul. Those breathings and gaspings after an Eternal participation of
+Him are but the energy of His own breath within us."[34]
+
+Smith finds the world in which he lives a fair world, everywhere full
+of "the Prints and Footsteps of God," the finite creatures of which are
+"Glasses wherein God reflects His glory." There are many "golden links
+that unite the world to God," and good men, "conversing with this lower
+world and viewing the invisible things of God in the things that are
+made in the outward Creation, may many times find God secretly flowing
+into their souls and leading them silently out of the Court of the
+Temple into the Holy Place."[35]
+
+{315}
+
+The outward world is thus not something stubbornly foreign to the
+spirit; it is not the enemy's country, but every finite good and
+everything of beauty is "a Blossom of the First Goodness, a Beam from
+the Father of Lights." The spiritual person discovers that the whole
+creation is spiritual. He learns to "love all things in God and God in
+all things, and he sees that God is All in all, the Beginning and
+Original of Being, the Perfect Idea of their goodness and the end of
+their motion." In the calming illumination of this clarified vision,
+the good man, in whose soul religion has flowered, "is no longer
+solicitous whether this or that good thing be mine, or whether my
+perfections exceed the measure of this or that particular Creature, for
+whatever good he beholds anywhere he enjoys and delights in as much as
+if it were his own, and whatever he beholds in himself he looks upon
+not as his _property_ but _as a common good_; for all these Beams come
+from one and the same Fountain and Ocean of Light in whom he loves them
+all with an universal Love. When his affections run along the stream
+of any created excellencies, whether his own or any one's else, yet
+they stay not here but run on until they fall into the Ocean; they do
+not settle into a fond love and admiration either of himself or any
+other's excellencies, but he owns them as so many Pure Effluxes and
+Emanations from God, and in any particular Being loves the Universal
+Goodness. Thus a good man may walk up and down the world as in a
+Garden of Spices and suck a Divine Sweetness out of every flower.
+There is a twofold meaning in every Creature: a Literal and Mystical; a
+good man says of everything that his Senses offer to him: it speaks to
+his lower part but it points out something above to his Mind and
+Spirit. . . . True Religion never finds it self out of the Infinite
+Sphere of Divinity and wherever it finds Beauty, Harmony, Goodness,
+Love, Ingenuity, Wisdom, Holiness, Justice, and the like, it is ready
+to say: _Here is God_. Wheresoever any such Perfections shine out, an
+holy Mind climbs up by these Sunbeams and raises up it self to
+God. . . . A good man finds every place he {316} treads upon _Holy
+Ground_; to him the world is God's Temple."[36]
+
+The supreme instance of the revelation of the Universal through the
+particular, of the invisible through the visible, the Divine through
+the human, is seen in Christ. It was precisely such an event as might
+have been expected, for "the Divine Bounty and Fulness has always been
+manifesting Itself to the spirits of men." Those who have lived by
+inward insight have perpetually found themselves "hanging upon the arms
+of Immortal Goodness." At length, in this One Life the Divine Goodness
+blossomed into perfect flower and revealed its Nature to men. In Him
+divinity and humanity are absolutely united in one Person. In Christ
+we have a clear manifestation of God and in Him, too, "we may see with
+open face what human nature can attain to."[37] This stupendous event,
+however, was no "gracious contrivance," no scheme to restore lapsed men
+in order that God might have "a Quire of Souls to sing eternal
+Hallelujahs to Him"; it was just "the overflowing fountain and efflux
+of Almighty Love bestowing itself upon men and crowning Itself by
+communicating Itself."[38] The Christ who is thus divine Grace become
+visible and vocal is also at the same time the irresistible attraction,
+"strongly and forcibly moving the souls of men into a conjunction with
+Divine Goodness," which is what Smith always means by the great word,
+_Faith_. It is something in the hearts of men which by experience
+"feels the mighty insinuations of Divine Goodness"; complies with it;
+perpetually rises into co-operation with it, and attains its true "life
+and vivacity" by partaking of it.[39] Christ is thus the Node, or
+Centre, of both Grace and Faith.
+
+With this apprehension of Faith as a vital thing--a new and living
+way--Smith thinks very lightly of "notions" and what he calls "a
+knowledge of Divinity [Theology] which appears in systems and
+models."[40] This is but a poor way, he thinks, to "the Land of
+Truth." {317} "It is but a thin and aiery knowledge that is got by meer
+speculation." "This is but spider-like to spin a worthless web out of
+one's own bowels." "Jejune and barren speculations may unfold the
+Plicatures of Truth's garment, but they cannot discover her lovely
+Face." "To find Truth," he says in another figure, "we must break
+through the outward shell of words and phrases which house it," and by
+_experience and practice_ discover the "inward beauty, life and
+loveliness of Truth."[41]
+
+This hard "shell of words and phrases" which must be broken before
+Truth is found, is one of Sebastian Franck's favourite sayings, and we
+find Smith also repeating Franck's vivid accounts of the weakness of
+Scripture when it is treated only as external history, or as words,
+texts, and phrases. "Scripture," he says, in the exact words and
+figures of the German Humanist, "is a Sealed Book which the greatest
+Sophist may be most acquainted with. It is like the Pillar of fire and
+cloud that parted between the Israelites and Egyptians, giving a clear
+and comfortable light to all those that are under the manuduction and
+guidance thereof [_i.e._ those who have the inner experience] but being
+full of darkness and obscurity to those that rebel against it."[42]
+"The dead letter," he says, "is a sandy foundation" for religion,
+because it is never in books and writings but rather in the human soul
+that men must seek for God.[43] Action and not words; life and not
+motions; heart and not brain, hold the key to Truth: "They cannot be
+good at Theorie that are bad at Practice."[44] "Our Saviour," he says,
+"would not draw Truth up into any System, nor would He lay it out into
+Canons or Articles of Faith, because He was not so careful to stock the
+world with Opinions and Notions as to make it thrive with true piety,
+Godlike purity and spiritual understanding"; and in a very happy
+passage, he reminds us that there are other ways of propagating
+religion besides writing books: "They are not alwaies the best Men who
+blot the most paper; Truth is not so {318} voluminous nor swells into
+such a mighty bulk as our Bookes doe. Those minds are not alwaies the
+most chaste that are the most parturient with learned Discourses."[45]
+
+I have, I believe, now given a true account of Smith's type of
+Christianity, It was no new message. It was a re-expression of ideas
+and ideals that had already been often proclaimed to the dull ears of
+the world. He, however, is never a repeater of other men's ideas.
+What he offers is always as much his own as was the life-blood which
+coursed through his heart. He fed upon the literature which was
+kindred to his growing spirit, and his books helped him find the road
+which he was seeking; but he was nobly true to his own theory that the
+way of Life is discovered by spiritual experience rather than by
+"verbal description," and this quiet, sincere scholar and prophet of
+the soul found it thus. He once said that "Truth is content, when it
+comes into the world, to wear our mantles, to learn our language and to
+conform itself as it were to our dress and fashions";[46] that is to
+say, prophets speak in their own dialect and use the modes of their own
+culture, but they are prophets through their own temporal experience of
+that one eternal Reality which shines into their souls in its own
+Light.[47]
+
+What impressed his contemporary friends most was the beauty of his
+spirit, and that is what still most impresses the reader of his
+Discourses. He has succeeded in preserving some of the strong elixir
+of his life in the words which survive him, and we know him as a
+valiant soldier in that great army of soldier-saints who have fought
+with spiritual weapons. "This fight and contest," he himself has told
+us, "with Sin and Satan is not to be known by the rattling of Chariots
+or the sound of an alarm: it is indeed alone transacted upon the inner
+stage of men's souls and spirits--but it never consists in a sluggish
+kind of doing nothing that so God might do all."[48] A Life is always
+battle, and the true Christian is always "a Champion of God" clad in
+the armour of Light for the defeat of {319} darkness and the seed of
+Satan. In this battle of Armageddon John Smith took a man's part, and
+his affectionate disciple Simon Patrick was quite right in saying, as
+the master passed away, "My father, my father, The chariot of Israel
+and the horsemen thereof."
+
+The other members of this impressive group of Cambridge Platonists,
+especially Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, Nathaniel Culverwel and John
+Norris, might well be studied, and they would furnish some additional
+aspects of religious thought, but the teachings of the two exponents
+whom I have selected as representative of the school have brought the
+central ideas and the underlying spirit of this seventeenth century
+religious movement sufficiently into view. Their intimate connection
+with the currents of thought which preceded them has also been made
+adequately clear. This volume does not pretend to be exhaustive, and
+it cannot follow out all the interesting ramifications of the
+complicated historical development which I have been tracing. I have
+been compelled to limit myself to the presentation of typical specimens
+and examples of this continuously advancing spiritual movement which
+found one of its noblest figures in John Smith.
+
+
+
+[1] Simon Patrick uses this phrase in his funeral sermon on his friend
+John Smith. _Select Discourses_ (1673), p. 472.
+
+[2] _Rational Theology_, ii. p. 122.
+
+[3] Patrick's Sermon, _Select Discourses_, p. 496.
+
+[4] Worthington's Sketch is given in the Preface to the Reader in
+_Select Discourses_, pp. iii-xxx, and Patrick's Sermon is given as an
+Appendix to the same volume, pp. 471-512.
+
+[5] Preface, p. vi.
+
+[6] Patrick, _op. cit._ p. 498.
+
+[7] Preface, p. xxviii.
+
+[8] Patrick, _op. cit._ pp. 471 and 472.
+
+[9] _Ibid._ p. 484.
+
+[10] _Ibid._ p. 477.
+
+[11] _Ibid._ p. 474.
+
+[12] _Ibid._ pp. 480-481.
+
+[13] _Ibid._ p. 486.
+
+[14] Preface, p. iii.
+
+[15] This portrait is made up entirely of passages gathered out of
+Patrick's Sermon, and but slightly altered.
+
+[16] _Op. cit._ p. 509.
+
+[17] "A Short Discourse on Superstition," in _Select Discourses_, pp.
+24-36.
+
+[18] "Discourse on Legal Righteousness, etc.," _ibid._ pp. 273-338.
+
+[19] Smith uses this phrase in precisely the same manner as Jacob
+Boehme.
+
+[20] _Select Discourses_, p. 316.
+
+[21] _Ibid._ pp. 319-321, quoted freely.
+
+[22] _Ibid._ p. 21, quoted freely.
+
+[23] _Select Discourses_, pp. 13, 14, 57, 61, and 118.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ p. 370.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ pp. 375, 393, 395, 403, 407-408.
+
+[26] _Ibid._ p. 311.
+
+[27] _Select Discourses_, pp. 303, 305, and 315.
+
+[29] _Ibid._ p. 364. For Smith's view of mimical Christians see pp.
+359-364.
+
+[29] _Ibid._ p. 144.
+
+[30] _Select Discourses_, p. 452.
+
+[31] _Ibid._ p. 456.
+
+[32] _Ibid._ pp. 452 and 445.
+
+[33] _Select Discourses_, p. 416.
+
+[34] _Ibid._ pp. 97-98. Quoted freely.
+
+[35] _Ibid._ pp. 419-420.
+
+[36] _Select Discourses_, pp. 421-423.
+
+[37] _Ibid._ pp. 332 and 336.
+
+[38] _Ibid._ p. 398.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ p. 325.
+
+[40] _Ibid._ p. 2.
+
+[41] _Select Discourses_, pp. 4, 7, and 8.
+
+[42] _Ibid._ p. 278.
+
+[43] _Ibid._ pp. 3 and 288.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ p. 12.
+
+[45] _Select Discourses_, p. 12.
+
+[46] _Ibid._ p. 165.
+
+[47] _Ibid._ p. 260.
+
+[48] _Ibid._ pp. 461 and 458.
+
+
+
+
+{320}
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THOMAS TRAHERNE AND THE SPIRITUAL POETS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
+
+I
+
+The powerful religious upheaval in England which reached its
+culmination during the two middle decades of the seventeenth century,
+profoundly stirred both the upper and lower intellectual strata of
+society. It fused and organized men on the one hand, and carried them
+beyond themselves; and on the other hand it broke up settled habits of
+thought, swept away many customs and practices which had become almost
+irresistible subconscious influences, and left those who were in any
+way morally and intellectually defective at the mercy of chance
+currents and eddies. As a result there appeared a strange medley of
+tiny sects. These groups, seething with enthusiasm, scattered pretty
+much over England, unorganized or loosely organized, generally gathered
+about some influential psychopathic leader, were lumped together in the
+public mind and named "Ranters."[1] They are by no means a negligible
+phenomenon of the period. They reveal the back-wash of the spiritual
+movement, which in the main went steadily onward. They exhibit, in
+their loose and unmoralized freedom, the inherent dangers which attach
+to the proclamation of spiritual liberty, and they furnish a clear
+historical illustration of the truth that progress toward a religion
+grounded upon the inner life of man can only be slowly and painfully
+achieved.
