Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 26

The way back to this infinite Ocean from which we have come and in which we belong is through the tiny rivulet, the narrow inlet, of our own souls, for "the Sea flows into all the creeks and crannies of the World."[33] But to find Him--this original Ground and Reality--we must "leave the outcoasts" and go back into "the Abysse." Most of us are busy "playing with c.o.c.kel-sh.e.l.ls and pebble-stones that lie on the outcoasts of the Kingdom," and we do not put back to the infinite Sea itself, where we become united and made one with His Life.[34]

The process of return is a process of denial and subtraction. The "c.o.c.kel-sh.e.l.ls and pebble-stones" must be left, and one finite thing after another must be dropped, and finally "all that thou callest I, all that self ness, all that propriety that thou hast taken to thyself, whatsoever creates in us Iness and selfness, must be brought to nothing."[35] If we would hear G.o.d, we must still the noises within ourselves. "All the Artillery in the World, were they all discharged together at one clap, could not more deaf the ears of our bodies than the clamorings of desires in the soul deaf its ears, so you see a man must go into silence or else he cannot hear G.o.d speak."[36] All "the minstrels" that are singing of self and self interests "must be cast out." If "the creature" is to be loved and used at all, it must be loved and used rightly and in balance, which is hard to do. "Thou must love it and use it as if thou loved it not and used it not, not appropriating it to thyself, and always being ready to leave it willingly and freely; so that thou sufferest no rending, no tearing in thy soul to part with it, and so thou usest it for G.o.d and in G.o.d and to ends appointed by G.o.d."[37]

The result of this junction of finite and infinite in us is {250} that a Christian life is bound to be a strenuous contest: "you must expect to fight a great battel." "You are," Everard says again, "bidden to fight with your own selves, with your own desires, with your own affections, with your own reason, with your own will; and therefore if you will finde your enemies, never look without. If you will finde out the Devil and what he is and what his nature is, look within you.

_There_ you may see him in his colours, in his nature, in his power, in his effects and in his working."[38]

In a word, the way to G.o.d is the way of the Cross. Christ Himself is the pattern and His way of Life is the typical way for all who would find G.o.d--"Christ Jesus is He that all visions tend to; He is the substance of all the types, shadows, and sacrifices. He is the _business_ that the whole Word was ever about, and only is, and shall be about; He hath been, is, and shall be the business of all ages, in one kinde or other."[39] "The Book of G.o.d," he says in another sermon, "is a great Book, and many words are in it, and many large volumes have been drawn out of it, but Jesus Christ is the body of it; He is the Mark all these words shoot at."[40] It henceforth becomes our business to find Christ's life and Christ's death in us, to see that all His deeds are done in us. Christ's will must become our will, Christ's peace our peace, Christ's sufferings our sufferings, Christ's cross our cross, and then we may know "the eternal Sabbath," and keep "quiet, even if the whole fabrick of heaven and earth crack and the mountains tumble down."[41]

Everard was always on the watch for those things which prevent the growth, progress, and advance of the soul into the deeper significance of religion. The true Christian continually "grows taller in Christ,"

he does not stop at "the child's stature," his growth is "not stinted like a Dwarf."[42] He discovers one of the prevailing {251} causes of arrested development, the "stinting" of the soul, to lie in the wrong use of externals, in the subtle tendency to "rest" in the elements or beginnings of religion, as he calls them, in "the lowest things in Christianity." This is "to cover oneself with fig-leaves as Adam did."[43] Men "turn shadows into substance," and instead of using ordinances and sacraments, "as means, schoolmasters and tutors," "as steps and guides to Christ who is the Truth and Substance," they so use them that they stop the soul mid-way and hinder it from going on to Christ.[44] He cites the way in which St. Paul "burst out into a holy defiance" of everything which did not directly minister to the formation of a new creation within the person, whether it were Moses and the law or even Christ after the flesh, or any "outward Priviledges and Ordinances" whatever. Those who make these things "the top and quintessence of religion" miss the Apostle's "more excellent way."

