Chapter I. Recapitulation
The conclusion to which we have arrived seems to be this—that the principles asserted by the religious societies which have been formed in Europe since the Reformation are solid and imperishable; that the systems in which those principles have been embodied were faulty in their origin, have been found less and less to fulfil their purpose as they have grown older, and are now exhibiting the most manifest indications of approaching dissolution. Now I have alluded, when speaking of modern philosophical movements, to certain prevalent and popular statements which seem at first sight very closely to resemble those which have been the result of our inquiry. The doctrine that systems, religions, churches, are dying out, but that they have been the clothing of certain important ideas which will survive their extinction, and which it is the business of wise men to note, preserve, and perhaps furnish with a new vesture, is one which I cannot be expected to entertain; nay, to which if this book mean anything I must be directly opposed; nevertheless a conscientious reader may find it difficult to discover what is the point at which this doctrine and mine diverge. It is necessary for the purpose of making the connection of what has been said with what I am about to say intelligible, that I should relieve him of this embarrassment; and I know no way in which I can do it so effectually as by reminding him of the different points of evidence which have gradually offered themselves to us as we have proceeded.
I. The doctrine which, upon the authority of the old Quaker books, and in opposition to one of their modern teachers, I maintained to be the fundamental one of Quakerism, is, that man is a twofold creature, having inclinations towards sensible things, being united to the divine Word by trusting in whom he may rise above these inclinations and attain to a spiritual life and communion. Of all persons, those who seem the most unlike the primitive Quakers are modern philosophers, artists, and politicians; yet we found that various persons belonging to these different classes had been led by different processes of thought to adopt the maxim which had formed the great obstacle to the belief of Fox’s principle. “It cannot be true,” said religious people, “because man as such apart from a peculiar religious vocation and impulse is not spiritual;” “It cannot be true,” said the philosophers of the last generation, “because he is not susceptible of a religious vocation and impulse at all, he is simply a creature of flesh and blood.” Both these opinions would be disowned by those who claim to represent the enlightenment of our time; they would say ‘man as man has spiritual powers, and is a spiritual creature.’
Now it is probable that many of those who use that language would produce it as an instance of the way in which a doctrine has been disencumbered of its ancient form and been reduced to a pure and simple essence. “In the acknowledgment of a spiritual life or existence in man,” they would say, “we uphold Fox’s meaning, we only take away from it that phraseology with which the religious traditions of former centuries had invested it.” My object is not to argue the point whether this be so or not, but to shew that our observations have not led us to this conclusion, but to a most opposite one. It seemed to us that a man believing he has certain spiritual capacities within him, is just the person who is obliged to consider under what conditions these capacities exist; that it was this problem about which Fox was occupied; that the sense of certain upward tendencies within him which were continually restrained and resisted, instead of giving him peace and happiness was the very cause of his torment; that we may talk generally about our spiritual power and existence, but that the moment we practically realize them, amidst all the contradictions under which they exist in this world, they become so involved with awful feelings of responsibility, with the vision of an unknown world, with the certainty of moral evil, that we are glad to escape from them into materialism; that this escape being now impossible we must inquire whence these spiritual desires and impulses have come, by what they are upheld, whither they are tending; that these questions lead directly to the principle which Fox asserted, that it may be omitted or substituted for some other in a system, but that it must be steadily faced and considered by every man who is really engaged in the world’s conflict; that modern thinkers are perpetually exhibiting their want of it, especially when they speak of our self-consciousness, the necessity of it, the misery and falsehood of it; that the words, “Not I but Christ in me,” are the answer to these perplexities; that we may search heaven and earth before we find any other. And if we are asked on what ground, then, we affirm that the Quaker system has proved inadequate, the answer would be, Precisely on this ground, that it has failed in giving a clear definite expression to the idea of Fox; that it has reduced that idea too nearly into a vague synonym of the notion that we have certain spiritual capacities or feelings within us, that it has not exhibited to men the object on whom Fox affirmed that their spiritual capacities and feelings were to be exercised.
