CHAPTER XVII.
George Fox was the father of Quakerism, but to William Penn belongs the distinction of being the first logical expounder of its principles.
William Penn was the son of Admiral Penn. When only twelve years old he began “to listen to the voice of God in his soul:” and when a student at Oxford he suffered fines and expulsion for his incipient Nonconformity. His father, incensed by these religious peculiarities, turned him into the streets, but this did not in the least degree destroy his convictions; and subsequently, European travel, and education, which it might have been expected would dissipate his impressions, left them as deep as ever, combined with an accession of intelligence, and an acquisition of graceful manners which rendered him the admiration of polite society. He had learned to handle the rapier, with all the skill of a French gentleman, yet he remained imbued with “a deep sense of the vanity of the world, and the irreligiousness of its religions.” “Further,” to use his own language, “God, in His everlasting kindness, guided my feet in the flower of my youth, when about two-and-twenty years of age. Religion is my crime, and my innocence,—it makes me a prisoner to malice, but my own freeman.” When the fashionable world laughed at the rumour of the accomplished William Penn becoming a Quaker, such ridicule did not move his purpose, he only showed more steadfastness of conviction, and avowed his adoption of Quaker habits by going to Court with his hat on. When the Bishop of London menaced him with imprisonment, “My prison shall be my grave,” the youth replied. When Charles sent Stillingfleet to talk with him, the youthful Dissenter, through that Divine, returned an answer to every threat—“The Tower is to me the worst argument in the world.” This was in 1668, the year in which he published his Truth Exalted, or a Testimony to Rulers, Priests, and Bishops; and the same year, and in consequence of this same book, he was actually confined as a prisoner within the gloomy walls of the old Norman fortress, where he remained seven months; and where he wrote his No Cross, No Crown, or Several Sober Reasons against Hat Worship, Titular Respect, You to a single person, with the Apparel and Recreations of the Times, in Defence of the poor despised Quakers, against the practice and objections of their adversaries. The title is modified in later editions.
QUAKERS.—WILLIAM PENN.
The old Admiral paid his son’s fines, and on his deathbed, in altered tones, observed to him, “Son William, if you and your friends keep to your plain way of preaching and living, you will make an end of the priests.” Now possessed of his father’s fortune, he surprised people by his religious eccentricities. “You are an ingenious gentleman,” said a magistrate before whom he was brought, “you have a plentiful estate, why should you render yourself unhappy by associating with such a simple people?” “I prefer,” said he, “the honestly simple to the ingeniously wicked;” this was in 1670, when committed to Newgate, under the Conventicle Act, for preaching to “a riotous and seditious assembly,”—that is to say, for preaching to a company of Friends, who met for worship in the open-air; and from Newgate, he addressed to Parliament and the people of England, a plea for liberty of conscience, saying, if the efforts of the Quakers cannot obtain “the olive branch of toleration, we bless the providence of God, resolving by patience to outweary persecution, and by our constant sufferings, to obtain a victory, more glorious than our adversaries can achieve by their cruelties.”[499]
These incidents in his early life were obviously connected with his religious opinions. Far less imbued with the element of mysticism than was the founder of the sect, this eminent disciple appears no less earnest in the advocacy of his opinions; and he works them out with a facility of reasoning, a compass of knowledge, and a force and glow of diction, in which the reader cannot but recognize, in connection with his natural ability, the fruits of his Oxford culture. A comparison between the writings of Fox and Penn, as it regards mental peculiarities, is interesting and instructive, showing the original and creative genius of the one, and the effect of academical training upon the other: in the enjoyment of a spiritual education, not of this world, they were much alike.