Those who "stick in externals" and "rest upon them as Crutches and Go-bies" [_i.e._ become arrested there] prevent growth in religion, "turn the ordinance into an Idol" and occasion disputes and differences, "like children who quarrel about triffles."[45] But Everard is, nevertheless, very cautious not to go too far in this direction and he always shows poise and balance. So long as the outward, whether letter or sacrament, is kept in its place and is used as means or medium for the attainment of a spiritual goal--the formation of Christ within--he approves of its use and warns against a too sudden transcendence of the outward helps to the soul.[46]

Here in England, then, during the tumultuous years from 1625 to 1650 a solid scholar and a great preacher was teaching the people the same views which the spiritual Reformers of Germany had taught a century earlier. Like them, Everard taught that the book of the Bible, in so far as it consists of words, syllables, and letters, is not the Word of G.o.d, for G.o.d's Word is not ink and paper, but Life and Spirit, quick and powerful, illuminating the {252} soul immediately, and demonstrating itself by its creative work upon the inward man until he becomes like the Spirit that works within him.[47] Like them, he insisted that Christ becomes Saviour only as He becomes the Life of our lives and repeats in us in a spiritual way the events of His outward and historical life. Like them, too, he had discovered that G.o.d is not a being of wrath and anger, needing to be appeased. On the contrary he says: "Beloved, were you once to come to a true sight of G.o.d, you would see Him glorious and amiable, full of love and mercy and tenderness--all wrath and frowns blown clean away. We should see in Him not so much as any shadow of anger."[48] Like them, he found heaven not far away but in the redeemed soul: "Heaven is nothing but Grace perfected, 'tis of the same nature of that you enjoy here when you are united by faith to Christ."[49] "I remember," he once said, "how I was taught as a child, either by my nurse, or my mother, or my schoolmaster, that G.o.d was above in heaven, above the sun, moon and stars, and there, I thought, was His Court, and His Chamber of presence, and I thought it a great height to come to this knowledge; but I a.s.sure you I had more to do to unlearn this principle than ever I had to learn it."[50] He tries to call his hearers away from "the childish apprehensions" that heaven is a place of "visible and ocular glories," or that "it shall be only hereafter," or that its glory "consists in Thrones, and Crowns, and Scepters, in Music, Harps and Vyols, and such like carnal and poor things."[51]

He was a man of beautiful spirit, of saintly life, "courageous and discerning," "concerned not so much over self-sufferings as that truth should not in any way be obstructed through him," and he belongs in the list of those who saw through the veil of the outward, through the parable of the letter, and found the inward and eternal Reality.[52]

{253}

III. GILES RANDALL AND HIS TRANSLATIONS

Another seventeenth-century interpreter of religion as direct and immediate experience of G.o.d was Giles Randall, who, like John Everard, was a scholar, a translator of religious books, and a powerful popular preacher. If one knew him only through the accounts of the heresy-hunters of the period, one would suppose him to have been a disseminator of the most "virulent poyson" for the soul; but a careful examination of all the material available convinces me that he was a high-minded, sincere, and fearless bearer of the message of the present, living, inwardly-experienced Christ, as Eternal Spirit, Divine Light, and Word of G.o.d.

It is extremely difficult, from the fragmentary details at hand, to construct a biographical account of Randall, but the following sketch of him seems fairly well supported by facts:

He was the son of Edward Randall of Chipping Wycombe, Bucks, and received his B.A. from Lincoln College, Oxford, February 13, 1625-6.[53] He was probably the nephew of John Randall, B.D.