The founder of Quakerism is however not much known to the ordinary philosopher: he would be much more anxious to shew that he had retained all that is really precious in the teaching of the great Reformer. Our mere men of letters, who reverence Leo and believe Erasmus to have protested quite as much as was needful against the abominations of his time, regard Luther, who knew nothing of statues and wrote indifferent Latin, with positive aversion; but the more earnest men among us—those especially who believe that European society has been making continual progress from darkness to light—speak of him as one who worked mightily for the overthrow of opinions based upon mere authority and tradition, and prepared the way for the utterance of thoughts which he himself would have rejected with horror. I am not now alluding to the ignorant declaimers who boast of Luther because he exalted the understanding in place of faith; but of those who being really acquainted with his writings, are aware that he as much deserves that praise as Brutus deserved to be canonized by the French sansculotte for the noble plebeian spirit which led him to slay the great aristocrat Julius Caesar; and who would consider it a very ill compliment to anyone to say that he wanted faith himself and wished to destroy it in others. They will cheerfully admit that the assertion, “A man is justified by faith,” is more characteristic of Luther than his opposition to popes or masses. They will allow that the different acts of his outward life had all a more or less direct reference to that principle. But then they would say, ‘this principle when it is taken out of the swaddling bands of the sixteenth century and allowed to move freely, means just this, that it is the inward state of man and not his performance of certain prescribed acts, or even the worthiness of his outward conduct, which entitles him to be called good, that not what he seems nor even what he does, but what he is, constitutes him a right and true man. This truth had been set at nought by the Church of that day; by the vehemence with which he declared it and compelled men to listen to it, Luther established his chief claim to the gratitude of mankind.’
I am well convinced that this principle had been practically denied by the Romanists, and that Luther was the most powerful of all instruments in re-asserting it. But we have seen reason to believe that George Fox maintained the doctrine of an inward righteousness quite as strongly as the German; and yet that there was a very marked difference between them. The difference seemed to consist in this, that while Fox urged his disciples to exercise their faith in a spiritual Being, the Lord of their spirits, Luther delighted to declare that that Being had actually taken human flesh, had died a human death, and by these acts had redeemed us from a curse and justified us before his Father. If Luther was, as his modern admirers constantly affirm that he was, eminently straightforward and practical, impatient of abstractions, dealing in all plain homely images,—here, it seemed to us, lay the secret of these qualities. It was no fantastic Being he was speaking of, no mere idea; not even merely an object for spiritual apprehension, though that in the highest degree; it was one who had identified himself with men, had by a series of outward acts those which the creed announces—established his human as well as his divine character. It struck us that this, which is in the strictest sense the Lutheran characteristic, was particularly necessary as a complement of the Quaker doctrine; that this without it soon passes into mere vapour. But be that as it may, it was this peculiarity in Luther’s preaching which enabled him to effect the overthrow of existing superstitions, and so to be (as we are told) the precursor of greater deliverances hereafter. No doubt the fact of the Incarnation was fully recognised by the Romanists, but by certain notions about inward and inherent righteousness, and by certain practices which were grounded on these notions, this fact had been deprived of its significance. It had ceased to be a witness to any man of what he was. By affirming the reality of this fact and its significance, Luther got rid of the impositions upon the understanding and conscience, which the practical unbelief of it had made possible. It seemed to us then, judging from these facts, that we do not merely strip Luther of his dress, but that we destroy the man himself when we make him the witness for a principle and not for a fact, that we do not preserve that quality in him which enabled him to be a reformer, and deprive him of that which belonged to him in common with those whom he reformed, but that we take from him that wherein his reforming power consisted, and leave ourselves to the certain peril, if all history be not a delusion, of falling under those sensible tyrannies from which he was permitted to emancipate us. And if I be asked again in this case, what then is my objection to the Lutheran system, I answer this and no other—that it does not bear witness for the all-importance of that fact which Luther asserted to be all-important; that it teaches us to believe in justification by faith instead of to believe in a Justifier; that it substitutes for Christ a certain notion or scheme of Christianity.
