CHAPTER XI

SOME PROTESTANT MYSTICS
BOEHME—ANGELUS SILESIUS—THE MYSTICAL POETS AND CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS—FOX AND THE QUAKERS—WILLIAM LAW—HENRY MARTYN
Ir will seem to many readers that an excessive space has so far been given to Mysticism in the Catholic Church, especially since the emphasis placed by the Protestant reformers on personal rather than institutional religion might be expected to encourage the mystical approach to God and produce a flourishing school of mystics. It is one of the curiosities of religious history that this does not seem to have been the case. Luther, it is true, had his mystical side. The Lutheran “ faith,” which is the foundation-stone of his theology, has far more the character of mystical adherence to God than of mere belief. He was deeply influenced by the Theologia Germanica, and in his popular preaching continued many of the ideas of the German mystics. But this aspect of his reform died with him, and mysticism has never been really at home in the Lutheran—still less in the Calvinistic—branch of the Church.
The great achievements of the medieval mystics had been accomplished within a home atmosphere which, if it sometimes cramped them, certainly gave them nourishment, discipline, support ; and
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left their spiritual energies free to respond fully to God. The Protestant mystics of the post-Refor- mation were, on the contrary, inhabitants of a house in which building operations were still going on. The sound of the hammer seems often to break in upon their quietude, and the anxious search for a suitable environment gives them an air of unrest. In their periods of self-conquest they are necessarily individualists, and have no ascetic scheme on which to rely. Hence the spiritual miseries of Bunyan, or the “ perpetual hurly-burly, pulling and hauling, warring, fighting, struggling and striving’’ which Jacob Boehme endured and described. Clearly, lack of support- “ing tradition and religious unrest increased these sufferings, and acted prejudicially on many of these true prophets and saints. Finding no food in external religion, they became hostile to it, and set up a false opposition between personal experi- ence of God and “‘ outward forms.’’ Some tended to Quietism ; others wandered off into realms of speculation, invented strange doctrines, and mis- took their personal experiences for the authorita- tive revelation of objective truths. In consequence, many were bitterly persecuted by the official Pro- testant Churches, which showed themselves, in the true spirit of the parvenu, more intolerant than Rome itself towards claims to individual enlighten- ment,
The post-Reformation was a great time for “religious views,” most of which are now for- gotten. But some of these views sprang from and witnessed to a genuine mystical experience, and continued their influence long after their author’s
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death. The outstanding example of this is Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), one of the most original and astonishing of the Christian mystics. Of peasant origin, he was born near Gorlitz, on the borders of Saxony and Silesia, and spent the greater part of his life as a cobbler. He was of an abnormal psychic constitution: a brooding visionary, easily passing into automatic states. Of such material the religious passion can make a great prophet ; and Boehme had the religious assion from the first. Even as a boy he craved _ for the reality of God. His spiritual history, much of which can be recovered from the personal refer- ences in his works, shows the phases through which a mystical genius passes, wholly uninfluenced by the traditional Catholic scheme. During adoles- cence he suffered much from the inward conflicts, torturing doubts, and unruly desires, with which all students of the mystics are familiar: “ I went through a long and sore conflict before I obtained my noble garland.” ‘This stage ended in a mystical experience wherein he seemed for seven days of intense happiness “‘ enwrapt in the Divine Light.” This event, which he regarded as his true conse- cration, took place when he was about nineteen. But the joy and peace which he then experienced failed to silence his intellectual questionings, per- petually revolving round the problem of evil.
I fell into a very deep melancholy and heavy sadness, when I beheld and contemplated the great deep of this world, and con- sidered in my spirit the whole creation of this world. Wherein then I found to be in all things evil and good, love and anger, in the inanimate creatures, viz. in wood, stones, earth and the elements,
as also in men and beasts. . But when in this affliction and trouble I elevated my spirit (for
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I then understood very little or not at all what it was) I earnestly raised it up into God, as with a great storm or onset; wrapping up my whole heart and mind, as also all my thoughts and whole will and resolution, incessantly to wrestle with the love and mercy of God, and not to give over until He blessed me, that is until He enlightened me with His holy spirit, whereby I might understand His will, and be rid of my sadness. And then the spirit did break through.