(1570-1622), an eminent Puritan divine, a man of good scholars.h.i.+p and of large means, who bequeathed by will his house and garden to his "loveing Nephewe Gyles Randall."[54] He seems to have been for some years a minister in good odour and repute, and to have given no occasion of complaint against his doctrine before 1643. He probably was the Giles Randall who was arrested in 1637 and tried in the Star Chamber for {254} preaching against "s.h.i.+p-money" as unjust and an offence against G.o.d, since it was, he declared in his sermon, "a way of taking burdens off rich men's shoulders and laying them on the necks of poor men."[55] He was again before the Star Chamber--this time it is certainly our Giles Randall--in 1643 charged with preaching "anabaptism," "familism," and "antinomianism," according to the usual labels of the time. He had been for some years preaching peaceably at "the Spital" in London with great mult.i.tudes of people nocking to hear him.[56] The charge of heresy was brought against Randall for a sermon which he was said to have preached in St. Martin Orgar's, a soundly orthodox church, in Candlewick ward, London--the charge being that he preached against "the mandatory and obligatory nature of the law as a Christian rule to walk by," and a.s.serted that a child of G.o.d can live as sinless a life as Christ's was.[57] He was "removed" from the ministry "for his anabaptism" in the autumn of 1644, though he continued to preach after being "removed."[58] The famous drag-nets of heresy give us a few more details of Randall's "poysonous" doctrine.

Edwards says that Randall taught that "our common food, ordinary eating and drinking, is a sacrament of Christ's death," and that "all creatures [_i.e._ everything in the visible creation] held forth G.o.d in Christ."[59] Samuel Rutherford charges him with teaching a possible perfection in this life: "Randall, the antinomian and Familist says, those persons are ever learning and never coming to knowledge who say that perfection is not attainable in this life."[60] He further charges that Randall in a sermon said that "Christ's Parables, from Sowing, a Draw-net, Leaven, etc., did prove that to expound the Scriptures by allegories was lawfull and that all the things of this life, as Seeds, the Wayside, a Rocke, the Sea, a {255} Net, the Leaven, etc., were sacraments of Christ . . . and that a spiritual minde might see the mysteries of the Gospel in all the things of nature and of this life. This man who preacheth most abomnable Familisme is suffered in and about London publickly, twise on the Lord's Day, to draw hundreds of G.o.dly people after him!"[61]

John Etherington throws a little more light upon the nature of this "abomnable Familism," which so many G.o.dly people liked. He says that Randall taught in his sermons that when a person is baptized with the Holy Ghost he knows all things, and has entered into the deep mystery which is "like the great ocean where there is no casting anchor nor sounding the bottome"; that perfection and the resurrection are attainable in the present time; that "those who have the Spirit have nothing to doe with the law nor with the baptism of repentance which John preached"; "he presumes to turn the holy writings of Moses, the Prophets, of Christ and His Apostles into Allegories," and gives "a spiritual meaning" to the same.[62] It is clear from the comments of these crumb-pickers of pernicious doctrine that Giles Randall, as a preacher, was teaching the views now quite familiar to us. He was teaching that the whole world is a revelation of G.o.d, that Christ is G.o.d fully revealed; that the Divine Spirit, incarnate in Him, comes upon men still and brings them into the bottomless, unsoundable deeps of Life with G.o.d, and makes it possible for them to attain a perfect life; that the Scriptures as outward and legal must be transcended, and that they must be spiritually discerned and experienced.

Nearly everything connected with Randall's name presents an historical puzzle to us. His biography, as we have seen, lies hid in obscurity and his books present baffling problems. There are three translations of religious cla.s.sics which bear his name on the t.i.tle-page, and which are introduced to the reader in Prefaces written by him, but it is far from certain that he actually made the {256} translations. In 1646 he published a little book called the _Single Eye, or the Vision of G.o.d wherein is unfolded the Mystery of the Divine Presence_. Randall says that the book was written by "that learned Doctor Cusa.n.u.s." It is in fact a translation of the _De visione Dei_ of Nicholas of Cusa, and it is word for word a printed copy of the Cambridge MS. ascribed to John Everard. The other book, published in 1648, is an English edition of _Theologia Germanica_, the translation being made from the Latin of "John Theophilus," that is, Sebastian Castellio. It is called "a Little Golden Manuall briefly discovering the mysteries, sublimity, perfection and simplicity of Christianity in Belief and Practice."

