In individualism lurks a danger against which no revelation can absolutely secure us. I may transgress its prescribed limitations and become excessive. It may strive after independence from its Creator and put forth its hands to forbidden fruit. It may assume prerogatives which the divine Being reserves to himself. It may substitute its own imaginings and volitions for voices of God, and displace that real spirituality which only the Holy Ghost can create with an auto-spiritualism which is deceptive, illusory, and specious, the precursor of spiritual and intellectual anarchy.
Our Lord gave warning of this peril when, predicting the trials which should come, he said, “There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.” Paul foresaw it, saying to the Ephesian elders, “Of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to drawaway disciples after them.” It was this which led John to write, “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”
The writer of the Revelation had no need to go beyond his own memory to find symptoms of this spirit. Already it had begun to manifest itself in the apostolic Church. Simon Magus was a conspicuous but not solitary example. In the epistles to the seven churches there are cautions against “the Nicolaitans” and “the woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess,” very distinct from those which denounce the pleasures or the persecutions of the world. In the ante-Nicene age gnosticism, with its pretensions to a theosophy more profound, a knowledge more extensive and exact, a code of ethics more consistent, and a self-denial more rigid than those of the faithful, was a more dangerous adversary than the Roman empire; and we who appreciate the skillfulness of its specious arguments realize that nothing but the providence of God carried the artless and unsuspicious Church safely through the peril.[¹] And throughout the ages since there has been a continuous reappearance of this spirit, sometimes within, sometimes outside the Church; not always avowedly antagonistic to Christianity, but assuming to be a more perfect form of it; not impugning the authority of the Scriptures, but claiming to possess deeper views of their esoteric meaning; not openly subverting the foundations of morals, but superseding them by a show of a more austere and uncompromising sanctimoniousness. It so puts on the appearance of a lamb that its dragon nature is hard to detect. It has cropped out in Manichæism, in Paulicianism, in Albigensianism, among hermits and pillar saints, among pietists, mystics, occultists, and other professors of a strained and exalted perfection and illumination to which only the elect initiate can aspire, and from which the common masses of believers are excluded.
[¹] Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria, Bampton Lectures, 1886, lecture i, p. 35; Harnack, History of Dogma, book i, chapter iv.
It is hard to describe this spirit by a single name. It wears so many forms that no one word can comprehend all of them. Even the apostolic pen failed to depict this adversary clearly or sketch its outline with distinctness. Deceit seems to be the pervading and controlling element of its being, and to affect both substance and form. But it has as its usual accompaniment one mark which it stamps upon its devotees—a scrupulous and rigid asceticism which deludes itself with the hope of emancipation from the necessary conditions of earthly life, which denounces as sinful things proper in themselves, simply because they are natural or secular, and which aims at the profitless and impracticable task of anticipating in this life the celestial state of disembodied spirits. No creature can ever with impunity contravene the laws imposed upon his nature. The abnormal and excessive development of one side of man’s constitution is sure to involve a corresponding atrophy of some other side, and thus the sins excluded by one system of defenses find entrance through some other avenue left unguarded. And the constant result of asceticism has been in the end to revive with new power the worldliness it aimed to destroy; so that in this sense the second beast gives “life” and breath “unto the image” of the first. For the termination of all hyperspiritualism has been either in an arrogant self-exaltation, the very opposite of Christian humility and love, or in an antinomianism which, under the affectation of liberty, gives loose rein to sensualism.
To the question, which thus becomes of vital importance, How shall we “try the spirits” to know “whether they are of God”? John has elsewhere furnished a sufficient answer: “Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world” (1 John iv, 2, 3).
The central principle of all asceticism, in whatever form, and whether perceived and acknowledged or not, is that matter is essentially evil and spirit essentially good. It is in the contact of soul with body and of spirit with matter that sin lies. Holiness, therefore, means only the diminution or destruction of this contact. All bodily desires, activities, and enjoyments, if they cannot be annihilated, must be reduced to the minimum, that thereby the ascendency of the spirit may be gained and maintained. Thus human nature is mutilated to half its capacities. Religion becomes only a “concision,” not a process of transformation. The problem of redemption is no longer the moral one of the salvation of the soul from the guilt and pollution of sin, but the metaphysical one of the liberation of the spirit from matter.[¹] By such as hold this view of things the assumption by the Son of God of the likeness of sinful flesh, his birth, his fellowship with earthly conditions and experiences, can never be fully accepted; his crucifixion is attenuated into a figure of speech or becomes a mere parable, and cannot be the necessary means of our salvation.
[¹] Möller, History of the Christian Church, vol. i, pp. 152, 153. New York, Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1892.
Against such a theory the Revelation is one long protest. Its keynote is salvation through “the Lamb that was slain.” Nor does anything prove so conclusively that John was the author of the Apocalypse as the fact that in it, in the fourth gospel, and in the epistles which bear his name, the central and fundamental truth was the same: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us;” and, “This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.”
The acquisition of knowledge depends as much upon a right method as upon an earnest purpose. Alphabets must be mastered before sentences can be read. No one can understand the higher mathematics who has not been grounded in the fundamental axioms. And one of the axioms of the spiritual life is that the Holy Spirit cannot be given until Jesus is glorified (John vii, 39). Whoever does not accept, with all implied therein, the exemplary earthly life and the atoning and sacrificial death of the Son of God may well pause to reflect whether the spirit which leads and moves him is indeed the Spirit of God, or whether it is not the spirit of evil and untruth. We may not set limits to the spiritual flights of which the soul is capable, but it must have a solid basis from which to start; otherwise it wastes its strength in aimless wanderings amid mazy fogs and vagaries.