This reference is clearly to the great ecstatic vision of the year 1600, when gazing one day at a bright pewter dish which reflected the sunlight, he sud- denly fell into a trance. Then the long-sought gate was opened, and he attained once for all the incommunicable mystic certitude. In one quarter of an hour
I saw and knew more than if I had been many years at a Univer- sity . . . the Being of Beings, the Byss and Abyss . . . the essential nature of evil and of good . . . The greatness of the triumphing that was in the spirit I cannot express . .. in this Light my * spirit suddenly saw through all, and in and by all the creatures, even in herbs and grass, it knew God—who He is and how He is and what His will is—and suddenly in that Light my will was set on by a mighty impulse to describe the Being of God.
In this characteristic description, written twelve years after the event, we see how large a speculative « and philosophic element entered into Boehme’s mysticism. His spiritual demands ranged from that sense of personal communion which has satisfied many of the saints, to a world-view which should justify the ways of God. Even more thor- oughly than Meister Eckhart, he doubles the parts of the philosopher and contemplative. In the next paragraph of the Aurora, the meditative cast of his mind becomes apparent. As Julian of
Norwich pondered for years the meaning of her 295
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“revelation of love,’’ so Boehme quickly realized that he “could not at once apprehend” and ‘“‘there passed almost twelve years before the exact understanding thereof was given me.” In other words, the formless but convincing cosmic revelation was gradually reduced by him to con- ceptual images.
There is not much doubt that this “ exact understanding” was helped by the reading of those alchemic and hermetic books then so much in vogue, from which he obtained the greater part of his vocabulary. The result is that in dealing with his voluminous and very difficult writings, we are called upon to distinguish the element of - genuine revelation from the unconscious memories of suggestive phrases and ideas obtained from the common stock of German theosophy. This task may often seem hopeless, and indeed it is doubt- ful whether it will ever be completely performed. Yet the personal confessions scattered through his books constantly reveal the depth and simplicity of his soul; its child-like dependence on that “Heart of God” in which “he sought to hide himself.” It is in his combination of this deep quiet sense of personal communion with God, and an utter certitude that he had indeed been given a revelation of His creative method, a “‘ ground- plan of the universe,” that Boehme is unique among the mystics. The two aspects of experience interlock—only the pure in heart perceive the invisible realities of the “‘ great Deep.”
Where will you seek for God? Seek Him in your soul that is proceeded out of the eternal nature, the living fountain of forces wherein the Divine working stands.
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O that I had but the pen of a man, and were able therewith to write down the spirit of knowledge! I can but stammer of great mysteries like a child that is beginning to speak ; so very little can the earthly tongue express of that which the spirit comprehends.
_ It was at the close of these twelve years of brood- ing upon his great revelation—a period, we might say, of spiritual and also mental education—that a ‘vehement impulse”’ urged him to write down what he knew. ‘The result was his first book, The Aurora, largely, according to his own account (which internal evidence confirms), the result of automatic composition :
Art has not written here, neither was there any time to consider how to set it down punctually, according to the understanding of the letters, but all was ordered according to the direction of the Spirit, which often went in haste, so that in many words letters may be wanting, and in some places a capital letter for a word; so that the Penman’s hand, by reason that he was not accustomed to it, did often shake. And though I could have wrote in a more accurate, fair, and plain manner, yet the reason was this, that the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and the hand and pen must hasten directly after it; for it goes and comes like a sudden shower.
This strange mixture of “ Philosophie, Astrolo- gie and Theologie . . . set down diligently from a true ground in the knowledge of the Spirit and the impulse of God” introduces us to Boehme’s intensely dualistic yet essentially Platonic concep- tion of reality ; governed by the two hostile prin- ciples of ‘“‘the eternal darkness and the eternal light,” which “‘ couch within” the visible world and the living soul. It is hardly surprising that The Aurora offended local orthodoxy ; and its author was forbidden to write again. For six years he remained silent; but the circulation of the work in MS. had brought him many learned and
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distinguished, and probably some eccentric, friends and admirers, under pressure from whom he again began to write in 1618; an unfortunate enrich- ment of his alchemic and astrological vocabulary keeping pace with his mystical development. Between this date and 1624 he produced an immense mass of writings, each in his own opinion “ten times deeper ’’ than the last ; for his spiritual vision matured, and with each fresh “‘flash”’ he perceived how crude and approximate the earlier revelations had been.
It was in 1620 that Boehme declared himself to have reached the “lovely bright day” of full and peaceful illumination ; and his most lucid and spiritual works—the Six Theosophic Points, Super- sensual Dialogues, and lovely Way to Christ with its truly mystical emphasis on religious realism and the personal responsibility of the soul—were all written after this date. In these books his thought sometimes finds a wonderfully simple and direct expression; and has opened up for many a path along which it seems possible to reconcile the ruthless energy of nature with the peace and gentleness of God “wherein all worketh and willeth in quiet love.”
