Gower. Whatever direction the mysticism of a man like Fox might have taken, it must have been always actively benevolent. His mysticism is simple—no artificial stages of abstraction, mounting step by step above the finite, to a solitary superhuman sanctity. It is beneficent—his many and various spiritual distresses were permitted by God, he tells us, ‘in order that he might have a sense of all conditions—how else should he speak to all conditions?‘[[380]]
Willoughby. Truly, metaphysical refinements and Platonic abstraction could have no charm for this most practical of mystics. What a contrast here is his pietism to that of Zinzendorf—as abundant in sentiment as Fox is devoid of it.
Gower. Nicholas of Basle is more like Fox than any of the German mystics—much more so than Tauler.
Atherton. Fox is, as you say, eminently practical in one sense, yet not enough so in another. In one respect Behmen and Law are more practical than he, because more comprehensive. They endeavour to infuse a higher spiritual life into forms and communities already existing. Fox will have no steeple-houses, vestments, forms of prayer, no ministry, regularly paid and highly educated. Such a code is not practical, for it rests on an abstraction: it does not legislate for men as they are. Formalism does not lie in these outward things themselves—it consists in the spirit in which they are used. Here, you see, the mystic, who will always go beneath the surface to the reality, is too superficial. Formalism cannot be expelled by any such summary process. The evil lies deeper.
Willoughby. So with the asceticism of the Friends. The worldly spirit is too subtile to be exorcised by a strict outward separation between church and world. How much easier is total abstinence from scenes of amusement than temperance in money-getting.
Gower. Yet I know men and women who pique themselves on their separateness from the world, because they were never seen at a concert, whose covetousness, insincerity, or censorious speech, proclaim them steeped in worldliness to the very lips.
Willoughby. What say you, Atherton, to the doctrine of the Universal Light? In their theory on this matter the mystics seem to divide into two classes. With the mystics of the fourteenth century there is still left in fallen man a native tendency Godward, on which grace lays hold. With Behmen and Fox, on the contrary, the inward Seed is a supernatural gift, distinct from conscience, reason, or any relics of natural goodness—the hidden word of promise, inspoken into all men, in virtue of the redeeming work of Christ.[[381]]
Atherton. I do not believe that fallen man required a divine bestowment of this kind—a supernatural soul within the soul, to give him a moral sense, and make him responsible. But I am so far a believer in the doctrine that I would not go beyond what is written, and rigidly confine all the benefits of Christ’s redemption to those only who have had access to the Christian Scriptures. The words of the Apostle are still applicable,—‘Is he the God of the Jews only, is he not of the Gentiles also?’ I cannot suppose that all Pagan minds, past and present, have been utterly and for ever abandoned by the Divine Spirit, because the dispensation under which they have been placed is so much less privileged than our own. God has light enough to be Himself, in the twilight, even as in the noonday. Did He rule the rising and falling of ancient nations, working all things toward the fulness of time;—did He care for the bodies of those heathen, with seedtime and harvest for his witness, and shall we suppose that He debarred Himself from all access to their souls?
Willoughby. Yet no doctrine we can hold on this question materially lessens the mystery of that dark fact—the prevalence of Evil.
Atherton. I am afraid not. Whether we call that better part of man the light of nature, conscience, or the internal Word, we must admit that it accomplished next to nothing for the restoration of the vast majority. We must not judge of the moral effects of heathendom by the philosophic few merely; we must remember the state of the superstitious many. And mysticism will be the first to admit that an inoperative Christ (like that of the Antinomian, for example) is a deceptive phantom or a vain formula.