CHAPTER XIII.
There is in humanity an element of mysticism presenting manifold developments. It characterizes both individual minds and schools of thought: mediæval theologians, and men and women of Romish Christendom, altogether ignorant of scientific divinity, and only burning with pious fervour, have been mystics without knowing that they were so. Since the Reformation particular members of all sects have been tinged with this peculiarity; and a whole body of religionists in England have from the very beginning of their remarkable history avowed the love and walked in the light of a mystical spiritualism. Though the Anglo-Saxon race are believed generally to have less sympathy with transcendental views than Spaniards, Germans, or Frenchmen, yet it is a fact that nowhere as in this country has mysticism produced a distinct and permanent ecclesiastical organization. And what is further remarkable, whilst it claims a purely spiritual basis—there is no other sect which has an equal distinctness of form and an equal prominence in external singularity; for not only in worship and discipline does it stand out in marked visibility before the world, but so obvious are or were its outward signs that, until very lately, a member of the Society might be as easily recognized as a Roman Catholic priest or a Capuchin friar.
Rise of Quakerism.
The origin of the Quakers, as they were first derisively called,[363] of the Friends, as they prefer to be designated, was under the Commonwealth. Then the freedom granted to enquiry within Evangelical limits, the violent reaction which had set in against the forms and ceremonies of Anglo-Catholicism, the generally unsettled state of religious thought, the activity of tendencies towards a sort of ultra-spirituality, and a natural craving—amidst the revolutions of an age which tore up old conventionalities of belief—to get at the pure substance of truth, and at the heart of things, combined to draw out and to nourish whatever of the mystical element there might be in English souls. Sympathies of that order were vaguely working and were indefinitely expressed in many quarters.
Quakerism, as a congenial centre, speedily attracted them to itself. The true Friend, travelling in modern days on religious service, finds in churches the most remote, persons whose inner life presents strange affinities to his own. Discoursing in his peculiar way upon the mysteries of religious experience, he evokes recognitions of brotherhood from the Spanish Catholic and the Russian Greek;[364] no wonder, therefore, when mysticism in England found for itself such a voice in the middle of the seventeenth century, that it soon drew within the circle of its fellowship thousands who were waiting for its call.
George Fox.
The rise of Quakerism must be sought in the life of its founder. If ever the child was father to the man, it certainly was so in the case of George Fox. Born of humble but virtuous parents—his father, Christopher, an honest weaver, winning amongst his companions the name of "righteous Christer;" his mother, Mary Lago, a pure-minded woman, sprung from a family stock which had borne fruits of martyrdom—he was not likely in his early days to see much of immorality, nor were the folks who crossed his parents' threshold, and whom the boy heard talking round the hearth-stone, likely to be otherwise than of the better sort in morals; yet their cheerfulness and mirth shocked little George so much, that he would say within himself, "If ever I come to be a man surely I will not be so wanton." He was too precocious to like childish games, and shewed his activity of intellect and depth of feeling in strange questions about religion, and in ways of worship unlike his mother's. When only eleven, he had inward monitions, inclining him to an ascetic life, and impulses which two hundred years earlier would have made a youth of his stamp an exemplary monk. Apprenticed to a dealer in leather and wool, who bred sheep for the sake of the fleece, George was set to watch the flocks, and in his shepherd life he found "a just emblem of his after ministry and service." As he grew older, men admired the justness of his dealings, and in his "verily" found what was more than equivalent to another man's oath, so that it became a proverb, "If George says verily there is no altering him." When business or persuasion took him to the market or the fair, his righteous soul was vexed with what he saw and heard—for even drinking healths appeared offensive—and he would return from the gaiety of the gathering to mourn in secret, through sleepless nights, over the world's vanity and sin. He resolved to separate from his acquaintances and to spend a life of retirement and devotion. None of the professions of religion in those days met his views. The Episcopal Church seemed little better than the world—Baptists and Independents were not sufficiently spiritual—current forms of theology did not supply the necessities of the young enquirer—and therefore in solitude and fasting, in the Scriptures, and in communion with his own deep thoughts, George Fox sought to satisfy the hunger of his soul.[365]
The intellectual character of this remarkable person is not easily measured. Possessing little of the logical faculty, eschewing argumentative forms of thought, and altogether ignorant of Baconian methods of induction, he had nevertheless a keen, lightning-like power of penetrating hidden truths and of laying open secret things. By intuitive perception he reached spiritual truths. He felt a great deal to be right which he could not prove to be so; and much which to men of another mould seemed occult and shadowy, to him appeared firmer than the earth on which he trod. He cared not for the coverings of truth, the nakeder it was to him the better. He could boast of no poetical imagination, yet he possessed a prodigious power of realizing what he believed, and had he been a school-man, he would have been as decided a Realist as Thomas Aquinas.