The fundamental principle of Quaker theology is found in the doctrine of the inward light; and to the exposition and establishment of that doctrine, William Penn devotes himself in his work, entitled The Christian a Quaker (1674). He explains the light as being not something metaphorical, nor yet the mere spirit or reason of man, but Christ, “that glorious Sun of Righteousness and heavenly luminary of the intellectual or invisible world, represented of all outward resemblances, most exactly by the great sun of this sensible and visible world; that as this natural light ariseth upon all, and gives light to all about the affairs of this life, so that Divine light ariseth upon all and gives light to all that will receive the manifestations of it about the concerns of the other life.” That light manifests sin, and reveals duty. It saved from Adam’s day, through the holy patriarchs’ and prophets’ time down to Christ; amongst the Jews as proved from Scripture, amongst the Gentiles, as proved from their own literature. Under this division, Penn quotes largely from the Stromata of Clement of Alexandria, adopting his quotations as genuine and trustworthy. The primitive Fathers expressed themselves in accordance with this doctrine; and amongst the heathen there were men of virtuous lives, who taught the indispensableness of virtue to life eternal. The author contends that the latter foresaw the coming of Christ, and curiously adds, that their refusing to swear proves the sufficiency of the inward light.[500] In the support of these opinions, Penn appeals to the authority of Scripture, and employs a large amount of general reasoning.
QUAKERS.—WILLIAM PENN.
Although the inward light be the rule,[501] Holy Scripture is a rule, and one authoritative and binding on those who possess it. Hence, whilst ever appealing to reason in his theological arguments, Penn habitually refers to Scripture as an inspired revelation from God, of great importance in determining religious controversy. The distinction which he makes, and the place which he assigns to the Bible had better be given in his own words:—“A rule, and the rule are two things. By the rule of faith and practice I understand the living, spiritual, immediate, Omnipresent, discovering, ordering Spirit of God; and by a rule I apprehend some instrument, by and through which, this great and universal rule may convey its directions. Such a subordinate, secondary, and declaratory rule, we never said several parts of Scripture were not, yet we confess the reason of our obedience is not merely because they are there written (for that were legal) but because they are the eternal precepts of the Spirit in men’s consciences, there repeated and declared.”[502] This is the key which unlocks Penn’s theological system; and it is remarkable, how the controversy between the old Quakers and their contemporaries, turned mainly upon a question, agitated in the present day by thinkers very unlike the Quakers in many respects.
The two rules thus defined were regarded by this writer as requiring the rejection of the Anglican doctrine of the Trinity, and of the Puritan doctrines respecting Christ’s Atonement, as a satisfaction offered to God, and respecting the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.[503]
In consequence of what he said touching the Trinity, Penn was charged with not believing in the Divinity of Christ, and indeed was sent to prison on that account; but he clearly avows in his apology, entitled, Innocency with her Open Face, that Christ is God; for, he observes, if none can save or be properly styled a Saviour, but God, and yet Christ is said to save, and is properly called a Saviour, it must needs follow that Christ the Saviour is God. The strongest passage I have noticed in the writings of Penn in relation to the atonement is the following:—“That as there was a necessity that ‘One should die for the people,’ so, whoever, then or since, believed in Him, had and have a seal or confirmation of the remission of their sins in His blood; and that blood—alluding to the custom of the Jewish sacrifices—shall be an utter blotting out of former iniquities, carrying them as into a land of forgetfulness.”
The prominence which this Quaker Divine justly gave to the truth, that Christ saves from sin, is not associated with such ideas of justification as accord with Puritan standards. According to his own view, holiness is an integral part of that justification, which he seems to identify with man’s entire salvation.[504]
Penn, no doubt, misunderstood both Anglicans and Puritans, and in some cases his disputes turned very much upon the meaning of words, yet no one who attentively studies his works, can help seeing that there were real and momentous differences between the Quakers and their fellow Christians. Quakers, absorbed by their inward experiences, did not attach the importance which is due to the historical and dogmatic instructions of the sacred volume. Not that Quakers denied what is historical, but they often, like early mystical expositors—Origen, for example—overlaid it with fanciful meanings. Not that they neglected all dogmatic teaching, but they failed to bring out clearly some of the truths revealed in the New Testament, especially in the writings of the Apostle Paul. The bright side of Quakerism lies in the marked elevation of the moral above the intellectual, of the spiritual above the formal, of the Divine above the human, of the work of God above the work of man: and it is as a corollary from the master principle of the whole system, the principle of the inner light, rather than as a deduction from reason or from expediency, or even from Scripture, that there is contained in Quaker literature such a distinct enunciation of men’s right, universally, to the freedom of religious speech and of religious worship.[505]
QUAKERS.—WILLIAM PENN.
