Don’t here thy excellencies know,
Till death our understandings does improve,
And then our wiser ghosts thy silent night-walks love.’
In the writings of Henry More we can see, by a notice here and there, how Quakerism looked in the eyes of a retired scholar, by no means indiscriminately adverse to enthusiasm. The word enthusiasm itself, he always uses more in the classical than the modern sense. ‘To tell you my opinion of that sect which are called Quakers, though I must allow that there may be some amongst them good and sincere-hearted men, and it may be nearer to the purity of Christianity for the life and power of it than many others, yet I am well assured that the generality of them are prodigiously melancholy, and some few perhaps possessed with the devil.’ He thinks their doctrine highly dangerous, as mingling with so many good and wholesome things an abominable ‘slighting of the history of Christ, and making a mere allegory of it,—tending to the utter overthrow of that warrantable though more external frame of Christianity which Scripture itself points out to us.’ Yet he takes wise occasion, from the very existence of such a sect, to bid us all look at home, and see that we do not content ourselves with the mere Tabernacle without the Presence and Power of God therein.—Mastix, his Letter to a Friend, p. 306.
[388]. See Swedenborg’s True Christian Religion, chap. iv.
[389]. See E. Swedenborg, a Biography, by J. G. Wilkinson, p. 99; a succinct and well-written account of the man, and the best introduction to his writings I have met with.
[390]. Wilkinson, pp. 187, 118.
[391]. Wilkinson, pp. 79, 130.
[392]. Heaven and Hell, § 360.
[393]. True Christian Religion, § 796.