Were you reading a letter informing you that a friend had departed on a journey, riding on a black horse, and was told by one of your auditors that the expression was figurative and that he meant a white cow, you would probably laugh; and yet the incongruity is not greater than some of your own discoveries. For instance, Paul said "let your women keep silence in your churches;" and you observe that all who are truly enlightened will understand that the woman means the selfish spirit which ought not to be permitted to speak in churches; but you have forgot to tell us how to apply the succeeding observation that "if they will learn any thing they must consult their husbands at home." Nor is it probable that Paul, (although a bachelor,) was so uncharitable as to believe the selfish spirit so identified with woman, as to render her a proper emblem of it.
In this instance Paul was recommending a rule of conduct, and ought to be allowed to speak for himself: so thought Robert Barclay, and in accounting for the exhortation he has given the probable reason of it. He considered it neither as an allegory or a figure; but he had not arrived at that degree of spiritual knowledge which enabled him to discover in every page of the Bible a meaning in direct contradiction to the plain and obvious sense of the written language. Religion was with him not an occult science, nor the Bible a caballistick book which can never be read to advantage until the truths contained in it have been previously revealed to us.[[41]] On the contrary, he believed with the Apostle Paul "that these things were written for our learning," that "the holy scriptures are able to make wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesus," and that "all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto every good work."[[42]]
LETTER VII.
When the early Quakers, dissatisfied with the formal worship of the existing protestant church, separated themselves and formed a society of their own, they were reproached by some with denying the authenticity of the sacred writings, and by others with setting up their own inspirations in opposition to them; and they seem at an early period to have discovered the necessity of recording their belief on this subject, not only to refute the calumnies circulated by their opponents, but as a guide to the inexperienced of their own sect. For, such was the ferment of men's minds at that moment, and the violence of the change from the dull uniformity of formal belief, to all the extravagancies of unrestrained enthusiasm, that it appeared like an epidemic affecting all descriptions of people; and their imaginations became so exalted, that every fancy was mistaken for a revelation, and every preacher, however wild his doctrines, had his followers. Nor did their own members wholly escape the infection; for with all their care, there were those among them who indulged in extravagancies, to the great grief of their more sober friends.
It fell to the lot of Robert Barclay to record the doctrines of the early Quakers, and none of them was better fitted for the task; for he was learned and pious, clear in his perceptions and logical in his arrangement, and well able to give his reasons for his faith. He knew that superstition and fanaticism were the Scylla and Charybdis of religion, and how much care was necessary to prevent us, while avoiding the one, from being swept into the whirlpool of the other. He was surrounded by instances of the unhappy effects of that exaltation of mind, which induced individuals to believe they had arrived at such an unerring state of spiritual knowledge, that the recorded opinions and advice of their pious predecessors, and even the scriptures, (being only in the letter,) were to them neither authority nor a guide; and that they had derived the fulness of knowledge from the fountain itself. That to them reason itself had ceased to be of use, since they were under the constant influence of a clear and distinct revelation, as stable and certain as any of the instincts of our nature: and such was the fever of the brain, that when their prophecies were contradicted by the event, it did not impair their confidence in their own inspirations, because it was the Lord who chose to deceive them, and they were deceived.
He had not adopted the fantastical idea that every passage of scripture has a mystical meaning; but declares them to be the revelations of the spirit of God to the saints, and that they contain a faithful historical account of the actings of God's people in various ages; a prophetical account of several things, whereof some have passed, and some to come; and a full and ample account of all the chief principles of the doctrine of Christ. That they are profitable for correction and instruction in righteousness, and that divine inward revelations can never contradict the outward testimony of the scriptures, or sound reason.
Here all is plain and consistent. No man of sound mind can believe that the revelations of infinite wisdom are ever contradictory; and as the evidence of the divine origin of the scriptures is such as no individual can produce, he was warranted in his conclusion, that all pretensions to the spirit in contradiction to them, are delusions of the devil. And indeed no man of observation can cast his eyes round him, and contemplate the various illusions into which the human mind is seduced on religious subjects, without perceiving the absolute necessity of a standard or rule by which its wanderings may be checked and its aberrations corrected, and we find Locke concurring with Barclay, in stating the scripture revelations and right reason, as the true standards by which our faith is to be tried.
You also seem to perceive the necessity of some check, but in the very spirit which induces that necessity, your own standard is as visionary, and as fruitful a source of evil, as the propensity it is intended to correct; for yours is not that reason which proceeds from premises to consequences, but an actual illusion, which has persuaded you that there is a reason which can see all things immediately and by intuition;[[43]] and your bible, a book written in cypher,[[44]] the key of which is one of the most vigorous plants of the wilderness of fanaticism. Hence it follows, that your standard, so far from being a true test or corrector of your opinions, must always, when used, confirm you in error; for it is a magnifying mirror, reflecting the exaggerated image of the delusion it is intended to control.
There is not a more prolific source of error, than assuming principles without a careful examination of their correctness, and drawing conclusions from them; and even when the principle is correct, and the inference fairly deducible, men in the ardour of their zeal, often push it to an extreme far beyond its just limits.
It is not difficult to conceive, that a man whose mind is convinced by internal evidence of the truth of the christian religion, and who, under an awful impression of its incalculable importance, opens the sacred volume, finds more instruction and comfort in it, than he who only reads it as history, or from an indistinct sense of duty; because he has a greater degree of inward acquaintance with the same spirit and work in the heart. But this simple exposition is too plain to satisfy the lofty imaginations of the high professors of the present day: because the lukewarm and indifferent do not receive the same instruction and profit from the scriptures as the more serious and pious, the perusal can afford them no benefit; and even to the sincere inquirer it is a sealed book, until its contents are previously communicated by an especial revelation.[[45]]