Francis Rous was born in Cornwall in 1579. He graduated B.A. at Oxford in 1597 and at the University of Leyden in 1599. He entered the Middle Temple in 1601, with the prospect of a legal and public career before him, but soon withdrew and retired to Cornwall, where in a quiet country retreat he became absorbed in theological studies. His later writings show an intimate acquaintance with the great Church Fathers, especially with St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and the two Gregorys, and with the mystics, especially with the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bernard, Thomas à Kempis, and John Tauler. He was intensely Puritan in temper and sympathies in his earlier period of life, and much of his writing at this stage was for the purpose of promoting the increase of a deeper and more adequate reform in the Church. He translated the Psalms into "English Meeter," and his version was approved by the Westminster Assembly, authorized for use by Parliament, and adopted by the estates in Scotland, "whose Psalms," Carlyle says, "the Northern Kirks still sing."[2]
He was a member of Charles I.'s first and second Parliaments, and again of the Short Parliament and of {268} the Long Parliament. He was also a member of the Little Parliament, often called "Barebones Parliament," of which he was Speaker, and of the Parliaments of 1654 and of 1656, and he was, too, a member of Oliver's Council of State. He was one of many thoughtful men of the time who passed with the rapid development of affairs from the Presbyterian position to Independency, and he served on the Committee for the propagation of the Gospel which framed a congregational plan for Church government. He was a voluminous writer, but his type of Christianity can be seen sufficiently in his three little books: Mystical Marriage (1635), The Heavenly Academy (1638), and The Great Oracle (1641).[3]
He, again, like so many before him, influenced by Plato as well as by the New Testament and Christian writers, made the discovery that there is something divine in the soul of man, and that this "something divine" in man is always within hail of an inner world of divine splendour. "I was first breathed forth from heaven," he says, "and came from God in my creation. I am divine and heavenly in my original, in my essence, in my character. . . . I am a spirit, though a low one, and God is a Spirit, even the highest one, and God is the fountaine of this spirit [of mine]."[4]
The possession of this divine "original," unlost even in the mist and mystery of a world of time and sense, enables man, he holds, to live in that higher world even while he sojourns in this lower world. Human reason, i.e. reasoning, is sufficient to guide in the affairs of this life, but it is blind to the world of the Spirit from which we came. "The soule has two eyes—one human reason, the other far excelling that, a divine and spiritual Light. . . . By it the soule doth see spiritual things as truly as the corporall eye doth corporal things."[5] "Human reason acknowledges the sovereignty of this spiritual Light as a candle acknowledges the greater light of the sun," and, {269} by its in-shining, the soul passes "beyond a speculative and discoursing holiness, even beyond a forme of godliness and advances to the power of it."[6] But this inward Light does not make outward helps unnecessary. "The light of the outward word [the Scriptures] and the Light in our soules are twinnes and agree together like brothers,"[7] and again he says, "It is an invaluable [inestimable] Loss that men do so much divide the outward Teacher from the Inward," though he insists that the ministry of the Spirit is above any ministry of the letter.[8]
This eye of the soul which is a part of its original structure and is responsive to the Light of the spiritual world, so that "soule and Light become knit together into one," is also called by Rous, as by his predecessors, "Seed" or "Word." Sometimes this divine Seed is thought of as an original part of the soul, and sometimes, under the assumption that "man has grown wild by the fall of Adam" and is "run to weeds," it is conceived, as by Schwenckfeld, as a saving remedy supernaturally supplied to the soul—"Christ entering into our spirits lays in them an immortal seed."[9] In any case, whether the Seed be original, as is often implied and stated, or whether it be a supernatural gift of divine Grace in Christ, as is sometimes implied, it is, in Rous' conception, essential for the attainment of a religious experience or a Christian life: "A Christian man hath as much need of Christ's Spirit [called in other passages Seed or Word] to be a Christian and to live eternally, as a natural man hath of a spirit [principle of intelligence] to be a man and to live temporally, so Christ's Spirit and a man together are a Christian, which is a holy, eternal and happy thing."[10] He shows, as do so many of those who emphasize the inner experience of Christ as a living presence, an exalted appreciation of the historical revelation in Christ. Christ is, he says, both God and man, and thus being the perfect union of divinity and humanity {270} can be our Saviour.[11] Here in the full light of His Life and Love we may discover the true nature of God, who was "great with love before we loved Him."[12] The outer word answers to the inner Light as deep calls unto deep, and the two are "knit together" not to be sundered. The eye must be on Christ the Light, and the wise soul "must watch the winde and tide of the Spirit, as the seaman watcheth the naturall winde and tide. When the tide of the Spirit floweth then put thy hand to the oar, for then if thou row strongly thou maiest advance mightily."[13]
He quaintly says that he has written about these spiritual things, about the world of divine splendour and the "soule's inner eye," because he wants to exhibit "some bunches of grapes brought from the land of promise to show that this land is not a meere imagination, but some have seene it and have brought away parcels, pledges and ernests of it. In these appears a world above the world, a love that passeth human love, a peace that passeth naturall understanding, a joy unspeakable and glorious, a taste of the chiefe and soveraigne good." He has, further, written because he wanted to "provoke others of this nation to bring forth more boxes of this precious ointment."[14]
His little books are saturated with a devotional spirit rising into words like these: "Let my love rest in nothing short of thee, O God!" "Kindle and enflame and enlarge my love. Enlarge the arteries and conduit pipes by which Thou the head and fountaine of love flows in thy members, that being abundantly quickened and watered with the Spirit I may abundantly love Thee."[15] They contain bursts of intense prayer—"Put thy owne image and beauty more and more on my soule." He went through all the Parliamentary storms of that great epoch; he was Provost of Eton College; he was Cromwell's friend; but his main ambition seems to have been to be "knit to God by a personal union," to have "the {271} dayspring in his own heart," and to be taught in "the heavenly Academy—the High School of Experience."[16]
II
The story of Sir Harry Vane's life, adequately told, would involve the entire history of the great epoch of the Commonwealth. Next to Cromwell, he was the most influential shaper of events from the time of the meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640 until his "retirement" on the occasion of the expulsion of the members of Parliament in 1653. In his views of constitutional government and of human liberty he was one of the most original and one of the most modern men of the seventeenth century. Richard Baxter, who had no love for Vane, is only stating an actual fact when he says: "To most of our changes he was that within the House that Cromwell was without."[17] Clarendon, who loved him still less, said of him: "He was indeed a man of extraordinary parts, a pleasant wit, a great understanding which pierced into and discerned the purposes of men with wonderful sagacity."[18] What Milton thought of him he has told in one of the noblest sonnets that a poet ever wrote on a great statesman:
Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old,
Than whom a better senator ne'er held
The helm of Rome, when gowns not arms repelled
The fierce Epirot and the African bold:
Whether to settle peace, or to unfold
The drift of hollow states hard to be spelled,
Then to advise how war may best upheld
Move by her two main nerves, iron and gold,
In all her equipage; besides to know
Both spiritual power and civil, what each means,
What severs each, thou hast learned, which few have done:
The bounds of either sword to thee we owe;
Therefore on thy firm hand religion leans
In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son.[19]