+
+{321}
+
+The religious poets of this period, on the other hand, furnish clear
+evidence of the constructive, organizing and fusing power of these
+newly dawning spiritual insights, as they worked upon the minds of
+highly gifted and endowed persons. Poets are not Reformers. They do
+not consider themselves "commissioned" to reconstruct old systems of
+thought, old forms of faith and old types of church-organization, or to
+re-interpret the Gospel, the way of salvation and the communion of
+saints. Their mission is a different one, though it is no less
+spiritual and, in the best sense of the word, no less practical. The
+poets are always among the first to feel the direction of spiritual
+currents, and they are very sure voices of the deeper hopes and
+aspirations of their epoch. All the religious poets of this particular
+period reveal very clearly the influence of the ideas which were
+central in the teaching of the spiritual leaders whom we have been
+studying. The reader of Milton needs no argument to convince him of
+the fact that, however far removed the great poet was in most points of
+view from the contemporary Quakers, he nevertheless insisted
+emphatically, as they did, on the illumination of the soul by a Light
+within; "a celestial Light," he calls it in _Paradise Lost_, which
+shines inward and irradiates the mind through all her powers, and
+supplies an inward sight of things invisible to sense[2]--a Light which
+steadily increases as it is used by the obedient soul.[3] The origin
+of this inward Light, according to Milton's thought, is the eternal
+Word of God, who is before all worlds and who is the source of all
+revelation, whether inward or outward: the Spirit that prefers
+
+ Before all temples the upright heart and pure.[4]
+
+
+The minor religious poets of the period had not, however, formed their
+intellectual outlook under the imperial sway of theological systems of
+thought in anything like {322} the degree that Milton had. They
+reflect the freer and less rigidly formulated currents of thought.
+"All divinity is love, or wonder," John Donne wrote in one of his
+poems. No phrase could better express the intense religious life of
+the group of spiritual poets in England who interpreted in beautiful,
+often immortal, form this religion of the spirit, this glowing
+consciousness that the world and all its fulness is God's and that
+eternity is set within the soul of man, who never is himself until he
+finds his Life in God.
+
+ E'en like two little bank-dividing brooks,
+ That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams,
+ And having rang'd and search'd a thousand nooks,
+ Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames,
+ Where in a greater current they conjoin:
+ So I my best beloved's am; so He is mine.
+
+ E'en so we met: and after long pursuit,
+ E'en so we joined; we both became entire:
+ No need for either to renew a suit,
+ For I was flax and He was flames of fire.
+ Our firm united souls did more than twine;
+ So I my best beloved's am; so He is mine.[5]
+
+
+Whatever these poets, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Crashaw, Quarles, say
+of the soul and its fuller life, they say quite naturally in terms of
+love and wonder. Religion has become for them the flowering of the
+soul; the flooding of the whole being with health and joy; the
+consummation of life; and they tell of it as lovers tell of their
+discovery and their joy.
+
+ Oh mightie love! man is one world and hath
+ Another to attend him.[6]
+
+
+We have here in these poets, as in the writings of Whichcote and Smith,
+a type of religion which is primarily concerned with the liberation and
+winning of the whole of life, a thing which, they all tell us, can be
+done only in conscious parallelism with the set of eternal currents.
+
+These minor prophets of seventeenth century English literature have
+often been treated as mystics, and there {323} is in all of them,
+except George Herbert, a rich strand of mystical religion, but their
+mysticism is only an element, a single aspect, of a very much wider and
+completer type of religion which includes all the strands that compose
+what I have been calling "spiritual religion"--an inner flooding of the
+life with a consciousness of God, a rational apprehension of the soul's
+inherent relation to the Divine, and a transforming discovery of the
+meaning of life through the revelation in Christ, which sets all one's
+being athrob with love and wonder.
+
+ Eternal God! O thou that only art
+ The sacred fountain of eternal light,
+ And blessed loadstone of my better part,
+ O thou, my heart's desire, my soul's delight,
+ Reflect upon my soul and touch my heart,
+ And then my heart shall prize no good above thee;
+ And then my soul shall know thee; knowing, love thee.[7]
+
+
+
+II
+
+Thomas Traherne is one of the best and most adequate representatives,
+in this literary group, of this type of religion. He was profoundly
+influenced by the revival of Plato and Plotinus, and by the writings of
+the religious Humanists and he had absorbed, consciously or
+unconsciously, the ideas and ideals which appear and reappear in the
+widespread movement which I have been tracing. He was a pure and noble
+soul, a man of deep experience and fruitful meditation, the master of a
+rare and wonderful style, and we shall find in his writings a glowing
+appreciation and a luminous expression of this type of inner, spiritual
+religion.
+
+He was born about the year 1636, probably at Hereford, the son of a
+poor shoemaker, but of a notable and well-endowed family line. He took
+no pains to inform the world of his outward history and we are left
+with guesses as to most of the details of his earthly career, but he
+has himself supplied us with an unusually full account of his {324}
+inward life during the early years of it. "Once I remember," he says,
+"I think I was about four years old when I thus reasoned with myself,
+sitting in a little obscure room of my father's poor house: If there be
+a God certainly He must be infinite in Goodness, and I was prompted to
+this by a real whispering instinct of Nature."[8] Whereupon the child
+wonders why, if God is so rich, he himself is so poor, possessed of "so
+scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts," but he
+tells us that as soon as he was old enough to discover the glory of the
+world he was in, and old enough for his soul to have "_sudden returns
+into itself_," there was no more questioning about poverty and narrow
+fortunes. All the wealth of God was his--
+
+ I nothing in the world did know
+ But 'twas divine.[9]
+
+
+As nobody has better caught the infinite glory of being a child, and as
+nobody in literature has more successfully "set the little child in the
+midst," than has Traherne, it may be well to let him tell us here in
+his splendid enthusiasm what it is to be a child and what the eyes of a
+child can see. He shall do it, first in his magnificent prose and then
+in his fine and simple verse.
+
+"Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious
+apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child. All appeared
+new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and
+beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the
+world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge
+was Divine. . . . My very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one
+brought into the Estate of Innocence. All things were spotless and
+pure and glorious: yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious.
+I knew not that there were any sins, or complaints or laws. I dreamed
+not of poverties, contentions or vices. All tears {325} and quarrels
+were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal.
+I knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for
+tribute or bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an
+Angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory, I saw all the
+peace of Eden; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator's praises, and
+could not make more melody to Adam, than to me. All Time was Eternity,
+and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that an infant should be
+heir of the whole World, and see those mysteries which the books of the
+learned never unfold?
+
+"The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped,
+nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to
+everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as
+gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees
+when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished
+me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and
+almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.
+The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem!
+Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and
+maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls
+tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not
+that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as
+they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the Light
+of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared; which
+talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to
+stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the
+temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and
+silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy
+faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars,
+and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.
+. . . So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the
+dirty devices of this world. Which {326} now I unlearn, and become, as
+it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of
+God."[10]
+
+ How like an Angel came I down!
+ How bright are all things here!
+ When first among His works I did appear
+ O how their Glory did me crown!
+ The World resembled His _Eternity_
+ In which my soul did walk;
+ And everything that I did see
+ Did with me talk.[11]
+
+ Long time before
+ I in my mother's womb was born,
+ A God preparing did this glorious store,
+ The world, for me adorne.
+ Into this Eden so divine and fair
+ So wide and bright, I come His son and heir.[12]
+
+
+Like Vaughan, who, in his "angel-infancy," could
+
+ In these weaker glories spy
+ Some shadows of eternity,
+
+and who
+
+ Felt through all this fleshly dress
+ Bright shoots of everlastingness,[13]
+
+Traherne not only saw, in his paradise-innocence, the glory of the
+earth and sky--the streets paved with golden stones, and boys and girls
+with lovely shining faces--but he also felt that he was part of a
+deeper world which lay about his infancy and wooed him with love.
+
+ O Lord I wonder at Thy Love,
+ Which did my Infancy so early move.[14]
+
+And out of this childhood experience, which many a meditative child can
+match, he insists that God visited him.
+
+ He did Approach, He did me woo;
+ I wonder that my God this thing would do.
+
+ He in our childhood with us walks,
+ And with our thoughts Mysteriously He talks;
+ He often visiteth our Minds.[15]
+
+
+{327}
+
+I know of no one who has borne a louder testimony than Traherne to the
+divine inheritances and spiritual possibilities of the new-born child,
+or who has more emphatically denied the fiction of total depravity: "I
+speak it in the presence of God," he says, "and of our Lord Jesus
+Christ; in my pure primitive Virgin Light, while my apprehensions were
+natural and unmixed, I cannot remember but that I was ten thousand
+times more prone to good and excellent things than to evil."[16] And
+he adds this impressive word on the doctrine of inheritance: "It is not
+our parents' loins, so much as our parents' lives, that enthrals and
+blinds us."[17]
+
+After a happy childhood, during which "The Earth did undertake the
+office of a Priest,"[18] and when his soul was
+
+ A living endless eye
+ Just bounded with the sky,
+ Whose power, whose act, whose essence was to see,[19]
+
+he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in the year 1652, being made B.A.
+in 1656, M.A. in 1661, and Bachelor of Divinity in 1669. He was
+admitted in 1657 to the Rectory of Credenhill, near Hereford, where he
+remained for about ten years, and in 1667 he was made chaplain to Sir
+Orlando Bridgman, in whose service he died in 1674, and was buried
+"under the reading-desk" in the church at Teddington near Hampton Court.
+
+During his lifetime he published _Roman Forgeries_ (1673), an
+unimportant work, and had begun the publication of his _Christian
+Ethics_, which appeared, after his death, in 1675. His _Poems_ and his
+_Centuries of Meditations_ remained in MS. unknown until they were
+discovered in a London bookstall about the year 1897, and their
+authorship was proved by Bertram Dobell who published the _Poems_ in
+1903, and the _Centuries of Meditations_ in 1908. There still remains
+in MS. an octavo volume of meditations and devotions.
+
+Traherne's poems show that he always dwelt near the {328} gate of
+Heaven and was easily aware of the "ancient Light of Eden." An
+accidental bit of gossip, reported in John Aubrey's _Miscellanies_,
+indicates that he was subject to psychical experiences of an unusual
+sort, and the poet himself has reported an impressive crisis-experience
+when he chose his destiny and settled his preference for inward
+treasures, even though it meant, as with George Fox, the wearing of a
+leather suit.
+
+"When I came into the country, and being seated among silent trees, and
+meads and hills, had all my time in mine own hands, I resolved to spend
+it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of happiness, and to satiate
+that burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from my youth. In
+which I was so resolute, that I chose rather to live upon ten pounds a
+year, and to go in leather clothes, and feed upon bread and water, so
+that I might have all my time clearly to myself, than to keep many
+thousands per annum in an estate of life where my time would be
+devoured in care and labour. And God was so pleased to accept of that
+desire, that from that time to this, I have had all things plentifully
+provided for me, without any care at all, my very study of Felicity
+making me more to prosper, than all the care in the whole world. So
+that through His blessing I live a free and a kingly life as if the
+world were turned again into Eden, or much more, as it is at this
+day."[20]
+
+Like his predecessors in this faith, Traherne is never tired of
+declaring the infiniteness of the human soul. Eternity is in the human
+heart, if only the way of the open door is taken, if only the eyes are
+opened to see. God, he says, has made our spirits "centres in
+eternity," opening upon "innumerable infinities." The Ocean is but a
+drop of a bucket to the immensity of the soul, with its abysmal deeps
+and its immeasurable capacities. It is the very essence and being of
+the soul to feel infinity, for "God is ever more near to us than we are
+to ourselves, so that we cannot feel our own souls without feeling
+Him."[21] "You are never," he says, "your true self, till you live
+{329} by your soul more than by your body, and you never live by your
+soul until you feel its incomparable excellence."[22] Its nobility is
+revealed by its insatiable hungers, its surpassing dignity is declared
+by its endless wants, its inability to live by bread alone. "As by the
+seed we conjecture what plant will arise, and know by the acorn what
+tree will grow forth, or by the eagle's egg what kind of bird; so do we
+by the powers of the soul upon earth, know what kind of Being, Person,
+and Glory will be in the Heavens, where its latent powers shall be
+turned into Act, its inclinations shall be completed, and its
+capacities filled."[23]
+
+Not only in a primitive Eden, but in the world as we know it, with its
+black and white, man always bears within himself the mark of a heavenly
+origin, and has the quickening Seed of God in the depth of his soul:
+"The Image of God is seated in the lineaments of the soul." Man is the
+greatest of all miracles; he is "a mirror of all Eternity."[24] His
+thoughts run out to everlasting; he is made for spiritual supremacy and
+has within himself an inner, hidden life greater than anything else in
+the universe.[25] We are "nigh of kin to God" and "nigh of kin
+
+ To those pure things we find
+ In His great mind
+ Who made the world."[26]
+
+There is
+
+ A Spiritual World standing within
+ An Universe enclosed in Skin.[27]
+
+
+With the same enthusiasm with which he proclaims the divine origin and
+the heavenly connections of the soul, Traherne also proclaims the glory
+and beauty of the visible world as a revelation of God.
+
+ Eternity stooped down to nought
+ And in the earth its likeness sought.[28]
+
+The world is not God, for He is Spirit, but the world is "a glorious
+mirror" in which the verities of religion are {330} revealed and in
+which the face of God is at least partially unveiled.[29] It is here
+in this "mirror" that the clairvoyant eye discovers God's being,
+perceives His wisdom, goodness, and power, guesses out the footsteps of
+His love, and finds promises and pledges of the larger fulfilment of
+that love. Here in the world, which is full of "remainders of
+Paradise," is surely the visible porch or gate of Eternity.[30] It is
+easy to believe that God has given us His Son when once we have seen
+the richness of the world which He has given us.[31] But the world is
+never "ours" until we learn how to see it and enjoy it in its beauty,
+even in the most common things, and until we discover that all its
+service and all its excellency are spiritual: "Pigs eat acorns, but
+neither consider the sun that gave them life, nor the influences of the
+heavens by which they were nourished, nor the very root of the tree
+from whence they came. This being the work of Angels who in a wide and
+clear light see even the sea that gave them [the acorns] moisture: And
+feed upon that acorn spiritually while they know the ends for which it
+was created, and feast upon all these as upon a World of Joys within
+it: while to ignorant swine that eat the shell it is an empty husk of
+no taste nor delightful savour."[32]
+
+Men, as well as angels, can learn to use the world spiritually--can
+learn to see how rough, common things are part of "the divine
+exchequer"; how a grain of sand exhibiteth the wisdom of God and
+manifesteth His glory.[33] With this prelude, Traherne gives his
+glowing account of the true, spiritual way to enjoy the world.
