This seems to be the plain outcome of the teaching. What is it, mutatis mutandis, but the sermon “cold-blooded” or not, which every righteous soldier has to preach to himself, day by day, as long as his duty commands him to kill his human brothers?
Yet the fact is undeniable that Hindoo Mysticism has failed of practical result—that it has died down into brutal fakeerism. We look in vain, however, in Mr. Vaughan’s chapter for an explanation of this fact, save his assertion, which we deny, that Hindoo Mysticism was in essence and at its root wrong and rotten. Mr. Maurice (“Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy,” p. 46) seems to point to a more charitable solution. “The Hindoo,” he says, “whatsoever vast discovery he may have made at an early period of a mysterious Teacher near him, working on his spirit, who is at the same time Lord over nature, began the search from himself—he had no other point from whence to begin—and therefore it ended in himself. The purification of his individual soul became practically his highest conceivable end; to carry out that he must separate from society. Yet the more he tries to escape self the more he finds self; for what are his thoughts about Brahm, his thoughts about Krishna, save his own thoughts? Is Brahm a projection of his own soul? To sink in him, does it mean to be nothing? Am I, after all, my own law? And hence the downward career into stupid indifferentism, even into Antinomian profligacy.”
The Hebrew, on the other hand, begins from the belief of an objective external God, but One who cares for more than his individual soul; as One who is the ever-present guide, and teacher, and ruler of his whole nation; who regards that nation as a whole, a one person, and that not merely one present generation, but all, past or future, as a one “Israel”—lawgivers, prophets, priests, warriors. All classes are His ministers. He is essentially a political deity, who cares infinitely for the polity of a nation, and therefore bestows one upon them—“a law of Jehovah.” Gradually, under this teaching, the Hebrew rises to the very idea of an inward teacher, which the Yogi had, and to a far purer and clearer form of that idea; but he is not tempted by it to selfish individualism, or contemplative isolation, as long as he is true to the old Mosaic belief, that this being is the Political Deity, “the King of Kings.” The Pharisee becomes a selfish individualist just because he has forgotten this; the Essene, a selfish “mystic” for the same reason; Philo and the Jewish mystics of Alexandria lose in like manner all notion that Jehovah is the lawgiver, and ruler, and archetype of family and of national life. Christianity retained the idea; it brought out the meaning of the old Jewish polity in its highest form; for that very reason it was able to bring out the meaning of the “mystic” idea in its highest form also, without injury to men’s work as members of families, as citizens, as practical men of the world; and so to conquer at last that Manichæan hatred of marriage and parentage, which from the first to the sixteenth century shed its Upas shade over the Church.
And here let us say boldly to Mr. Vaughan and to our readers: As long as “the salvation of a man’s own soul” is set forth in all pulpits as the first and last end and aim of mortal existence; as long as Christianity is dwelt on merely as influencing individuals each apart—as “brands plucked, one here and another there, from the general burning”—so long will Mysticism, in its highest form be the refuge of the strongest spirits, and in its more base and diseased forms the refuge of the weak and sentimental spirits. They will say, each in his own way: “You confess that there can be a direct relation, communion, inspiration, from God to my soul, as I sit alone in my chamber. You do not think that there is such between God and what you call the world; between Him and nations as wholes—families, churches, schools of thought, as wholes; that He does not take a special interest, or exercise a special influence, over the ways and works of men—over science, commerce, civilisation, colonisation, all which affects the earthly destinies of the race. All these you call secular; to admit His influence over them for their own sake (though of course He overrules them for the sake of His elect) savours of Pantheism. Is it so? Then we will give up the world. We will cling to the one fact which you confess to be certain about us—that we can take refuge in God, each in the loneliness of his chamber, from all the vain turmoil of a race which is hastening heedless into endless misery. You may call us Mystics, or what you will. We will possess our souls in patience, and turn away our eyes from vanity. We will commune with our own hearts in solitude, and be still. We will not even mingle in your religious world, the world which you have invented for yourselves, after denying that God’s human world is sacred; for it seems to us as full of intrigue, ambition, party-spirit, falsehood, bitterness, and ignorance, as the political world, or the fashionable world, or the scientific world; and we will have none of it. Leave us alone with God.”