George Fox had strong sympathies with what is spiritual everywhere and in all things, but especially with what is so in religion. As in striving after truth he was ever breaking shells to get at kernels, so in his pantings for fellowship with God, which constituted the most pressing need of his nature, he was intolerant of forms. He had no patience with any ceremonial avenues by which to walk up to the temple of the Eternal, but rather longed for an eagle's wing to fly at once to the mount of God; forgetful, in his sincere raptures, of the conditions of humanity, and not considering that in the pursuit of the noblest as of the humblest ends, mortals cannot dispense with means, and that we are all of us two-sided beings, needing helps from without to strengthen and preserve what is most Divine within.
In morals his character was more than unimpeachable. Rarely has a man been found so just and true, so virtuous and temperate, so benevolent and pacific; although, withal, so bold, and even severe in rebuking falsehood, hypocrisy, and every kind of sin. His moral indignation, which was sometimes misplaced, made him forgetful of the courtesies of life, and the rudeness which he thus displayed served to increase both the animosity and the number of his enemies.[366]
George Fox.
Mysticism formed his whole character. It penetrated his intellect. It pervaded his spirit. It was the soul of his religion, and the mainspring of his morality. It inspired him with the love of solitude and the love of nature. To get away from his fellow-creatures to commune with himself, and with God, amidst the solitudes of creation, became his chief delight. Not that when he speaks of wandering in fields and orchards, and of getting into the depths of forests, and the hollows of trees, it was with a poet's perception of nature's mysteries. He rather wished, whilst away from the noisy world, in the deep silence of a summer's noon or a winter's night, to open his inmost self to the Spirit of God, to uncover the hidden harp that an invisible finger might touch the strings; to walk in an inward light, to enjoy the indwelling Christ, and to receive revelations of truth and love from those pure realms where they everlastingly reign. George Fox often deluded himself, and mistook for the Divine what was merely human: but that the Holy Ghost wrought within his heart in a powerful manner, who can doubt? His errors were often the shadows of everlasting verities; some of his aberrations came from noble self-denying impulses; and with respect to him it might be aptly said, "And e'en the light that led astray was light from heaven."
The solitary became ascetic, as was natural. He denied himself the common comforts of life, he would not eat and drink like other people, and for a while he belied the name of "friend," and walked about like a hermit or a ghost. "And when he came into a town, he took a chamber to himself there, and tarried sometimes a month, sometimes more, sometimes less, in a place; for he was afraid of staying long in any place, lest, being a tender young man, he should be hurt by too familiar a conversation with men."[367] He had deep spiritual exercises of soul. No one could be more conscious of the existence of evil powers—of Satanic agencies in the invisible world to which the inner nature of man belongs even in the present life. But applying to himself the holy words, "in returning and in rest shall ye be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength," he sought refuge from his mysterious troubles by abiding "under the shadow of the Almighty." Describing his experience when he was pressed by the greatest of mystical problems, he says:—"One morning, as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me, and a temptation beset me; but I sat still. And it was said, 'All things come by nature,' and the elements and stars came over me, so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it. But as I sat still, and said nothing, the people of the house perceived nothing. And as I sat still under it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me, and a true voice which said:—'There is a living God, who made all things,' and immediately the cloud and temptation vanished away, and life rose over it all; my heart was glad, and I praised the living God."[368]
George Fox.