+
+"Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you
+awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father's Palace; and look upon
+the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys: having such a
+reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. The bride of
+a monarch, in her husband's chamber, hath no such causes of delight as
+you.
+
+"You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself {331} floweth in
+your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the
+stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world,
+and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as
+well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as
+misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.
+
+"Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your
+jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as
+with your walk and table; till you are intimately acquainted with that
+shady nothing out of which the world was made; till you love men so as
+to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own;
+till you delight in God for being good to all; you never enjoy the
+world. Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more
+present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties
+there, than in your own house; till you remember how lately you were
+made, and how wonderful it was when you came into it: and more rejoice
+in the palace of your glory, than if it had been made but to-day
+morning.
+
+"Yet further, you never enjoy the world aright, till you so love the
+beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade
+others to enjoy it. And so perfectly hate the abominable corruption of
+men in despising it, that you had rather suffer the flames of Hell than
+willingly be guilty of their error. . . . The world is a mirror of
+infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no
+man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men
+disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God. It is more to man since he is
+fallen than it was before. It is the place of Angels and the Gate of
+Heaven. When Jacob waked out of his dream, he said, 'God is here, and
+I wist it not. How dreadful is this place! This is none other than
+the House of God, and the Gate of Heaven.'"[34]
+
+But notwithstanding his exuberant and overflowing joy in creation,
+Traherne is conscious that the world has {332} its "dreggy parts," that
+it has been "muddied" by man's misuse of it, and that the havoc of sin
+is apparent. The light which shined in infancy becomes eclipsed as the
+customs and manners of life close down over it and cover it. Men's
+mouths are full of talk of fleeting, vulgar, and worthless things, and
+they speak no syllable of those celestial and stable treasures which
+form the only wealth of life. The emphasis in education is on the
+wrong things. So with much ado the innocent child is "corrupted and
+made to learn the dirty devices of the world," which he must again
+unlearn and become a little child once more in the Kingdom of God.[35]
+The taint, however, is not in the native structure of the soul, it is
+not through a biological transmission, it is due to false training--it
+is from the parents' lives rather than their loins. Let parents, he
+says, who desire holy children learn to make them possessors of divine
+things _betimes_. It is "deadly barbarous and uncouth" to "put grubs
+and worms" into little children's minds, to teach them to say this
+house is mine, this bauble is a jewel, this gew-gaw is a fine thing,
+this rattle makes music, when they ought to be made instead to see the
+spiritual glory of the earth and sky, the beauty of life, the sweetness
+and nobility of Nature, and to live joyously, like birds, in union and
+communion with God. I am sure, he concludes, that barbarous people
+that go naked come nearer to Adam, God, and the Angels, in the
+simplicity of their wealth, than do many among us who partake of what
+we nick-name civility and mode.[36] The entire work of redemption is,
+thus, to restore man to himself, to bring him once more to the Tree of
+Life, to enable him to discover the glory all about him, to reveal to
+him the real values of things, and to bring to birth within him an
+immortal love. The true healing of the soul is always through the
+birth of love. Before a soul loves, it lives only to itself; as soon
+as love is born it lives beyond itself and finds its life in the object
+of its love. It is Christ who first reveals the full measure of love,
+who makes us see the one adequate Object of love, and who {333} forges
+within our human spirits the invisible bonds of a love that binds us
+forever to Him who so loved us. Here in Him--"a Man loving all the
+world, a God dying for mankind"[37]--we see that we are infinitely
+beloved, that the foundations of an eternal Friendship are laid, that
+God is infinitely prone to love, and that true love spares nothing for
+the sake of what it loves--"O miraculous and eternal Godhead suffering
+on a Cross for me!"[38] "That Cross is a tree set on fire with
+invisible flame which illuminateth all the world. The flame is love:
+the love in His bosom that died upon it."[39]
+
+But there is no salvation for us in the Cross until it kindles the same
+flame of love in us, until that immeasurable love of His becomes an
+irresistible power in us, so that we henceforth live unto Him that
+loved us. It must, if it is to be efficacious, shift all our values
+and set us to loving as He loved--"He who would not in the same cases
+do the same things Jesus Christ hath done can never be saved," for love
+is never timorous.[40] The love of Christ is to dwell within us and
+every man is to be the object of it. God and we are to become one
+spirit, that is, one in will and one in desire. Christ must live
+within us. We must be filled with the Holy Ghost, which is the God of
+Love; we must be of the same mind with Christ Jesus and led by His
+Spirit, and we must henceforth treat every man in respect to the
+greatness of Christ's love--this is salvation in Traherne's conception
+of it, and holiness and happiness are the same thing.[41] The Cross
+has not done its complete work for us until we can say: "O Christ, I
+see thy crown of thorns in every eye; thy bleeding, naked, wounded body
+in every soul; thy death liveth in every memory; thy crucified person
+is embalmed in every affection; thy pierced feet are bathed in every
+one's tears and it is my privilege to enter with thee into every
+soul."[42]
+
+However contemplative and mystical the bent of Traherne's mind may have
+been, he always finds the {334} terminus of spiritual life in action,
+indeed, in brotherly service, in what he calls "blessed operations."
+Speaking apparently of himself, he finely says: "He thought it a vain
+thing to see glorious principles buried in books, unless he did remove
+them into his understanding; and a vain thing to remove them into his
+understanding unless he did revive them and raise them up with
+continual _exercise_. Let this therefore be the first principle of
+your soul--that to have no principles or to live beside them is equally
+miserable. Philosophers are not those that speak but do great
+things."[43] "It is," he writes in words which sound like those of his
+contemporary Winstanley, "it is an indelible principle of Eternal
+truth, that practice and exercise is the Life of all. Should God give
+you worlds and laws and treasures, and worlds upon worlds, and Himself
+also in the Divinest manner, if you will be lazy you lose all. The
+soul is made for action and cannot rest till it be employed. . . . If
+therefore you would be happy, your life must be as full of operation as
+God of treasure."[44]
+
+Love, once kindled in the soul, is the mother of all heroic actions;
+love knows how to abound and overflow--the man who has lighted his life
+from Christ's love is constant in trials, patient in sufferings,
+courageous in assaults, prudent in difficulties, victorious and
+triumphant in action.[45]
+
+Traherne shares with Boehme and with the Cambridge Platonists the view
+that Eternity is as much here as anywhere. Those Christians, he
+thinks, who put off felicity and defer their enjoyment with long delays
+"are to be much suspected."[46] "'Tis not," so he states his law,
+"change of place, but glorious principles well practised that establish
+Heaven in the life and soul. An angel will be happy anywhere and a
+devil miserable, because the principles of the one are always good, of
+the other, bad. From the centre to the utmost bounds of the
+everlasting hills all is Heaven before God, and full of {335} treasure;
+and he that walks like God in the midst of them is blessed."[47] "You
+are in Heaven everywhere."[48] The real business of life, as he
+elsewhere declares, is to "piece this life with the life of Heaven, to
+see it as one with all Eternity, a part of it, a life within it,"[49]
+which reminds us of Vaughan's great words:
+
+ I saw Eternity the other night
+ Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
+ As calm as it was bright:
+ And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
+ Driv'n by the spheres,
+ Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
+ And all her train were hurl'd.[50]
+
+
+And with much penetration Traherne tells us that Eternity is not an
+endless addition of "times "--a weak infinite series of durations, but
+rather a Reality in which all true realities abide, and which retains
+in a present now all beginnings and all endings.[51] Eternity is just
+the real world for which we were made and which we enter through the
+door of love.
+
+ It is a spiritual world within,
+ A living world and nearer far of kin
+ To God than that which first He made.
+ While that doth fade
+ This therefore ever shall endure
+ Within the soul as more divine and pure.[52]
+
+
+
+[1] See my _Studies in Mystical Religion_, chap. xix.
+
+[2] Book III. lines 51-55.
+
+[3] Book III. lines 194-197.
+
+[4] Book I. line 18. Since this chapter was written, Alden Sampson's
+_Studies in Milton_ (New York, 1913) has been published. His valuable
+chapter on "Milton's Confession of Faith" reveals in Milton a very wide
+acquaintance with the ideas which I have been tracing, and shows by a
+vast number of quotations how frequently the poet used these ideas
+sympathetically.
+
+[5] Francis Quarles' "My Beloved is Mine."
+
+[6] George Herbert's poem "Man."
+
+[7] Francis Quarles' "Light."
+
+[8] _Centuries of Meditations_ (London, 1908), iii. 16. For details of
+his life and for the story of the discovery of his writings, see the
+Introduction to _The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne_ (1903) by
+Bertram Dobell.
+
+[9] Traherne's pom "Wonder," iii.
+
+[10] _Centuries of Meditations_, iii. 1, 2 and 3.
+
+[11] "Wonder," i.
+
+[12] "The Salutation"
+
+[13] Vaughan's "The Retreat."
+
+[14] Traherne's "The Approach."
+
+[15] _Ibid._
+
+[16] _Centuries of Meditations_, iii. 8.
+
+[17] _Ibid._
+
+[18] "Dumbness."
+
+[19] "The Preparative."
+
+[20] _Centuries of Meditations_, iii. 46.
+
+[21] _Ibid._ ii. 81. See also ii. 70 and 83.
+
+[22] _Centuries of Meditations_, ii. 92.
+
+[23] _Ibid._ iv. 70.
+
+[24] _Ibid._ i. 19, and iv. 81.
+
+[25] _Ibid._ ii. 23.
+
+[26] "My Spirit."
+
+[27] "Fullness."
+
+[28] "The Choice."
+
+[29] _Centuries of Meditations_, ii. 17.
+
+[30] _Ibid._ ii. 1 and 17.
+
+[31] _Ibid._ ii. 6.
+
+[32] _Ibid._ i. 26.
+
+[33] _Ibid._ i. 25 and 27.
+
+[34] _Centuries of Meditations_, i. 28-31.
+
+[35] _Centuries of Meditations_, iii. 7 and 3.
+
+[36] _Ibid._ iii. 11-13.
+
+[37] _Centuries of Meditations_, i. 59.
+
+[38] _Ibid._ i. 67 and 62.
+
+[39] _Ibid._ i. 60.
+
+[40] _Ibid._ iv. 59.
+
+[41] _Ibid._ iv. 28. See also iv. 31.
+
+[42] _Ibid._ i. 86.
+
+[43] _Centuries of Meditations_, iv. 2.
+
+[44] _Ibid._ iv. 95.
+
+[45] _Christian Ethics_, chapter on "Charity."
+
+[46] _Centuries of Meditations_, iv. 9.
+
+[47] _Centuries of Meditations_, iv. 37.
+
+[48] _Ibid._ iv. 38.
+
+[49] _Ibid._ iv. 93.
+
+[50] Vaughan's poem, "The World."
+
+[51] _Centuries of Meditations_, v. 7-8.
+
+[52] Traherne's poem, "Thoughts."
+
+
+
+
+{336}
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+Few words are needed in conclusion to point out the historical
+significance of the movement which we have been studying, and to indicate
+its connection with the rise and development of seventeenth century
+Quakerism. These chapters have presented sufficient historical evidence
+to show that from the very beginning of the Reformation there appeared a
+group of men who felt themselves commissioned, like the prophets of old,
+to challenge the theological systems of the Reformers, and to cry against
+what proved to be an irresistible tendency toward the exaltation of form
+and letter in religion. They were men of intense religious faith, of
+marked mystical type, characterized by interior depth of experience, but
+at the same time they were men of scholarship, breadth and balance.
+
+Their central loyalty was to the invisible Church which in their
+conception was the Body of Christ, forever growing and expanding through
+the ages under the guidance of the ever-present Spirit; and they esteemed
+but lightly the established Churches which seemed to them formed not
+after the pattern in the mount but after very earthly and political
+models. Challenging, as they did, the formulated doctrines of the
+Reformation, the type of Church which was being substituted for the Roman
+Catholic Church, and the entire body of ceremonial and sacramental
+practices which were being put in place of the ancient sacraments of the
+Church, these "prophets" found themselves compelled to discover the
+foundations {337} for a new type of Church altogether, and to feel their
+way down to a new and fundamental basis of religious authority. That
+would be a momentous task for any age, or for any spiritual leaders, and
+we must not demand the impossible of these sixteenth century
+pathbreakers. What they did do consistently and well was to proclaim the
+spiritual character of God as revealed in Christ, the native capacity of
+the human soul for God, the intimate and inherent relationship of the
+divine and human, the progressive revelation of God in history, the
+priority of the inward Word, the august ethical aspect which must attach
+to any religion adequate for the growing race, and the folly of losing
+the heart and spirit of Christianity in contentions over external,
+temporal, and pictorial features of it.