This has been the true reason of mystical isolation in every age and country. So thought Macarius and the Christian fakeers of the Thebaid. So thought the medieval monks and nuns. So thought the German Quietists when they revolted from the fierce degradation of decaying Lutheranism. So are hundreds thinking now; so may thousands think ere long. If the individualising phase of Christianity which is now dominant shall long retain its ascendancy, and the creed of Dr. Cumming and Mr. Spurgeon become that of the British people, our purest and noblest spirits will act here, with regard to religion, as the purest and noblest in America have acted with regard to politics. They will withdraw each into the sanctuary of his own heart, and leave the battle-field to rival demagogues. They will do wrong, it may be. Isolation involves laziness, pride, cowardice; but if sober England, during the next half-century, should be astonished by an outburst of Mysticism, as grand in some respects, as fantastic in others, as that of the thirteenth or the seventeenth centuries, the blame, if blame there be, will lie with those leaders of the public conscience who, after having debased alike the Church of England and the dissenting sects with a selfish individualism which was as foreign to the old Cromwellite Ironside as to the High Church divine, have tried to debar their disciples from that peaceful and graceful Mysticism which is the only excusable or tolerable form, of religion beginning and ending in self.
Let it be always borne in mind, that Quakerism was not a protest against, or a revulsion from, the Church of England, but from Calvinism. The steeple-houses, against which George Fox testified, were not served by Henry Mores, Cudworths, or Norrises: not even by dogmatist High-Churchmen, but by Calvinist ministers, who had ejected them. George Fox developed his own scheme, such as it was, because the popular Protestantism of his day failed to meet the deepest wants of his heart; because, as he used to say, it gave him “a dead Christ,” and he required “a living Christ.” Doctrines about who Christ is, he held, are not Christ Himself. Doctrines about what He has done for man, are not He himself. Fox held, that if Christ be a living person, He must act (when He acted) directly on the most inward and central personality of him, George Fox; and his desire was satisfied by the discovery of the indwelling Logos, or rather by its re-discovery, after it had fallen into oblivion for centuries. Whether he were right or wrong, he is a fresh instance of a man’s arriving, alone and unassisted, at the same idea at which Mystics of all ages and countries have arrived: a fresh corroboration of our belief, that there must be some reality corresponding to a notion which has manifested itself so variously, and among so many thousands of every creed, and has yet arrived, by whatsoever different paths, at one and the same result.
That he was more or less right—that there is nothing in the essence of Mysticism contrary to practical morality, Mr. Vaughan himself fully confesses. In his fair and liberal chapters on Fox and the Early Quakers, he does full justice to their intense practical benevolence; to the important fact that Fox only lived to do good, of any and every kind, as often as a sorrow to be soothed, or an evil to be remedied, crossed his path. We only wish that he had also brought in the curious and affecting account of Fox’s interview with Cromwell, in which he tells us (and we will take Fox’s word against any man) that the Protector gave him to understand, almost with tears, that there was that in Fox’s faith which he was seeking in vain from the “ministers” around him.
All we ask of Mr. Vaughan is, not to be afraid of his own evident liking for Fox; of his own evident liking for Tauler and his school; not to put aside the question which their doctrines involve, with such half-utterances as—
The Quakers are wrong, I think, in separating particular movements and monitions as Divine. But, at the same time, the “witness of the Spirit,” as regards our state before God, is something more, I believe, than the mere attestation to the written word.
As for the former of these two sentences, he may be quite right, for aught we know. But it must be said on the other hand, that not merely Quakers, but decent men of every creed and age, have—we may dare to say, in proportion to their devoutness—believed in such monitions; and that it is hard to see how any man could have arrived at the belief that a living person was working on him, and not a mere impersonal principle, law, or afflatus—(spirit of the universe, or other metaphor for hiding materialism)—unless by believing, rightly or wrongly, in such monitions. For our only inductive conception of a living person demands that that person shall make himself felt by separate acts.