CHAPTER I.
Is virtue then, unless of Christian growth,
Mere fallacy, or foolishness, or both?
Ten thousand sages lost in endless woe,
For ignorance of what they could not know?
That speech betrays at once a bigot’s tongue;
Charge not a God with such outrageous wrong.
Truly not I—the partial light men have,
My creed persuades me, well employed, may save;
While he that scorns the noonday beam, perverse,
Shall find the blessing, unimproved, a curse.
Cowper.
One morning, Willoughby, calling on Atherton, found him and Gower looking over an old-fashioned little volume.
Willoughby. What have you there, Atherton?
Atherton. A curious old book—The History of Hai Ebn Yokhdan, by Abu Jaafer Ebn Tophail—an Arabian philosopher of Spain, writing in the twelfth or thirteenth century: ‘done into English’ by Simon Ockley.
Gower (to Willoughby). I happened to be looking through Barclay’s Apology—found him referring to this History of Yokhdan; and, behold, Atherton fetches me down, from one of his topmost dust-of-erudition strata there, the very book. It appears that good Barclay was so hard put to it, to find examples for the support of his doctrine concerning the Universal and Saving Light, that he has pressed this shadowy philosophical romance into the service, as an able-bodied unexceptionable fact:—sets up a fanciful ornament from the Moorish arabesques of Toledo as a bulwark for his theory.
Willoughby. Who, then, may this Hai Ebn Yokhdan be?
Atherton. Simply a mystical Robinson Crusoe. The book relates how a child was exposed in an ark upon the sea, drifted to a Fortunate Island in the Indian Ocean, was there suckled by a roe, dresses himself with skins and feathers, builds a hut, tames a horse, rises to the discovery of ‘One supreme and necessarily self-existent Being,’ and does, at last, by due abstinence and exclusion of all external objects, attain to a mystical intuition of Him—a contemplation of the divine essence, and a consciousness that his own essence, thus lost in God, is itself divine:—all this, by the unaided inner Light. A Mussulman hermit who is landed on the island, there to retire from mankind, finds him; teaches him to speak; and discovers, to his devout amazement, that this Ebn Yokhdan has attained, first by deduction from the external world, and then, abandoning that, by immediate intuition, to the very truth concerning God which he has learnt through the medium of the Koran—the tee-totum mysticism of spinning dervishes included.[[374]]
Gower. Barclay, citing his Arab, points the moral as teaching ‘that the best and most certain knowledge of God, is not that which is attained by premises premised, and conclusions deduced; but that which is enjoyed by conjunction of the Mind of Man with the Supreme Intellect, after the mind is purified from its corruption and is separated from all bodily images, and is gathered into a profound stillness.’[[375]]
Willoughby. And the simple-hearted apologist of the Friends never suspected that this story was a philosopher’s conjecture—Abu Tophail’s ideal of what the inner light might be supposed to teach a man, in total seclusion?
Atherton. Not he. At any rate, Yokhdan figures in the first half-dozen editions of the Apology. I believe, in none later.
Gower. A curious sight, to see the Arabian Sufi and the English Quaker keeping company so lovingly.
Willoughby. And yet how utterly repugnant to our English natures, that contemplative Oriental mysticism.
Gower. In practice, of course. But in the theory lies a common ground.
Atherton. Our island would be but a spare contributor to a general exhibition of mystics. The British cloister has not one great mystical saint to show. Mysticism did not, with us, prepare the way for the Reformation. John Wycliffe and John Tauler are a striking contrast in this respect. In the time of the Black Death, the Flagellants could make no way with us. Whether coming as gloomy superstition, as hysterical fervour, or as pantheistic speculation, mysticism has found our soil a thankless one.
Gower. I should like to catch a Hegelian, in good condition, well nourished with the finest of thrice-bolted philosophic grain, duly ignorant of England, and shut him up to determine, from the depths of his consciousness, what would be the form which mysticism must necessarily assume among us.
Atherton. He would probably be prepared to prove to us à priori that we could not possibly evolve such a product at all.
