The English Church in the Eighteenth Century Part 22

edition of the British poets, has already been slightly referred to. His works would demand more attention at this point, were they not to a great degree an echo in rhyme of William Law's prose works. One of his longest poems was written in 1751, on the publication of Law's 'Appeal,'

&c., upon the subject of 'Enthusiasm.' It may be said of it, as of several other pieces he has left, that although written in very pedestrian verse, they are worth reading, as containing some thoughtful remarks, expressed occasionally with a good deal of epigrammatic force.

A few of his hymns and short meditations rise to a higher poetical level. They are referred to with much praise by Mr. G. Macdonald,[581]

who adds the just remark that 'The mystical thinker will ever be found the reviver of religious poetry.' Like Law, John Byrom was a great admirer of Behmen. He learnt High Dutch for the purpose of studying him in the original, and, nowise daunted by the many dark parables he found there, paraphrased in his halting rhymes what Socrates had said of Herac.l.i.tus:--

All that I understand is good and true, And what I don't, is I believe so too.[582]

The same influences, springing from a German origin, which thus deeply and directly impressed William Law, and a few other devout men of the same type of thought, acted upon the national mind far more widely, but also far more indirectly, through a different channel. The Moravian brethren, though dating in the first instance from the time of Huss, owed their resuscitation to that wave of mystic pietism which pa.s.sed through Germany in the seventeenth century,[583] showing its early power in the writings of Behmen, and reaching its full tide in the new vigour of spiritual life inspired into the Lutheran Church by the activity of Arndt and Spener. Their work was carried on by Francke, 'the S. Vincent de Paul of Germany.' Educated by him, and trained up in the teaching of Spener's School at Halle, Count Zinzendorf imbibed those principles which he carried out with such remarkable success in his Moravian settlement at Herrnhut. There he organised a community to which their severest critics have never refused a high amount of admiration; a society which set itself with simple zeal to lead a Christian life after the primitive model--frugal, quiet, industrious, shunning temptation and avoiding controversy,--a band of brethren who held out the hand of fellows.h.i.+p to all in every communion who, without giving up a single distinctive tenet, would unite with them in a union of G.o.dly living--which sent out labourers into Christian countries to convert but not to proselytise--whose missionaries were to be found among the remotest heathen savages. That they should fall short of their ideal was but human weakness; and no doubt they had their special failings. They might be apt, in the fervency of their zeal, to speak too disdainfully of all gifts of learning;[584] they might risk alternations of distressing doubt by too presumptuous expectations of visible supernatural help;[585] they might think too lightly of all outward aids to religion.[586] Such errors might, and sometimes did, prove very dangerous. But one who knew them well, and to whom, as his mind expanded, their too parental discipline, their timid fears of reasoning, their painful straining for experiences, had become intolerable, could yet say of them, 'There is not throughout Christendom, in our day, a form of public wors.h.i.+p which expresses more thoroughly the spirit of true Christian piety, than does that of the Herrnhut brotherhood.... It is the truest Christian community, I believe, which exists in the outward world.'[587]

The first Diaspora, or missionary colony, established by the Moravians in England was in 1728, at the instance of a lady in that centre of intellectual and religious activity, the Court of Queen Caroline. They did not, however, attract much attention. Winston, ever inquisitive and unsettled, wanted to know more about them, and began to read some of their sermons, but 'found so much weakness and enthusiasm mixed with a great degree of seriousness,' that he did not care to go to their wors.h.i.+p.[588] Their strictly organised discipline was in itself a great impediment to success among a people so naturally attached to liberty as the English. In the middle of the century, their missionary enterprise secured them special privileges in the American colonies.