Liberty, in William Penn’s estimation, was identical with Christianity. Persecution he held to be thoroughly anti-Christian. Judging people by their conduct, not by their creed, esteeming meekness and charity as fruits of the Spirit, inseparable from true religion, he looked upon all persecutors, whether Churchmen or Separatists, whether sound or heterodox, as alienated from their Maker, and as enemies to their race.[506]
William Penn had an opportunity such as no other person amongst the authors we are now describing ever possessed, of testing his theory of religion and morals.
After travelling with George Fox over the Continent upon religious service, and after finding all hopes of liberty crushed at home, Penn in 1681 resolved to cross the Atlantic, and in America to realize the bright dreams which had entertained his imagination from a boy—dreams of “a free Colony for all mankind.” He landed on the banks of the Delaware, to try “the holy experiment.” Tradition tells of his receiving the enfeoffment of the territory, by delivery of earth and water to him, as he stood surrounded by Swedes, Dutch, and English, in the Court House of the Colonial town of Newcastle; and of his ascending the river, fringed with pine trees, to the spot where was to rise the City of Philadelphia, and of his treaty with the Indians under the autumn-tinted elm tree of Shakamaxon. “We meet,” he said to his new neighbours, the red-complexioned children of the forest, “on the broad pathway of good faith and good will, no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love. I will not call you children, for parents sometimes chide their children too severely; nor brothers only, for brothers differ. The friendship between you and me, I will not compare to a chain, for that the rains might rust, or the falling tree might break. We are the same, as if one man’s body were to be divided into two parts, we are all one flesh and blood.” Never had there been in the wild regions of the earth such colonizing as that before. “We will live,” said the red men, “in love with William Penn and his children, as long as the moon and the sun shall endure.” God was the sole witness of that covenant. Its only memorials were the strings of wampun which these covenanters hung up in their huts, and the shells they counted over upon a piece of bark; yet whilst other treaties amongst civilized Europeans have been torn into shreds as soon as they have been sealed, this has remained inviolate. “We have done better,” could the Colonists say, “than if, with the proud Spaniards, we had gained the mines of Potosi. We may make the ambitious heroes whom the world admires, blush for their shameful victories. To the poor dark souls round about us we teach their rights as men.” Penn visited the natives in their cabins, partook of their roasted acorns, laughed and played with the frolicksome, and spoke to them of God. “The poor savage people believed in God, and the soul, without the aid of metaphysics.”
The infant city, the Philadelphia, which in 1683 “consisted of three or four little cottages,” grew and spread, hollow trees were succeeded by houses. The chestnut, the walnut, and the ash were cut down for the use of the emigrants, roads were made, boys and girls played in the streets of this new Jerusalem, and the kindly-hearted Quaker, with his genial good-humoured face, with his broad-brimmed hat, his long neckcloth, and his drab attire, might be seen patting their heads with fatherly love.
William Penn, as a theologian, wrote books. William Penn, as a Christian philanthropist and statesman, did a work which surpassed his books. “How happy must be a community instituted on their principles,” said Peter the Great, speaking of the Quakers. “Beautiful,” cried Frederic the Great; “it is perfect, if it can endure.” It has endured.
QUAKERS.—BARCLAY.