Quakerism and pure Protestantism both belong chiefly, if not entirely, to the region of individual life and experience. Unitarianism we found was of an altogether different character; it took men away from self-reflection to thoughts about nature and God. Nevertheless, it has changed its complexion as men’s views about themselves have changed; it applied material standards to the Infinite, so long as it was the habit of the time to consider men as purely material; when that habit ceased, it began to decry the ordinary theological language as too earthly and definite. Here then perhaps we have discovered a system which answered exactly to the philosophers’ demand, which readily abandons the dress of one period that it may clothe itself in that of another. But will it be said that this is merely a change of dress? Can those who just now represented the acknowledgment of man’s spiritual powers as the very essence of all religion, so entirely alter their note that they look upon it too merely as an accident? According to their shewing Unitarianism has not preserved its identity at all; the alteration of popular opinion has abolished its very nature and substance. But it seemed to us that this was not the case; that it had a principle, that it did contain something which is constantly and invariably true. The hold which it had maintained for a time over earnest minds arose, we thought, from this, that it declared the unity of God, the absolute love of God, the existence of a good and pure state for mankind, to be primary truths which cannot be altered or set aside by any experiences or any dogmas. These were eternal principles not subject to the mutations of costume or fashion; needful for man, needful for him at all times. And the objection which we made to the Unitarian system was, that it did so feebly and miserably represent these truths—nay, that it practically contradicted them as no other system ever did; a charge which applies to the modern scheme no less than to the old one on grounds even more forcible; for whereas the whole virtue of Unitarianism consisted in its asserting the existence of God as distinct from the thoughts and apprehensions of men, the later teachers are continually approaching nearer and nearer to a confusion between our own spiritual “nature” and the Being whom it acknowledges. The transition from this stage of belief to the worship of the separate feelings and moods of that “spiritual nature,” and thence to prostration before them in the shape of idols is very rapid indeed. Surely a strange apotheosis for Unitarianism!
I contend then that the principles of Fox, of Luther, of the Unitarians, are too strong, too vital, to bear the imprisonment to which they have been subjected in the different systems which have been invented for them; but so far from thinking that those principles will be more true and vital when they have lost their religious and personal character, and have been translated into the terms of a philosophical theory, I believe that when they shall suffer that change they will lose all their preciousness, and will attain the perfection of the impotence and insignificance to which hitherto they have been but partially reduced.
II. Seeing, however, that these principles, even in the time of their strength, have shewn a disposition to clothe themselves in some form or other, nay, that it is only in times of great weakness that they can be content to remain merely as notions or opinions for individual minds; we are bound to inquire further what this tendency means, and how it is possible that it may be satisfied when the systems which have owed their existence to it shall satisfy it no longer. To answer this question we must refer to another class of facts which we have been considering. The second distinguishing Quaker tenet was, that there is a spiritual and universal kingdom established in the world. We may conceive, though not without great difficulty, how the doctrine respecting the Indwelling Word might have been received and acknowledged as a doctrine and as nothing more—at all events might have appeared to Quakers only as the governing law of their own individual lives. But it is obvious that this tenet ceases to be one at all if it is nothing more—ceases to be a principle for individuals if it be only for them. That there should be such a kingdom, and that an honest man believing it to be should not ask, What are the conditions of citizenship in it? is incredible. To this conviction then we traced the origin of the Quaker society and the Quaker system: by entering the first, disciples of George Fox sought for themselves a place in this kingdom; by adopting the second, they interpreted to themselves and others its nature and its laws. And therefore our main inquiry in reference to the society was, Does it answer to this character? Does it even any longer profess to answer to it? and with respect to the system—what is there here which may tell us the secret of the failure to which the history of the body bears such a striking witness? I will not now dwell on the answer to this question, farther than to remark that we observed a resolute eschewing of forms to be one of the main characteristics of the Quaker system, and a disposition to formalism one of the most striking characteristics of the Quaker body. But my object at present is rather to remark upon the faith which seemed to make the existence of Quakerism necessary, than upon any of its good or evil features.
Was this faith a new one? was George Fox the first proclaimer of it? We found the acknowledgment of a spiritual kingdom among the Reformers as well as among the Quakers—a most strong and distinct acknowledgment of it. We found it working so strongly in Luther’s mind, connecting itself so closely with his recognition of a divine Person, a divine Man, as the object of all trust and allegiance, as to make him most reluctant to introduce any theory or scheme of doctrine which might eventually become a substitute for it: we found at the same time that it at last urged him and the other Reformers to set up little Churches or kingdoms of their own because they could not imagine or discover how otherwise God’s purpose could be accomplished. And we found that it was partly the unspiritual character of these bodies—their manifest inadequacy to express the idea of Christ’s spiritual kingdom, partly the importance which the Reformers and their followers attached to national societies and the confusion that seemed to have arisen between them and the universal body, which led to Fox’s protest in the subsequent age.