Everard, it will be remembered, also translated this "little golden book," but in this case there are very great variations between Randall's printed copy and the Cambridge MS., and they probably did not come from the same hand.[63] The English translation was evidently made some time before the appearance of this edition of 1648, for Randall says in his Introduction that "This little Book was long veiled and obscured (by its unknown tongue) from the eye of the illiterate and inexpert, until some years since, through the desires and industries of some of our own countrymen, lovers of Truth, it was translated and made to speak to thee in thine own dialect and language. But the time of its Nativity being under the late wise and wary Hierarchic who had monopolized and engrossed the discovery of others . . . it walked up and down the city in MSS. at deer rates from hand to hand of some well-wishers to truth, in clandestine and private manner; like Moses in his Arke, or the little {257} Child fled and hid from Herod, never daring to crowd into the Presse, fearing the rude usuage of those then in authority."[64]

Both Robert Baillie and Benjamin Bourne had seen the treatise before their respective books against heresy appeared in 1646, and they were deeply stirred against Randall for sowing what to their minds seemed such dangerous doctrines and such regard for "Popish writings."[65]

His critics further connect Randall with other books. Baillie speaks of two books: "the one by a Dutch Frier [evidently the Theologia] and the other by an English Capuchine." Bourne writes against those dangerous books _Theologia Germanica, The Bright Star, Divinity and Philosophy Dissected_, and Edwards couples with _the Vision of G.o.d_ (the treatise by Nicholas of Cusa) "the third part of the Rule of Perfection by a Cappuchian Friar."[66]

John Goodwin, vicar of St. Stephen's in Coleman St., commenting on Edward's _Gangraena_, humorously says: "I marvaile how Mr. Edwards having (it seems) an authorized power to make errors and heresies at what rate and of what materialles he pleaseth, and hopes to live upon the trade, could stay his pen at so small a number as 180, and did not advance to that angelicall quotient in the Apocalypse, which is _ten thousand times ten thousand_," and he adds that if Edwards had consulted with a book "printed within the compa.s.se of his foure years, int.i.tled _Divinity and Philosophy Dissected, set out by a mad man_, with some few others . . . He shall be able to increase his roll of errors from 180 to 280, if not to 500."[67] Samuel {258} Rutherford says: "So hath _Randel_ the _Familist_ prefixed an Epistle to two Popish Tractates, furnis.h.i.+ng to us excellent priviledges of Familisme, the one called _Theologia Germanica_, and the other _Bright Starre_, which both advance perfect Saints above Law, and Gospel". . .[68]

This treatise, called _A Bright Starre_ (London, 1646), which so deeply disturbed the seventeenth-century guardians of orthodoxy, is a translation of "The Third Part of the Rule of Perfection," written by an English Capuchin Friar, and "faithfully done into the English tongue," apparently by Randall, "for the common good."[69] It is a profoundly mystical book, characterized by interior depth and insight.

Its central aim is the exposition of a stage of spiritual life which transcends both "the active life" and "the contemplative life," a stage which the writer calls "the Life Supereminent." In this highest stage "the essential will of G.o.d is practiced," without strain or effort, because G.o.d Himself has now become the inner Life and Being of the person, the spring and power of the new-formed will.

Randall's preface, or "Epistle to the Reader," as he calls it, is a further revelation of his religious views, and his Christian spirit.

He pleads for freedom and for variety in religious life and thought.

G.o.d does not want one fixed and unvarying Christian form or doctrine; He wants variety in the spiritual life as He has arranged for variety in the external world of nature: "As in the world all men are not of an equall height and stature of body, but some taller, some shorter; some weaker, some stronger: so neither are all of one just and even proportion in spiritual light and strength of faith in the kingdome of Christ, some are dwarfs of Zacheus his pitch, some {259} againe of Saul's port, taller by his head and shoulders than his brethren; so, in the kingdome of Christ, some are babes, some are young men, some are fathers, every one according to the measure of the gift of Christ."