Robert Barclay, a Scotch Friend, the son of Colonel David Barclay, of an ancient family, and of Catherine Gordon, of the ducal house of that name, published his famous Apology in 1676, two years after Penn had published The Christian a Quaker. With nothing like the flowing style of his English contemporary, he had a more robust understanding, a keener conception of what he meant to say, a still more logical method of treatment, and, without any show of learning, perhaps he had a deeper amount of scholarship, obtained during his education and residence in France. Barclay affords the student a great advantage wanting in Penn; whereas, in the case of Penn, we have to search through several treatises, extending to five volumes, in order to ascertain the beliefs which he inculcated, in Barclay they are brought together in their proper relation and proportions, and are compactly yet fully expressed. A remarkable coincidence of opinion appears between the two writers, although the intimacy between them does not seem to have commenced until after Barclay had written his Apology.
He strikes the same key-note as does his friend. The inward light is the true foundation of knowledge, and the Scriptures are not to be esteemed the principal ground of truth and knowledge, the primary rule of faith and manners. He maintains that there is universal redemption by Christ, and that the saving spiritual light enlighteneth every man. Christ is in all men a supernatural light or seed, beyond reason, above conscience, Vehiculum Dei: yet there is a great difference between Christ in the wicked, and Christ in the saints. He is quenched and crucified in the one; He is cherished and obeyed in the other.[507]
QUAKERS.—BARCLAY.
Barclay speaks of an outward redemption wrought for man by Christ in His crucified body, whereby we are made capable of salvation, and of an inward redemption wrought within us by the Spirit of Christ. “The first,” he says, “is the redemption performed and accomplished by Christ for us, in His crucified body, without us; the other is the redemption wrought by Christ in us, which no less properly is called and accounted a redemption than the former. The first, then, is that whereby a man as he stands in the fall, is put into a capacity of salvation, and hath conveyed unto him a measure of that power, virtue, spirit, life, and grace, that was in Christ Jesus, which, as the free gift of God, is able to counterbalance, overcome, and root out the evil seed, wherewith we are naturally, as in the fall, leavened. The second is that whereby we witness and know this pure and perfect redemption in ourselves, purifying, cleansing, and redeeming us from the power of corruption, and bringing us into unity, favour, and friendship with God. By the first of these two, we that were lost in Adam are so far reconciled to God by the death of His Son, while enemies, that we are put into a capacity of salvation, having the glad tidings of the Gospel of peace offered unto us; and God is reconciled unto us in Christ. By the second, we witness this capacity brought into act; whereby receiving, and not resisting, the purchase of His death, to wit, the light, Spirit, and grace of Christ revealed in us, we witness and possess, a real, true, and inward redemption from the power and prevalency of sin; and so come to be truly and really redeemed, justified, and made righteous, and to a sensible union and friendship with God. Thus He died for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity; and thus we know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death. This last follows the first in order, and is a consequence of it, proceeding from it, as an effect from its cause; for, as none could have enjoyed the last, without the first had been (such being the will of God); so also can none now partake of the first, but as he witnesseth the last. Wherefore, as to us, they are both causes of our justification; the first the procuring efficient, the other the formal cause.”[508]
Although in Barclay’s proposition concerning justification, he seems verbally to distinguish between that privilege and holiness of character, yet he really confounds them together. Nor does he scruple to style good works meritorious “in a qualified sense.” He takes care, however, distinctly to ascribe human salvation to the merit of the Lord Jesus Christ. In another proposition, he expresses his faith in perfection, defining it as a freedom from actual sinning, yet admitting a growth of goodness which, however, involves a possibility of sin.[509] The Calvinistic doctrine of perseverance he distinctly denies; and in the remainder of the treatise he unfolds the well-known Quaker views concerning the ministry, Divine worship, the sacraments, the power of the magistrate, and social intercourse.
There is remarkable breadth in the Quaker scheme of theology, it has singular affinities to other systems; and hence, in addition to its inherent amiable and loving spirit—which from the beginning rose above its fierce antagonism to existing Churches—the hold it has frequently gained upon the sympathies of Christians of different communions. Its relationship to all mystical forms of Christianity is obvious at a glance. Not less real is the resemblance between it and certain aspects of Latitudinarianism on the one side, and of Anglicanism on the other. The Quaker, like the Latitudinarian, dwells chiefly on the moral and spiritual side of the Gospel, eschews dogmatical teaching, sees a heavenly Teacher in every human soul, and looks for religious instruction beyond what written texts convey. He also, like the Anglican, treats Scripture as insufficient, taken alone; it is to both a rule, a supreme rule, but not the only one. The Quaker finds in his own breast the supplemental voice which the Anglican seeks in the ancient Church.
