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]]