Whatever these poets, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Crashaw, Quarles, say of the soul and its fuller life, they say quite naturally in terms of love and wonder. Religion has become for them the flowering of the soul; the flooding of the whole being with health and joy; the consummation of life; and they tell of it as lovers tell of their discovery and their joy.
Oh mightie love! man is one world and hath
Another to attend him.[6]
We have here in these poets, as in the writings of Whichcote and Smith, a type of religion which is primarily concerned with the liberation and winning of the whole of life, a thing which, they all tell us, can be done only in conscious parallelism with the set of eternal currents.
These minor prophets of seventeenth century English literature have often been treated as mystics, and there {323} is in all of them, except George Herbert, a rich strand of mystical religion, but their mysticism is only an element, a single aspect, of a very much wider and completer type of religion which includes all the strands that compose what I have been calling "spiritual religion"—an inner flooding of the life with a consciousness of God, a rational apprehension of the soul's inherent relation to the Divine, and a transforming discovery of the meaning of life through the revelation in Christ, which sets all one's being athrob with love and wonder.
Eternal God! O thou that only art
The sacred fountain of eternal light,
And blessed loadstone of my better part,
O thou, my heart's desire, my soul's delight,
Reflect upon my soul and touch my heart,
And then my heart shall prize no good above thee;
And then my soul shall know thee; knowing, love thee.[7]
II
Thomas Traherne is one of the best and most adequate representatives, in this literary group, of this type of religion. He was profoundly influenced by the revival of Plato and Plotinus, and by the writings of the religious Humanists and he had absorbed, consciously or unconsciously, the ideas and ideals which appear and reappear in the widespread movement which I have been tracing. He was a pure and noble soul, a man of deep experience and fruitful meditation, the master of a rare and wonderful style, and we shall find in his writings a glowing appreciation and a luminous expression of this type of inner, spiritual religion.
He was born about the year 1636, probably at Hereford, the son of a poor shoemaker, but of a notable and well-endowed family line. He took no pains to inform the world of his outward history and we are left with guesses as to most of the details of his earthly career, but he has himself supplied us with an unusually full account of his {324} inward life during the early years of it. "Once I remember," he says, "I think I was about four years old when I thus reasoned with myself, sitting in a little obscure room of my father's poor house: If there be a God certainly He must be infinite in Goodness, and I was prompted to this by a real whispering instinct of Nature."[8] Whereupon the child wonders why, if God is so rich, he himself is so poor, possessed of "so scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts," but he tells us that as soon as he was old enough to discover the glory of the world he was in, and old enough for his soul to have "sudden returns into itself," there was no more questioning about poverty and narrow fortunes. All the wealth of God was his—
I nothing in the world did know
But 'twas divine.[9]
As nobody has better caught the infinite glory of being a child, and as nobody in literature has more successfully "set the little child in the midst," than has Traherne, it may be well to let him tell us here in his splendid enthusiasm what it is to be a child and what the eyes of a child can see. He shall do it, first in his magnificent prose and then in his fine and simple verse.