For of God and in Him are all things; darkness and light, love and anger, fire and light; but He calleth Himself God only as to the light of His love. . . . Our whole teaching is nothing else than how a man should kindle in himself God’s light-world. We live and are in God; we have heaven and hell in ourselves. What we make of ourselves that we are: if we make of ourselves an angel, and dwell in the light and love of God in Christ, we are so ; but if we make of ourselves a fierce, false and haughty devil which contemns all love and meekness in mere covetousness, greedy hunger and thirst, then also we are so.
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Ultimately his doctrine, in so far as it is amen- able to analysis, is a doctrine of ‘‘ will and desire.” Man is regenerated and “ saved” by effort as well as grace. He must strive for the “‘ noble garland”’ ; first by self-conquest, and then by an energetic and progressive self-yielding to the Will of God, “ harnessing his fiery energies to the service of the light.” To elude this obligation is to be at best a “‘ mere historical new man,” and miss beatitude : for ‘‘ heaven and hell are present everywhere, and it is but the turning of the wi// either into God’s love or into His wrath, that introduceth into them.”
The right of Boehme, with his complete inde- pendence of institutional religion, his outspoken criticism of “* churches of stone’ and their services and sacraments, to a place among the mystics of the Church, rests upon the great contribution which he undoubtedly made to the development of Christian experience. He was creative. His influence, during the century following his death, was felt strongly ; and nowhere more than in England, where certain aspects of the Quaker movement, and afterwards the mystical revival associated with William Law, are largely the results of his teaching.
A Christian (he said) is of no sect: he can dwell in the midst of sects and appear in their services, without being attached or bound to any.
And this seems to have been the destiny of his
doctrine. Though at first sight he may seem a
‘lonely prophet,” this appearance of isolation 1s
illusory. He does not, for all his intuitive experi-
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of first-hand communion with the unseen—escape the influence of tradition. Two lines of spiritual descent unite in him. On the one hand, he is a channel through which the teaching of the early German mystics—Eckhart, Tauler, the ‘‘ German Theology ’’—affected the Protestant world. ‘This teaching probably came to him at second-hand through the books of Valentine Weigel (1533-88) and his school, whose influence upon him can be established. On the other hand, through the current hermetic and theosophic literature which made so obvious an appeal to his mind, Boehme descends from Paracelsus, and the ‘‘nature- philosophers” of the Renaissance : and it was by means of imagery drawn from these sources that he struggled to give his vision concrete form. At his death in 1624 he was already deeply reverenced, not only by contemporary theologians, but also by philosophers and men of science. His influence was not limited to the reformed Churches, but by a curious turn of fortune it found its way even into the Catholic fold. Among those who owed their first enlightenment to his writings was Johann Scheffler (1624-77) commonly known as Angelus Silesius ; the son of a Polish nobleman, and Court physician to the Emperor Frederic III. Scheffler’s Divine Epigrams sufficiently attest the degree in which Boehme had influenced his thought ; even without the well-known lines which he dedicated to him :
In Water lives the fish, the plant in Earth abides, The bird in Air, the sun in Firmament. In burning Fire the salamander hides, God’s Heart is Jacob Boehme’s element ! 220
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Nevertheless, the ardently personal character of Schefler’s mysticism finally reached a point at which it could not be satisfied by Boehme’s doc- trines. He abjured them, entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1661, and became a Franciscan friar. In the poems which he wrote during this final period of his life—among them the famous hymn
O Love, who formedst me to wear ‘The image of Thy Godhead here! ~
—he appears as the spiritual heir of Jacopone da Todi and the great Franciscan mystics ; who are thus brought by converging streams of spiritual influence into unexpected contact with the “Teutonic philosopher ”’ of Gérlitz.
