The correspondence which followed this frank letter supplies us with the clearest light we possess, or can possess, upon Whichcote's inner life and type of religion. He replied to his old friend, whom he had always held "in love, reverence and esteem," that he had noticed of late that "our hearts have not seemed to be together when our persons have bin,"[13] "but," he adds, "your letter meets with no guilt in my conscience." "My head hath bin possessed with this truth [which I am preaching] these manie years—I am not late nor newe in this persuasion."[14] He then proceeds to quote from his notes exactly what he had said on the subject of reconciliation in his recent Discourse. It was as follows: "Christ doth not save us by onely doing for us without us [i.e. historically]: yea, we come at that which Christ hath done for us with God, by what He hath done for us within us. . . . With God there cannot be reconciliation without our becoming God-like. . . . They deceeve and flatter themselves extreamly; who think of reconciliation with God by means of a Saviour acting upon God in their behalfe and not also working in or upon them to make them God-like," and he says that he added in the spoken sermon, what was not in his notes, that a theology which taught a salvation without inward moral transformation was "Divinity minted in Hell."[15]
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Dr. Tuckney in his second letter becomes still more specific. He admits that Whichcote's "persuasion of truth" is not "late or newe"; he remembers, on the latter's first coming to Cambridge, "I thought you then somwhat cloudie and obscure in your expressions." What he now notices with regret is the tendency in his old pupil to "cry-up reason rather than faith"; to be "too much immersed in Philosophy and Metaphysics"; to be devoted to "other authours more than Scripture, and Plato and his schollars above others"; to be producing "a kinde of moral Divinitie, onlie with a little tincture of Christ added"; to put "inherent righteousness above imputed righteousness" and "love above faith," and to use "some broad expressions as though in this life wee may be above ordinances"; and finally he notices that since Whichcote has "cast his sermons in this mould," they have become "less edifying" and "less affecting the heart."[16] He thinks, too, that he has discovered the foreign source of the infection: "Sir, those whose footsteppes I have observed [in your sermons] were the Socinians and Arminians; the latter whereof, I conceive, you have bin everie where reading in their workes and most largely in their Apologie."[17]
"In a thousand guesses," Whichcote answers this last charge, in his second letter, "you could not have bin farther off from the truth of the thing." "What is added of Socinians and Arminians, in respect of mee, is groundless. I may as well be called a Papist, or Mahometan; Pagan or Atheist. And trulie, Sir, you are wholly mistaken in the whole course of my studies. You say you find me largelie in their Apologia; to my knowledge I never saw or heard of the book before! . . . I have not read manie bookes; but I have studied a fewe: meditation and invention hath bin my life rather than reading; and trulie I have more read Calvine and Perkins and Beza than all the bookes, authors and names you mention. I have alwaies expected reason for what men say, less valuing persons and authorities in the stating and {295} resolving of truth, therefore have read them most where I have found itt. I have not looked at anie thing as more than an opinion which hath not bin underpropt by convincing reason or plaine and satisfactorie Scripture."[18]
As to the charge that he has become immersed in philosophy, Whichcote modestly replies: "I find the Philosophers that I read good as farre as they go: and it makes me secretlie blush before God when I find eyther my head, heart or life challenged by them, which I must confess, I often find." To the criticism that he "cries-up reason," he answers that he has always found in his own experience that "that preaching has most commanded my heart which has most illuminated my head." "Everie Christian," he insists, "must think and believe as he finds cause. Shall he speak in religion otherwise than he thinks? Truth is truth, whoever hath spoken itt or howsoever itt hath bin abused. If this libertie be not allowed to the Universitie wherefore do wee study? We have nothing to do butt to get good memories and to learn by heart."[19] Finally, to the impression expressed by Dr. Tuckney that his sermons are less edifying and heart-searching, he replies with dignity and evidently with truth: "I am sure I have bin all along well understood by persons of honest heartes, but of mean place and education: and I have had the blessing of the soules of such at their departure out of this world. I thanke God, my conscience tells me, that I have not herein affected worldlie shewe, but the real service of truth."[20]
We need not follow further this voluminous correspondence in which two high-minded and absolutely honest men reveal the two diverging lines of their religious faith. To the man whose mind found its spiritual footing alone on the solid ground of Calvin's unmodified system, the new "persuasion" was sure to seem "cloudie and obscure"; and no number of letters could convince him that the new message presented a safe way of faith and life. And no amount of criticism or advice could change the other man who found it necessary for him to have {296} reasonable cause for what he was to believe and live by. Whichcote closes the friendly debate with some very positive announcements that for him religion must be, and must remain, something which guarantees its reality in the soul itself: "Christ must be inwardlie felt as a principle of divine life within us."[21] "What is there in man," again he says, "more considerable than that which declares God's law to him, pleads for the observation of it, accuseth for the breach and excuseth upon the performance of it?"[22] And finally he informs his friend that each of them must be left free to follow his own light: "If we differ there is no help for it: Wee must forbear one another. . . . If you conceeve otherwise of me than as a lover and pursuer after truth, you think amisse. . . . Wherein I fall short of your expectation, I fail for truth's sake."[23]
The central idea in Whichcote's teaching, which runs like a gulf-stream through all his writings, is his absolute certainty that there is something in the "very make of man"[24] which links the human spirit to the Divine Spirit and which thus makes it as natural for man to be religious as it is for him to seek food for his body. There is a "seminal principle," "a seed of God," "something that comes immediately from God," in the very structure of man's inner nature,[25] and this structural possession makes it as natural and proper for man's mind to tend toward God, "the centre of immortal souls," as it is for heavy things to tend toward their centre.[26] "God," he elsewhere says, "is more inward to us than our own souls," and we are more closely "related to God than to anything in the world."[27] The soul is to God as the flower is to the sun, which opens when the sun is there and shuts when the sun is absent,[28] though this figure breaks down, because, in Whichcote's view, God never withdraws and is never absent. This idea that the spiritual life is absolutely rational—a normal function {297} of man's truest nature—receives manifold expression in Whichcote's Aphorisms, which constitute a sort of seventeenth-century Book of Proverbs, or collection of Wisdom-sayings. He had absorbed one great saying from the original Book of Proverbs, which he uses again and again, and which became the sacred text for all the members of the school—"the spirit of man is a candle of the Lord."[29] This Proverb is for Whichcote a key that fits every door of life, and the truth which it expresses is for him the basal truth of religion, as the following Aphorisms will sufficiently illustrate:
"Were it not for light we should not know we had such a sense as sight: Were it not for God we should not know the Powers of our souls which have an appropriation to God."[30]
"God's image is in us and we belong to Him."[31]
"There is a capacity in man's soul, larger than can be answered by anything of his own, or of any fellow-creature."[32]