Gower. Most likely. The torches of the Bacchantes, flung into the Tiber, were said still to burn; but what whirling enthusiast’s fire could survive a plunge into the Thames? There could be nothing for it but sputtering extinction, and then to float—a sodden lump of pine and pitch, bobbing against the stolid sides of barges.
Willoughby. The sage might be pardoned for prophesying that our mysticism would appear in some time of religious stagnation—a meteoric flash spasmodically flinging itself this way and that, startling with its radiance deep slimy pools, black rich oozing reaches of plurality and sinecure. Remembering the very practical mysticism of the Munster Anabaptists, he might invest our mystical day-star with such ‘trains of fire and dews of death;’ or depict it as a shape of terror, like his who ‘drew Priam’s curtain at the dead of night;’ heralding horrors; and waking every still cathedral close to dread the burning fate that befell, ‘the topless towers of Ilium.’
Atherton. It certainly would have been hard to foresee that mysticism in England would arise just when it did—would go so far, and no farther:—that in the time of the Commonwealth, when there was fuller religious freedom by far, and, throughout the whole middle class, a more earnest religious life than at any former period of our history,—when along the ranks of triumphant Puritanism the electric light of enthusiasm played every here and there upon the steel which won them victory, and was beheld with no ominous misgiving, but hailed rather as Pentecostal effluence,—that, at such a juncture, Quakerism should have appeared to declare this liberty insufficiently free, this spirituality too carnal, this enthusiasm too cold,—to profess to eject more thoroughly yet the world, the flesh, and the devil,—to take its place in the confused throng contending about the ‘bare-picked bone’ of Hierarchy, and show itself not to be tempted for a moment by wealth, by place, by power,—to commit many follies, but never a single crime,—to endure enumerable wrongs, but never to furnish one example of resistance or revenge.
Willoughby. Well done, old England! It is gratifying to think that, on our shores, mysticism itself is less fantastic than its wont,—labours benignly, if not always soberly; and is represented, not by nightmared visionaries, or fury-driven persecutors, but by the holy, tender-hearted, much-enduring George Fox. The Muggletonians, Fifth-Monarchy men, and Ranters of those days were the exceptional mire and dirt cast up by the vexed times, but assuredly not the representatives of English mysticism.
Atherton. The elements of Quakerism lie all complete in the personal history of Fox; and the religious sect is, in many respects, the perpetuation of his individual character;—the same intellectual narrowness, incident to an isolated, half-disciplined mind, and the same large, loving heart of charity for all men. Remember how he describes himself as ‘knowing pureness and righteousness at eleven years of age;’ carefully brought up, so that from his childhood all vice and profaneness were an abomination to him. Then there were his solitary musings and sore inward battles, as he walked about his native Drayton many nights by himself: his fastings oft; his much walking abroad in solitary spots many days; his sitting, with his Bible, in hollow trees and lonesome places, till night came on. Because the religious teachers to whom he applied in his temptations to despair were unhappily incompetent to administer relief, he concludes too hastily that the system of ministerial instruction is more often a hindrance than a help to ‘vital godliness.’ Because ‘priest Stevens’ worked up some of his remarks in conversation into his next Sunday’s sermon,—because the ‘ancient priest’ at Mansetter, to whom he next applied, could make nothing of him, and in despair recommended tobacco and psalm-singing (furthermore violating his confidence, and letting young George’s spiritual distresses get wind among a bevy of giggling milk-lasses),—because, after travelling seven miles to a priest of reputed experience at Tamworth, he found him after all ‘but like an empty hollow cask,’—because horticultural Dr. Cradock of Coventry fell into a passion with him for accidentally trampling on the border of his flower-bed,—because one Macham, a priest in high account, offered him physic and prescribed blood-letting,—therefore the institution of a clerical order was an error and a mischief, mainly chargeable with the disputings of the church, and the ungodliness of the world. So, in his simplicity, he regarded it as a momentous discovery to have it opened to him ‘that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ.’[[376]]
Gower. We may hold that without joining the Society of Friends.
Atherton. In like manner he argues that because believers are the temple of the Spirit, and many venerate places superstitiously, or identify church-going with religion, therefore ‘steeple-houses’ are a sinful innovation, diffusing, for the most part, darkness rather than light. Because it appeared to him that in his study of the Scriptures he knew Christ ‘only as the light grew’—by inward revelation—‘as he that hath the key did open,’ therefore the doctrine of the inward Light is proclaimed to all as the central principle of Redemption.