The translation of Boehme’s works into English began in 1644, and was completed in 1661. As the lifeless and worldly character of the official Church had provoked in Germany a mystical re- action; so in England, those who failed to dis- cover either in Puritanism or Anglicanism sufficient nourishment for their souls, became “ seekers ” after some more vivid expression of the spiritual life. ‘This “‘ search’ was pursued along two main routes. On the one hand, the mystical poets Vaughan, Herbert, Traherne, and their contem- poraries the Cambridge Platonists represent the path taken by various types of gentle, cultivated, moderately fervent—in fact, characteristically Angli- can—spirits. Here we find much exquisite writing, much spiritual charm, but little evidence of first- hand struggle and experience. These, after all, are ‘tasters’ rather than ‘‘seekers”’ of truth. We have only to compare the sugary Platonics of
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Traherne, the pious rationalism of Whichcote, with the stern realism of Ruysbroeck, or even with Boehme’s cloud and fire, to perceive that we have to do with a manufactured product of great beauty ; and not the strong raw stuff of actual life. The Platonists were highly cultivated and spiritually susceptible men. ‘They knew and admired Ploti- nus, Dionysius the Areopagite, and many of the classics of medieval mysticism ; which were at this period republished and widely read, influencing numerous religious writers who could not properly be described as mystics. But they show us, as St. Augustine had said long ago of their prede- cessors, ‘‘ the vision of the land of peace—but not the road thereto.”
The writings of Augustine Baker and his pupil Dame Gertrude More show another and more hopeful path taken by those who sought for a vivid experience of God ; but these represent the continuance and enrichment of traditional Catholic mysticism, not the contribution of the Protestant world. Within this Protestant world the number and variety of spiritual experiments attested the general unrest ; and many of these experiments were strongly influenced by Boehme’s works. In Germany a sect of “‘ Behmenists,”’ rejecting the Christian ministry and sacraments, tried to per- petuate the master’s teachings. In England Dr. Pordage (1608-98) and his associate, the apoca- lyptic visionary and prophetess, Jane Lead (1623- 1704), reproduced Boehme’s doctrine in its most confused and least fortunate form. Pordage, origi- nally a clergyman, was deprived for heresy. His “sect ’’ and the Philadelphian Society which sprang
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from it, together with the other theosophic, her- metic and illuminist groups of this uneasy period, faded away, leaving little of value behind.
It was not among any of these that the true revival of mystical religion was prepared. Alien from them, and also from the formalism of the official Church, there had grown up in all parts of England groups of spiritual “ seekers” or “‘ waiters ’’—a term first applied to them in 1617. Distinguished on one hand by a strong tendency to Quietism, on the other by belief in individual illumination and consequent hostility to external religion, these—as William Penn afterwards said of them—“ left all visible churches and societies and wandered up and down as sheep without a shepherd . . . seeking their Beloved, but could not find Him as their souls desired to know Him.” Influenced by the mystical and quietist literature which was now in general circulation, some prac- tised great austerity of life and met regularly for silent prayer. ‘Their importance in the history of the Church consists in the fact that they provided the spiritual landscape within which the mystical genius of George Fox (1624-91) developed ; and that the formation of the Society of Friends, that great experiment in corporate mysticism, largely represents their discovery, under his leader- ship,, of the treasure they had sought.
Though it can hardly be contended that the Quaker method represents religion in its wholeness or ministers to all the complex needs of human souls, yet at least in its great period, and still in its greatest personalities, it witnesses to the mighty results that may be achieved by an uncompromising
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Christian inwardness ; and shows how simple men and women may share the essential experiences of the contemplative life, and reach a first-hand appre- hension of God inciting to heroic action and rivalling the conclusions of mystical philosophers. All this is ultimately derived from the spiritual creativeness of Fox himself, one of those great and life-giving personalities through whom from time to time the Spirit reaches out to men.
Fox, born of the craftsman class, and brought up in a strict but arid Puritan atmosphere, which could not satisfy his innate craving for spiritual reality, felt in adolescence the inward turmoil and longing for assurance so characteristic of religious genius of the “twice-born” type. At nineteen he left home and became in body as well as soul a ‘‘seeker’’ ; for many of those to whom this name was given literally wandered over the country in their search for a spiritual home. “I was,’ he says, “‘a man of sorrows in the time of the first workings of the Lord in me.” This period of conflict lasted for three years. It was brought to an end by the great and well-known ecstatic experi- ence, comparable to those in which St. Augustine and St. Francis were born into new life, which gave him, once for all, absolute certitude.
Then, O then, I heard a Voice which said, ‘‘’ There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”; and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy . . . when God doth work, who shall let it? And this I knew experimentally . . . and then the Lord did gently lead me along and did let me see His love, which was endless and eternal and surpasseth all the knowledge that men have in the natural state or can get by history or books.