More than this. At the instance of Gambold, who was exceedingly anxious that the Brotherhood should gain ground in England within the bosom of the Anglican Church, a Moravian synod, held in 1749, formally elected Wilson, the venerable Bishop of Sodor and Man, 'into the order and number of the Antecessors of the General Synod of the brethren of the Anatolic Unity.' With this high-sounding dignity was joined 'the administration of the Reformed Tropus' (or Diaspora) 'in our hierarchy, for life, with full liberty, in case of emergency, to employ as his subst.i.tute the Rev. T. Wilson, Royal Almoner, Doctor of Theology, and Prebendary of St. Peter's, Westminster.' It is further added that the good old man accepted the office with thankfulness and pleasure.[589]

Here their success ended. Soon afterwards many of the English Moravians fell for a time into a most unsatisfactory condition, becoming largely tainted with Antinomianism, and with a sort of vulgar lusciousness of religious sentiment, which was exceedingly revolting to ordinary English feeling.[590] After the death of Zinzendorf in 1760, the Society recovered for the most part a healthier condition,[591] but did not regain any prospect of that wider influence in England which Gambold and others had once begun to hope for, and perhaps to antic.i.p.ate.

Warburton said of Methodism, that 'William Law was its father, and Count Zinzendorf rocked the cradle.'[592] The remark was no doubt a somewhat galling one to Wesley, for he had afterwards conceived a great abhorrence of the opinions both of the father and the nurse. But it was perfectly just; and Wesley, though he might have been unwilling to own it, was greatly and permanently indebted to each. The light which, when he read Law's 'Christian Perfection and Serious Call,' had 'flowed so mightily on his soul that everything appeared in a new view,' was rekindled into a still more fervent flame by the glowing words of the Moravian teacher on the morning of the day from which he dated his special 'conversion.' Nor was his connection with men of this general turn of thought by any means a pa.s.sing one. His visit to William Law at Mr. Gibbon's house at Putney in 1732--the correspondence he carried on with him for several years afterwards--his readings of the mystic divines of Germany--his loving respect for the company of Moravians who were his fellow-travellers to Georgia in 1736--his meeting with Peter Bohler in 1738--the close intercourse which followed with the London Moravians--the fortnight spent by him at Herrnhut, 'exceedingly strengthened and comforted by the conversation of this lovely people,'[593]--his intimate friends.h.i.+p with Gambold, who afterwards completely threw in his lot with the United Brethren and became one of their bishops,[594]--all these incidents betoken a deep and cordial sympathy. It is true that all this fellow-feeling came at last to a somewhat abrupt termination. Pa.s.sing, at first, almost to the bitter extreme, he even said in his 'Second Journal' that 'he believed the mystic writers to be one great Anti-Christ.'[595] Some years afterwards he retracted this expression, as being far too strong. He had, he said, 'at one time held the mystic writers in great veneration as the best explainers of the Gospel of Christ;'[596] but added, that though he admired them, he was never of their way; he distrusted their tendency to disparage outward means. 'Their divinity was never the Methodist doctrine. We cannot swallow either John Tauler or Jacob Behmen.'[597]

His friendly correspondence with Law ceased after a few years. He continued to 'admire and love' his personal character, but attacked his opinions[598] with a vehemence contrasting somewhat unfavourably with the patience and humility of Law's reply.[599] As for the Moravians, not Warburton, nor Lavington, nor Stinstra, nor Duncombe, ever used stronger words against 'these most dangerous of the Antinomians--these cunning hunters.'[600] Count Zinzendorf, on the other hand, published a notice that his people had no connection with the Wesleys.