Gower. True. This proneness to extremes has led his followers often to attach undue importance to the mere externals of a protest against externalism. Those peculiarities of dress and speech are petty formalities unworthy of their main principle. In his ‘Epistle to gathered Churches into outward forms upon the Earth,’ Fox can see scarce a vestige of spiritual religion anywhere beyond the pale of the Society of Friends.
Atherton. Yet ascetic and narrow on many points as he unquestionably was, and little disposed to make concession to human weakness, in practical charity he was most abundant. Oppression and imprisonment awakened the benevolent, never the malevolent impulses of his nature,—only adding fervour to his plea for the captive and the oppressed. His tender conscience could know no fellowship with the pleasures of the world; his tender heart could know no weariness in seeking to make less its sum of suffering. He is a Cato-Howard. You see him in his early days, refusing to join in the festivities of the time called Christmas; yet, if a stranger to the mirth, never to the mercy, of that kindly season. From house to house he trudges in the snow, visiting poor widows, and giving them money. Invited to marriage merry-makings, he will not enter the house of feasting; but the next day, or soon after, we find him there, offering, if the young couple are poor, the effectual congratulation of pecuniary help. In the prison-experiences of George Fox are to be found the germs of that modern philanthropy in which his followers have distinguished themselves so nobly. In Derby Jail he is ‘exceedingly exercised’ about the proceedings of the judges and magistrates—concerning their putting men to death for cattle, and money, and small matters,—and is moved to write to them, showing the sin of such severity; and, moreover, ‘what an hurtful thing it was that prisoners should lie so long in jail; how that they learned badness one of another in talking of their bad deeds; and therefore speedy justice should be done.’[[377]]
Willoughby. How the spirit of benevolence pervades all the Journals of the early Friends. Look at John Woolman, who will neither write nor have letters written to him by post, because the horses are overwrought, and the hardships of the postboys so great. When farthest gone in rhapsody, this redeeming characteristic was never wanting to the Quakers. It may be said of some of them, as was said of dying Pope—uttering, between his wanderings, only kindness—‘humanity seems to have outlasted understanding.’
Atherton. As to doctrine, again, consider how much religious extravagance was then afloat, and let us set it down to the credit of Fox that his mystical excesses were no greater. At Coventry he finds men in prison for religion who declared, to his horror, that they were God. While at Derby, a soldier who had been a Baptist, comes to him from Nottingham, and argues that Christ and the prophets suffered no one of them externally, only internally. Another company, he says, came to him there, who professed to be triers of spirits, and when he questioned them, ‘were presently up in the airy mind,’ and said he was mad. The priests and magistrates were not more violent against him than the Ranters, who roved the country in great numbers, professing to work miracles, forbidding other enthusiasts to preach, on pain of damnation; and in comparison with whom, Fox was soberness itself. Rice Jones, the Ranter, from Nottingham, prophesies against him with his company. At Captain Bradford’s house, Ranters come from York to wrangle with him. In the Peak country they oppose him, and ‘fall a-swearing.’ At Swanington, in Leicestershire, they disturb the meeting—hound on the mob against the Friends; they sing, whistle, and dance; but their leaders are confounded everywhere by the power of the Lord, and many of their followers, says the Journal, ’were reached and convinced, and received the Spirit of God; and are come to be a pretty people, living and walking soberly in the truth of Christ.’[[378]] Such facts should be remembered in our estimate. Fox’s inner light does not profess to supersede, nor does it designedly contradict, the external light of Revelation.
But hand me his Journal a moment. Here is a curious passage. It shows what a narrow escape Fox had of being resolved into an English Jacob Behmen.
