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:—