This second idea—that God can be found in the depth of man's soul—is strongly emphasized in Sparrow's next Introduction, written in 1648—"The Ground of what hath ever been lieth in man."[15] All that is in the Scriptures has come out of man's experience and therefore can now be grasped by us. All that was in Adam lies in the ground and depth of any man. When the Apostle John wrote that there is an unction which teacheth all things and leadeth into all truth, he did not confine this possibility {215} to apostles, but intended to include all men in the class of those who may be anointed, and all who know "what is in man" realize that it is possible to attain to this inward and apostolic guidance.[16] In a passage of great boldness Sparrow goes in his venturous faith in the inner Spirit as far as the young Leicestershire preacher did who was starting out, the very year this Introduction was written, to proclaim the message of the inward Light. "The ground," he says, "of all that was in Adam is in us; for whatever Ground lay in God, the same lieth in Christ and through Him it lieth in us, for He is in us all. And he that knoweth God in himself . . . may well be able to speak the word of God infallibly as the holy men that penned the Scriptures. And he that can understand these things in himself may well know who speaketh by the Spirit of God and who speaketh his own fancies and delusions."[17]
In the Introduction to the Mysterium magnum, Sparrow returns to this idea of inward illumination, though he balances it better than he did in the former Introduction, with his estimation of "the antient Holy Scriptures," and he does not again suggest that present-day men speak "infallibly." He thinks that the same God who so eminently taught Moses by His Spirit that he could describe the processes of creation, must have also prepared the people by the instruction of the same Spirit, so that they could understand what was written, and so that the Spirit in one man could verify itself in the experience of many men. He declares that when the Scriptures instruct and perfect the man of God, they are effective, "not as a meer relation of things done," but as the medium of the living Word which reaches the inward Man, the hidden Man of the heart, the Christ in us, so that we pass beyond "the history of Christ" and rise to "the experience that Christ is born within us."[18]
No other book, he says, but the Scriptures, teaches {216} man "with assured knowledge of all the things which concern the soule, the eternal part of man," for other writers have written from the observation of their outward senses, but these writers had "inward senses—their eyes saw, their ears heard, their hands handled the Word of Life." And yet for those in these days who can "look through the vayle or shell within which the Eternal Spirit works its Wonders," the visible things of the world prove to be "a glasse wherein the similitude of spirituall things are represented" and "the Minde of man is a most clear and undeceiving glasse wherein we may perceive the motions and activities of that Work-Master, the Spirit who hath created everything in the world."[12] In the most satisfactory of all his Introductions, the one to the Aurora in 1656, he undertakes to show that "the Light within" which has now arisen in England is not a substitute for the Christ of history. On the contrary, he insists that the Christ within and the Christ of history is one and the same Person who is not divided. He was once manifested in the likeness of sinful flesh, suffering, dying, rising, ascending in glory, and now, in an inward and spiritual manner, He is actually present within men so that they may become conformable in soul and spirit to Him and share in His life, sufferings, death, resurrection and glory, or they may, by their own choice, crucify Him afresh within themselves.[20] The Word of Life calls loudly within every man, urging the soul to forsake that which it perceives to be evil and to embrace that which it perceives to be good and holy and divine. This, he says, is the Eternal Gospel, and it brings to all men everywhere the good news that we live and move and have our being in God, and that the soul that gropes in sincerity after God will find Him, for He is very nigh, even in the heart of the seeker.[21] He deals in an interesting way with the important contemporary problem—raised by the prevalence of the emphasis on an inward Divine Presence—whether human Perfection is possible in this life. His {217} conclusion is that the tendency to sin remains so long as "the mortal body" lasts. No person will ever reach a stage of earthly life in which the spur of the flesh is eradicated, and so no person can be infallibly certain that he is beyond sin, but when Christ is inwardly united to the soul and His Spirit dwells in us and reigns in us and we are risen in soul, spirit, and mind with Him, then we live no longer after the flesh, or according to its thrust and push, but share His life and partake of the conquering power of His Spirit; and thus, though "sown in imperfection we are raised in perfection."[22] The important matter, however, is not that one call himself a "Perfectist," but that he actually live "in this earthly pilgrimage and in this vale of sinfull flesh" in the power of Eternity and by the Light of Christ, whose fulness may be revealed in himself.[23]
John Ellistone, Sparrow's kinsman and able helper in the work of bringing Boehme into English thought, holds the same fundamental ideas as his co-labourer, though he has his own peculiar style and his own unique way of uttering himself. The stress of his emphasis is always on first-hand experience—what he calls "an effectual, living, essential knowledge and real spiritual being of it in one's own soul";[24] and the brunt of his attack is {218} always against a religion of "notions"—what he calls "verball, high-flowne, contrived knowledge and vapouring Notions," constructed from "the mental idolls of approved masters."[25] Religion, he maintains, can no more consist of "the letter" or of "a talkative historicall account" than music can consist of a row of written notes. These things are only signs for the direction of the skilful musician who must himself make the sounds on his instrument before there is any music. So, too, if there is to be any real religion in the world, we Christians must do more than read and approve "the deciphered writings of illuminated men," we must act by the same Spirit that inspired those men, we must be "practitioners of the Divine Light," we must give "living expression to Divine love and righteousness," we must "practice the way of regeneration in the Spirit of Christ and divinitize our knowledge into an effectual working love and attaine the experimental and essential reality of it in our owne soules!"[26] The way out of "the tedious Maze and wearisome laborinth of discussions and opinions concerning God, Christ, Faith, Election, the Ordinances and the Way of Worship" is "to know the Word of Life, Light and Love experimentally," to have "the fire of His love so enkindled in our own hearts that it may breake forth in our practice and conversation to the destroying of all Thornes and tearing Bryars of vaine contentions!"[27]