+
+They themselves were not founders of sects or churches. Their sole
+mission was the propagation of a message, of a body of truth and of
+spiritual ideals. They were from the nature of the case destined to be
+voices crying in a wilderness-world, and they were obliged to trust their
+precious cause to the contagion of their word and life and truth. The
+Quakers of the seventeenth century are obviously one of the great
+historical results of this slowly maturing spiritual movement, and they
+first gave the unorganized and inarticulate movement a concrete body and
+organism to express itself through. The modern student, who goes to the
+original expositions of Quakerism to find what the leaders of this
+movement conceived their message and their mission to be, quickly
+discovers that they were not radical innovators setting forth novel and
+strange ideas, but that they were on the contrary the bearers, the
+interpreters, the living embodiment of ideas which have now become
+familiar to the reader of these chapters.
+
+No one has given us a clearer statement of George Fox's mission and of
+the creation of the new "Society" than has the writer of the "Epistle to
+the Reader" in Fox's strange book _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_
+(1659). This "Epistle to the Reader" was {338} written by Edward
+Burrough and was printed, also under the same title, in Burrough's
+_Works_ in 1672.[1] In this striking document the writer gives his
+account of the existing Church, and over against this dark background he
+sets God's new Reformation that is just beginning, of which he feels
+himself to be the divinely sent herald and prophet. "As our minds became
+turned, and our hearts inclined to the Light which shined in every one of
+us," he writes, "we came to know the perfect estate of the Church; her
+estate before the apostles' days, and in the apostles' days and since the
+days of the apostles. And her present estate we found to be as a woman
+who had once been clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, who
+brought forth Him that was to rule the nations; but she [the Church] was
+fled into the wilderness, and there sitting desolate, in her place that
+was prepared of God for such a season, in the very end of which season,
+when the time of her sojourning was towards a full end, then _we_
+[Friends] were brought forth."[2]
+
+In the Light which broke in upon them, he says, they saw that "the world
+was in darkness" and that "anti-Christ was set up in the temple of God,
+ruling over all, having brought nations under his power, and having set
+up his government over all for many ages; even since the days of the
+apostles and true churches hath he reigned.~.~.~. As for the ministry,
+first, looking upon it with a single eye in the Light of the Spirit of
+God which had anointed us, we beheld it clearly _not to be of Christ, nor
+sent of Him, nor having the commission, power, and authority of Christ,
+as His ministry had in the days of true churches; but in all things, as
+in call, practice, maintenance, {339} and in everything else, in fruits
+and effects we found it to disagree, and to be wholly contrary to the
+true ministry of Christ in the days of the apostles_."[3] His charge
+against the ministers of his day is one now very familiar to us: "You
+preach to people what you have studied out of books and old authors, and
+what you have noted down you preach by an hour-glass and not as the
+Spirit of God gives you utterance. You preach other men's words which
+you have collected."[4] The "call" to ministry, he urges, is based upon
+learning acquired in schools, colleges, and universities, and is not of
+the Spirit, and ministers' lives are obvious signs that they are not in
+the true "apostolic succession."[5] "As for all churches (so called),"
+he continues, "we beheld you all in the apostasy and degeneration from
+the true Church, not being gathered by the Spirit of the Lord, nor
+anointed thereby as the true members of Christ ever were, but to be in
+forms of righteousness without power, and imitations without life. All
+the practices of religion we beheld to be without power and life.~.~.~.
+We beheld all professions [of religion] to be but as coverings of
+fig-leaves, while the [inner] nature stood uncondemned and not
+crucified."[6]
+
+He insists that no true and radical reformation of the Church has taken
+place, that the churches of his day still bear the marks of apostasy as
+did the churches before the Reformation occurred: "Do not professors and
+sects of people have the form without the power of godliness? Are not
+all people still covetous and earthly-minded, and given to the world, and
+proud and vain, even such as profess religion? Are not professors as
+covetous and proud as such as do not profess? Are they not given to the
+world, and doth it not show that they are not changed nor translated?
+And is it not manifest that they have taken up the _form_ of the
+apostles' and Christ's words and practices, and are without the {340}
+life, and not guided by the Spirit of Christ and the apostles in their
+praying and preaching?"[7]
+
+Here, with an air of prophet-like boldness and infallibility, we have
+once again an announcement of the inadequacy of the Reformation, the
+formal and external character of prevailing types of religion, and the
+unapostolic nature of the existing churches. The language describing the
+visible church is throughout the language of a "Seeker." "We ceased," he
+says in words that exactly describe the "Seeker," "from the teachings of
+all men, and their words and their worships, and their temples, and all
+their baptisms and churches, and we ceased from our own words and
+professions and practices in religion.~.~.~. We met together often, and
+waited upon the Lord in pure silence from our own words, and harkened to
+the voice of the Lord and felt His Word in our hearts."[8]
+
+The striking difference between him and the contemporary "Seeker" lies in
+the fact that he profoundly believed, that the time of "apostasy" was now
+at an end, that a new "commission" had come, that a real Reformation was
+being set into operation, and that the apostolic Church--the Church of
+Christ, the Church of the Spirit--had appeared as though let down from
+heaven. He relates how the "Lord raised us [Friends] up and opened our
+mouths in this His Spirit," and how "the Light of Christ revealed and
+made known to us all things that pertain to salvation, redemption, and
+eternal life, needful for man to know," and how through the outpouring
+and anointing of the Spirit "the true Church," "the true worship," "the
+true ministry" have come again to the world. He makes such exalted
+claims as these: we received the pouring out of the spirit upon us; the
+gift of God's eternal Spirit was bestowed upon us as in the days of old;
+the deep things of God were revealed to us; the Lord Almighty brought us
+out of captivity and bondage and put an end to sin and death; {341} the
+babe of glory was born in us; we entered into ever-lasting union,
+fellowship, and covenant with the Lord, and we were raised from death to
+Life. And, finally, he announces the new "commission" in positive words
+of glowing faith: "Then having armed us with power, strength, and wisdom
+and dominion, according to His mind, and having taught us in all things,
+and having chosen us unto His work, God put His sword into our and and
+gave us a perfect _commission_ to go forth in His name and authority,
+giving us the Word from His mouth what to cut down and what to preserve,
+and giving us the everlasting gospel to preach."[9]
+
+In the absolute certainty of his divine "commission," he challenges the
+Churches which are defending their authority "with jails and prisons and
+whips and stocks and inquisitions--all Cain's weapons"--to a "trial" of
+faith and spirit and power, like that on Mount Carmel in the days of
+Elijah, "whether it be they or we that are of the true faith and true
+worship of God that the apostles were in."[10]
+
+There can be no doubt, I think, that the writer of this "Epistle to the
+Reader" in _The Great Mystery_, has come out of the "Seeker" movement, or
+that he has "come out" of it only because he believes that he with others
+have found what they sought, and are the seed and nucleus of the true,
+restored, apostolic Church of God. They refuse absolutely to be called a
+sect; and they assume in all their early writings that they are the
+restored Church of Christ, though they seldom use that word "Church"
+because in their thought it was a name associated with the "apostasy,"
+and they preferred to call themselves "the Seed," or "the Children of the
+Light." These were, as I have sufficiently shown, names already in use.
+
+It is an interesting fact that this "Epistle" dates the beginning of the
+new era as 1652--"it is now {342} about seven years since the Lord raised
+us up in the North of England and opened our mouths in this His
+Spirit"[11]--and that it locates the springing forth of "the Seed" in the
+North of England. It was, we are now well aware, out of the
+Seeker-groups of the northern counties of England that the new "Society"
+was actually born, and it grew, like a rolling snowball, as it gathered
+in the prepared groups of "Seekers," both north and south in England, and
+a little later in America.[12]
+
+The creation of the Quaker "Society" was not the work of any man; the
+groups were there before the formative leader appeared on the scene. In
+fact the very term "Quaker," which was soon fixed upon the new movement
+as the popular name for it, had already been in use--at least as far back
+as 1646--for the members of some of these highly emotional communities.
+As soon as these groups--intense in their expectations--found a leader
+who was already raised to an impelling conviction of immediate contact
+with God and of definite illumination by the living Christ, and possessed
+of an overmastering _sense of mission_, the effect was extraordinary.
+The account of what happened is, we may be sure, none too strong: "The
+gift of God's eternal Spirit was poured upon us as in days of old, our
+hearts were made glad, our tongues were loosed, and we spake with new
+tongues as the Lord gave us utterance and as His Spirit led us."[13]
+Profound psychological experiences occurred; they felt themselves
+baptized together, fused and formed into one group-spirit, swept into
+trembling as by a mighty rushing wind, and carried beyond their common
+ordinary range of thought and power and utterance. Their
+group-experiences of a common divine Spirit coming upon their lives from
+beyond themselves, their discovery that God was in their midst, that
+gifts were conferred upon them, and, above all, Fox's compelling sense of
+apostolic mission--a conviction which was, as it always is,
+contagious--were {343} grounds enough to change these Seeker-groups into
+the seed and nucleus of a Body possessed of the faith that the
+long-expected Church of the Spirit had at last come. They rose to the
+group-consciousness that they were the beginners, in modern times, of a
+Church of the spiritual order, and a community-loyalty was born which
+gave the movement great conquering power and an amazing capacity for
+endurance and suffering.
+
+In Fox we have a person of extraordinary psychical experiences and of
+dynamic leadership, and in him the "prophetical" and "enthusiast" traits
+of the movement are strikingly in evidence. He reveals in a variety of
+ways his connections with the great body of spiritual ideas that had been
+accumulating for more than a century before his time, but for the most
+part these influences worked upon him in sub-conscious ways as an
+atmosphere and climate of his spirit, rather than as a clearly conceived
+body of truth which he got by reading authors and which he apprehended
+through clear intellectual processes. He can be rightly appreciated only
+as he is seen to be a potent member of an organic group-life which formed
+him as much as he formed it.
+
+The expositions, however, of the more trained and scholarly Quakers show
+an explicit acquaintance with the writings of these men whom we have been
+studying, and they cannot be adequately understood in isolation. The
+fruits of reading and of contact with a wider intellectual world are
+clearly in evidence, and the ideas and the peculiar phrases of the
+spiritual reformers "pass and come again" in their voluminous works.
+Robert Barclay is the chief literary exponent of Quakerism. His range of
+familiarity with religious and theological literature is very extensive,
+and he shows intimate acquaintance with contemporary thought. For him,
+as for his spiritual predecessors, the existing Church is "in apostasy";
+it has departed from "the simplicity and purity of the gospel as it was
+in the apostles' days." Christian faith has become "burdened with
+manifold inventions and traditions, with various notions and opinions"
+which {344} have been "substituted instead" of the true religion of
+Christ.[14]
+
+The Quaker interpreters all unite in treating "notions and opinions"--or,
+to use their sweeping phrase, "notional religion"--as barren
+_substitutes_ for a true religion of spiritual reality, which for them is
+always born in a first-hand experience of Christ as the inner spirit and
+life and power of one's entire being and activity. A good specimen
+instance of this position is found in William Penn's Tract, "A Key
+opening the Way to every Capacity," etc.[15] He says: "It is not
+Opinion, or Speculation, or Notions of what is true; or Assent to or
+Subscription of Articles or Propositions, tho' never so soundly worded,
+that makes a Man a true Believer or a true Christian." "Phrases of
+Schoolmen," "notions of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," "conceptions of
+man's meer Wit," "superfining interpretations of Scripture texts," he
+declares to be very chaffy substitutes for a consciousness of Christ's
+Life and Light within, conformity of mind and practice to the will of
+God, and the actual formation of Christ in the inner self.[16] The
+further Reformation, upon the necessity of which he insists, is one that
+will take Christianity not only beyond and beneath outward ceremonies,
+but beyond and beneath all formulations of creed and doctrine, and that
+will ground and establish it in the experience and attitude and verifying
+power of the person's life.[17] This is precisely what all these teachers
+of spiritual religion have all the time been demanding.