Fox was mighty in prayer. So great an effect he produced on one occasion, that the persons present felt as if the house were shaken by a mighty wind and the day of Pentecost had once more fully come; and Penn declared: "The most awful living reverent frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his in prayer."[369] By Fox's public teaching he became more widely known, and exerted an influence which has lasted from that day to this. Believing in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity,[370] and regarding them in an anti-Calvinistic light, strong in a simple Evangelical faith, but without any theological discipline of thought, preferring the language of Scripture to the words of men—he added to all this, as the first-fruit of his mystical tendencies, a belief in the "inward light," even the revelation of Christ in the soul, not as superseding holy Scripture, but as its necessary witness and its gracious supplement. He dwelt very largely upon redemption through Christ, as consisting in deliverance from sin, not simply from its guilt, but from its power;—a view of salvation of the very last importance, and one which had been, at least partially, obscured through the prominence given by some theologians of the day to the doctrine of pardon, and the change effected in our legal relationship by the work of Christ, without a due exhibition of the moral change in the heart and life which forms so important an aspect of the one salvation of the Gospel of God. He dwelt much on the subject of man's deliverance from sin itself—from its power and practice—which the Divine Redeemer had accomplished. Ideas of human perfectibility through Christ[371] blended with Fox's conceptions of holiness and of the work of the Spirit; and his notion of Christianity as a purely spiritual system[372] led to further peculiarities which, in fact, chiefly distinguished this remarkable teacher in the estimation of contemporaries. Hence sprang his opposition to sacraments, to ceremonies, and to forms of prayer, and also his delight in the exercises of silent worship. Hence, too, his dislike to all compulsory support of the ministry, whether by tithes or taxation; together with a horror of human priesthoods, and even of any order of Christian teachers educated and exclusively set apart for the service. His condemnation of the use of oaths and of the practice of war resulted from his reverence for the Supreme Being, and from the deep sympathies of his benevolent nature with the pacific spirit of the Gospel.
George Fox.
But his oddities attracted still more notice than his preaching. He wore very long hair, and clothed himself in a suit of leather; things, however, of which too much has been made by his biographers, seeing that this sort of dress was worn only for a time, and was adapted for rough use, while it was not so very strange in an age of leather doublets. Nor was his numbering the days of the week, instead of calling them by their usual names, so peculiar as is supposed, since it appears to have been the practice of Independents and Baptists to do the same. Nor did "thee" and "thou" sound so strange as in the present day. But the stern refusal to take off his hat before anybody, even before magistrates; the violence with which he assailed "priests," and all ministers; the terms he applied to parish churches, calling them "steeple-houses;" the encouragement he gave to the preaching of women; and the manner in which he publicly testified against evil, made this spiritual reformer appear a most eccentric personage, and brought down upon him ridicule and abuse, and a great deal of what was very much worse.[373] His testimonies were delivered at wakes, at fairs, at inns, in courts of justice, and in places of worship. When the bell rang for church, it smote his soul as a sign that the Gospel was going to be sold, not given without money and without price; and off the honest enthusiast went to the steeple-house, to interrupt the minister, and protest against his ministry. This, of course, could not be tolerated, and presently he found himself shut up in filthy cells, or set in the public stocks. The punishment was severe, monstrously and beyond all proportion to the offence, but the offender clearly put himself in a false position. With no taste for Gothic architecture, looking upon cathedrals as popish mass-houses, he could not endure the sight of the beautiful spires of Lichfield; so, pulling off his shoes, he walked through the streets, and thinking of pagan persecutions there in old times, cried "Woe, woe to the bloody city."[374] The magistrates of Derby most unjustly convicted him of blasphemy, under the late Act against atheistical opinions, and sentenced him to six months' confinement in the House of Correction. He subsequently moderated some of his excesses, but this did not secure him against outrageous persecutions and intolerable sufferings. The Quaker reveals his character as he tells his story. "When the Lord first sent me forth in the year 1643, I was sent as an innocent lamb (and young in years) amongst (men in the nature of) wolves, dogs, bears, lions and tigers into the world, which the devil had made like a wilderness, no right way then found out of it. And I was sent to turn people from darkness to the light, which Christ, the Second Adam, did enlighten them withal; that so they might see Christ, their way to God, with the Spirit of God, which He doth pour upon all flesh, that with it they might have an understanding to know the things of God, and to know Him, and His Son, Jesus Christ, which is eternal life; and so might worship and serve the living God, their maker and creator, who takes care for all, who is Lord of all; and with the light and Spirit of God they might know the Scriptures, which were given forth from the Spirit of God in the saints, and holy men and women of God.
