The details of his life are very meagre. We are in the {306} main dependent on the literary portraits of him drawn by two of his affectionate friends—John Worthington who edited his Discourses, and Simon Patrick who delivered the remarkable sermon on the occasion of his funeral.[4] From these sources we learn that John Smith was born at Achurch near Oundle about the year 1618, "of parents who had long been childless and were grown aged." It appears incidentally that his parents were poor, and that Benjamin Whichcote, who was Smith's college Tutor, made "provision for his support and maintenance" in his early student days.[5] He entered Emmanuel College in 1636, and here he came under the profound religious and intellectual influence of Whichcote, for whom "he did ever express a great and singular regard." He became a Master of Arts in 1644, and that same year was elected Fellow of Queens' College. It was about this time that Whichcote returned to Cambridge, "spreading and propagating a nobler, freer and more generous sett of opinions," which "the young Masters of Arts soon cordially embraced." Among those who formed this group of awakened and kindled students Smith was an enthusiastic member, and he himself soon became a powerful exponent in the Chapel of Queens' College of a similar message, which, a contemporary writer says, "contributed to raise new thoughts and a sublime style in the members of the University." He was smitten, while still young, with a painful lingering illness, which he bore "without murmuring or complaining," "resting quietly satisfied in the Infinite, Unbounded Goodness and Tenderness of his Father," hoping only that he might "learn that for which God sent the suffering,"[6] and he died August 7, 1652, "after God had lent him to the world for about five and thirty years."[7] "I was desirous," his friend Patrick says at the opening of his funeral sermon, "that I might have stai'd the wheels of that Triumphant Chariot wherein he seemed to be carried; that we might have {307} kept him a little longer in this world, till by his holy breathing into our souls, and the Grace of God, we had been made meet to have some share in that inheritance of the saints in light"; but now, he adds, "we are orphans, left without a father."[8] Patrick adapts to his own departed teacher the beautiful words which Gregory Thaumaturgus used of his great instructor, Origen: "He hath entangled and bound up my soul in such fetters of love, he hath so tyed and knit me to him, that if I would be disengaged, I cannot quit myself. No, though I depart out of the world, our love cannot die, for I love him even as my own soul, and so my affection must remain forever."[9] The whole sermon throbs with intense love, and while it is somewhat overweighted with quotations and learned allusions, it yet expresses in an impressive way the sincere affection of a disciple for a noble master who has "begot another shape in his scholar and has made another man of him."[10] "Such men," he says, "God hath alwaies in the world, men of greater height and stature than others, whom He sets up as torches on an hill to give light to all the regions round about."[11] Such men "are the guard and defense of the towns where they reside, yea of the country whereof they are members; they are the keepers and life-guards of the world; the walls and bulwarks of the Nation,"[12] and when they leave the world everybody soon feels that a glory has departed—"when Elijah goes away you shall have fifty men go three days to seek him!"[13]
This disciple, who declared that whatever "heavenly life" there was in himself had been "hatched" by the fostering care, the nurturing love and the brave conduct of his teacher, has left a few very clear traits for the creation of a true portrait of this saintly interpreter of the Spirit: He was a Fountain running over, Worthington says, "an ever bountifull and bubbling Fountain."[14] Love was bubbling and springing up in his soul and flowing out to all. He would have emptied his soul into others. He {308} was dipped into Justice as it were over head and ears; he had not a slight tincture but was dyed and coloured quite through with it. He cared only for those substantial and solid things of a Divine and Immortal Nature, which he might carry out of the world with him. He was a living library, a walking study, a whole college in himself, that carried his learning about with him; a man of great industry, indefatigable pains, and herculean labours. His learning was so concocted that it lay not in notions in his head, but was wrought out and formed in his very soul so that a man came away always better after converse with him. His faith did not busy itself about fine notions, subtilties, and curiosities, but it was firmly set and fixed in an experience of the mercy and goodness of God, seen in Jesus Christ. He lived in a continuous enjoyment of God and perpetually drew nearer to the Centre of his soul's rest and always stayed God's time of advancement. His spirit was absorbed in the business and employment of becoming perfect in his art and profession—which was the art of being a good man.[15] The devoted scholar's highest wish, as he closes his glowing account of his beloved master, who "enshrined so much Divinity that everything about him had a kind of sacredness," was that those who had enjoyed his presence and inspiration and had formed their lives under his instruction might "so express his life" in theirs, that men would say as they saw these disciples of his, "There walks at least a shadow of Mr. Smith!"[16]