He says, ‘Now (he was about four-and-twenty at the time) was I come up in spirit, through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness and innocency and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus; so that I say I was come up to the state of Adam which he was in before he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me how all things had their names given them, according to their nature and virtue. And I was at a stand in my mind whether I should practise physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures were so opened to me by the Lord. But I was immediately taken up in spirit to see into another or more stedfast state than Adam’s in innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus, that should never fall. And the Lord showed me that such as were faithful to Him in the power and light of Christ, should come up into that state in which Adam was before he fell; in which the admirable works of the creation, and the virtues thereof may be known, through the openings of that divine word of wisdom and power by which they were made. Great things did the Lord lead me into, and wonderful depths were opened unto me, beyond what can by words be declared; but as people come into subjection to the Spirit of God, and grow up in the image and power of the Almighty, they may receive the word of wisdom that opens all things, and come to know the hidden unity in the Eternal Being.‘[[379]]
Here he has arrived on life’s road where two ways meet;—had he taken the wrong alternative, and wandered down that shadowy and mysterious theosophic avenue, ignorant that it was no thoroughfare, what a different history! Imagine the intrepid, heart-searching preacher—the redoubted ‘man in leather breeches’—transformed into the physician, haply peruked and habited in black, dispensing inspired prescriptions, and writing forgotten treatises on Qualities and Signatures, Sympathies and Antipathies. What a waste of that indomitable energy!
Willoughby. How destructive to human life might his very benevolence have proved.
Gower. Whatever direction the mysticism of a man like Fox might have taken, it must have been always actively benevolent. His mysticism is simple—no artificial stages of abstraction, mounting step by step above the finite, to a solitary superhuman sanctity. It is beneficent—his many and various spiritual distresses were permitted by God, he tells us, ‘in order that he might have a sense of all conditions—how else should he speak to all conditions?‘[[380]]
Willoughby. Truly, metaphysical refinements and Platonic abstraction could have no charm for this most practical of mystics. What a contrast here is his pietism to that of Zinzendorf—as abundant in sentiment as Fox is devoid of it.
Gower. Nicholas of Basle is more like Fox than any of the German mystics—much more so than Tauler.
Atherton. Fox is, as you say, eminently practical in one sense, yet not enough so in another. In one respect Behmen and Law are more practical than he, because more comprehensive. They endeavour to infuse a higher spiritual life into forms and communities already existing. Fox will have no steeple-houses, vestments, forms of prayer, no ministry, regularly paid and highly educated. Such a code is not practical, for it rests on an abstraction: it does not legislate for men as they are. Formalism does not lie in these outward things themselves—it consists in the spirit in which they are used. Here, you see, the mystic, who will always go beneath the surface to the reality, is too superficial. Formalism cannot be expelled by any such summary process. The evil lies deeper.
Willoughby. So with the asceticism of the Friends. The worldly spirit is too subtile to be exorcised by a strict outward separation between church and world. How much easier is total abstinence from scenes of amusement than temperance in money-getting.
Gower. Yet I know men and women who pique themselves on their separateness from the world, because they were never seen at a concert, whose covetousness, insincerity, or censorious speech, proclaim them steeped in worldliness to the very lips.
Willoughby. What say you, Atherton, to the doctrine of the Universal Light? In their theory on this matter the mystics seem to divide into two classes. With the mystics of the fourteenth century there is still left in fallen man a native tendency Godward, on which grace lays hold. With Behmen and Fox, on the contrary, the inward Seed is a supernatural gift, distinct from conscience, reason, or any relics of natural goodness—the hidden word of promise, inspoken into all men, in virtue of the redeeming work of Christ.[[381]]
Atherton. I do not believe that fallen man required a divine bestowment of this kind—a supernatural soul within the soul, to give him a moral sense, and make him responsible. But I am so far a believer in the doctrine that I would not go beyond what is written, and rigidly confine all the benefits of Christ’s redemption to those only who have had access to the Christian Scriptures. The words of the Apostle are still applicable,—‘Is he the God of the Jews only, is he not of the Gentiles also?’ I cannot suppose that all Pagan minds, past and present, have been utterly and for ever abandoned by the Divine Spirit, because the dispensation under which they have been placed is so much less privileged than our own. God has light enough to be Himself, in the twilight, even as in the noonday. Did He rule the rising and falling of ancient nations, working all things toward the fulness of time;—did He care for the bodies of those heathen, with seedtime and harvest for his witness, and shall we suppose that He debarred Himself from all access to their souls?