+
+The Quaker view of the moral and dynamic character of saving faith, the
+view that justification is a vital process and not merely a forensic
+scheme, is, in heart and essence, indistinguishable from the central
+teaching of these spiritual predecessors of the Quakers. No Quaker has
+presented this view in a more compact, and at the same time adequate way
+than has Barclay in one of his {345} important early Tracts: "The manner
+and way whereby Christ's righteousness and obedience, death and
+sufferings, become profitable unto us and are made ours, is by receiving
+Him, and becoming one with Him in our hearts, embracing and entertaining
+that holy Seed, which as it is embraced and entertained, becometh a holy
+birth in us~.~.~. by which the body of sin and death is done away, and we
+cleansed, and washed, and purged from our sins, _not imaginarily_, but
+really; and we are really and truly made righteous.~.~.~. Christ Himself
+revealed in us, indwelling in us. His life and spirit covering us--that
+is the ground of our justification."[18]
+
+The root principle of Quakerism is belief in a divine Light, or Seed of
+God, in the soul of man. All of the multitudinous Quaker books and
+tracts bear unvarying testimony to that, and all their contemporary
+accounts make that faith, that principle, their _organizing idea_. What
+they all say is that there is a Light in man which shines into his
+darkness, reveals his condition to him, makes him aware of evil and
+checks him when he is in the pursuit of it; gives him a vision of
+righteousness, attracts him toward goodness, and points him infallibly
+toward Christ from whom the Light shines. This Light is pure, immediate,
+and spiritual. It is of God, in fact is God immanently revealed.[19]
+
+Then, again, the figure is changed and what was called Light is now
+called "Seed," and it is thought of as a resident germ of divine Life
+which, through the active co-operation of the individual, produces a new
+creation within, and makes the person through and through of a new nature
+like itself.[20] It is also frequently called "the Word of God," or
+"Grace of God," or "That of God in you," or "Christ within," or "the
+Spirit," or "the Kingdom within you." "By this Seed, Grace, and Word of
+God, and Light wherewith every one is enlightened," {346} Barclay says,
+"We understand a spiritual, heavenly, and invisible Principle in which
+God, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, dwells; a measure [_i.e._ a
+portion] of which divine and glorious Life is in all men as a Seed, which
+of its own nature draws, invites, and inclines to God. This some call
+_vehiculum dei_, or the spiritual Body of Christ, the flesh and blood of
+Christ, which came down from heaven, of which all saints do feed and are
+thereby nourished unto eternal life."[21] But under whatever name it
+goes, it is always thought of as a _saving Principle_. He who says yes
+responds, obeys, co-operates, and allows this resident Seed of God, or
+Christ-Light, to have full sway in him becomes transformed thereby and
+re-created into likeness to Christ, by whom the inner Seed was planted
+and of whose nature it is. The spiritual predecessors of the Quakers, as
+we have seen, all held this view with individual variations of phrase and
+experience. All the Quaker terms for the _Principle_ were used by
+Sebastian Franck and by Caspar Schwenckfeld; and all the men who taught
+the dynamic process of salvation presuppose that something of the divine
+nature, as Light or Seed or Spirit, or the resurrected Christ, is
+directly operative upon or within the human soul. That is, salvation is
+for them more than a moral change, it is a birth-and-life-process,
+initiated and carried through by the _real presence_ of the Divine in the
+human.[22]
+
+The Quakers are perhaps somewhat more emphatic than were their spiritual
+forerunners, with the exception {347} of Schwenckfeld, in their
+declarations that this Seed, this Light, is not _natural_. "We assert,"
+William Penn wrote, "the Light of Christ not to be a Natural Light,
+otherwise than as all men born into the world have a Measure of Christ's
+Light, and so in a sense it may be called Natural to all Men. But this
+Light is something else than the bare Understanding which Man hath as a
+Rational Creature."[23] What man does naturally have, in William Penn's
+view, is a _capacity_ for the Light, but the Light itself is from a
+source wholly heavenly and divine. Barclay, in quite Cartesian fashion,
+interprets it to be "a real spiritual Substance," "a substantial Seed"
+from another world, hidden away within man's soul at birth, lying there
+"like naked grain in stony ground," until the child is old enough to feel
+its stirrings and to determine by his own free choices of obedience or
+disobedience to its movings whether it shall grow and develop or not.[24]
+We plainly have here a double world. The once-born man is "natural,"
+though he carries buried deep in the subsoil of his nature a Seed of God,
+a germ of Life drawn from the higher, spiritual world. He may live in
+and under the dominion of either world, but he must choose which it shall
+be. By response to and participation with the divine Seed of
+radio-active spiritual energy, he can become transformed--utterly and
+completely--into a new nature, and can belong here and now to the
+spiritual World which Christ by His victorious Life has brought across
+the chasm and planted in our soil. On the other hand, by negligence or
+by disobedience he can live a mere empirical, natural life, and keep his
+inestimable Seed of God buried and forgotten in a region of himself which
+he seldom or never visits.
+
+The Quakers, however, as a consequence of their heightened
+group-consciousness, and as a result of the intense experiences enjoyed
+in their gatherings, exhibited a far greater degree of _enthusiasm_ than
+had appeared in the earlier exponents of the inner Word; and they showed
+a heightened element of _prophetism_, both in their faith {348} and
+practice. They devoutly believed that in them the prophecy of Jeremiah
+had found fulfilment: God had written His Word in their hearts, so that
+they were recipients of His will and His message. The more sure Word of
+prophecy, announced by Peter, had come and the Day Star had risen in
+their hearts. Their Light was to them not only a principle of connection
+with a higher world, a germ of a new nativity, it was also a principle
+and basis for continuous revelation, and for definite openings of light
+and guidance on all matters that concern present-day life and practice.
+"The inward command," Barclay says, "is never wanting in the due season
+to any duty."[25]
+
+Like their predecessors, they did not slight the importance of the
+outward word, the Scriptures. They had an immense reverence for them and
+were diligent in the study and skilful in the use of them, though of
+course they used them in a thoroughly uncritical and unhistorical way, as
+did also their opponents. But they would never allow the Scriptures to
+be called the Word of God or to be treated as God's only revelation of
+Himself to man without a challenge. "The Word of God," Barclay says,
+"is, like unto Himself, spiritual, yea, Spirit and Life, and therefore
+cannot be heard and read with the natural external senses as the
+Scriptures can." Our Master, he adds, is always with us. "His letter is
+writ in our hearts and there we find it."[26] "There is," William Penn
+declares, "something _nearer to us_ than Scriptures, to wit, the Word in
+the heart from which all Scriptures came," though he is very emphatic in
+his claim that Friends never slight the Scriptures and believe in their
+divine authority.[27]
+
+It is not necessary to prolong the exposition of early Quakerism farther.
+The similarity of its fundamental position with that of the preceding
+spiritual reformers is perfectly clear. Quakerism is, thus, no isolated
+or sporadic religious phenomenon. It is deeply rooted and embedded in a
+far wider movement that had been {349} accumulating volume and power for
+more than a century before George Fox became a "prophet" of it to the
+English people. And both in its new English, and in its earlier
+continental form, it was a serious attempt to achieve a more complete
+Reformation, to restore primitive Christianity, and to change the basis
+of authority from external things, of any sort whatever, to the interior
+life and spirit of man.
+
+That the _formulation_ of this vast spiritual Reformation, as presented
+by the men who are studied in this volume, was adequate, I do not for a
+moment assert. The views here expounded in their historical setting are
+plainly hampered by inadequate philosophical and psychological
+presuppositions. They need reconstructive interpretation and a fresh
+re-reading, in terms of our richer experience, our larger historical
+perspective, and our truer psychological conceptions. That work of
+reexamination and reinterpretation, especially of the Quaker movement and
+the Quaker message, is a part of the task undertaken in the historical
+volumes which follow this one in this series. It must suffice for the
+present to have reviewed here the story and the struggles of these brave,
+sincere men and their heroic endeavours to proclaim a spiritual
+Christianity. It has been a privilege to live for a little while with
+this succession of high-minded men, to review for our time their type of
+spiritual religion, and to retrace their apostolic efforts to bring the
+world, with its sins and its tragedies and its inner hungers, back to the
+Father's Love and to the real presence of the eternal Christ. They may
+have failed in their intellectual formulation, but at least they
+succeeded in finding a living God, warm and tender and near at hand, the
+Life of their lives, the Day Star in their hearts; and their travail of
+soul, their brave endurance, and their loyal obedience to vision have
+helped to make our modern world.
+
+
+
+[1] This document, though, as stated above, not written by Fox, had his
+approval, and may be taken as exactly expressing his views and his
+position. Many of the early Quaker books show how remarkable was the
+corporate character and the group-spirit of the "Society" at this period.
+Whatever any individual could contribute was given for the common cause
+and went into the life of the whole. I have given the passages, which I
+have quoted from this "Epistle," in modern English.
+
+[2] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_ (London, 1659), p. B1. Jacob
+Boehme had already set Fox the example of calling the existing Church by
+this opprobrious name. See _The Threefold Life of Man_, vii., 56-58.
+
+[3] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_, p. B3.
+
+[4] _Ibid._ p. A6.
+
+[5] _Ibid._ pp. A5-A7.
+
+[6] _Ibid._ p. B4. This is almost word for word Boehme's view.
+
+[7] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_, p. C3.
+
+[8] _Ibid._ p. B1.
+
+[9] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_, p. B2. I have taken some
+liberty in correcting the grammatical form of the passage quoted, but the
+original sense is preserved.
+
+[10] _Ibid._ p. C2.
+
+[11] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_, p. B.
+
+[12] For evidence of Seeker-groups in America, see my _Quakers in the
+American Colonies_.
+
+[13] _The Great Mystery of the Great Whore_, pp. B1-B2.
+
+[14] Preface to _A Catechism and Confession of Faith_.
+
+[15] _Works_ (London, 1726), ii. p. 781.
+
+[16] _Ibid._ ii. pp. 781-783.
+
+[17] "Salvation lieth not in literal but in experimental
+knowledge."--Barclay's _Apology_, Props. V. and VI. sec. 25.
+
+[18] Barclay, "Truth cleared of Calumnies," _Works_ (London, 1691), i.
+pp. 1-48.
+
+[19] This view appears _passim_ in the works of Isaac Penington.
+
+[20] See Penington's Tract, "Concerning the Seed of God," _Works_
+(edition of 1761), ii. pp. 593-607.
+
+[21] _Apology_, Props. V. and VI. sec. 13. This passage could be exactly
+paralleled in the writings of Schwenckfeld.
+
+[22] It is interesting to see how closely William Law, the great exponent
+of "Spiritual" Christianity in the eighteenth century, carrying on this
+train of thought in another channel, approaches the Quaker position:
+"Thou needest not run here or there saying, 'Where is Christ?' Thou
+needest not say, 'Who shall ascend into heaven, that is, to bring Christ
+down from above?' or, 'Who shall descend into the deep, to bring up
+Christ from the dead?' For, behold, the Word, which is the Wisdom of
+God, is in thy heart. It is there as a bruiser of Thy serpent, as a
+Light unto thy feet and Lanthorn unto thy paths; it is there as an Holy
+Oil, to soften and overcome the wrathful fiery properties of thy nature,
+and change them into the humble meekness of Light and Love; it is there
+as a speaking Word of God in thy soul; as soon as thou art ready to hear,
+this eternal, speaking Word will speak wisdom and peace in thy inward
+parts, and bring forth the birth of Christ, with all His holy nature,
+spirit, and temper within thee."--"Spirit of Prayer," _Works_, vii. p. 69.
+
+[23] _Works_, ii. p. 780.
+
+[24] _Apology_, Props. V. and VI. sec. 13.
+
+[25] "Truth Cleared of Calumnies," _Works_, i. p. 13.
+
+[26] _Ibid._ i. pp. 13-15.
+
+[27] _Works_, ii. p. 782.