It would be difficult to find any one, in the long list of those who have interpreted Christianity, who has been more insistent than was John Smith that religion is the normal function of the soul and the surest evidence of its health and sanity. But religion of this normal and spiritual type must be sharply differentiated both from superstition and from legalistic religion. The mark of superstition in his mind is the apprehension of God as capricious, a hard Master, and of such a character that his {309} favour can be gained only by servile flattery or bribery or by spells of magic. Superstition is "a brat of darkness" born in a heart of fear and consternation. It produces invariably "a forced and jejune devotion"; it makes "forms of worship which are grievous and burdensome" to the life; it chills or destroys all free and joyous converse with God; it kills out love and inward peace, and instead of inspiring, heightening, and purifying man's soul, it bends all its energies in the vain attempt to alter the capricious attitude of the superior Being who scares and terrifies men. It is, however, a very subtle spirit and one hard to eradicate. It invades our religion even when we are least aware of it: "it enters into our chambers, creeps into our clothes, twines about our secret devotions, and actuates our forms of belief and orthodox opinions."[17]
Legalistic religion, or the "covenant of works," is much of a piece with superstition. It, again, is always a burden to be borne. Its mark is "drudgery and servility." It is a "lean and lifeless form of external performances." Its "law" is always something outside the soul itself. It is a way of acquiring "merit," of getting reckoned among "heaven's darlings," but it is not a way of life or expansion or power or joy.[18]
This "dead" legalistic form of religion is, however, not merely a thing of antiquity, of some early "dispensation" in the long stretch of years called "B.C." Like superstition, legalistic religion also has "crept into our clothes" and "twined about our secret devotions." The "gospel" can be made, and has often enough been made, "as legal as ever the religion of the Jews was." The gospel becomes legal, in Smith's sense, wherever it is treated "as something onely without us," "as a meer historical story or account," or as a collection of book-facts, or "as credenda propounded for us to believe," or when we attempt to "make Christ's righteousness serve onely as our outward covering."[19] "Some of our {310} Dogmata," he thinks, "and Notions of Justification puff us up in far higher and goodlier conceits of ourselves than God hath of us; and we profanely make the unspotted righteousness of Christ serve only as a covering to wrap up our foul deformities and filthy vices in."[20] This tendency, wherever it appears, is but legal religion. Men adopt it because it does not "pinch their sins." It gives them a "sluggish and drowsie Belief, a lazy Lethargy to hugg their supposed acceptation with God"; it enables them "to grow big and swell with a mighty bulk with airy fancies and presumptions of being in favour with Heaven," and it fans up "a pertinacious Imagination that their Names are enrolled in the Book of Life, or crossed off in the Debt-Book of Heaven." But it is all "a meer Conceit or Opinion," for such men are "never the better in reality in themselves and God judges all things as they are." "While men continue in their wickedness, they do but vainly dream of a device to tie the hands of Almighty Vengeance."[21]
True religion, on the other hand, is absolutely another thing, sundered by the width of the sky from either superstition or legalistic religion. It is a reception and assimilation of the Life of God within the soul of man which is predisposed by its fundamental nature to the influx and formative influence of the Spirit of God, who is the environing Life and inner atmosphere of all human spirits: "Spiritual Life comes from God's breath within us and from the formation of Christ within the soul."[22]
Like all of his kind, Smith begins with what to him is an axiomatic fact, that the human soul has a "royal pedigree and noble extraction," that, "as the best philosophers have alwaies taught, we must enquire for God within ourselves," that "Principles of Divine Truth have been engraven on man's Heart by the finger of God," that we can find "a clear impression of some Eternal Nature and Perfect Being stamped upon our own souls," that there are "Radical Principles of Divine Knowledge" {311} and "Seeds of Divine Nature" hidden within us and that a Divine Spirit blows and breathes upon men's hearts, assisting the soul to participate in the Life of God.[23] In one of his bold sayings this position is summed up as follows: "Religion is a Heaven-born thing, the Seed of God in the spirits of men, whereby they are formed to a similitude and likeness of Himself. A true Christian is every way of a most noble extraction, of an heavenly and divine pedigree."[24]
