We shall now venture to offer a few remarks on this system.
What we admire in Madame Guion is, the purity of her heart, its incessant aspirations after holiness, its secret and close communion with God. These are qualifications in which there is reason to believe that the great bulk of professing Christians are greatly deficient. Religion, even among reflecting minds, partakes more of a philosophical than a spiritual character. The fire is in the intellect, the ice is in the heart. In the social circle, the essay, or review, how often is spiritual religion branded with the title of enthusiasm, and the wings of devotion clipped, lest she should soar with too lofty an elevation, and pass beyond the limits which a cold and calculating policy would prescribe.
Among others again, who are the professed followers of Christ, how far do all fall short in the sublime and devotional feeling of love to God! The higher attainments of Christian piety, the inward fervency of spirit, and the entire surrender of the soul, are not sufficiently realized. Men do not rise to the elevation of Bible Christianity. Religion is considered too much in the light of a struggle and a warfare, and too little as a state of inward repose and joy unspeakable and full of glory.
It is in this respect that we think the devotional spirit of Madame Guion may be contemplated with profit, if by a wise discrimination we can adopt what is excellent, and reject what is overstrained, legal, and visionary.
There is, however, a familiarity in her addresses to the Deity incompatible with the reverence due to a sense of his majesty and greatness. In exposing this objectionable part of her writings, Bossuet beautifully apostrophizes the seraphs, and entreats them to bring burning coals from the altar to purify his lips, lest they should have been defiled by the impurities which he had been obliged to record.[917]
With respect to the distinguishing feature of mysticism, the pure and disinterested love of God, for his own sake, and without any consideration of self, that the mind may, at particular seasons, rise to this degree of holy contemplation, we believe to be possible; but we are persuaded that such a state of feeling cannot be habitually sustained, and that it is beyond the general standard and capacities of human nature. God's love to us is recorded in the Scripture as the foundation of our love to him:—"We love him, because he first loved us." Even glorified spirits, whose devotion we may justly suppose to have attained its highest degree of perfection, are represented as making their own salvation the theme of adoring gratitude and praise. "For thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood, and hast made us unto our God kings and priests." Besides, it is in the great work of redemption that the divine attributes are so gloriously displayed; that the most affecting appeals are made to our fears and hopes; and the most animating motives held forth for our obedience. Man's personal interest is therefore so interwoven with the display of the divine perfections, that the former can never be excluded without obscuring the glory of the very attributes which mysticism requires us to adore.
Again, the doctrine of the Mystics proposes the utter suppression of the passions of hope and fear; the annihilation, as it is called, of all our natural feelings, and an entire abstraction from the world.
The annihilation of our natural feelings, that the heart may be wholly filled with the love and contemplation of the Deity, is not possible, nor, if it were possible, would it be desirable, as we should cease, in that case, to be men, without acquiring the nature of angels. It is not the suppression, but the due control and consecration of our feelings to the purest ends that the Bible proposes; not the exclusion of what is human, but the admixture of what is divine. The apostles, though gifted with the Holy Ghost from heaven, were still "men of like passions with ourselves," and the Saviour who was transfigured on Mount Tabor, thirsted at the well of Sychar, and wept at the grave of Lazarus.
Nor is it abstraction from the world, but from its spirit, that the Bible enjoins as a duty on the Christian. "Let us open this wonderful book," observes an elegant writer, "where we may, we meet no mystical abstraction. We feel our whole mind to be addressed at once; no faculty, active or passive, being left without its provision. Human nature is every where made to furnish the machinery, which may work most effectually on itself. To withdraw the mind from sensible ideas while reading the Bible, is absolutely impossible. It places real life before us, in all its most interesting and most impressive forms; and obliges us to converse with 'men of like passions with ourselves,' even while it is teaching us the way of God most perfectly.
"Instead of abstracting us from the world, it makes it a school of wisdom to us; and teaches us, by example as well as precept, to proceed in making it so daily to ourselves. We discover that while it is the scene of the devil's temptations, it is also the scene of God's providence; and that, as on the former account we must be ever vigilant against its seductions, so, on the latter account, we cannot but be deeply interested in its various movements, past, present, and future. To be regardless of these would be to overlook the volume of prophecy, as well as that kingdom of the Messiah upon earth, of whose gradual advancement the prophetic oracles chiefly treat, and in whose final triumph all their brightest rays concentre. It is not, therefore, a mystical escape from the world to which the Christian is called. His vocation is much more glorious; he is to keep himself 'unspotted from the world;' but he is to remain in it, that he may maintain, as far as in him lies, his Lord's right to it, and promote his interest in it. He is taught this by the Redeemer's last prayer for his followers: 'I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.' And he is still more fully instructed by our Lord's own example; who made every walk of human life the scene of his beneficence, and turned every object and occurrence into a means of the most interesting and deepest instruction."[918]