G.o.d has something in His kingdom that fits each spiritual stature, something suited to each intellectual capacity. He does not want one and the same note struck by all--"harping blindly on one string." He does not want men to be "tyed to one forme and kept forever to one lesson, unable to top up their work"--He wants men to "go from strength to strength, from faith to faith and from height to height."

Randall declares that he has observed with deep sorrow "the _non-proficiency_ of many ingenuous spirits who through the policie of others and the too too much modesty and timerity of themselves" have failed to progress "to the top and pitch" of their possible perfection--"poore soules after many years travelling being found in the same place and going the same pace!" He hopes that this book on Perfection which he is now giving "common vulgar people in their own mother tongue," though it is a way that is "high and hard and almost unheard of amongst us," may help men to grow up into their full stature and to come to "the uttermost steps of Jacob's Ladder which reacheth into the heavens." The lower stages of the religious life consist (1) of external practices and exercises in conformity to the law of G.o.d, and (2) interior contemplation and meditation of a G.o.d thought of as outside and beyond the soul's real possession. But the true spiritual life, and "Sabbath rest of the soul," is reached only when G.o.d becomes the inner Life of our lives, when Christ is formed within and we see Light and have our wisdom through His divine anointing. At the highest stage of spiritual life man finds himself by ceasing to be himself.

G.o.d can now reveal His beauty and glory through such a person and act and work in him and through him. This teaching, Randall admits, is only for "experienced Christians," but he believes that this book will have "good successe amongst _the Children of {260} the Light_, who are taught of G.o.d and who run and read the hidden and deepe things of G.o.d."[70]

If we may judge Randall from his extant Prefaces he was a beautiful spirit and was, in fact, what he calls himself, "a lover of the Truth in the Truth."[71] He says that "Nothing is or ever was endeavored by most men, with more industry and less success than the true knowledge of G.o.d," but this perennial failure is due, he thinks, to the false ways which have been taken, especially to "the negative process of abstraction" by which men have tried in vain to find G.o.d. The only true way to Him is "the new and living way" through the concrete revelation of Him. "The sound and unerring knowledge of G.o.d standeth in your knowledge of your man Christ Jesus, and whoever hath seen Him hath seen the Father also, for He is not a dead image of Him, but a living Image of the invisible G.o.d, yea, the fulgor or brightness of His glory and character of His person. . . . He is an Immanuel, G.o.d with us, G.o.d in us. . . . But there is no true knowledge of G.o.d within us till He be in us formed in the face of Jesus Christ."[72] He declares that since "understanding" must be helped by "sense" and "sense is not available till it live in the light of the understanding," we must learn to find the infinite in the finite, the invisible in the visible, and thus in Christ we have G.o.d "finitely infinite and infinitely finite"--"He cloathes Himself with flesh, reason, sense and the form and nature of a servant, who yet is above all and Lord over all." "He that is infinitely above thee makes himselfe be to thee [visibly] what He is in thee."[73] Christ is the universal revealer of G.o.d to all who see Him, just as the portrait of a human face seems to fix and follow the beholder from any position in the room, while at the same time it does the same to all other beholders from whatever angle they may look.[75]

_The Vision of G.o.d_, whether Englished by Randall or {261} by Everard, or by both working together, is translated into beautiful, often poetical and rhythmical English, and contains many vivid pa.s.sages, such as the following: "Thou, O G.o.d, canst never forsake me so long as I am _capable of Thee_."[75] "I love my life exceedingly because Thou art the sweetness of my life."[76] "No man can turn to Thee except Thou be present, for except Thou wert present and diddest solicit me I should not know Thee at all."[77] "Restless is my heart, O Lord, because Thy love hath enflamed it with such a desire that it cannot rest but in Thee alone."[78] "In the Son of Man I see the Son of G.o.d, because Thou art so the Son of Man that Thou art the Son of G.o.d and in the finite attracted nature I see the Infinite Attracting Nature." "I see all things in thy human nature which I see in thy divine nature."[79] "To come to G.o.d is Paradise; to see G.o.d is to be in Paradise."[80] "The Word of G.o.d illuminateth the understanding as the light of the sun doth the world. I see the fountain of Light in the Word of G.o.d. . . .

