And out of this childhood experience, which many a meditative child can match, he insists that God visited him.
He did Approach, He did me woo;
I wonder that my God this thing would do.
He in our childhood with us walks,
And with our thoughts Mysteriously He talks;
He often visiteth our Minds.[15]
{327}
I know of no one who has borne a louder testimony than Traherne to the divine inheritances and spiritual possibilities of the new-born child, or who has more emphatically denied the fiction of total depravity: "I speak it in the presence of God," he says, "and of our Lord Jesus Christ; in my pure primitive Virgin Light, while my apprehensions were natural and unmixed, I cannot remember but that I was ten thousand times more prone to good and excellent things than to evil."[16] And he adds this impressive word on the doctrine of inheritance: "It is not our parents' loins, so much as our parents' lives, that enthrals and blinds us."[17]
After a happy childhood, during which "The Earth did undertake the office of a Priest,"[18] and when his soul was
A living endless eye
Just bounded with the sky,
Whose power, whose act, whose essence was to see,[19]
he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in the year 1652, being made B.A. in 1656, M.A. in 1661, and Bachelor of Divinity in 1669. He was admitted in 1657 to the Rectory of Credenhill, near Hereford, where he remained for about ten years, and in 1667 he was made chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman, in whose service he died in 1674, and was buried "under the reading-desk" in the church at Teddington near Hampton Court.
During his lifetime he published Roman Forgeries (1673), an unimportant work, and had begun the publication of his Christian Ethics, which appeared, after his death, in 1675. His Poems and his Centuries of Meditations remained in MS. unknown until they were discovered in a London bookstall about the year 1897, and their authorship was proved by Bertram Dobell who published the Poems in 1903, and the Centuries of Meditations in 1908. There still remains in MS. an octavo volume of meditations and devotions.
Traherne's poems show that he always dwelt near the {328} gate of Heaven and was easily aware of the "ancient Light of Eden." An accidental bit of gossip, reported in John Aubrey's Miscellanies, indicates that he was subject to psychical experiences of an unusual sort, and the poet himself has reported an impressive crisis-experience when he chose his destiny and settled his preference for inward treasures, even though it meant, as with George Fox, the wearing of a leather suit.