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doubt that this is the description of a genuine mystical conversion, an opening of “‘ the eye which looks on eternity.” It was indeed the first of those “ openings,” or abrupt ecstatic apprehensions, which witness to his abnormal psychic constitution and supported his apostolic life. It was probably in the following year that the establishment of his consciousness on these new levels was completed in a prolonged trance—said to have lasted fourteen days—during which his whole bodily aspect became changed ; and he afterwards declared that he had been brought through “‘a very ocean of darkness and death”’ into “‘ the greatness and infinitude of the Love of God which cannot be expressed in words . . . an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of darkness.’’ These phrases inevitably remind us of Boehme, whose works were eagerly devoured by the early Quakers and must have been known to Fox by the time his Fournal was composed ; and there are other “openings”? which approach even more closely in character to Boehme’s great pictorial intuitions of Reality :
All things were new; and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. ... The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me how all things had their names given them, according to their nature and virtue.
Such passages, all belonging to his first period of growth, prove Fox to have been a visionary ; but it is the apostolic life which developed from and through these experiences which gives him an honoured place among the creative mystics of the Church. In a period of arid religious formalism
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he brought back, because he possessed it, the life- giving sense of the Presence of God. As St. Paul passed from the ‘‘ abundance of revelations” to the strenuous career of itinerant missionary, and St. Teresa from the life of contemplation to the hard work of religious reform; so Fox’s ecstatic openings prepared him for a wandering ministry which lasted forty years, often involved persecu- tion, hardship and danger, and included visits to Holland, Germany, and Bermuda, and two years in America. Wherever he went he established groups of Friends, or as they were first called, ‘* Children of the Light.’’ With these disciples he remained in a close spiritual sympathy, sometimes even involving such a telepathic knowledge of their vicissitudes as St. Catherine of Siena had of her “sons.” Uniting spiritual power with that stern common sense and capacity for detail so often found in the saints, he organized his groups with the thoroughness and success of a new St. Paul, colouring them with his own peculiar spirit and infecting them with his enthusiastic energy. His converts came from every class; and his “ first companions,” like those of St. Francis, included the extremes of culture and simplicity.
With little education, and often rough and intolerant in manner, he is, nevertheless, an out- standing example of the “power of the Spirit” ; and there is much contemporary evidence of the immense impression which was made by his trans- figured personality. Said William Penn of him: “The most awful, living, reverent frame I ever felt or beheld was his in prayer.” An equivalent
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““numinous”’ quality came from the Cambridge students who had assembled to attack him, but exclaimed “‘O hee shines, hee glisters!” and let him go unharmed—a story which should be com- pared with the insistent and unexplained reports of abnormal radiance which meet us in the lives of earlier mystics. Nor was this enhancement of life merely apparent. Attacked in 1652 by a mob, and left for senseless on the ground, Fox himself experienced the working of that healing gift which he used on other men. ‘“ The power of the Lord sprang through me,” he said, ‘‘and the eternal refreshings refreshed me,” and to the astonish- ment of his enemies he rose unharmed to his feet. Yet more mysterious, this man, uninfluenced by the medizval ascetic traditions, felt that he was called like certain Catholic saints to bear in his own person the burden and grief of the world’s sins. ‘“‘ He bears the iniquity, wherever he comes,”’ was said of him by one of his contemporaries.
Though it must be acknowledged that the Quaker emphasis on inward experience alone, its deliberate cult of quietistic devotion, and its com- plete rejection of external religion, means in prac- tice a subtraction from the full human richness of the Christian scheme, with its close interlocking of inward and outward things; yet plainly this ‘renewed emphasis on the invisible is one which is perpetually needed if the realities of the spiritual life are to survive.
In spite, then, of exaggerations in their doctrine, Fox and his first companions must rank, as truly as the first Franciscans, among the reconstructive mystics of the Church. Their alienation from the
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main Christian stream and wholesale rejection of its methods of worship, was an implied criticism of the Christian institutions which surrounded them; and we need not deny that these were at alow ebb. In a living Church their position need have differed little from that of Brother Lawrence ; for, had external forms still been found to convey spiritual value, the revolt from them would have been less intense. ‘The extent to which a cor- porate mystical life, often of the deepest and purest kind, developed in the first Quaker communities is an indication that England, like France, was capable at this period of a genuine spiritual renais- sance. But the English love of sects and passion for individualism and freedom, here replaced the Latin love of order, as the controlling factor in its outward expression. ,
Yet it is impossible to read the first-hand accounts of Quaker faith and life, based wholly on the principle of loving surrender and the “* practice of the Presence of God,” without per- ceiving the close identity between their funda- mental ideas and those of the great saints of contemporary France. At many points the Quaker and the Catholic contemplative approach one another. It is significant that Quaker spirituality of the second generation was nourished, not only by the writings of Boehme and his precursors and followers, but also by the great masters of tradi- tional mysticism, especially Thomas 4 Kempis and Fénelon. In these the Friends found those very principles that governed their own religious prac- tice ; and through them they are linked with
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These writers fed the loving and courageous soul of John Woolman (1720-72); whose deep mys- tical consciousness of the unity in love of God and man drove him to vigorous and unpopular denun- ciations of slavery, and beyond this to a “‘ concern ”’ for the animal creation Franciscan in its tenderness and unique in his period and place.
