Atherton. It seems to me so unfair and ungrateful that after having been so largely indebted, from the first, to the outer world, any man should pretend, at a certain point, to deny utterly that indispensable coadjutor in his inward development.
Gower. You remind me of the affectation of the author in Humphrey Clinker, who professed such an antipathy to green fields as made him careful to sit with his back to the window all dinner-time,—though he had, in fact, passed his childhood with the asses on the village common.
Lowestoffe. Let us, then, celebrate the reconciliation of the pair—Reason and Understanding, if the terms are to be retained. So only can our nature realize its full productiveness,—as the richest mines lie always near the junction of two dissimilar rocks.
Atherton. I think spiritualism, which complains that religion is separated too widely from common life, will scarcely mend the matter by teaching men that they use one faculty, or set of faculties, about their week-day business, and a quite distinct one in their worship.
Gower. As though we were to leave our understandings—like the sandals of old—at the door of our holy places.
Atherton. Enough on this question, I have only one remark to add. We have seen mysticism endeavouring to exclude all distinct form or expression, all vivid figure, from its apprehensions of spiritual truth; as if such clearness and warmth belonged to our meaner nature—were low and sensuous.
Gower. Confounding spirituality with abstraction.
Atherton. Spiritualism now repeats the same error—is the revival of an old mistake in a new form. It shrinks from distinctness, mistaking it, I suppose, for so much gross materialism, or artificial formalism. It shuns, as far as possible, actual outward persons and events—as though reality were carnality—as though the fewer facts we acknowledged, the less formal we were sure to be—as though we were spiritual in proportion as we resolved sacred narrative into symbols of inward states or emotions, forsook history for reverie, and evidence for hazy sentiment. The Spanish Quietists were well nigh enjoining the exclusion of the conception of Christ’s humanity from their higher contemplation, as an image too substantial and earthy. Spiritualism, in its tendency to escape from objective facts to subjective experience, displays a similarly unnatural timidity—a morbid aversion to that manly exercise of our whole nature on religious questions which we put forth on others.
Gower. Thinking, I conclude, that the opposite to spirituality is, not sensuality or earthliness—but external reality.
Willoughby. Why look at me? You don’t suppose I have a word to say in defence of such a curious confusion of thought?