+
+
+
+
+{351}
+
+ INDEX
+
+
+ Abrahams, Galenus, 118, 120-121
+ and George Fox, 122-123
+ discussion with Penn and Keith, 122
+ Acontius, J., 115
+ Agrippa of Nettesheim, Cornelius, 55 _n._, 136-137
+ Althamer, A., 48
+ Ambrose, Saint, 267
+ Anabaptism--
+ characteristics of, 17-18, 28, 31, 81 _n._, 112, 267 _n._
+ attacked by Franck, 48
+ Schwenckfeld and, 80
+ Coornhert and, 112
+ Giles Randall and, 254
+ Anabaptists, xv
+ divisions among, 33
+ Anderdon, John--
+ on Behmenists, 227, 231-232
+ Antinomianism, 238, 241, 254, 263
+ Antinomians, xv
+ Aristotle, 211
+ Arminius, J.--
+ controversy over views of, 114
+ and Coornhert, 107
+ and Whichcote, 289, 294
+ and Culverwel, 289
+ Arnold, Gottfried--
+ on Entfelder, 39
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ on Arminius, 107 _n._
+ on Boreel, 118 _n._
+ Astrology, 134, 137
+ as used by Weigel, 148-150
+ as used by Tentzel, 150 _n._
+ Aubrey, John--
+ on Traherne, 328
+ Augsburg--
+ Anabaptist Synod in, 20, 33
+ Augustine, Saint, 6, 9, 246, 267
+ theology of, 22, 204
+ Automatism--
+ of Jacob Boehme, 162, 207
+
+ Baader, F. von--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 153 _n._
+ Baillie, Robert--
+ on Anabaptism, 254 _n._
+ on Giles Randall, 256 _n._; 262
+ Balling, Peter, 123-124, 128
+ influence of Cartesianism on, 124, 128, 130
+ Barclay, Robert (of Ury), 123
+ influence of Cartesianism on, 124, 347
+ on divine Seed in man, 283, 345-346, 347
+ teaching of, 343, 344-345, 348
+ Barclay, Robert--
+ on Boehme's influence on Quakers, 220 _n._
+ Barneveldt, John of, 114 _n._
+ Baxter, Richard--
+ on Behmenists, 227
+ on Vane, 271, 274
+ on Sterry, 280
+ Behmen, Jacob, 155 _n._ (_see_ Boehme)
+ Behmenists, 227-234
+ and Quakers, 231-233
+ Bellers, John--
+ on John Everard, 253 _n._
+ "Bellius, Martinus," 93, 95
+ Bernard, Saint, 6, 267
+ Bewman, Jacob, 220
+ Beza, T., 95, 290, 294
+ Bible, translations from--
+ by Denck, 21
+ by Castellio, 90, 92
+ by de Valdes, 237
+ by Rous, 267
+ Boehme, Jacob, 43 _n._, 139
+ life and character of, 151-171, 208
+ vision of, 148 _n._, 158, 159-161
+ mysticism of, 154, 159, 201-206
+ automatism of, 162, 207
+ symbolism of, 173
+ view of man, xxx
+ view of God, xli _n._, 35 n; 174-177
+ views on salvation, 170, 190-198, 289, 309
+ views on the universe, 150 _n._, 159-160, 172-189
+ writings of, 151 _n._, 161, 165 _n._
+ in England, 208-220
+ influence on--
+ George Fox, 165 _n._, 170 _n._; 221-227, 338 _n._, 339 _n._
+ Quakers, 220, 233
+ Seekers, 220
+ Isaac Newton, 181 _n._, 234
+ John Milton, 234
+ William Law, 153 _n._, 179, 234
+ Sir Harry Vane, 275
+ and the Behmenists, 227-234
+ and B. Whichcote, 289, 302 _n._
+ Boethius, 105
+ Boreel, Adam, 117-120
+ Borellists--
+ views of, 119-120
+ Bosanquet, Bernard, xxxi _n._
+ Bourne, Benjamin--
+ on Randall, 256 n; 257
+ Boutroux, Emile--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 183 _n._
+ Breen, Daniel van, 117
+ Brooks, Thomas--
+ on Everard, 241
+ Brothers of the Common Life, 4
+ Broussoux, Emile--
+ on Castellio, 88 _n._
+ Browne, Sir Thomas, 275
+ Browning, Robert--
+ on Paracelsus, 138
+ Bucer, Martin, 47
+ Buisson, F.--
+ on Castellio, 88 _n._
+ Buenderlin, Johann--
+ life of, 32-34, 40
+ teaching of, 34-39, 69, 76, 169, 190
+ writings of, 34 _n._
+ a mystic, 35
+ Franck's opinion of, 48
+ Buonarotti, Michael Angelo, 237
+ Burnet, Bishop G.--
+ on Vane, 272
+ on Cambridge Platonists, 289-290
+ Burrough, Edward--
+ on mission of "the Children of Light," 337-341
+
+ Cabala, the--
+ teaching of, 134-136
+ Caird, Edward--
+ on Cartesianism, 125 _n._
+ Calvin, xlix, 121
+ relations with Castellio, 89-91, 93, 96
+ influence on Cambridge Platonists, 290, 294, 295
+ Calvinism--
+ in Holland, 106
+ in England, 279
+ and Arminianism, 114
+ Campanus, Johann, 48, 59
+ Carlyle, Thomas--
+ on Rous, 267
+ Castellio, Sebastian--
+ life, 88-93, 97
+ teachings of, 90, 91, 93-102, 107
+ writings, 90, 92-94, 96, 97, 98, 99 _n._, 101, 103 _n._
+ _nom-de-plume_ of, 93, 103 _n._
+ as a Reformer, 103
+ influence in England, 103 _n._, 243
+ on Van der Kodde brothers, 115
+ on Boreel, 118
+ Caton, William--
+ on Castellio, 103 _n._
+ Charles II.--
+ on Vane, 272
+ "Children of the Light," 132, 221, 260, 277, 341
+ Chillingworth, William, 291
+ Christ--
+ in a Faith religion, xxxix-xliv
+ as viewed by--
+ Denck, 25
+ Buenderlin, 37
+ Entfelder, 41, 42
+ Spiritual Reformers, 44, 337
+ Franck, 54, 61
+ Schwenckfeld, 65, 69, 70
+ Castellio, 99-101
+ teachers of "Nature Mysticism," 134
+ Weigel, 142-144
+ Boehme, 183, 185 _n._, 191, 193-194
+ John Sparrow, 216
+ John Everard, 244, 250
+ Pascal, 250 _n._
+ Francis Rous, 269-270
+ Peter Sterry, 284
+ John Smith, 316
+ Thomas Traherne, 332
+ Chrypffs, Nicolaus (_see_ Cusa)
+ Church, the--
+ historical conception of, xlix
+ as conceived by--
+ Montanists, the, xiii
+ Protestant Reformers, l
+ Luther, 8, 121
+ Denck, 38
+ Buenderlin, 38
+ Entfelder, 41
+ Spiritual Reformers, l, 45
+ Franck, 58-59, 145, 199
+ Schwenckfeld, 78-80, 85
+ Seekers, 84, 86, 340
+ Collegiants, 84
+ Borellists, 120
+ Abrahams, 120-121, 122
+ Weigel, 145, 147
+ Boehme, 169-170, 199-201, 226
+ George Fox, 200, 226, 339-340
+ Church, interim, (_see also Sttilstand_)--
+ Coornhert and, 113
+ Cicero, 105
+ Clarendon, Earl of--
+ on Vane, 271, 279
+ Clement of Alexandria, xxxix, 267
+ Colet, John, 236
+ Collegiants, the--
+ and the _Stillstand_, 68 _n._
+ Schwenckfeld and, 84
+ history of, 113-124
+ influence of Descartes and Spinoza on, 123 _seq._
+ Colonna, Vittoria, 237
+ Comans, Michael, 117
+ Commonwealth, English--
+ Reformation in, 266
+ Rous in, 268
+ Vane in, 271-272
+ Puritans in, 290
+ Conscience, liberty of--
+ taught by--
+ Castellio, 93-96
+ Coornhert, 106
+ Boreel, 118
+ Vane, 273, 275
+ Sterry, 286
+ William Caton on, 103 _n._
+ in Holland, 104
+ dangers of, 320
+ Coornhert, D. V.--
+ life, 105-108
+ writings, 105, 106
+ teachings, 106, 108-113
+ and Calvinism, 106, 111
+ and Van der Kodde brothers, 115
+ and Adam Boreel, 118
+ Cotton, John, 292
+ "Covenant of Grace," 274
+ "Covenant of Works," 274, 309
+ Crashaw, Richard, 322
+ Crautwald, Valentine, 67 _n._, 81
+ Cromwell, Oliver, 268, 271, 272, 274, 275, 280
+ Cudworth, Ralph, 280, 290
+ Culverwel, Nathaniel, 319
+ on Arminius, 289
+ Cunitz, M., 47 _n._
+ Curio, Valentin, 18
+ Cusa, Nicholas of, 3, 4
+ translated into English by Everard, 243, 256, 260
+ published by Randall, 256, 260
+
+ Dante, xxiii, 171, 174
+ Dell, William, l, 267 _n._
+ Denck, Hans, 48
+ life of, 18-21
+ writings of, 22 _n._
+ teaching of, xxx, 21-30, 69, 76, 242-243
+ not an Anabaptist, 18
+ begins "Spiritualist" movement, 132, 139, 169, 190
+ Everard's translation of, 242
+ Denqui, John, 242 _n._
+ Descartes, R.--
+ philosophy of, 117, 123-125, 128
+ and Cambridge Platonists, 291
+ Deussen, Paul--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 153 _n._
+ Dilthey, Wilhelm--
+ on justification, 8 _n._
+ Dionysius, the Areopagite, 236, 239
+ his conception of God, xxvii, 247
+ translation of, by Everard, 243
+ influence on Rous, 267
+ on Sterry, 280
+ Dobell, Bertram--
+ on Traherne, 324 _n._; 327
+ Doellinger, Johann--
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ _Dompeldoop_, 116
+ Donne, John, 322
+ Dort, Synod of, 114
+ Duerer, Albrecht, 48
+
+ Ecke, Karl--
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ Eckhart, Meister, 3, 4, 239, 243
+ his conception of God, xxvi, xxvii, 247
+ Ederheimer, Edgar--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 153 _n._
+ Edward VI. of England, 92
+ Ellington, Francis--
+ on Boehme, 221
+ Ellistone, John, 213
+ translates Boehme into English, 213, 217, 221, 234 _n._
+ views of, 217-220, 222
+ Emmanuel College, 279, 290, 291, 306
+ Endern, Carl von, 162 _n._, 165
+ England--
+ influence in--
+ of Castellio, 103 _n._
+ of Schwenckfeld, 84, 87, 103 _n._
+ of Weigel, 139, 141, 146, 148, 150
+ of Boehme, 208-234
+ of Spiritual Reformers, 235, 251, 252, 267, 288
+ of de Valdes, 237-238
+ Quakers in, 132, 221, 227, 337
+ Reformation spirit in, 266-267
+ religious upheaval in, 320
+ Entfelder, Christian--
+ life of, 39, 40
+ writings, 40
+ teaching, 40-43, 69, 169, 190
+ "Enthusiasm," 238
+ "Enthusiasts," xv, 31, 48
+ Erasmus, 34, 51, 55 _n._, 92, 105
+ Christian Humanist, 1 _n._, 3, 47
+ quoted on toleration, 93
+ Erbkam, H. W.--
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ Erigena, 3
+ Etherington, John--
+ on Randall, 255
+ Everard, John--
+ life of, 239-241, 289
+ translations by, 241-243, 250 _n._, 256, 260
+ Sermons, 241
+ teaching, 243-252
+ and Randall, 243 _n._, 256, 260
+ Evil (_see_ Sin)
+
+ Faith--
+ definition of, xxxix
+ in "spiritual" religion, xv
+ as an approach to religion, xxxviii-xlv
+ magic reliance on, 75
+ Confessions of, 118
+ Confessions of, source of divisions, 115
+ view of, held by--
+ Luther, xxxix, 5-11, 75
+ Schwenckfeld, 75, 77-78
+ Castellio, 100
+ Coornhert, 109-110
+ Weigel, 146
+ Boehme, 195-198
+ de Valdes, 236, 237
+ John Smith, 316
+ Quakers, 344
+ Familism, 238, 241, 254, 255, 256 _n._., 258, 263, 267 _n._
+ Faust, xxiii
+ Ferrar, Nicholas, 237, 238
+ Ficino, Marsilius, 134, 235-236
+ influence on Sterry, 280
+ Fox, George, 328
+ mission of, 337-34l, 349
+ character, 343
+ conception of the Church, 200, 226, 339-341
+ and Abrahams, 122-123
+ and Boehme, 165 _n._, 170 _n._, 221-227, 338 _n._, 339 _n._
+ and Justice Hotham, 210
+ and Henry Vane, 278
+ France--
+ Castellio on conditions in, 101-102
+ Francis of Assisi--
+ and Schwenckfeld, 65
+ Franck, Sebastian, 139
+ Humanist and Mystic, 46, 55, 105
+ life of, 47-52, 92
+ writings, 49, 51
+ teachings, 49, 50, 52-63, 69, 93, 199, 242, 243, 247, 346
+ on the _Stillstand_, 86
+ quoted by William Caton, 103 _n._
+ translated by Everard, 242, 243
+ influence on--
+ Coornhert, 107
+ Boreel, 118
+ Weigel, 145, 146 _n._, 148
+ Boehme, 154, 169, 190
+ Franckenberg, Abraham von--
+ on Boehme, 156, 165
+ Frecht, Martin, 47
+ Freedom--
+ views on, of--
+ Spiritual Reformers, xlix
+ Hans Denck, 22, 23
+ Buenderlin, 35
+ Luther, 70
+ Schwenckfeld, 70, 72
+ Castellio, 93-96, 107
+ Coornhert, 106, 113
+ Randall, 258-259
+ Vane, 273, 275
+ Freedom of conscience in Holland, 104
+ Frettwell, Ralph, 232, 233
+ Furley, Benjamin, 128 _n._
+ collection of books, 258 _n._
+
+ Gairdner, W. H. J., xxvii _n._
+ _Gangraena_, Edwards'--
+ on Giles Randall, 254, 256 _n._, 257, 262
+ Gataker, Thomas--
+ on Giles Randall, 254 ft.