I was early convinced (he says in his Fourza/) that true religion consisted in an inward life, wherein the Heart doth Love and Reverence God the Creator, and lear to exercise true Justice and Goodness, not only toward all men, but also toward the Brute Creatures. . . . That as by His breath the flame of life was kindled in all Animals and Sensible Creatures, to say we love God as unseen and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving by His life, was a contradiction in itself.
This intense love of consistency, the determina- tion that outward life and inward vision should be all of one piece, 1s a distinguishing character of Woolman’s mysticism—the cause alike of his most heroic and most eccentric acts. In his de- liberate linking-up of social questions with his interior vision of Divine Will and Love, he is indeed the first of the modern mystics; finding a close connection between the ‘‘ pure Operation of the Holy Spirit’ and “a longing in my mind that people might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of person, cleanness about their houses and garments.”
Though he could say of himself that through ‘most steady attention to the voice of the True Shepherd . . . my Soul was so environed with Heavenly Light and Consolation that things were made easy to me which had been otherwise,” he could not rest in this personal communion. It
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drove him to an ardent crusade against slavery, oppression, and the luxury of the propertied class, by which he earned the enmity of the rich American Quakers, exasperated by his constant demand for a return to the lost simplicity of the early Friends. ‘The weight of this degeneracy hath lain so heavy upon me,” he says, “‘ my heart has been so ardent for a reformation, that we may come to that right use of things where living on a little we may inhabit that holy Mountain in which they neither hurt nor destroy.”” Because of the miseries of the plantation slaves, he refused sugar ; because they were “‘ stained with worldly glory’ he would not use silver spoons ; because dyed cloth was “ in- sincere’ he wore undyed clothes—with the result that in spite of his real holiness ‘‘ ye singularity of his appearance might in some Meetings Draw ye Attention of ye Youth, and even cause a change of Countenance in some.’ Yet these eccentricities all arose from the mystic’s conviction of the sacra- mental character of outward things ; the mysterious unity of all life in God.
As Woolman’s soul matured, his self-abandon- ment and austerities increased. Like Fox, he felt the call to take on himself the sorrows of the world. Of an experience which came to him two years before his death he says :
I saw a mass of matter of a dull gloomy colour, between the South and the East, and was informed that this mass was human beings, in as great misery as they could be, and live ; and that I was mixed in with them, and henceforth I might not consider myself as a distinct or separate being.
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Christian passions of pity and redemptive love which, in the last years of his devoted life, he poured with- out stint from his beloved ‘‘ interior silence’? on the needs and sorrows of all living things.
The light of true Quaker spirituality, at once So inward and so active, passed from Woolman to a succession of saintly and vigorous souls. It is seen again in Stephen Grellet (1773-1855), that untiring missionary of the Inward Light, and in the heroic prison-reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780- 1845), who found in the silence that mysterious power which “* loves the unlovely into loveableness.”’ These convince us of the continuously life-giving character of that Spirit which George Fox served and proclaimed.
Though the influence of Jacob Boehme is most marked in the Quakers, and other sectarian pro- moters of religious inwardness, and later in the quite unchurched mysticism of Blake (1757-1827), that powerful genius also contributed something to the revival of mysticism in the Anglican Church. Through the interpretations of his great disciple William Law (1686-1761) his teachings brought their renewing touch to English institutionalism at one of the most deadly moments of its career. William Law’s few mystical writings were pro- duced in the later part of his life ; for Boehme’s influence reached him in middle age. Belonging to the High Church party, and having small sym- pathy with the religious rationalism of the Cam- bridge Platonists, the ‘‘inward light” of God’s prevenient and all-penetrative presence is as central to Law’s teaching as it is to that of the Quakers.