Like many other men who have been distinguished in divinity and religion,[601] John Wesley, as he grew older, became far more charitable and large-hearted in what he said or thought of opinions different from his own. Methodism also had become, by that time, well established upon a secure basis of its own. Wesley had no longer cause to be disturbed by its features of relations.h.i.+p with a school of theology which he had learnt greatly to distrust. The fanciful and obscure philosophy of Dionysius, of Behmen, or of Law had been repugnant to him from the first. He had beheld with the greatest alarm Law's departures from commonly received doctrine on points connected with justification, regeneration, the atonement, the future state. Above all, he had become acquainted with that most degenerate form of mysticism, when its phraseology becomes a pretext to fanatics and Antinomians. Much in the same way as in the Germany of the fourteenth century the lawless Brethren of the Free Spirit[602] had justified their excesses in language which they borrowed from men of such n.o.ble and holy life as Eckhart[603] and Tauler, and Nicolas of Basle, so the flagitious conduct, at Bedford and elsewhere, of some who called themselves Moravians threw scandal and odium on the tenets of the pure and simple-minded community of Herrnhut. This was a danger to which Wesley was, without doubt, all the more sensitive, because he lived among hostile critics who were only too ready to discredit his teaching by similar imputations on its tendencies. The truth is that Methodism, in its different aspects, had so many points of contact with the essential characteristics of mysticism, both in its highest and more spiritualised, and in its grosser and more fanatical forms, that Wesley was exceedingly anxious his system should not be confused with any such 'enthusiasm,' and dwelt with jealous care upon its more distinctive features.

It has been already observed that a French historian of Christianity speaks of Quakerism and Methodism as the two chief forms of English mysticism.[604] To an educated man of ordinary observation in the eighteenth century, especially if he regarded the new movement with distrust, the a.n.a.logy between this and different or earlier varieties of 'enthusiasm' appeared still more complete. Lord Lyttelton, for example, in discussing a favourite theological topic of that age--namely, the absence of enthusiasm in St. Paul, and his constant appeals to the evidence of reason and the senses--contrasts with the life and writings of the Apostles the extravagant imaginations, and the pretensions to Divine illumination, of 'mystics, ancient and modern,' mediaeval saints, 'Protestant sectaries of the last age, and some of the Methodists now.'[605] Monta.n.u.s and Dionysius, St. Francis and Ignatius Loyola, Madame Bourignon, George Fox, and Whitefield are all ranked together in the same general category. Methodists, Moravians, and Hutchinsonians are cla.s.sed as all nearly-related members of one family. Just in the same way[606] Bishop Lavington, in his 'Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists,' has entered into an elaborate comparison between what he finds in Wesley's journals and in the lives and writings of saints and mystics of the Roman Church.[607] Nor does he fail to discover similar resemblances to Methodist experiences among the old mystic philosophers, Montanists, Quakers, French Quietists, French prophets, and Moravians.

The argumentative value of Lavington's book may be taken for what it was worth. To his own contemporaries it appeared the achievement of a great triumph if he could prove in frequent cases an almost identical tone of thought in Wesley and in Francis of a.s.sisi or Francis de Sales. To most minds in our own days it will rather seem as if he were constantly dealing blows which only rebounded upon himself, in comparing his opponent to men whose deep piety and self-denying virtues, however much tinged by the errors of their time and order, worked wonders in the revival of earnest faith. On the whole Lavington proved his case successfully, but he only proved by what easy transitions the purest and most exalted faith may pa.s.s into extravagances, and, above all, the folly of his own Church in not endeavouring to find scope for her enthusiasts and mystics, as Rome had done for a Loyola and a St.

Theresa. He himself was a typical example of the tone of thought out of which this infatuation grew. What other views could be looked for from a bishop who, though himself an awakening preacher and a good man, whose dying words[608] were an ascription of glory to G.o.d ([Greek: doxa to theo]), was yet so wholly blind to the more intense manifestations of religious fervour that he could see nothing to admire, nothing even to approve, in the burning zeal of the founders of the Franciscans and of the Jesuits? Of the first he had nothing more to say than that he was 'at first only a well-minded but weak enthusiast, afterwards a mere hypocrite and impostor;' of the other he spoke with a certain compa.s.sion as 'that errant, shatter-brained, visionary fanatic.'[609] And the Methodist, he thought, had a somewhat 'similar texture of brain.'