"And when they began to be turned to the light (which is the life in Christ) and the Spirit of God, which gave them an understanding, and had found the path of the just, the shining light, then did the wolves, dogs, dragons, bears, lions, tigers, wild beasts and birds of prey make a roaring and a screeching noise against the lambs, sheep, doves, and children of Christ, and were ready to devour them and me, and to tear us in pieces. But the Lord's arm and power did preserve me; though many times I was in danger of my life, and very often cast into dungeons and prisons, and haled before magistrates. But all things did work together for good, and the more I was cast into outward prisons, the more people came out of their spiritual and inward prisons (through the preaching of the Gospel). But the priests and professors were in such a great rage, and made the rude and profane people in such a fury, that I could hardly walk in the streets, or go in the highways, but they were ready oft-times to do me a mischief. But Christ, who hath all power in heaven and in the earth, did so restrain and limit them with His power, that my life was preserved; though many times I was near killed.
"Oh! the burdens and travels that I went under! Often my life pressed down under the spirits of professors and teachers without life, and the profane! And besides, the troubles afterwards with backsliders, apostates, and false brethren, which were like so many Judases in betraying the truth, and God's faithful and chosen seed, and causing the way of truth to be evil spoken of! But the Lord blasted, wasted, and confounded them, so that none did stand long; for the Lord did either destroy them or bring them to nought, and His truth did flourish, and His people in it, to the praise of God, who is the revenger of His chosen."[375]
Fox appeared before the Lord Protector. The meeting of the two at Whitehall must have been a remarkable scene. Both mystical, but in different degrees—both enthusiastic in religion, and perhaps equally sincere in the most erratic forms of their respective faiths—the man in power excelled in that practical shrewdness and common sense, which were not altogether wanting in his persecuted brother; and, while the latter was throwing the religious world into disturbance, the former aimed at restoring it to order. Cromwell reproached Fox for opposing the regular clergy. Fox told Cromwell that all Christendom had the Scriptures; but that those who preached were destitute of the Spirit by which the Scriptures were written. Thus two strong wills came into collision. But when the Quaker went on lovingly to talk upon the mysteries of spiritual experience, it touched the heart of the Lord Protector at once; and pressing his friend's hand, whom he allowed to wear his hat in his presence, he said: "Come again to my house; if thou and I were together but one hour in every day we should be nearer to each other. I wish you no more ill than I do to my own soul."
Fox's Disciples.
Fox had many followers,[376] and the character of the master reproduced itself in his disciples. Organization in so large a body soon became a necessity; and, in spite of the extreme spiritualism of the system, the Quakers were consolidated into a sect, having a gradation of ecclesiastical courts, under the name of "meetings," as elaborate as those of completed Presbyterianism, yet vesting all power in the people, and combining liberty with subordination. Some early Quaker preachers vied with Fox in simplicity, earnestness, and courage. Edward Burroughs, a man of great spirituality and power, would step into the wrestlers' ring—as lusty peasants on a summer's evening kept up the ancient sports on the village green—and speak to the rustic spectators with "a heart-piercing power." He thundered against sin—to use the Scripture-coloured language of his admirers, and broke stony hearts; his bow never turned back, and his sword returned not empty from the slaughter of the mighty. "And, although coals of fire, as it were, came forth of his mouth, to the consuming of briars and thorns; and he, passing through unbeaten paths, trampled upon wild thistles and luxuriant tares, yet his wholesome doctrine dropped as the oil of joy upon the spirits of the mourners in Zion."[377] But there were people numbered amongst the Quakers—for the term was widely and vaguely applied—who had not the wisdom and gentleness of Edward Burroughs. One at least of these persons—in imitation of the Oriental method of teaching by signs, as seen in the Hebrew prophets; and also after the manner of the Russian anchorites—went forth in public stripped and naked, making a wailing like the dragons, and a mourning as the owls. George Fox himself says: "the Lord made one to go naked among you, a figure of thy nakedness, and as a sign amongst you, before your destruction cometh, that you might see that you were naked and not covered with the truth."[378] But, notwithstanding he speaks of this singular manifestation in such terms, he is not to be held responsible for the manifestation itself. Nothing of the kind occurred in his own history, nor, as far as we can discover, in that of any distinguished, or of even any recognized member of the Society of Friends in this country.[379]
Fox and Cromwell.