+ Gerson, 6
+ Gichtel, J. G.--
+ on Boehme, 153 _n._
+ Gnosticism--
+ view of man in, xii, xiii
+ seven qualities in, 180 _n._
+ God--
+ as conceived--
+ in a Faith religion, xliv
+ by Reason, xxxv-xxxviii
+ by Spiritual Reformers, xlvii, 44
+ by Mystics, xxiv, xxvii-xxviii, 247
+ by Luther, 10, 11
+ by Denck, 22-26
+ by Buenderlin, 35-37
+ by Entfelder, 40
+ by Castellio, 99
+ by Descartes, 125
+ by Spinoza, xxviii, 126-127
+ by Boehme, 35 _n._, 174-177
+ in _The Light on the Candlestick_, 130
+ in the Cabala, 134-135
+ by Justice Hotham, 210
+ by Everard, 246-248
+ by Randall, 260-261, 262
+ Goeters, W.--
+ on Collegiants, etc., 104 _n._
+ "Gomarists," 114
+ Gonzaga, Giulia, 237
+ Goodwin, John--
+ on Randall, 257
+ Grace--
+ salvation by, 75, 99
+ "Covenant of, the," 274
+ as conceived by--
+ the Remonstrants, 114
+ Boehme, 170, 191
+ Gregory of Nazianzen, 267
+ Gregory of Nyssa, 267
+ Gregory Thaumaturgus, 307
+ Grocyn, 236
+ Grotius, Hugo, 114 _n._
+ Gruetzmacher, R. H.--
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ on Boehme, 168
+
+ Hagen, Carl--
+ on Buenderlin, 34 _n._
+ Haldane, E. S.--
+ on Descartes, 124 _n._
+ Hales, John, 291
+ Harford, Rapha--
+ on Everard, 240, 241
+ Harless, von--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._
+ Harnack, A.--
+ on Luther, 15
+ on Irenaeus, 71 _n._
+ Hartmann, Franz--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._
+ Hartranft, C. D.--
+ editor of _Corpus Schwenchfeldianorum_, 64 _n._
+ Heaven--
+ as conceived by--
+ Spiritual Reformers, xlviii
+ Weigel, 147
+ Boehme, 179, 186-188, 289, 302 _n._, 312, 334
+ Milton, 187 _n._
+ Everard, 252
+ Whichcote, 289, 301-302, 312
+ John Smith, 312-313
+ Thomas Traherne, 334-335
+ Heberle--
+ on Denck, 17 _n._
+ Hegel, G. W. F.--
+ on nature of consciousness, xxxii
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 195 _n._
+ Hegler, A.--
+ on Franck, 48 _n._
+ Hell--
+ as conceived by--
+ Spiritual Reformers, xlviii
+ Weigel, 147
+ Boehme, 179, 186-188, 289, 302 _n._, 312, 334
+ Milton, 187 _n._
+ Whichcote, 289, 301-302, 312
+ John Smith, 312-313
+ Thomas Traherne, 334-335
+ Heppe, H.--
+ on Collegiants, 104 _n._
+ Heraclitus, 63
+ Herbert, George, 237, 322
+ "Hermes Trismegistus," 53, 136 _n._, 210
+ translated by Everard, 243
+ Hetzer, Ludwig, 19, 21
+ Hill, Thomas, 291
+ Hinkelmann, Dr., 167
+ Hobbes, Thomas, 291
+ Hoffman, Melchior, 33
+ Holland--
+ Collegiants in, 68 _n._, 84, 86, 113-124
+ William Caton in, 103 _n._
+ disciples of Castellio in, 102, 103
+ religious liberty in, 104
+ Calvinism in, 106
+ Hotham, Charles--
+ on Boehme, 209, 211, 221
+ Hotham, Durant--
+ on Boehme, 209-210, 211, 221, 222
+ and George Fox, 210
+ views of, 211-212
+ Howgil, Francis, 231
+ Huebmaier, Balthasar, 40
+ Huegel, Friedrich von, xlii
+ Humanists--
+ finding a new world, 1-3
+ view of man, 2, 4, 19, 69
+ view of "Hermes Trismegistus," 243
+ in England, 235-236
+ influence on--
+ Spiritual Reformers, xxx, 289
+ Denck, 18, 19
+ Franck, 46, 47
+ Castellio, 89
+ Coornhert, 105-106
+ Cambridge Platonists, 289
+ Thomas Traherne, 323
+ Hutchinson, Anne, 274
+ Hutten, Ulrich von, 47
+ Hylkema, C. B.--
+ on Collegiants, 104 _n._
+ on Boreel, 118 _n._
+
+ _Imitation of Christ, The_, 4, 267
+ Immortality--
+ John Smith on, 314
+ Independency, 268
+ Inquisition, Spanish, 106
+ Irenaeus, 71
+ Israel, A.--
+ on Weigel, 140 _n._
+
+ Jarrin, Charles--
+ on Castellio, 88 _n._
+ Job, xxiii
+ Joris, David, 108
+ Justification--
+ mediaeval conception of, 8 _n._
+ as conceived by--
+ Luther, 8 _n._, 19, 74
+ Schwenckfeld, 75, 77
+ John Smith, 310
+ the Quakers, 344
+
+ Keith, George, 122, 233
+ Keller, L.--
+ on Denck, 17 _n._, 18 _n._
+ Kempis, Thomas a, 267
+ Kessler, J., 18 _n._
+ Kober, Dr. Tobias, 165
+ Kodde, Giesbert Van der--
+ founder of Collegiants, 115-116
+ Kodde, John Van der, 115, 117
+ Kodde, William Van der, 115
+ Kolde, Th., 20 _n._
+
+ Ladders, mystical, xxiii _n._
+ Langcake, Thomas, 234 _n._
+ "Latitude-men," 279, 288-291
+ Law, William--
+ on Boehme, 153 _n._, 179, 234
+ on Inner Word, 346 _n._
+ Leade, Jane, 228, 230, 232 _n._, 233
+ Lee, Francis, 230-231, 233
+ Letter, the--
+ _versus_ the Spirit in--
+ Denck, 28-29
+ Buenderlin, 36-39
+ Entfelder, 41-43
+ Schwenckfeld, 72-74
+ Franck, 60-62, 154, 245, 317
+ Castellio, 101
+ Coornhert, 108-109
+ _The Light on the Candlestick_, 130
+ Weigel, 148
+ Boehme, 169-170, 201
+ John Ellistone, 217-218
+ Everard, 241, 245-246, 251
+ Randall, 263
+ Rous, 269
+ Vane, 276
+ Sterry, 285
+ John Smith, 316-318
+ Liegnitz Pastors, 67 _n._
+ _Life and Light of a Man in Christ Jesus, The_, 263-265
+ "Light, Children of the," 132, 221, 260, 277, 341
+ Light, Inward, 129-132 (_see_ Inward Word)
+ _Light on the Candlestick, The_, 123, 128
+ teaching of, 128-132
+ circulated as Quaker Tract, 128
+ Linacre, Thomas, 236
+ Loofs, F.--
+ on Luther, 13
+ Lucifer, 178, 185, 192, 234
+ Luther, Martin--
+ child of the people, 4, 9
+ influence of mystics on, 6, 7, 9
+ influence of Humanists on, 7, 8
+ discovers way of Faith, xxxix, 5-8, 15
+ theology of, 9-14, 19, 70, 76
+ as a Reformer, 14-16, 12l
+ quoted on Toleration, 93
+ influence on--
+ Franck, 47
+ Schwenckfeld, 65-69
+ Boehme, 154
+
+ Magic--
+ in use of words, xi
+ as an aspect of--
+ the Sacraments, 13
+ Justification, 75
+ Sacerdotalism, 79
+ Superstition, 309
+ in the Cabala, 135
+ in Agrippa of Nettesheim, 136
+ in Paracelsus, 137
+ Man--
+ as conceived by--
+ Gnostics, xii, xiii
+ the psychologist, xvii
+ the mystics, xxvi, 70
+ the Spiritual Reformers, xxx-xxxii, xlviii, 337
+ the Humanists, 2, 4, 19, 69
+ Luther, 9, 11-12, 70
+ Denck, xxx, 21-23
+ Buenderlin, 35, 36
+ Franck, 53-55
+ Schwenckfeld, 54, 70, 77, 269
+ Castellio, 99
+ Coornhert, 106
+ Remonstrants, 114
+ Descartes, 124-125
+ Spinoza, 127
+ author of _The Light on the Candlestick_, 130-131
+ exponents of "Nature Mysticism," 133
+ Agrippa of Nettesheim, 137
+ Paracelsus, 138
+ Weigel, 142-145
+ Boehme, xxx, 184-186, 188, 190-191
+ Charles Hotham, 211
+ John Ellistone, 218, 219
+ John Sparrow, 218, 219
+ Everard, 248-250
+ Rous, 268
+ Vane, 276-277
+ Sterry, xxx, 283
+ Robert Barclay, 283, 347
+ Cambridge Platonists, 290
+ Whichcote, 296-297
+ John Smith, 310-311
+ English poets, 322, 323
+ Traherne, 327, 328-329
+ the Quakers, 347
+ Mann, Edward, 233 _n._
+ Martensen, H. L.--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._
+ Martyr, Peter, 236
+ Massachusetts--
+ religious controversies in, 273-274
+ McGiffert, A. C.--
+ on Luther, 15
+ Mennonites, 115
+ views of, 116
+ and Collegiants, 116, 120
+ Mildmay, Sir Walter, 279
+ Millennium, the--
+ Vane on, 275, 277-278
+ Milton, John--
+ on heaven and hell, 187 _n._
+ on strange sects, 214
+ on Vane, 271
+ on Inward Word, 321
+ influence of Boehme on, 234
+ and Sterry, 281
+ and Quakers, 321
+ Ministry--
+ must be divinely ordained, 79
+ in interim-Church, 113
+ among Mennonites, 116
+ among Collegiants, 115, 117
+ as conceived by--
+ Weigel, 146-147
+ de Valdes, 237
+ George Fox, 226, 338-339
+ Montanists establish a "spiritual" church, xiii
+ "Montfort, Basil," 93
+ More, Henry, 118, 280, 319
+ More, Sir Thomas, 236
+ "Morning Meeting," the, of London Friends, 232-233
+ Muenzer, Thomas--
+ views on Inward Word, 19
+ Mysticism--
+ characteristics of, xix-xxi, 223
+ limitations of, xxii-xxix
+ negative way of, xxv-xxviii
+ in "spiritual" religion, xv
+ the basis of life, 3, 4
+ a pathway to God, 133
+ of Buenderlin, 35
+ of Entfelder, 41
+ of Franck, 46, 55, 62, 155
+ of Coornhert, 108
+ of Spinoza, 123, 125
+ of Ficino, 134
+ of Paracelsus, 138
+ of Weigel, 141, 155
+ of Boehme, 154-155, 159, 201-206
+ of Randall, 258
+ of Vane, 273
+ of English poets, 323
+ of Traherne, 333-334
+ "Mysticism, Nature," 133-139, 148, 154, 180 _n._
+ Mystics--
+ conception of--
+ man, 70
+ salvation, 75
+ the universe, 155
+ God, xxiv, xxvii-xxviii, 246-247
+ influence on--
+ Luther, 6, 7, 9
+ new views, 136 _n._
+ Coornhert, 108
+ Boreel, 118
+ Everard, 247
+ Rous, 267
+ Sterry, 280
+ Cambridge Platonists, 289
+
+ "Nature Mysticism," 133-139, 148, 154, 180 _n._
+ Neo-Platonism, 134, 136 _n._
+ Neo-Pythagoreanism, 134
+ Newton, Sir Isaac--
+ influence of Boehme on, 181 _n._, 234
+ Nicholas, Henry, 108
+ Nicoladoni, A., 21
+ on Buenderlin, 33 _n._
+ Norris, John, 319
+ Novalis--
+ on Boehme, 153 _n._
+
+ Oaths--
+ views on--
+ of Mennonites, 116
+ of Collegiants, 116
+ Ochino, Bernardino, 236, 237, 238
+ OEcolampadius, 18, 21, 34, 137
+ Oporin, Humanist printer, 92
+ Origen, 267, 307
+
+ Paracelsus, 137-139
+ teaching of, 159 _n._, 184
+ symbolism of, 173 _n._
+ influence on--
+ Weigel, 148, 150 _n._
+ Tentzel, 150 _n._
+ Boehme, 154, 174, 175 _n._
+ Parker, Alexander, 233 _n._
+ Pascal, xxx _n._, 94, 250 _n._, 261 _n._
+ Patrick, Simon (S. P.)--
+ on "Latitude-Men," 288 _n._, 290
+ on John Smith, 305 _n._, 306-308, 319
+ Paul St.--
+ use of word "spiritual," xi
+ Penington, Isaac, xix, xxi, 345 _n._
+ Penn, William--
+ and Abrahams, 122
+ teaching of, 344, 347, 348
+ Pennsylvania--
+ migration of Schwenckfelders to, 83
+ Penny, A. J.--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._
+ Pepys, Samuel--
+ on Vane, 272
+ Perfection, doctrine of--
+ John Sparrow on, 216-217
+ Randall on, 254, 255, 259
+ Perkins, 294
+ Personality, xlix, 8
+ Pfeiffer, F.--
+ on Eckhart, xxvi _n._, xxvii _n._
+ Pflug, Julius, 34
+ Philadelphian Society, the, 230, 23l, 233
+ Philosophy--
+ Greek, 134
+ in England, 235-236, 288, 295
+ Arabian, 134
+ Pico of Mirandola, 134
+ Pirkheimer, 47
+ Plato, xxxiv, 53, 134, 211, 268
+ influence on--
+ Ficino, 235-236
+ Peter Sterry, 280
+ Cambridge Platonists, 289, 290
+ Traherne, 323
+ Platonists, Cambridge, 279, 280, 288-291, 319, 334
+ Plotinus, 3, 53, 211, 236, 239, 280, 289, 290, 323
+ Poiret, Peter--
+ on Boehme, 153 _n._
+ Pordage, John, 227-230
+ on Quakers, 230 _n._
+ Pordage, Samuel--
+ on John Sparrow, 217 _n._
+ Predestination, 99
+ as viewed by--
+ Spiritual Reformers, xlix
+ Coornhert, 111
+ Remonstrants, 114
+ Boehme, 164, 204
+ Presbyterianism, 268, 28l
+ Principles, Three--
+ in Boehme's universe, 183
+ Proclus, 280
+ Psalms, translated by Rous, 267
+ Puritans, 279, 290, 291
+ Pythagoras, 210
+
+ Quakers, the--
+ precursors of, xxxii, 31, 83, 116, 123, 132, 146,
+ 263, 264 _n._, 283, 337, 346, 348
+ circulate _The Light on the Candlestick_, 128
+ influence of Boehme on, 220-227, 233 _n._, 338 _n._
+ influence of Everard on, 252 _n._
+ and the Behmenists, 231-233