‘“‘'There is but one salvation for all mankind, and 231
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that is the Life of God in the soul . . . you have no true, religion, are no worshipper of the one true God, but in and by that Spirit of Love which is God Himself living and working in you.” “Turn therefore inwards, and all that is within you will demonstrate to you the Presence and Power of God in your soul, and make you find and feel it, with the same certainty as you find and feel your own thoughts.”
It is this vivid, unflinching realism, this demand for a true organic life and growth of the spirit, founded on a change in the direction of its will and desire—for he equals St. Augustine in his insistence on the will as ‘‘the only workman in nature ’—which gives to Law’s mystical writings their freshness and stimulating power. He learned from Boehme the way to a vastly enriched and deepened vision of God, and His relation with the soul ; and in the light of that vision was able to give expression to the ancient truths of Christian mysticism. We cannot doubt that he experienced that interior transformation which he passionately proclaims ; and which turned the brilliant ecclesi- astic into the gentle and saintly recluse and director of souls, who wrote The Spirit of Love and The Spirit of Prayer. ‘Through these little books, into which Law poured the fruits of his deep musings and his secret communion with God, he has influ- enced, and continues to influence, many souls. He was read and appreciated by the leaders of the Evangelical Revival ; and the mystical element in that movement owes something to its contact through him with the great traditional doctrines of the interior life.
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Since the Evangelical Revival was mainly a return to religious realism, and especially to that ardent personal devotion which has always formed one strand in the Church’s secret life, we might expect to find in it a nursery of mystics. This, notoriously, it did not become. Nevertheless, in the greatest souls whom it nourished, we see again the special quality of sanctity, tender, childlike, heroic, and contagious, which is the characteristic product of Christocentric mysticism. In Henry Martyn (1781-1812) we have a typical and beauti- ful example of its transforming power. A study of this half-forgotten scholar-mystic, who, in an atmosphere even hostile to the ideals of Catholicism, was possessed of the same experience, and driven to the same disciplines, as the mystics of the medieval Church, may well complete our survey of Protestant mysticism. Here we may realize its substantial identity with the classic Christian expres- sions of spiritual life.
Born at Truro, and growing up in a religious atmosphere coloured by Wesley’s influence, Martyn was a brilliant, hypersensitive, unstable, not specially religious boy. His conversion took place at Cam- bridge, and was chiefly due to the influence of Charles Simeon. Simeon, a generation older than Martyn—mystical, passionately Christocentric, full of energy, courting persecution for the sake of his ideals—was one of the great apostolic souls of the Evangelical movement. Martyn, though a Wes- leyan background and the immense impression made upon him by the life of David Brainerd counted for much in his development, is essentially his spiritual child.
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With an intellect of exceptional power and delicacy, now doubled by a growing spiritual sense, Martyn is an outstanding example of that well-marked saintly type to which his French contemporary Jean-Nicholas Grou (1731-1803), mystic and Platonist, and later the holy and scholarly Abbé Huvelin (18 39-1910) also belonged : a type in which the activities of an exquisite and critical mind are combined with a childlike, humble, and adoring attitude of soul. At twenty-one he was Senior Wrangler, and assured of a brilliant academic career.. Two years later he was ordained, and under the dominion of his growing desire to help and redeem, was struggling as one of Charles Simeon’s curates with the pastoral duties most alien to his shy and fastidious temperament. He had now begun, too, that impassioned study of Oriental languages in which, for the rest of his life, he found interest and refreshment. More significant still, he, a child of the most rigidly Protestant piety, began to discipline his body by those physical austerities which possess such un- dying attraction for the saints. In 1805, drawn to further renunciations, he sailed for India as a missionary chaplain. Only the spiritual journal kept during these years reveals his true life, and the springs of action which dictated his sacrifices. We see in its successive entries the growth of his soul, its deepening and expanding experience of
God.
My imagination takes to itself wings and flies to some wilderness where I may hold converse in solitude with God. . . . What is this world, what is religious company, what is anything to me without God? They become a bustle and a crowd when I lose
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sight of Him. ‘The most dreary wilderness would appear Paradise with a little of His presence. . . . I had such need of being alone with God. ... It sometimes appeared astonishing that men of like passions with myself, of the same bodies, alike in every other respect, knew and saw nothing of that blest and adorable Being in whom my soul findeth all its happiness.