In the "Broadmead Records" strange suspicions about Quakerism are expressed, and tales are told to shew how "the Papists, by their emissaries and agents, did promote this error and delusion." A public declaration of the magistrates of Bristol testified to the same effect.[380] But nothing appears beyond surmises. Some people in those days, like some people still, were wild upon the subject of Romanism, and fancied that they saw the print of the Papacy all over the country.[381] The source of this terror has been already explained; and, looking at what was then attributed to the Roman Catholics, we see that the feeling, under the circumstances, is not wonderful. Impartial historians of the present day, however, will require more than vague rumours, and unsupported accusations, to convince them of the existence of a scheme so subtle and so unreasonable. That Rome could promote its interests through the spread of Quakerism seems an idea even more absurd than the current story of the Queen's Jesuit confessor, plotting the death of Charles, and riding up and down the street before Whitehall upon the day of the monarch's execution with a drawn sword in his hand. How could Franciscans, in the garb of Quakers, fail to be detected by Quakers themselves, who of all sectaries perhaps, most hated Popery? How can the activity of well-known preachers amongst them—who loathed the ritual and the polity of Rome, and who were sincere in following the inward light in opposition to all human authority whatever—be reasonably believed to have received support from Catholic intriguers?[382]
The amount of persecution inflicted upon Quakers by magistrates and by mobs during the Commonwealth is almost incredible. "Fox's Journal" and "Sewel's History" abound in examples of the cruelties which they endured. Cromwell's latter Parliaments disliked Quakers as much as other people did; but Cromwell himself, although disapproving of their disorderly conduct, shewed mercy to the offenders. Treatment such as they generally received reflects, beyond anything else, upon the character of the times for toleration and Christian justice. England at large could not have learned the doctrines of religious liberty, and must have been sadly out of sympathy with Cromwell and others, to have inflicted such wanton barbarities upon people who were harmless as a rule, and mischievous only in a few exceptions. As they quietly worshipped God, parish ministers would rush into their places of meeting—accompanied by people armed with staves, cudgels, pitchforks, "and such like armour"—and interrupt the Quaker preacher more than any Quaker preacher at the very worst had ever interrupted them. Yet, under these circumstances, the poor Quakers disturbed—not the people disturbing—were hustled off to gaol. Katherine Evans, who publicly exhorted the citizens in Salisbury market-place, was whipped for the first offence, and for the second was thrown into the "blind-house," the worst part of the bridewell.[383]
The justices of Exeter, in the month of June, 1656, made an order of sessions to apprehend as vagrants all Quakers travelling without a pass:[384] and the year afterwards a Bill came before Parliament to the same effect, supported by Major-General Desborough, Mr. Bampfield, an Independent, and Sir Christopher Pack, a Presbyterian.[385]
James Nayler.