Like his kinsman, he has endless faith in the possibility of man; he thinks that the entire Scripture directs us to the Word within us, and that the Book of all mysteries is within ourselves. "In our owne Book," he says, "which is the Image of God in us, Time and Eternity and all Mysteries are couched and contained, and they may be read in our owne soules by the illumination of the Divine Spirit. Our Minde is a true mysticall Mirror and Looking-glasse of Divine and Naturall Mysteries, and we shall receive more real knowledge from one effectuall innate essentiall beame or ray of Light arising from the New Birth within us than in reading many {219} hundreds of authors whereby we frame a Babel of knowledge in the Nation."[28]
He goes so far with his faith in the soul's possibility to return into "the Original Centre of all Reality" that he declares that a man may sink deep enough into this Original Principle that binds his own soul into union with God so that he can penetrate by an inner Light and experience into the secret qualities and virtues hid in all visible and corporeal things, and may learn to discover the healing and curative powers of metals and plants, and may thus, by inward knowledge, advance all Arts and Sciences.[29]
Ellistone returns to this inner way of arriving at a knowledge of outward things in his Preface to Signatura rerum in 1651. Man, he declares, is a microcosm, or abridgment, of the whole universe, he is the emblem and hieroglyphic of Time and Eternity, and he who will take pains to push in beyond Solomon's Porch, or the Outer Court of sense and natural reason, to the Inner Court and Holy Place, where the immortal Seed abides and where man can become one again with that which he was in God before he became a creature, then he will have the key that opens all mysteries both inner and outer. Nature will be an open Book of Parables in which he can read the truth of Eternity, the world will be a clear mirror in which he can see the things of the Spirit and he will know what will cure both soul and body. The "Depth of God within the Soul," the Inner Light, is the precious Pearl, the never-failing Comfort, the Panacea for all diseases, the sure Antidote even against death itself, the unfailing Guide and Way of all Wisdom.[30]
Here, then, were two very enthusiastic disciples of Boehme who took their master's teaching very seriously, who on the whole grasped its essential meaning, were possessed and penetrated by the idea of a deeper eternal world manifesting itself in the temporal, and who gave their lives to the difficult task of making Boehme's message {220} available to their own people and to their own perplexed age. They were not "occultists." They did not run into enthusiastic vapourings, nor did they strain after psychic experiences which would relieve them of the stress and strain of achieving the goal of life through the formation of balanced character and the practice of social virtues, though, as we shall see, some of the readers of their translations took the risky course, and ended in the fog rather than in the clear light.
The question has naturally been raised whether Boehme exercised any direct influence upon the early Quaker movement.[31] There is at present no way of proving that George Fox, the chief exponent of the movement, had actually read the writings of the Teutonic philosopher or had consciously absorbed the views of the latter, but there are so many marks of influence apparent in the Journal that no careful student of both writers can doubt that there was some sort of influence, direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious. The works of Boehme were, as we have seen, all available in English, during the great formative period of Fox's life, from 1647 to 1661. There can be no question that they were read by the serious Seekers in the period of the Commonwealth. Thomas Taylor, who was one of the finest fruits of the Seeker movement, bears in 1659 a positive testimony to the spiritual value of Jacob Bewman's (Behmen) writings. Taylor received a letter from Justice William Thornton of Hipswell in Yorkshire, warning him to beware of "the confused Notions and great words of Jacob Bewman and such like frothy scriblers." Taylor replies: "For thy light expressions of Jacob Bewman, I know in most things he speaks a Parable to thee yet, and so his writings may well be lightly esteemed of by thee; but there is that in his Writings which, if ever thy eye be opened, will appear to be a sweet unfolding of the Mystery of God and of Christ, in divers particulars, according to his Gift. And therefore beware of speaking Evil of that which thou {221} know'st not."[32] We have also seen how Boehme appealed to such noble Seekers as Charles and Durant Hotham, John Sparrow, and John Ellistone.[33] One Quaker of some importance, Francis Ellington, not only read the writings of Boehme, but regarded "that Faithful Servant Jacob Behme" as "a Prophet of the Lord."[34] He quotes from his German "Prophet" the words: "A Lilly blossometh to you ye Northern Countries; if you destroy it not with sectarian contention of the learned, then it will become a great Tree among you, but if you shall rather contend than to know the true God, then the Ray passeth by and hitteth only some; and then afterwards you shall be forced to draw water for the thirst of your souls among strange nations." Ellington regards Boehme as a genuine "prophet," and the "Lilly" that was to blossom in the North seems to Ellington plainly to be George Fox and his Quaker Society, which the learned have tried in vain to overthrow. He cites many passages from the Teutonic Prophet of the Lord to show the parallelism between the prophesied type of spiritual religion and the Children of the Light who have exactly fulfilled it.[35]
It would be natural to expect that the young Quaker seeker, eager for any light on his dark path, would read the Forty Questions and The Three Principles of the Divine Essence, or at least that he would hear them discussed by the people among whom he moved in these intense and eventful years. In any case there are ideas expressed and experiences described in the Journal which look strangely like memories, conscious or subconscious, of ideas and experiences to be found in the Boehme writings. The most striking single passage is one which describes an experience which occurred to Fox in 1648. It is as follows: "Now was I come up in Spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were {222} new; and all the Creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness and innocency and righteousness, being renewed into the image of God by Jesus Christ, to the state of Adam before he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me how all things had their names given them, according to their nature and virtue. I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practise physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtue of things were so opened to me by the Lord. . . . The admirable works of creation and the virtues thereof may be known through the openings of that divine Word of Wisdom and power by which they were made."[36]