The Methodist leaders were wholly free from some dangerous tendencies which mysticism has been apt to develop. They never disparaged any of the external aids to religion; their meaning is never hidden under a haze of dim conceptions; above all, they never showed the slightest inclination to the vague and unpractical pantheistic opinions which are often nurtured by a too exclusive insistance on the indwelling and pervading operations of the Divine Spirit. In the two latter points they resembled the Quietist and Port-Royal mystics of the French school, who always aimed at lucidity of thought and language, rather than those of German origin. From mystics generally they differed, most of all, in adopting the Pauline rather than the Johannine phraseology.

But, with some important differences, there can be no question that Methodism rose and prospered under the same influences which in every age of Christianity, or rather in every age of the world, have attended all the most notable outbursts of mystic revivalism. Its causes were the same; its higher manifestations were much the same; its degenerate and exaggerated forms were the same; its primary and most essential principle was the same. As the religious brotherhoods of the Pythagoreans rose in spiritual revolt against the lax mythology and careless living of the Sybarites in Sicily;[610] as in the third century of the Christian era Neoplatonism concentrated within itself whatever remains of faith and piety lingered in the creeds and philosophies of paganism;[611] as in the Middle Ages devout men, wearied with forms and controversies, and scholastic reasoners seeking refuge from the logical and metaphysical problems with which they had perplexed theology, sought more direct communion with G.o.d in the mystic devotion of Anselm and Bernard, of Hugo and Bonaventura;[612] as Bertholdt and Nicolas, Eckhart and Tauler,[613] organised their new societies throughout Germany to meet great spiritual needs which established systems had wholly ceased to satisfy; as Arndt and Spener and Francke in the seventeenth century breathed new life into the Lutheran Church, and set on foot their 'collegia pietatis,' their systematised prayer-meetings, to supplement the deficiencies of the time[614]--so in the England of the eighteenth century, when the force of religion was chilled by drowsiness and indifference in some quarters, by stiffness and formality and over-cautious orthodoxy in others, when the aspirations of the soul were being ever bidden rest satisfied with the calculations of sober reason, when proofs and evidences and demonstrations were offered, and still offered, to meet the cry of those who called for light, how else should religion stem the swelling tide of profligacy but by some such inward spiritual revival as those by which it had heretofore renewed its strength? If Wesley and Whitefield and their fellow-workers had not come to the rescue, no doubt other reformers of a somewhat kindred spirit would have risen in their stead. How or whence it is useless to speculate. Perhaps Quakerism, or something nearly akin to it, might have a.s.sumed the dimensions to which a half-century before it had seemed not unlikely to grow. The way was prepared for some strong reaction. Past aberrations of enthusiasm were well-nigh forgotten, and large ma.s.ses of the population were unconsciously longing for its warmth and fire. It was highly probable that an active religious movement was near at hand, and its general nature might be fairly conjectured; its specific character, its force, extent, and limits, would depend, under Providence, upon the zeal and genius of its leaders.

Nothing could be more natural than that to many outside observers early Methodism should have seemed a mere repet.i.tion of what England, in the century before, had been only too familiar with. The physical phenomena which manifested themselves under the influence of Wesley's and Whitefield's preaching were in all points exactly the same as those of which the annals of imaginative and excited religious feeling have in every age been full. Swoons and strange convulsive agitations, however impressive and even awe-inspiring to an uninformed beholder, were undistinguishable from those, for example, which had given their name to English Quakers[615] and French Convulsionists,[616] which were to be read of in the Lives of Guyon and St. Theresa,[617] and which were a matter of continual occurrence when Tauler preached in Germany.[618] It is no part of this inquiry to dwell upon their cause and nature, or upon the perplexity Wesley himself felt on the subject. Occasionally he was mortified by the discovery of imposture or of superst.i.tious credulity, and something he was willing to attribute to natural causes.[619] On the whole his opinion was that they might be rejoiced in as a glorious sight,[620] visible evidences of life-giving spiritual agencies, but that the bodily pain was quite distinct and due to Satan's hindrance.[621] He sometimes added a needful warning that all such physical disturbances were of a doubtful nature, and that the only tests of spiritual change which could be relied upon were those indisputable fruits of the Spirit which the Apostle Paul enumerates.[622] His less guarded words closely correspond with what may be read in the journals of G. Fox and other early Quakers. When he writes more coolly and reflectively we are reminded not of the first fanatical originators of that sect, but of what their distinguished apologist, Barclay, has said of those 'pangs of the new birth' which have often accompanied the sudden awakening to spiritual life in persons of strong and undisciplined feelings. 'From their inward travail, while the darkness seeks to obscure the light and the light breaks through the darkness ...