James Nayler brought much dishonour on the whole sect. The nineteenth century, with all its rationalism, has seen Joanna Southcote, and her numerous disciples. The seventeenth, with all its fanaticism, witnessed, in the greatest enthusiast of the age, less absurdity, and with him a smaller following than we have witnessed even in our own time. Though Nayler was a convert of George Fox, George Fox regarded Nayler with some suspicion, "struck with a fear," as he said, "and being, as it were, under a sense of some great disaster that was like to befal him."[386] Nayler's fall grieved the hearts of his own people, and filled the whole country with exaggerated reports of his shame. While a sufferer in Exeter gaol, his deluded followers addressed him as "the Everlasting Son, the Prince of Peace, the fairest among ten thousand." He fancied himself possessed of the Divine nature in some inexplicable way. Reports were circulated that he pretended to raise to life one Dorcas Erbery two days after her death. Liberated from gaol, he marched through Glastonbury and Wells, men and women walking before him, bareheaded, and strewing the ground with their clothes, in imitation of what was done at Christ's entrance into Jerusalem. At Bristol people shouted as he passed along, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Israel, Hosanna in the highest." In prison he received greetings from fanatics who sung hymns to him, and cried, in Scripture words: "Rise up, my love, my dove, my fair one, and come away: why sittest thou among the pots?" This national scandal, as the Parliament deemed it, could, in their judgment, be washed out only by pains and penalties; a fact which has received attention in our account of the second Protectorate Parliament. Although a fanatic, James Nayler demands justice. It has been rarely meted out to him. His fanaticism was mystical. He had a notion of some extraordinary indwelling of the Spirit within his soul, which he enjoyed, as he supposed, not in consequence of his own superiority, but entirely from abounding grace. Not himself, but the indwelling Lord, he deemed the object of the honours paid—honours, it would appear, volunteered by enthusiasts who were madder than himself. This point is largely noticed in his trial.[387] Things were laid to his charge which he denied, and he distinctly repudiated the pretence of raising the dead. Most important of all is the fact that he repented of his folly, and published a recantation of his errors in several forms.[388]
The Quakers lamented Nayler's madness and backsliding, and they must not be held responsible for his aberrations, although they humanely sympathized with him in his sufferings, which were both unrighteously inflicted, and patiently endured. Nobody now will vindicate the treatment he received; yet few besides members of his own sect condemned it then. To the honour of Lord Fairfax's Presbyterian chaplain, Joshua Sprigg, it should be mentioned that he, with thirty other petitioners, personally sought, at the hands of Parliament, some mitigation of the culprit's doom.[389]
Number of Sects.
Certain parties under the Commonwealth had the habit—and the fashion still exists—of exaggerating the number of religious denominations. Ephraim Pagitt—in his "Heresiography," published in 1654—gives a list of between forty and fifty sects: the historical worth of which enumeration we may estimate, when we observe that he distinguishes between Anabaptists and plunged Anabaptists—between Separatists and semi-Separatists—between Brownists and Barrowists—and then proceeds to specify three orders of Familists. Edwards, in his "Gangræna," with the strongest wish to make the most of his subject, cannot advance beyond the enumeration of sixteen kinds of schismatics: but immediately impeaches his own distinctions, by informing us that one and the same society of persons were Anabaptistical, Antinomian, Manifestarian, Libertine, Socinian, Millenary, Independent, and enthusiastical.[390] Our distrust is increased by a subjoined catalogue of one hundred and seventy-six errors, swollen by statements of substantially the same thing in varied forms of words, and by the inclusion of all sorts of trivial opinions and absurd vagaries. Edwards also gives another catalogue of "particular practices," twenty-eight in number; besides an array of "blasphemies" culled from sectarian prayers. Adopting such methods, there is no religious denomination which we might not subdivide at pleasure. A dozen different names may, with a little ingenuity, be given to almost every Church upon earth; and thus twelve different Churches may be made out of one.
Baxter mentions only five, in addition to the larger religious parties. He describes the minor sects as Vanists, Seekers, Ranters, Quakers, and Behmenists. With all his power of analysis, however, he very unsatisfactorily performs his task; for it is idle to represent Vane as the founder of a sect, and the chief reason why the Kidderminster polemic placed him in this category seems to be, that he honestly disliked the man, and that he had been "a means to lessen his reputation."[391] The account of the Seekers, many of whom, according to his statement, were "Papists and Infidels," runs into that of the Ranters. The Quakers he describes as Ranters, turned from profaneness and blasphemy to asceticism. With the writings of Jacob Behmen it appears that Baxter had little acquaintance. But he mentions, as chief of the English Behmenists, one Pordage, who had "sensible communion with angels," who was acquainted with spirits "by sights and smells," who fought fiery dragons, and who saw an impression upon the wall of his house representing a coach drawn by lions and tigers, which could not be removed without pickaxes.[392] The record of such idle rumours, whilst it does not raise our opinion of Baxter as a historian of religious sects—for the man he describes seems to have been a lunatic—gives some little insight into the psychological curiosities of the times, and brings us into acquaintance with "spiritualists" of the seventeenth century.