These extracts date from his academic period, when he had to bear the ridicule and contempt which his intellectual equals reserved for those who took religion seriously. During the physical hardships and intense spiritual loneliness of the nine months’ journey to India, in pastoral charge of a ship’s company of the roughest type, a manifest deepening of his mystical life took place. Not only the joys of contemplative experience— the transcendent sweetness of the privilege of being always with God would appear to me #00 great, were it not for the blessed command, ‘ Set your affections on things above’”’—but a new con- sciousness of something far greater, more authori- tative than these emotional delights, now came to him : ‘I perceived for the first time the difference between sensible sweetness in religion, and the really valuable attainments.”
Thus the man who reached Calcutta in 1806 had already achieved something like spiritual maturity : a fact soon recognized by those capable of appreciating it. During the remaining six years of his life his growth was the saint’s growth in outflowing love, simplicity, devotedness. In the touching descriptions of his desperate but often unavailing efforts to teach and win souls, and of the contagious influence of his own spirit of selfless love, we rediscover the methods, longings, and
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achievements of all the apostolic mystics of the Church, from Francis of Assisi to the Quaker saints. ‘‘I wish,” said Martyn, “to have my whole soul swallowed up in the Will of God”’ ; and we seem to see the fulfilment of this desire through the reports of his contemporaries. ‘* The outbeaming of his soul,”’ said one who knew him, ‘“‘ would absorb the attention of every observer ”’ ; and another, “‘ he shines in all the dignity of love, and seems to carry about him such a heavenly majesty, as impresses the mind beyond description.”
Yet he combined this spiritual ascendancy with that wide and supple power of entering fully and simply into each phase and moment of life, which is the crowning grace of those who are really at home with God. He could turn from the uphill pastoral labours of an Anglo-Indian chaplain of that day to his great and absorbing work of trans- lating the New Testament into Hindustani, Arabic, and Persian—a task in which nothing satisfied him which fell below the level of the most exact scholarship—and from this again to delighted intercourse with the children or animals by whom he was always adored. “A little dog to play with, or what would be best of all a dear little child,” were the companions he longed for when his health broke down. His friends worshipped him as a saint: to others he was ‘‘a learned and cheerful man.”
The last years of Martyn’s short and various life have a heroic and romantic character which link him with such great missionary mystics as St. Francis Xavier, whom he so greatly admired and envied, and the intrepid saint of the Sahara,
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Charles de Foucauld. Driven by ill-health from India, he could not rest, but travelled with much difficulty to Persia, that he might get his translation of the Scriptures revised by Persian scholars. We have in his letters a vivid and amazing picture of his life in Shiraz; the gentle, studious, and fragile Evangelical clergyman, now disguised in Persian dress and adopting local manners, but still ‘‘ sing- ing hymns over my milk and water,” since “‘ tea I have none.’’ Alone amongst a hostile Moslem population, to whom he fearlessly preached the Christian faith, he was yet “clothed in an almost magical calm” ; and was recognized by the more spiritual amongst them as belonging to the uni- versal company of the saints. Deep conversations took place between the Christian missionary and the Sifi mystics, whom he quaintly described as ““the Methodists of the East.” ‘“‘ I am sometimes led on,” he said, “‘ to tell them all I know of the very recesses of the sanctuary ; and these are the things that interest them.” The “‘love clear, sweet and strong ’”’ which glorified and supported Martyn’s sufferings and efforts here transcended credal barriers, and revealed one to another these diverse seekers for an identical Reality. His task finished, he started for England in a dying con- dition; and after a journey marked by the extremes of physical misery and spiritual joy died in great loneliness at Tokat, aged only thirty-one.
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THE MYSTICS OF THE CHURCH ILLUSTRATIVE WORKS
Boehme, Jacob. The Aurora. ‘Translated by J. Sparrow. London, 1914. , Six Theosophic Points. ‘Translated by J. R. Earle. London, 1919. The Way to Christ. London, 1911. Confessions of. Edited by W. Scott Palmer. London,
be © 1920,
Braithwaite, W. The Beginnings of Quakerism. London, 1912.
Christian Life, Faith, and Thought, being the first Part of the Book of Christian Discipline of the Religious Society of Friends. London, 1922.
Emmott, E. B. A Short History of Quakerism. London,
1923.
Fox, George. Journal. Edited from the MSS. by N. Penney. Cambridge, 1911.
Fones, Rufus. Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries. London, 1914.
Law, William. Liberal and Mystical Writings. Edited by W. Scott Palmer. London, 1908.
Padwick, C. Henry Martyn, Confessor of the Faith, London, 1922.
Woolman, John. Journal and Essays. Edited by A. M.
Gummere. London, 1922.
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