Willoughby. Yet no doctrine we can hold on this question materially lessens the mystery of that dark fact—the prevalence of Evil.
Atherton. I am afraid not. Whether we call that better part of man the light of nature, conscience, or the internal Word, we must admit that it accomplished next to nothing for the restoration of the vast majority. We must not judge of the moral effects of heathendom by the philosophic few merely; we must remember the state of the superstitious many. And mysticism will be the first to admit that an inoperative Christ (like that of the Antinomian, for example) is a deceptive phantom or a vain formula.
Our own position, however, is the same, let our theory or our hope, concerning others, be what it may. Whatever it may be possible (under the constitution of our nature) for the Spirit of God to make known inwardly to that man who is shut out from external teaching, it is quite certain that we shall receive no inward communications of gracious influence, while we neglect those outward means which are of divine appointment.
Note to page 300.
The full title of the work referred to runs as follows: The Improvement of Human Reason, exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokhdan: written in Arabick about 500 years ago, by Abn Jaafer Ebn Tophail. In which is demonstrated by what methods one may, by the mere Light of Nature, attain the knowledge of things Natural and supernatural; more particularly the knowledge of God and the affairs of another Life. Newly translated from the original Arabick by Simon Ockley, &c. 1708.
Ockley adds an Appendix, to guard the book from abuse by the Quakers, wherein he proposes to examine ‘the fundamental error’ of his author—viz. that ‘God has given such a power or faculty to man whereby he may, without any external means, attain to the knowledge of all things necessary to salvation, and even to the Beatifick Vision itself, whilst in the state.’
The following is a specimen of the mystical progress which our Arabian Defoe describes his Crusoe as making,—precisely that with which Ebn Tophail was well acquainted, but which no real solitary Ebn Yokhdan could ever have struck out for himself.
‘He began, therefore, to strip himself of all bodily properties, which he had made some progress in before, during the time of the former exercise, when he was employed in the imitation of the heavenly bodies; but there still remained a great many relicks, as his circular motion (motion being one of the most proper attributes of body), and his care of animals and plants, compassion upon them, and industry in removing whatever inconvenienced them. Now, all these things belong to corporeal attributes, for he could not see these things at first, but by corporeal faculties; and he was obliged to make use of the same faculties in preserving them. Therefore he began to reject and remove all those things from himself, as being in nowise consistent with that state which he was now in search of. So he continued, after confining himself to rest in the bottom of his cave, with his head bowed down and his eyes shut, and turning himself altogether from all sensible things and the corporeal faculties, and bending all his thoughts and meditations upon the necessarily self-existent Being, without admitting anything else besides him; and if any other object presented itself to his imagination, he rejected it with his utmost force; and exercised himself in this, and persisted in it to that degree, that sometimes he did neither eat nor stir for a great many days together. And whilst he was thus earnestly taken up in contemplation, sometimes all manner of beings whatsoever would be quite out of his mind and thoughts, except his own being only.
‘But he found that his own being was not excluded from his thoughts; no, not at such times when he was most deeply immersed in the contemplation of the first, true, necessarily self-existent Being; which concerned him very much,—for he knew that even this was a mixture in this simple vision, and the admission of an extraneous object in that contemplation. Upon which he endeavoured to disappear from himself, and be wholly taken up in the vision of that true Being; till at last he attained it; and then both the heavens and the earth, and whatsoever is between them, and all spiritual forms, and corporeal faculties, and all those powers which are separate from matter, and all those beings which know the necessarily self-existent Being, all disappeared and vanished, and were as if they had never been; and amongst these his own being disappeared too, and there remained nothing but this one, true, perpetually self-existent Being, who spoke thus in that saying of his (which is not a notion superadded to his essence):—“To whom now belongs the kingdom? To this One, Almighty God.”[[382]] Which words of his Hai Ebn Yokhdan understood and heard his voice; nor was his being unacquainted with words, and not being able to speak, any hindrance at all to the understanding him. Wherefore he deeply immersed himself into this state, and witnessed that which neither eye hath seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive.’—§§ 83, 84.