Number of Sects.
Besides Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers, there were no sects, properly so called—no groups of professing Christians distinctly organized. Socinianism, however, existed. John Biddle—who has been already noticed in connection with the proceedings of Cromwell's first Parliament—contended, at a public disputation in St. Paul's with Griffin, a Baptist minister, that Christ was not the Most High God, and this man never lost an opportunity of avowing Unitarian sentiments.[393] But he founded no party, nor are there traces of any separate congregations under the Commonwealth maintaining similar views. There was also much floating mysticism. The theology of Jacob Behmen, through an "Account of his Life and Writings," written in English, produced some effect in this country. The spiritualism of that extraordinary person—akin to the "Theologia Germanica"—anticipated in "Tauler's Sermons"—and possessing some affinity to certain Lutheran principles, fed the devotion of English transcendentalists. Notwithstanding its errors and visionary fancies, on its better side it nourished a spirit of self-abnegation, protested against formality, exposed the dangers of dogmatical dispute, opposed High Calvinism, and pronounced millenarian speculations as of little profit. And, independently of all foreign culture, mysticism, deeply rooted in humanity, grew freely on Anglo-Saxon soil; not always with quiet grace, as in the Cambridge school under the husbandry of learning, but with twisted roots, gnarled trunks, and oddly-forked branches, bent and torn by those political and theological storms which swept so wildly over the whole country. But mysticism of this description did not settle down into any sectarian type. It has been common to pass strong and indiscriminate votes of censure upon all the Commonwealth theology which was leavened by an element of this kind; but now that such theology is better understood, because more carefully studied, the universal application of such censure is seen to be exceedingly unfair.
Floating Mysticism.
Mysticism, in German and English books of the better class, is opposed to Antinomianism; but, no doubt, mysticism existed in the middle of the seventeenth century in close alliance with high predestinarian opinions, and with very loose views of moral obligation and responsibility. Dr. Tobias Crisp, a Puritan clergyman, who died in 1643, was the most distinguished Divine of the Antinomian class; yet, although unguarded and violent in his theoretical statements to the very last degree, he is described as having been a man of undeniable Christian virtue. Habits of thinking like his—not marking the boundaries of a sect—pervaded, in all probability, many minds which, by an inconsistency happily for mankind very common, were preserved, through the force of better impulses, from carrying their principles into practice. But Antinomianism did, in some cases, become practical, if heed be given to contemporary reports. Monstrous excesses were committed by individuals;[394] and communities arose, called Families of Love, amidst which, according to contemporary pamphlets, a shameless immorality prevailed.[395] These monstrous outgrowths of fanaticism, however, as we might expect from their very nature, were but short-lived; and they mostly belonged to the soldiery during the continuance of the Civil Wars. In short, things of this sort formed the filthy surf thrown up by lashed waters, and disappeared when the storm had subsided.
We may name, in addition, four eccentric, if not crazy, individuals, called founders of sects, who in their strangeness really represented only themselves. The first was John Robins, who pretended to work miracles, to ride on the winds, and to exhibit angels and other supernatural sights—proclaiming himself to be an incarnation of the Deity; the second was John Tawney, the high priest of this Robins, and who joined with him in a commission to lead a company of followers to Jerusalem; and the third and fourth, men equally hare-brained, were named Reeve and Muggleton, who called themselves the witnesses predicted in Revelation, and who said they were able by fire to devour their adversaries. These fanatics cursed everybody who did not agree with them. It is useless to pursue the subject further. Enough has been said to prove that the number of sects under the Commonwealth has been enormously exaggerated; that various opinions were held then, as now, without forming distinct ecclesiastical communions; and that the greatest absurdities were little more than the hallucinations of individual minds.[396]