there will be such a painful travail found in the soul that will even work upon the outward man, so that oftentimes through the working thereof the body will be greatly shaken, and many groans, and sighs, and tears, will lay hold upon it.'[623]

Wesley himself was protected both by disposition and training from falling deeply into some of the dangers to which enthusiastic and mystical religion is very liable. He was credulous, and even superst.i.tious, but he checked his followers in the credence which many of them were inclined to give to stories of ecstasies, and visions, and revelations. He spoke slightingly of orthodoxy, and held that 'right opinions were a very slender part of religion;'[624] but, far from countenancing anything like a vague undogmatic Pietism, his opinions went almost to the opposite extreme of precise definition. Neither could it be said of him that he spiritualised away the plain meaning of Scripture--a charge to which the old Quakers were constantly liable, and which was sometimes alleged against the later Methodists. He himself never spoke contemptuously--as the mystics have been so apt to do--of the value of learning; and of reason he said, in the true spirit of Henry More, 'I believe and reason too, for I find no inconsistency between them. And I would as soon put out my eyes to secure my faith, as lay aside my reason.'[625] But the Methodists, as a body, were far less inclined to act on this principle. Without disparagement to the conspicuous ability of some individual members of their communion, both in the present and in the past, it may be certainly said that they have always utterly failed to attract the intellect of the country at large.

Great, therefore, as was its moral and spiritual power among large cla.s.ses of the people, Methodism was never able to take rank among great national reformations.

Neither Wesley nor the Wesleyans have ever yielded to a mischievous tendency which has beset most forms of mysticism. They have never, in comparison with the inward wors.h.i.+p of the soul, spoken slightingly of 'temples made of stones,'[626] or of any of the chief outward ordinances of religion. Their opponents often attempted to make it a charge against them, and thought, no doubt, they would be sure to prove it. But they never did so. Wesley was always able to answer, with perfect correctness, that what was thus said might be true of Moravians, or of Tauler, or of Behmen, or of St. Theresa, or of Madame de Bourignon, or of the Quakers, or even of William Law, but that he himself had never done otherwise than insist most strongly on the essential need of making use of all the external helps which religion can offer.[627]

By far the gravest imputation that has ever been brought against the disciples of each various form of mystical or emotional religion is that, in aspiring after some loftier ideal of spiritual communion with the Divine, they have looked down with a kind of scorn upon 'mere morality,' as if it were a lower path. And it must be acknowledged that men of the most pure and saintly lives have, nevertheless, used expressions which misguided or unprincipled men might pervert into authority for lawlessness. Tauler, whom an admiring contemporary once called 'the holiest of G.o.d's children now living on the earth,'[628]

could yet say of the higher elevation of the Christian life that, 'where this comes to pa.s.s, outward works become of no moment.'[629] What wonder that the fanatical Beghards, or Brethren of the Free Spirit, against whom he contended with all his energies,[630] should seek to confuse his principles with theirs, and a.s.sert that, having attained the higher state, they were not under subjection to moral commandments? So, again, of the early Quakers Henry More[631] observed that, although their doctrine of special illumination had guided many into much sanct.i.ty of life, the more licentious sort had perverted it into a cloke for all kinds of enormity, on the ground that they were inspired by G.o.d, and could be guilty of no sin, as only exercising their rights of liberty.

