Willoughby. It is the less of two evils, perhaps; but, let divines say what they will, men cannot abjure self as such a doctrine requires. Man may ask it of his fellow-men, but God does not require it of them, when he tells them He would have all men to be saved. That inalienable desire of individual well-being, to which God appeals, these theologians disdain.
Gower. But man comes into this world to live for something higher than happiness.
Willoughby. That depends on what you mean by the word. Of course, life has a purpose far above that snug animalism which some men call happiness. In opposition to that, the outcry revived of late against happiness, as a motive, has its full right. But I mean by happiness, man’s true well-being—that of his higher, not his lower nature—that of his nature, not for a moment, but for ever. With such happiness, duty, however stern, must always ultimately coincide. I say, man was formed to desire such a realisation of the possibilities of his nature, that to bid him cease or slacken in this desire is a cruelty and a folly, and that the will of God ought never for an instant to be conceived as hostile to such well-being. If He were, why hear we of Redemption? And I may point with reverence to the Incarnate Perfectness, ‘who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross;’ he would die to know the blessedness of restoring to us our life. Only the most sublime self-sacrifice could account such a result a recompense; and that recompense he did not refuse to keep constantly in view.
Atherton. Your dispute is very much a question of words. True self-annihilation certainly does not consist in being without a personal aim, but in suppressing all that within us which would degrade that aim below the highest.
Gower. The Quietists are right in undervaluing, as they do, mere pleasurable feeling in religion.
Atherton. Quite so: in as far as they mean to say by such depreciation that God may be as truly near and gracious in spiritual sorrow as in spiritual joy,—that inward delights and blissful states of mind are not to be put virtually in the place of Christ, as a ground of trust—that the witness of the Spirit does not evince itself in the emotional nature merely, but is realised in the general consciousness of a divine life, which is its own evidence. But I think the Quietists too much overlook the fact that peace, rising at times to solemn joy, is after all, the normal state of the Christian life, and as such, always a legitimate object of desire.
Gower. As to disinterested love, once more, may we not take Bunyan as a good example of the mean between our two extremes? When in prison, and uncertain whether he might not soon be condemned to die, the thought came into his mind:—Suppose God should withdraw Himself at the very last moment—fail to support me at the gallows—abandon me. But he resisted the temptation like a man. He tells how he said within himself, ‘If God doth not come in (to comfort me), I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. It was my duty,’ he declared, ‘to stand to His word, whether He would ever look upon me, or save me at the last, or not.’
Willoughby. I can understand Bunyan. He was driven to that self-abandonment, and his faith made its brave stand there; he did not seek it. But the Quietists would have us cultivate, as the habit of Christian perfection, that self-oblivion which is, in fact, only our resource in the hottest moment of temptation. Why shut ourselves up in the castle-keep, if not an outwork has been carried?
Atherton. What a torrent of cant and affectation must have been set a flowing when Quietism became the fashion for awhile! What self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation; and how easily might the detail of spiritual maladies and imaginary sins be made to minister to display! Is it not thus Pope describes Affectation?—how she
Faints into airs, and languishes with pride,