Samuel Rutherford declares the little treatise to be "a rude, foolish and unlearned Pamphlet of late penned and changing, as Familists and Antinomians doe, Scripture and God and Christ into metaphores and vaine Allegories."[87] The comment of this good man is honest and sincere, but of value only as revealing the mental attitude of himself. Here the representative of the old system was speaking out of the past and condemning a dawning movement which with his apperceiving material he could not understand, but which was in a few years to have extraordinary expansion and which, when it should in time become defecated through discipline and spiritual travail, was destined to speak to the condition of many minds to whom Rutherford's "notions" have become only empty words.
IV
A beautiful little anonymous book of this period, containing a similar conception of Christianity to that set forth in the writings of Everard and Randall, must be briefly considered here: The Life and Light of a Man in Christ Jesus (London, 1646). The writer, who was a scholarly man, shows the profound influence of the Theologia Germanica, that universal book of religion which {264} fed so many souls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he has evidently found, either at home or abroad, spiritual guides who have brought him to the Day-star in his own heart.
Religion, he says, is wholly a matter of the "operative manifestation of Christ in a man—the divine Spirit living in a man."[88] To miss that experience and to lack that inner life in God is to miss the very heart of religion. "There be many and diverse Religions and Baptisms among many and diverse peoples of the habitable world, but to be baptized as a man in Christ—that is to be baptized into the living, active God, so that the man has his salvation and eternal well-being wrought in him by the Spirit and life of his God—is the only best."[89] Those who lack "this real spiritual business" never attain "the true Sabbath-rest of the soul." They go to meeting on "Sunday, Sabbath or First day [sic] merely to hear such or such a rare divine preach or discourse, or to participate in such or such Ordinances."[90] They have "an artificiall, historicall Divinity [Theology] which they have attained by the eye, that is by reading books, or by the ears, that is, by hearing this or that man, or by gathering up expressions"—their religion rests on "knowledge" and not on Christ experienced within.[91] This external religion is not so much wrong as it is inadequate and immature. "It is," he says, "like unto young children, who with shells and little stones imitate a real building!"[92] The religion which carries a man beyond shadows to true realities and from the cockle-shell house to a permanent and eternal temple for the Spirit is the religion which finds Christ within as the Day-star in the man's own heart.[93]
There is throughout this simple little book a noble appreciation of love as the "supream good" for the soul. "The God of infinite goodness and eternal love" is a kind of refrain which bursts forth in these pages again {265} and again. Love in us is, he thinks, "a sparkle of that immense and infinite Love of the King and Lord of Love."[94] Salvation and eternal well-being consist for him in the formation of a life "consecrated and united unto the true Light and Love of Christ." The man who has this Life within him will always be willing and glad when the time comes "to returne againe into the bosome of his heavenly Father-God."[95] And not only is the man who has the Life of Christ in him harmonized in love upwardly toward God; he is also harmonized outwardly towards his fellows. "He is a member with all other men, with the good as a lowly-minded disciple to them; with those that are not in Christ, as a deare, sympathizing helper, doing his utmost to do them good."[96] He has written his "little Treatise," he says, "as a love-token from the Father" to help lead men out of the "darke pits of the world's darkness" into the full Light of the soul's day-dawn.
The book lacks the robustness and depth that are so clearly in evidence in most of the writings that have been dealt with in this volume, but there is a beauty, a simplicity, a sweetness, a sincerity born of experience, which give this book an unusual flavour and perfume. The writer says that there is "an endless battle between the Seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent," but one feels that he has fought the battle through and won. He says that "a man should be unto God what a house is to a man," i.e. a man should be a habitation of the living God, and the reader feels that this man has made himself a habitation for the divine presence within. He says if you want spiritual help you must go to a "man who has skill in God," and one lays down his slender book feeling assured that, out of the experience of Christ in his own soul, he did have "skill in God," so that he could speak to the condition of others. There was at least one man in England in 1646 who knew that the true source and basis of religion was to be found in the experience of Christ within and not in theological notions of Him.
[1] The Italian titles of these two books are Alfabeto Christiana (1546) and Le Cento et dieci divine Considerationi (1550).
[2] A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist (1648), p. 164.
[3] Ibid. p. 319.
[4] Epistle Dedicatory to Some Gospel Treasures Opened (London, 1653).