Madame de Bourignon was an excellent woman, but Leslie and Lavington[632] showed that some of her writings seem dangerously to underrate good works. Moravian principles, lightly understood, made Herrnhut a model Christian community; misunderstood, they became pretexts for the most dangerous Antinomianism.[633] An example may even be quoted from the last century where the n.o.bler elements of mystic enthusiasm were found in one mind combined with the pernicious tendency in question. In that very remarkable but eccentric genius, William Blake, mysticism was rich in fruits of faith and love, and it is needless, therefore, to add that he was a good man, of blameless morals; yet, by a strange flaw or partial derangement in his profoundly spiritual nature, 'he was for ever, in his writings, girding at the "mere moral law" as the letter that killeth. His conversation, his writings, his designs, were equally marked by theoretic licence and virtual guilelessness.'[634]

Bishop Berkeley's name could not be pa.s.sed over even in such a sketch as this without a sense of incompleteness. He was, it is true, strongly possessed with the prevalent feeling of aversion to anything that was called enthusiasm. When, for example, his opinion was asked about John Hutchinson--a writer whose mystic fancies as to recondite meanings contained in the words of the Hebrew Bible[635] possessed a strange fascination for William Jones of Nayland, Bishop Horne, and other men of some note[636]--he answered that he was not acquainted with his works, but 'I have observed him to be mentioned as an enthusiast, which gave me no prepossession in his favour.'[637] But the Christianity of feeling, which lies at the root of all that is sound and true in what the age called enthusiasm, was much encouraged by the theology and philosophy of Berkeley. It may not have been so to any great extent among his actual contemporaries. A thoroughly prosaic generation, such as that was in which he lived, was too unable to appreciate his subtle and poetic intellect to gain much instruction from it. He was much admired, but little understood. 'He is indeed,' wrote Warburton to Hurd, 'a great man, and the only visionary I ever knew that was.'[638] It was left for later reasoners, in England and on the Continent, to separate what may be rightly called visionary in his writings from what may be profoundly true, and to feel the due influence of his suggestive and spiritual reflections.

The purely mystic element in Berkeley's philosophy may be ill.u.s.trated by the charm it had for William Blake, a man of whom Mr. Swinburne says that 'his hardest facts were the vaguest allegories of other men. To him all symbolic things were literal, all literal things symbolic. About his path and about his bed, around his ears and under his eyes, an infinite play of spiritual life seethed and swarmed or shone and sang.'[639] To this strange artist-poet, in whose powerful but fantastic mind fact and imagination were inextricably blended, whose most intimate friends could not tell where talent ended and hallucination began, whom Wordsworth delighted in,[640] and whose conversation in any country walk is described as having a marvellous power of kindling the imagination, and of making nature itself seem strangely more spiritual, almost as if a new sense had awakened in the mind of his hearer[641]--to William Blake the theories of Berkeley supplied a philosophy which exactly suited him.[642] Blake's ruling idea was that of an infinite spiritual life so imprisoned under the bondage of material forces[643] that only by spiritual perception--a power given to all to cultivate--can true existence be discovered.[644] He longed for the full emanc.i.p.ation which a better life would bring.