There were at that period other Mystics besides the Quakers. Indeed, our English theological literature of the seventeenth century is much richer in sentiment, speculation, and imagery of this kind, than many well-informed persons suppose.
OTHER MYSTICS.—SALTMARSH.
John Saltmarsh’s “Sparkles of Glory, or some beams of the Morning Star, wherein are many discoveries as to truth and peace, to the establishment and pure enlargement of a Christian in spirit and truth,” is a book of considerable power, written in a compact and lucid style, such as one rarely finds in works of this description. The author—without condemning water baptism, or the divers organized ministries of the Churches, or the institutes of Episcopacy, Presbyterianism, and Independency, as the Quakers were wont to do, but rather counting them as mere forms, full of weakness and defect, yet to be tolerated, as having subordinate and preparatory uses—dwells chiefly upon the passage from lower ministrations to higher, and expatiates with much delight upon the mystery of true Christian liberty from God, upon the glorious discoveries of the Spirit to the soul, and upon the revelation of Christ in us. The history of Christ’s life and death, with the new relationships in which those stupendous events place mankind to the Divine Being, and the grand doctrines embodied in the ancient Church creeds, are little, if at all, noticed in this mystical treatise. Religion is resolved entirely into the experience of a spiritual life. Personal responsibility, moral obligation, and individual duties, are not the subjects which attract the writer’s attention, his one chief idea throughout being, that the Christian soul is the passive, quiet, trustful recipient of grace and love. The highest prayer is a spiritual revelation. “All that we pray—and not the Spirit of God in us, not that spirit of prayer spoken of in Scripture—is but the spirit of man praying, which is but the cry of the creature, or a natural complaining for what we want, as the Ninevites, and the children and beasts of that city, all cried unto the Lord.” “That which is the pure, spiritual, comprehensive principle of a Christian is this:—That all outward administrations, whether as to religion, or to natural, civil, and moral things, are only the visible appearances of God, as to the world, or in this creation; or the clothing of God, being such forms and dispensations as God puts on amongst men to appear to them in: this is the garment the Son of God was clothed with down to the feet, or to His lowest appearance. And God doth not fix Himself upon any one form or outward dispensation, but at His own will and pleasure comes forth in such and such an administration, and goes out of it, and leaves it, and takes up another. And this is clear in all God’s proceedings with the world, both in the Jewish Church and State, and Christians now. And when God is gone out, and hath left such or such an administration, of what kind soever it is, be it religious, moral, or civil, such an administration is a desolate house, a temple whose veil is rent, a sun whose light is darkened; and to worship it then, is to worship an idol, an image, a form, without God, or any manifestation of God in it, save to him who (as Paul saith) knows an idol to be nothing. The pure, spiritual, comprehensive Christian, is one who grows up with God from administration to administration, and so walks with God in all his removes and spiritual increasings and flowings; and such are weak and in the flesh who tarry behind, worshipping that form or administration out of which God is departed.”[510]
OTHER MYSTICS.—STERRY.