He finds the mark of man's excelling dignity in the inexhaustible depth of his nature and in his noble discontent with every finite and mutable thing. The soul of man is "too big for earthly designs and interests." There is forever a restless appetite within man for some infinite Good without which he can never be satisfied. Everything which he attains or achieves still leaves him in "pinching penury," unsatiated with "the thin and spare diet which he finds in his finite home." His soul, "like the daughters of the Horseleach is always crying: 'Give, give.'" No happiness worth having ever arises, nor through a whole eternity could arise, for any soul sequestered like a hermit in the narrow confines of its own private cell, sundered from "the Fountain-Goodness," for which it was created. The immortal Principle within forever drives it to seek its Original, and it lives only when it "lives above itself," and follows "its own proper motion upward."[25]
The real Gospel in contrast to the "legal gospel," is "the formation of a Christlike Nature in a man's soul by the mighty power of the Divine Spirit."[26] It is no new set of opinions; no body of Notions about Truth; "no system of saving Divinity, cast in a Pedagogical mould"; it is, from its Alpha to its Omega, Spirit and Life, or, to put it in Smith's own words, it is "a vital or energetical Spirit or Power of Righteousness," "a Principle of Life working in man's spirit," "a quickening ministration," "a Seed of God," "a vital Influx, spreading through all {312} the powers of the soul and bringing it into a Divine Life."[27] There are many close imitations of this real Gospel which on the outside look exactly like it, but they only assume "the garish dress and attire of religion," they put on "the specious and seemingly-spiritual Forms" without the inward Life and Power which are always the mark of true religion. These "mimical Christians" reform their looks, instruct their tongues, take up the fitting set of duties and system of opinions, underprop their religion with sacred performances; "chameleon-like, they even turn their insides to whatever hue and colour" is demanded of religion; they "furnish this domestick Scene of theirs with any kind of matter which the history of religion affords them"—only, however they "cunningly fashion out their religion by Book-skill," they cannot get "the true and living thing," which creates a new spirit and produces a new inward joy: "True Religion is no piece of artifice; it is no boiling up of our Imaginative powers nor the glowing heats of Passion; though these are too often mistaken for it, when in our jugglings in Religion we cast a mist before our eyes. But it is a new Nature informing the souls of Men; it is a Godlike frame of Spirit, discovering it self most of all in serene and clear Minds, in deep Humility, Meekness, Self-denial, Universal Love of God and all true Goodness, without Partiality and without Hypocrisie; whereby we are taught to know God, and knowing Him to love Him and conform ourselves as much as may be to all that Perfection which shines forth in Him."[28]
Heaven and Hell for John Smith, as for Boehme and for Whichcote, "have their foundation laid in Men's own souls."[29] They are rather something within us than something without us. Sin and hell have the same origin, "the same lineage and descent." "The Devil is not only the name of one particular thing, but a nature. He is not so much a particular Being designed to torture wicked men in the world to come as a hellish and diabolical {313} nature seated in the minds of men. . . . Could the Devil change his foul and impure nature, he would neither be a Devil nor miserable. . . . All Sin and Wickedness in man's spirit hath the Central force and energy of Hell in it, and is perpetually pressing down towards it as towards its own place. There needs no fatal necessity or Astral influences to tumble wicked men down forcibly into Hell: No, Sin itself, hastened by the mighty weight of its own nature, carries them down thither with the most swift and headlong motion."[30] "Would wicked men dwell a little more at home, and descend into the bottom of their own Hearts they would soon find Hell opening her mouth wide upon them, and those secret fires of inward fury and displeasure breaking out upon them."[31] So, too, the Kingdom of Heaven is within. It lies not so much in external things, golden streets and crowns, as in the quality and disposition of a man's mind. The enjoying of God consists not so much in a change of place as in participation in the nature of God and in assimilation to God. Nothing can stand firm and sure, nothing can have eternal establishment and abiding permanence that "hath not the everlasting arms of true Goodness under it."[32]