At the very close of the century, in the year 1798, an elaborate treatise on enthusiasm was published by Richard Graves, Dean of Ardagh, a man of considerable learning and earnest piety. It is needless to enter into the arguments of his 'Essay on the Character of the Apostles and Evangelists.' Its object was to prove they were wholly free from the errors of enthusiasts; that in their private conduct, and in the government of the Church, they were 'rational and sober, prudent and cautious, mild and decorous, zealous without violence, and steady without obstinacy; that their writings are plain, calm, and unexaggerated, ... natural and rational, ... without any trace of spiritual pride, any arrogant claims to full perfection of virtue; ...

teaching heartfelt piety to G.o.d without any affectation of rapturous ecstasy or extravagant fervour.'[645] On the other hand, he ill.u.s.trates the extravagances into which enthusiasts have been led, from the history of Indian mystics and Greek Neoplatonists, from Manichaeans and Montanists, from monastic saints, from the Beghards of Germany, the Fratricelli of Italy, the Illuminati of Spain, the Quietists of France, from Anabaptists, Quakers, and French prophets. He refers to what had been written against enthusiasm within the preceding century by Stillingfleet, Bayle, Locke, Hicks, Shaftesbury, Lord Lyttelton, Barrington, Chandler, Archibald Campbell, Stinstra, Warburton, Lavington, and Douglas--a list the length of which is in itself a sufficient evidence of the sensitive interest which the subject had excited. He remarks on the attempts made by Chubb and Morgan to attach to Christianity the opprobrium of being an enthusiastic religion, and reprobates the a.s.sertions of the younger Dodwell that _faith_ is not founded on argument. The special occasion of his work[646] arose out of more recent events--the publication at Geneva in 1791 of Boulanger's 'Christianity Unmasked,' and the many similar efforts made during the period of the French Revolution to represent fanaticism and Christianity as synonymous terms.

But while Dean Graves was writing in careful and moderate language his not unseasonable warnings, thoughts representative of a new and deeper strain of theological feeling were pa.s.sing through the mind of Samuel Coleridge. His was a genius singularly receptive of the ideas which emanated from the leading intellect of his age in England or abroad. He was probably better acquainted than any other of his countrymen with the highest literature of Germany, which found in him not only an interpreter, but a most able and reflective exponent. Few could be better fitted than he was--no one certainly in his own country and generation--to deal with those subtle and intricate elements of human nature upon which enthusiasts and mystics have based their speculations, and hopelessly blended together much that is sublime and true with not a little that is groundless and visionary, and often dangerous in its practical or speculative results. In the first place, he could scarcely fail in sympathy. He was endowed with a rich vein of that imaginative power which is the very life of all enthusiasm. It is the most prominent characteristic of his poetry; it is no less conspicuous in the intense glow of excited expectation with which he, like so many other young men of rising talent, cherished those millennial visions of peace and brotherhood, and simple faith and love, which the French Revolution in its progress so rudely crushed. Mysticism also must have had great charms for one who could write verses so imbued with its spirit as are the following:--

He first by fear uncharmed the drowsed soul, Till of its n.o.bler nature it 'gan feel Dim recollections; and thence soared to hope, Strong to believe whate'er of mystic good The Eternal dooms for His immortal sons; From hope and firmer faith to perfect love Attracted and absorbed; and centred there, G.o.d only to behold, and know, and feel, Till by exclusive consciousness of G.o.d, All self annihilated, it shall make G.o.d its ident.i.ty--G.o.d all in all!

We and our Father one!

And blest are they Who in this fleshy world, the elect of heaven, Their strong eye darting through the deeds of men, Adore with steadfast, unpresuming gaze Him, nature's essence, mind, and energy; And gazing, trembling, patiently ascend, Treading beneath their feet all visible things As steps, that upward to their Father's throne Lead gradual.[647]