+ mission of, 337-341
+ organization of, 341-343
+ views of, 343-348
+ Qualities, Seven--
+ in Jacob Boehme, 180-183, 191
+ in Gnosticism, alchemy, etc., 180 _n._
+ Quarles, Francis, 322, 323
+
+ Randall, Giles--
+ and Everard, 243 _n._, 256, 260
+ life of, 253-254
+ teaching, 254, 255, 260-263
+ translations, 255-256, 258, 260, 261
+ Randall, John, 253
+ Ranterism, 31, 210, 241, 267 _n._
+ among Anabaptists, 33
+ Ranters, 320
+ Raphael, 176
+ Reason--
+ in "spiritual" religion, xv
+ as an approach to religion, xxxii-xxxviii
+ use of, for--
+ Luther, 12
+ Franck, 55
+ Castellio, 98, 101
+ Coornhert, 108
+ Ficino, 235-236
+ Rous, 268
+ Durant Hotham, 210, 211
+ Whichcote, 295, 300 _n._
+ Reformation, the--
+ divisions in, 1, 31, 49, 88, 98-99, 169
+ character of, 43-44, 66-67
+ how to be carried out, 82, 112
+ false course of, 97, 121
+ in England, 266-267
+ Spiritual Reformers and, xiv-xv, xlvi, 336-337, 349
+ Reformer, a--
+ types of, 14-16
+ Denck as, 29
+ Buenderlin as, 43-45
+ Entfelder as, 43-45
+ Franck as, 46
+ Schwenckfeld, 64, 65, 75, 139
+ Castellio as, 103
+ Reformers, Spiritual--
+ type of religion, xxix-xxxii, xlvi-li
+ views of early, 43-45, 76, 133
+ views brought into England, 235
+ mission of, 336-337, 349
+ and Spinoza, 127
+ and Weigel, 139, 148
+ and the Cambridge Platonists, 288-290
+ influence of, on--
+ Coornhert, 107
+ Everard, 239, 251-252
+ Randall, 255
+ Vane, 273
+ Milton, 321
+ Traherne, 323
+ Quakerism, 336-337, 348-349
+ Reforms, Economic and Social, 4
+ Religion, First-hand--
+ Faith as, xlv
+ in "Covenant of Grace," 274
+ as taught by--
+ Denck, 26-27
+ Buenderlin, 37-39
+ Entfelder, 42
+ Franck, 45, 58
+ Schwenckfeld, 71-72
+ Spiritual Reformers, 76
+ Castellio, 90, 100
+ Coornhert, 109
+ Weigel, 141
+ Boehme, 154, 170-171, 192 _seq._
+ Durant Hotham, 212
+ John Ellistone, 217-218
+ de Valdes, 237
+ Everard, 244
+ Rous, 267
+ Vane, 272, 274
+ Whichcote, 296, 297-299, 300-301, 322
+ John Smith, 308, 310, 311-312, 318, 322
+ English poets, 322-323
+ Religion of lay type--
+ Humanism and, 3, 4, 8
+ found in Schwenckfeld Societies, 82-83
+ in Collegiant Societies, 115-117, 120
+ in Congregational Church government, 268
+ Religion, rational type of, xxxii-xxxviii
+ Religion, "spiritual," xlvi
+ in Montanism, xiii
+ in Gnostic sects, xii
+ during Reformation period, xiv-xv
+ three tendencies in, xv, xxix, xlv-xlvi
+ Religion, study of, xv-xix
+ Remonstrants, the--
+ views of, 114
+ Reuchlin, J., 47
+ forerunner of Reformation, 134
+ Richter, Gregorius--
+ and Boehme, 162-164, 166-167, 168
+ Rieuwertz, John, 128
+ Roehrich, Gustave--
+ on Denck, 17 _n._
+ Roth, F.--
+ on Schwenckfeld Societies, 83 _n._
+ Rous, Francis--
+ life, 267-268, 270
+ writings, 268
+ teaching, 268-271
+ Rues, S. F.--
+ on Collegiants, 123 _n._
+ Rutherford, Samuel--
+ on Schwenckfeld, 87
+ on de Valdes, 238
+ on Randall, 254, 258, 262, 263
+ "Rynsburgers," 114 (_see_ Collegiants)
+
+ Sabbath, the--
+ names for, 264 _n._
+ true, for Coornhert, 111
+ Sachs, Hans, 47
+ Sacraments, the use of--
+ as taught by--
+ Luther, 12-14, 19
+ Denck, 27
+ Buenderlin, 37, 39
+ Entfelder, 41-43
+ Franck, 59
+ Schwenckfeld, 67-69, 80-82, 86, 270
+
+ Castellio, 101
+ Coornhert, 110-112
+ Collegiants, 116
+ Borellists, 120
+ Weigel, 142, 147
+ Boehme, 201
+ Behmenists, 232-233
+ Jane Leade, 232 _n._
+ Everard, 251
+ Randall, 254, 255
+ Vane, 273
+ Seekers, 273
+ Whichcote, 302-303
+ Salter, Dr. Samuel--
+ on Whichcote, 291 _n._
+ Saltmarsh, John, 267 _n._
+ Salvation--
+ by Faith, xlii-xliv
+ by works, xlvi, 75
+ view of, as held by--
+ Protestant Reformers, xlvi
+ Spiritual Reformers, xlvii-xlix, 44, 76
+ historic Church, 75, 99
+ Mystics, 75
+ Luther, 10-12, 76
+ Denck, 25-27, 28, 243
+ Buenderlin, 36-38
+ Entfelder, 42
+ Franck, 54-55
+ Schwenckfeld, 70-72, 74-78, 285
+ Irenaeus, 70
+ Castellio, 98, 100
+ Coornhert, 110
+ Remonstrants, 114
+ Weigel, 141
+ Boehme, 170, 190-198, 289
+ de Valdes, 236, 237
+ Everard, 250
+ Sterry, 285
+ Whichcote, 289, 293, 301
+ John Smith, 311-312
+ Traherne, 332-333
+ Quakers, 345, 346-347
+ Sampson, Alden--
+ on Milton, 321 _n._
+ Schellhorn, J. G., 66 _n._
+ Schleiermacher, Friedrich, xxxii
+ Schmalkald League, 69
+ Schneider, Walter--
+ on Adam Boreel, 118 _n._
+ Schweinitz, Sigismund von, 167, 168
+ Schweizer, A.--
+ on Castellio, 88 _n._
+ Schwenckfeld, Caspar, 48
+ as a Reformer, 64, 65, 75, 139
+ life, 65-69
+ teaching, 54, 66, 67, 69-87, 154, 269, 285, 346, 347
+ writings, 64 _n._, 70 _n._
+ organizes Societies, 82-83
+ appearance of views in England, 84, 87, 103 _n._
+ influence on--
+ Weigel, 142, 148
+ Boehme, 154, 156 _n._, 190
+ Scriptures, the--
+ views on, as held by--
+ Luther, 12
+ Denck, 28, 29, 242
+ Buenderlin, 36
+ Entfelder, 42
+ Spiritual Reformers, 44, 251
+ Franck, 58, 60, 6l, 243
+ Schwenckfeld, 73
+ Castellio, 101
+ Coornhert, 108
+ Borellists, 120
+ Boehme, 169, 170, 225
+ John Sparrow, 215, 216, 225
+ George Fox, 225
+ Everard, 245, 251
+ Randall, 255
+ Rous, 269
+ Whichcote, 300
+ John Smith, 317
+ Quakers, 348
+ Scultetus, B., 163 _n._
+ Seekers, the--
+ and the _Stillstand_, 68 _n._
+ view of the Church, 84, 86, 340
+ view of sacraments, 273
+ Schwenckfeld and, 84
+ among the Collegiants, 117, 120, 122
+ in England, 122, 267 _n._
+ Boehme of the type of, 159
+ Boehme's influence on, 220-221
+ Vane one of the, 273
+ and the Quakers, 340-342
+ Seidemann, J. R.--
+ on Muenzer, 19 _n._
+ Servetus, 93, 96
+ Sewel, William--
+ on Abrahams, 122 _n._
+ "Signature," 174, 183, 222, 223
+ Silesius, Angelus, 244 _n._
+ Simons, Menno, 112, 121
+ Sin--
+ views of, as held by--
+ Franck, 62
+ Schwenckfeld, 70
+ Castellio, 99
+ Remonstrants, 114
+ Boehme, 154, 155, 177-179, 188-189, 191
+ John Sparrow, 216, 217
+ Sterry, 284
+ Whichcote, 301-302
+ John Smith, 312-313
+ Traherne, 331-332
+ Slee, J. C. Van--
+ on Collegiants, 114 _n._
+ Smith, John--
+ life, 305-306
+ character, 305, 306-308, 318
+ teaching, 308-318, 322
+ Societies--
+ organized by Schwenckfeld, 82-83
+ of Collegiants, 115-117, 119-120, 123
+ Society of Friends--
+ organized by George Fox, 337, 341-343
+ Socrates, xxxiii _n._, 211
+ Sopingius, G., 114
+ Sparrow, John--
+ translates Boehme into English, 213-221, 222, 234 _n._
+ views of, 214-217, 225
+ Spinoza, B.--
+ mysticism of, xxviii, 123, 125
+ Philosophy of, 125
+ and the Spiritual Reformers, 127
+ and the Collegiants, 123, 128
+ Spiritual, the word--
+ Paul's use of, xi
+ in Johannine writings, xii
+ among Gnostics, xii
+ Montanists, xiii
+ Spiritual Reformers, xiv-xv
+ "Spiritualists," 12, 31, 48
+ Spruyt, David, 120
+ Steiner, R.--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._
+ Sterry, Peter--
+ life, 279-281
+ writings, 281
+ teachings, xxx, xxxiv, 281-287
+ _Stillstand_, the--
+ Schwenckfeld and, 67, 86, 273
+ Franck and, 86
+ revived by Collegiants and Seekers, 68 _n._
+ Vane adopts type of, 273
+ Stoddart, A. M.--
+ on Paracelsus, 137 _n._
+ Stoicism, 134
+ Stoupe--
+ on Collegiants, 119
+ Strobel, G. T.--
+ on Muenzer, 19 _n._
+ Sub-conscious, the, xxviii-xxix
+ Swinburne, A. C., 173
+
+ Tauler, xxvi, 3, 4, 6, 19, 141, 239, 243, 253 _n._, 267
+ his conception of God, 247
+ Taylor, Jeremy, 291
+ Taylor, Thomas--
+ on Boehme, 220
+ "Temperature," 178, 181, 185
+ Tentzel, A., 242
+ use of astrology by, 150 _n._
+ _Theologia Germanica_, xxvi _n._, 4, 6, 239, 263
+ translated by--
+ John Theophilus (Castellio), 103 _n._, 243, 256
+ Everard, 243
+ Randall, 256-257, 258
+ influence on Weigel, 141
+ Theophilus, John (Castellio), 103 _n._, 243
+ Thornton, William, 220
+ Tilken, Balthazar, 170
+ Traherne, Thomas--
+ life, 323-324, 327, 328
+ writings, 327
+ teaching, 322, 324-327, 328-335
+ Trithemius, 137
+ Troeltsch, E.--
+ on Luther, 15 _n._
+ on Franck, 47 _n._
+ on Schwenckfeld, 64 _n._
+ Tuckney, Dr. Anthony, 279, 291
+ correspondence with Whichcote, 292-296, 302
+ Tulloch, John--
+ on Cambridge Platonists, 303 _n._, 305
+ Tully, 290
+ Turner, Wyllyam, 84
+
+ Underhill, Evelyn, x
+ Universe, the--
+ as conceived--
+ in a rational religion, xxxii-xxxviii
+ by Buenderlin, 35
+ by Entfelder, 40
+ in "Nature Mysticism," 133
+ in the Cabala, 135
+ by Agrippa of Nettesheim, 137
+ by Paracelsus, 138-139
+ by Weigel, 148
+ by Boehme, 150 _n._, 159-160, 172-189
+ by John Sparrow, 214
+ by John Ellistone, 219
+ by Everard, 248
+ by Vane, 276-278
+ by Sterry, 282
+ by John Smith, 314-316
+ by Traherne, 329-331
+ Vadian, 21
+ Valdes, Alfonso de, 236
+ Valdes, Juan de--
+ life, 236-237
+ teaching, 237
+ influence in England, 237-238
+ Vane, Sir Harry--
+ life, 271-274
+ teaching, 274
+ and George Fox, 278
+ and Sterry, 280
+ Vaughan, Henry, 322, 326, 335
+ Veesenmeyer--
+ on Buenderlin, 33 _n._
+ on Entfelder, 40
+ Vermigli, Pietro Martire, 236, 237, 238
+
+ Wallace, William, xxxvii
+ Walther, Dr. B., 165
+ Walton, Christopher--
+ on Boehme, 151 _n._, 179 _n._
+ on Jane Leade, 230
+ War--
+ views of Collegiants on, 117
+ views of Boehme on, 199
+ Ward, George--
+ on Boehme, 234 _n._
+ Ward, James, xxxvi
+ Warmund, Church of, 115-116
+ Weigel, Valentine--
+ life, 139-140, 148 _n._
+ teaching, 141-150
+ writings, 141, 145, 148
+ influence on Boehme, 139, 148, 150 _n._, 154, 156 _n._, 169, 190
+ influence in England, 139, 141, 146, 148, 150
+ Weissner, Dr. Cornelius, 163, 165
+ Whichcote, Benjamin--
+ life, 279, 289, 291-293
+ teaching, 293-304
+ and Dr. Tuckney, 292-295
+ and John Smith, 306
+ Whitaker, Richard--
+ on Boehme, 208 _n._
+ Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, xxxviii
+ Williams, Roger--
+ on Vane, 275
+ Winstanley, Gerard, 267 _n._, 334
+ Winthrop, John, 274, 275
+ Word of God, Inward--
+ as taught by--
+ the Spiritual Reformers, xxx, xxxviii, li, 32, 44, 337
+ Thomas Muenzer, 19
+ Ludwig Hetzer, 19
+ Denck, 24, 27, 28-30, 243
+ Buenderlin, 36-39
+ Entfelder, 41
+ Franck, 53, 56-58, 346
+ Schwenckfeld, 66, 72, 346, 347
+ Castellio, 101
+ Coornhert, 108-109
+ _The Light on the Candlestick_, 129-132
+ Weigel, 147
+ Boehme, 169
+ John Sparrow, 214-216
+ George Fox, 215
+ John Ellistone, 218
+ de Valdes, 238
+ Everard, 246, 251-252
+ Randall, 263
+ Rous, 268-269
+ Vane, 276, 279
+ Milton, 321
+ William Law, 346 _n._
+ root principle of Quakerism, 345, 348
+ Wordsworth, William, xxiii, xxxv
+ Worthington, John--
+ on John Smith, 306, 307
+
+ Zwickau Prophets, 12
+ Zwingli, 121
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPIRITUAL REFORMERS IN THE 16TH &
+17TH CENTURIES***
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