Christ is the Word of G.o.d humanified and man deified."[81] "What is more easie than to believe G.o.d, what is more sweet than to love Him. . . . Thy Spirit, O G.o.d, comes into the intellectual spirit of good men, and by the heat of divine love concocts the virtuall power which may be perfected in us. . . . All Scriptures labour for nothing but to show Thee, all intellectual spirits have no other exercise but to seek Thee and to reveal Thee. Above all things Thou hast given me Jesus for a Master, the Way of Life, and Truth, so that there might be nothing at all wanting to me."[82]

The literary style of _Divinity and Philosophy Dissected_ is unlike that of Randall's known writings, and yet it is not impossible for him to have written it.[83] The ideas which fill the little book are quite similar to those which {262} Randall held and are in full accord with those which prevailed in this general group of Christian thinkers. The writer of the treatise, whoever he was, is fond of allegory and symbolic interpretation. He turns Adam into a figure and makes the Garden of Eden an allegory in quite modern fas.h.i.+on. "Doe you thinke,"

he writes, "that there was a materiall garden or a tree whereon did grow the fruit of good and evill, or that the serpent did goe up in the same to speake to the woman? Sure it cannot stand with reason that it could be so, for it is said that all the creatures did come to Adam, and he gave them names according to their natures: now it is contrary to the Serpent's nature to speake after the manner of men, unlesse you will alleadge that she understood the language of the beasts, and thought them wiser than G.o.d, and resolved to be ruled by them, which to me seems altogether against reason, that the woman should be so ignorant and unrationall, who was created rationall after the image of G.o.d to be ruler of all creatures: for at this day if a Serpent went up into a tree, and did speake from thence to men and women, it would make them afraid in so much that they would not doe what he bid them: or dost thou thinke that in Mesopotamia (a great way off beyond the seas) that there is a materiall garden wherein standeth the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and ill, both in one place, and an angell, standing with a flickering sword to keep the tree of life from the man!"[84]

The book contains a very striking confession of Faith quite unlike that which Rutherford or Baillie or Edwards would have allowed as "sound,"

but yet serious, honest, and marked with a clear note of experience.

G.o.d is, for the writer, above everything a living G.o.d, a Spirit, "a perfect clear Light that reveals to man the Truth." G.o.d is, he says, Light, Life, and Love, and He is all these things to man. He instructs and convinces his conscience; He disciplines and corrects him; He raises condemnation in us for our sins, and "His Light persuades our hearts to have true sorrow and real repentance for our sins, with a {263} broken and contrite heart and sorrowful spirit, and so we begin to hate ourselves and our sins, and doe really forsake them."[85]

"There is," he maintains, in words that sound strangely like the yet unborn Quakers, "an infallible Spirit, Jesus Christ, the power of G.o.d in us, which directs, corrects, instructs, perswades, and makes us wise unto salvation; for He is the holy Word of life unto us . . . and discovers all mysteries unto us, . . . if so be we are obedient unto Him; but if we are not obedient unto Him, this infallible Spirit, Jesus Christ in us, then we shall know nothing of G.o.d or of the Scriptures, but it shall be a _sealed book, a dead letter, a seeming contradiction_ unto us."[86]

Samuel Rutherford declares the little treatise to be "a rude, foolish and unlearned Pamphlet of late penned and changing, as Familists and Antinomians doe, Scripture and G.o.d and Christ into metaph.o.r.es and vaine Allegories."[87] The comment of this good man is honest and sincere, but of value only as revealing the mental att.i.tude of himself. Here the representative of the old system was speaking out of the past and condemning a dawning movement which with his apperceiving material he could not understand, but which was in a few years to have extraordinary expansion and which, when it should in time become defecated through discipline and spiritual travail, was destined to speak to the condition of many minds to whom Rutherford's "notions"

have become only empty words.