If we would further understand how far removed must have been Coleridge's tone of thought from that which for so long a time had regarded enthusiasm in all its forms as the greatest enemy of sober reason and sound religion, we should only have to consider what a new world of thought and sentiment was that in which Coleridge was living from any of which the generation before him had experience. The band of poets and essayists represented by Coleridge and Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, De Quincey, and we may add Blake, were in many respects separated by a wider gulf, except only in time, from the authors of twenty years before, than they were from the writers of the Elizabethan age. New hopes and aspirations as to the capabilities of human life, new and more spiritual aspects of nature, of art, of poetry, of history, made it impossible for those who felt these influences in all the freshness of their new life to look with the same eyes as their fathers on those questions above all others which related to the intellectual and spiritual faculties of the soul. It was a worthy aim for a poet-philosopher such as Coleridge was--a mystic and enthusiast in one aspect of his mind, a devoted 'friend of reason' in another--to a.n.a.lyse reason and unite its sublimer powers with conscience as a divinely given 'inner light,' to combine in one the highest exercise of the intellectual and the moral faculties. Emotional religion had exhibited on a large scale alike its powers and deficiencies. Thoughtful and religious men could scarcely do better than set themselves to restore the balance where it was unequal. They had to teach that faith must be based, not only upon feeling and undefined impulse, but on solid intellectual apprehension. They had to urge with no less earnestness that religious truth has to be not only outwardly apprehended, but inwardly appropriated before it can become possessed of true spiritual efficacy. It is most true that vague ideas of some inward illumination are but a miserable subst.i.tute for a sound historical faith, but it is no less true that a so-called historical faith has not become faith at all until the soul has received it into itself, and made of it an inward light. In the eighteenth century, as in every other, mystics and enthusiasts have insisted only on inward illuminations and spiritual experiences, while of men of a very different cast of mind some have perpetually harped upon authority and some upon reason and reasonableness. It may be hoped that our own century may be more successful in the difficult but not discouraging task of investigating and harmonising their respective claims.

C.J.A.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 468: Or to a painter's imagination. The _Idler_, not however without some fear of 'its wild extravagances' even in this sphere, allows that 'one may very safely recommend a little more enthusiasm to the modern painters; too much is certainly not the vice of the present age.'--No. 79.]

[Footnote 469: Henry More, _Enthus. Triumphatus_, -- 4.]

[Footnote 470: _Quarterly Review_, xxviii 37.]

[Footnote 471: H. More, _On the Immortality of the Soul_, b. iii. ch.

12; and the whole treatise, especially the third and fourth books.]

[Footnote 472: H. More, _Phil. Works_, General Preface, -- 6; and _Enthusiasmus Triumphatus_, -- 52.]

[Footnote 473: -- 62.]

[Footnote 474: 'Address to the Clergy.'--Wesley's _Works_, 492.]

[Footnote 475: Coleridge seems to have read H. More with much enjoyment.--_Aids to Reflection_, i. 106-10. 'Occasional draughts,'

Channing writes, of More and other Platonists, 'have been refres.h.i.+ng to me.' ... Their mysticism was n.o.ble in its kind, 'and perhaps a necessary reaction against the general earthliness of men's minds. I pardon the man who loses himself in the clouds, if he will help me upwards.'--W.E.

Channing's _Correspondence_ 338.]

[Footnote 476: Quoted by Bishop Berkeley, _Theory of Vision_, pt. i. -- 116.]

[Footnote 477: Schlosser, _History of the Eighteenth Century_, chap. 1.

i. Horsley's _Charges_, 86. _Quarterly Review_, July 1864, 70-9.]

[Footnote 478: Warburton's _Works_, iv. 568.]

[Footnote 479: 'Letter to the Bishop of Gloucester.'--Wesley's _Works_, ix. 151.]

[Footnote 480: Dedication to his _Three Sermons_, quoted by H.S. Skeats, _History of the free Churches_, 333.]

[Footnote 481: W. Roberts, _Memoirs of Hannah More_, i. 500, ii. 61, 70, 110.]

[Footnote 482: R.A. Vaughan's _Hours with the Mystics_, ii. 391.]

[Footnote 483: C. Leslie, 'Snake in the Gra.s.s.'--_Works_, iv. 21.]

[Footnote 484: Dr. Sherlock, _On Public Wors.h.i.+p_, chap. iii. -- 1, 4.]

[Footnote 485: Warburton's 'Alliance.'--_Works_, 1788, iv. 53.]