Peter Sterry, one of Cromwell’s chaplains, is described as “a high-flown mystical Divine.” After being first much abused and then long neglected, he has of late been named with honour in high literary quarters. The Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the Soul of Man, is a publication in which the characteristics of the author’s mind and teaching may be fully seen. It consists of a series of sermons upon the words, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven;” the rise to the kingdom being conversion, the race to the kingdom being a life like that of little children, and the royalty itself being composed of the two states of present grace and future glory. The practice of minutely dividing and subdividing a discourse, until it becomes a thing of shreds and patches, is pushed in this instance to an intolerable extreme; and the breaking up of sentences into distinct paragraphs, with the carrying on of different sets of numbers from page to page, render the perusal of the book a tremendous task. Upon reading it, I find that the mysticism which it exhibits is of another order than that found in the pages of Saltmarsh. The substance of Saltmarsh’s thought is saturated with the spirit of mysticism, the whole nature and scope of his theology is mystical from head to foot; but the mysticism of Sterry strikes one as pertaining more to his imaginative forms of conception and modes of expression than to anything else. His doctrines of conversion and of religious life, of Christian experience, duty, and hope, are of the usual evangelical type, but his ideas are ever dressed in mystical phraseology. He quotes texts of Scripture in abundance, and then commonly runs out into some strain of allegorical interpretation. I will quote one passage, which, whilst a specimen of his style, is more than ordinarily impregnated with mysticism in the substance of the thought:—
“God comes into our nature, as the root of each single person. Here He becomes our Jesus, making Himself a new seed; out of this seed He brings forth a new image of Divinity, by which He breaks through the image of the devil and nature, brings forth man out of them, brings them into subjection to this growing beauty. As the fuel is dissolved into smoke, and the smoke again breaks up into flame, so the image of the devil riseth up out of the image of nature, shaking that to dust, as it riseth: the image of God, again, sprouts forth in the midst of the devil’s image, first spoiling, then triumphing over, and in both.
“God through nature, as the root, grows up into single persons, as the branches. Then as the shades of night fly away before the ascending day, so,—as this Divine seed our Jesus sends forth itself in an image of beauty through our souls,—the image of darkness and death sinks down into its own place, and principle.”[511]
To Sterry’s book on The Kingdom of God an introduction is prefixed, written by Jeremy White, who had been chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and who lived in private after the Restoration, preaching but occasionally. White sympathized in the mysticism of Sterry, and, in the following beautiful passage, uttered truths well worth the serious consideration of all spiritually-minded people, especially of those who are disposed to undervalue, perhaps to ridicule, thoughts imbued with mystic elements:—
“Who among us is yet able to comprehend all the distinct ages and growths of good minds; to understand the various improvements, measures, and attainments, the several capacities, languages, and operations which are peculiar to those ages and growths? It is impossible for us to set the bounds to spiritual things, to stint that spirit in ourselves or others which is a fountain of Divine light and life in all regenerated souls, continually sending forth new streams, and running along with a fresh succession of waters without any stop or limit. We are too proud to understand the condescensions, too low to take the height, too shallow to fathom the depth, too narrow to measure the breadth, too short to reach the length of the Divine truth and goodness, and the various communications of themselves to us. We cannot assign the highest or the lowest state of saints whilst they are here below. We cannot say, All above this is fancy, whimsey, dream, and delusion; all below that is common, carnal, formal, and superstitious. As we ought not, then, to despise and contemn that which is below, so let us not censure and condemn that which is above us. Blessed be God, all good souls, in the midst of their greatest distances from one another here below, do all meet in the Divine comprehension above. We are all enfolded in the Divine arms, we are all encircled in the Divine love. That has breadth, and length, and depth, and height enough to reach and hold us all. And if we cannot yet receive and embrace each other in our several ages, growths, measures, and attainments, it is because we have little, low, dark, narrow, and contracted hearts, feel but little of the love of Christ, and are no more filled with that Spirit which is the spring, the centre, the circle, the band to all good spirits in heaven and on earth.”
Jeremy White was a follower of Origen in his views of the ultimate safety and happiness of the whole universe, and he wrote a book,—published after his death,—the title of which sums up his theory: he calls it “The Restoration of all Things, or a vindication of the goodness and grace of God, to be manifested at last, in the recovery of the whole creation out of their fall.”
OTHER MYSTICS.—SIR HENRY VANE.
Sir Henry Vane is numbered amongst English Mystics, but he was more of the mystical philosopher than the mystical theologian, and the same may be said, to some extent, of Henry More; but the profession of the latter, as a clergyman, naturally directed his attention to Divinity properly so called, and how his mystical views influenced his religious life and character, will be shown in a subsequent portion of this volume.