IV

A beautiful little anonymous book of this period, containing a similar conception of Christianity to that set forth in the writings of Everard and Randall, must be briefly considered here: _The Life and Light of a Man in Christ Jesus_ (London, 1646). The writer, who was a scholarly man, shows the profound influence of the _Theologia Germanica_, that universal book of religion which {264} fed so many souls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he has evidently found, either at home or abroad, spiritual guides who have brought him to the Day-star in his own heart.

Religion, he says, is wholly a matter of the "operative manifestation of Christ in a man--the divine Spirit living in a man."[88] To miss that experience and to lack that inner life in G.o.d is to miss the very heart of religion. "There be many and diverse Religions and Baptisms among many and diverse peoples of the habitable world, but to be baptized as a man in Christ--that is to be baptized into the living, active G.o.d, so that the man has his salvation and eternal well-being wrought in him by the Spirit and life of his G.o.d--is the only best."[89] Those who lack "this real spiritual business" never attain "the true Sabbath-rest of the soul." They go to meeting on "Sunday, Sabbath or First day [_sic_] merely to hear such or such a rare divine preach or discourse, or to partic.i.p.ate in such or such Ordinances."[90]

They have "an artificiall, historicall Divinity [Theology] which they have attained by the eye, that is by reading books, or by the ears, that is, by hearing this or that man, or by gathering up expressions"--their religion rests on "knowledge" and not on Christ experienced within.[91] This external religion is not so much wrong as it is inadequate and immature. "It is," he says, "like unto young children, who with sh.e.l.ls and little stones imitate a real building!"[92] The religion which carries a man beyond shadows to true realities and from the c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l house to a permanent and eternal temple for the Spirit is the religion which finds Christ within as the Day-star in the man's own heart.[93]

There is throughout this simple little book a n.o.ble appreciation of love as the "supream good" for the soul. "The G.o.d of infinite goodness and eternal love" is a kind of refrain which bursts forth in these pages again {265} and again. Love in _us_ is, he thinks, "a sparkle of that immense and infinite Love of the King and Lord of Love."[94]

Salvation and eternal well-being consist for him in the formation of a life "consecrated and united unto the true Light and Love of Christ."

The man who has this Life within him will always be willing and glad when the time comes "to returne againe into the bosome of his heavenly Father-G.o.d."[95] And not only is the man who has the Life of Christ in him harmonized in love upwardly toward G.o.d; he is also harmonized outwardly towards his fellows. "He is a member with all other men, with the good as a lowly-minded disciple to them; with those that are not in Christ, as a deare, sympathizing helper, doing his utmost to do them good."[96] He has written his "little Treatise," he says, "as a love-token from the Father" to help lead men out of the "darke pits of the world's darkness" into the full Light of the soul's day-dawn.

The book lacks the robustness and depth that are so clearly in evidence in most of the writings that have been dealt with in this volume, but there is a beauty, a simplicity, a sweetness, a sincerity born of experience, which give this book an unusual flavour and perfume. The writer says that there is "an endless battle between the Seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent," but one feels that he has fought the battle through and won. He says that "a man should be unto G.o.d what a house is to a man," _i.e._ a man should be a habitation of the living G.o.d, and the reader feels that this man has made himself a habitation for the divine presence within. He says if you want spiritual help you must go to a "man who has skill in G.o.d," and one lays down his slender book feeling a.s.sured that, out of the experience of Christ in his own soul, he did have "skill in G.o.d," so that he could speak to the condition of others. There was at least one man in England in 1646 who knew that the true source and basis of religion was to be found in the experience of Christ within and not in theological notions of Him.

[1] The Italian t.i.tles of these two books are _Alfabeto Christiana_ (1546) and _Le Cento et dieci divine Considerationi_ (1550).

[2] _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_ (1648), p. 164.

[3] _Ibid._ p. 319.

[4] Epistle Dedicatory to _Some Gospel Treasures Opened_ (London, 1653).

[5] _Gospel Treas._, "To the Reader."

[6] _Ibid._

[7] Sometimes "Divers Earls and Lords and other great ones" were in his audience.

[8] _Gospel Treas._, "To the Reader."