But though this idea of a spiritual and universal kingdom was not new in the seventeenth century, may it not have become obsolete in the nineteenth? The history of Unitarianism was an important link in the evidence on this subject. We found that in the last century the idea of a spiritual kingdom was distinctly and formally repudiated by those who were most admired for wisdom and enlightenment; man at all events being excluded from any concern in such a kingdom, seeing that he had no faculties wherewith he could take cognizance of it. At the same time the idea of a very comprehensive world, which should include all nations, systems, religions, began at that time to be prevalent, and to be produced in opposition to the different sects of Christendom. Here, then, was one half of the belief which had belonged to other ages, that half which had been apparently least regarded by Protestants—trying in the eighteenth century to assert itself under new conditions and to the exclusion of the other half. But if the Roman empire, from Augustus to Diocletian, had not been the sufficient type of this all tolerant all including world, the French Empire which succeeded to and carried out the speculations of the last generation was a fair specimen of what it must be. While this Empire was diffusing philanthropy through Europe, we noticed in different directions the gradual re-appearance of that other element in the idea of a kingdom for mankind, which this philanthropy had cast aside as unnecessary. First, we observed a religious awakening—men becoming strongly convinced that there is a spiritual power and influence at work among them. The immediate result of this awakening was a greater value for personal religion; then it led to a desire among those who had felt it for combination and fellowship in the promotion of spiritual objects; finally, to the inquiry whether such a combination must not have a spiritual foundation, whether it must not be connected with belief and worship. Then we were struck by various indications among philosophical men of a new habit of thinking in reference to the constitution of our race, of a tendency to look upon man as essentially a spiritual creature, and therefore to conclude that his highest and most important acts and exercises must be of a spiritual kind. Along with this faith, we noticed the growth of another, that there must be a region for those acts and exercises; that they cannot merely turn in upon themselves, though that may be part of their occupation, but that there must be a world adapted to them and formed for them. We could not find any clear account of this world except that it was this universe which surrounds us, and of which our eyes and ears take account; but though this universe be proclaimed as the great possession and inheritance of mankind, we could not learn that more than a few gifted poets and sages had a right of admission to its meanings and mysteries. Another difficulty which these philosophers seemed to experience, arose from the question, whether a distinct spiritual world do exist at all, or whether it be only created out of this common world, by the class which is endued with faculties for that purpose. But this point was peremptorily decided by another set of deep and earnest thinkers, who seemed to have proved the existence of something which man did not create himself, but to which he must in some sort refer all his acts and thoughts, and which must be assumed as the ground of them.
Meanwhile we found the most eager and passionate demands for a universal constitution into which men as men might enter, occupying not religious, not philosophical men, but labourers, handicraftsmen, serfs. The nature of this constitution had been discussed again and again; and the settlement of it had not been left to mere discussions; it had been brought to the most severe practical tests. These inferences seemed to follow from them all: first, that every modern attempt to construct a universal society had been defeated by the determination of men to assert their own wills; secondly, that the true universal society must be one which neither overlooks the existence of those wills, nor considers them as an inconvenient and accidental interruption to its workings, as a friction to be regretted and allowed for, but which assumes them as the very principle and explanation of its existence; thirdly, that it is equally impossible for men to be content with a spiritual society which is not universal, and with a universal society which is not spiritual. This doctrine then, I think, cannot be said to be obsolete, cannot be turned into a mere philosophical notion. Time has added to its strength, not diminished it; there is more necessity now than in any former day, that it should have a practical not a theoretical satisfaction.
III. It would seem from these observations, that the spiritual and universal society must be involved in the very idea of our human constitution, say rather, must be that constitution, by virtue of which we realize that there is a humanity, that we form a kind. But supposing this to be the case, may not we suppose that this constitution has been gradually making itself known to men as civilization has advanced; and that when it has been diffused more widely, each man will feel and understand his place in it—rightly and harmoniously exercising those spiritual powers which fit him for living in it, and suffering his neighbour without molestation, nay, kindly assisting him to exercise his; that in this way, those strifes and oppositions of opinion which have hindered men from cheerfully co-operating with each other, will gradually cease, and peace and good will become general; and may not one means to this end be the abandonment of those notions which prevailed in the early ages of the world, and which have been kept alive by the different religious sects and systems since—that the character of this constitution has been revealed to us in an inspired Book; and that it is ruled over in some incredible manner, by a divine Person?’ This is the last hint I shall consider. It leads us to notice another class of facts which have passed under our review.
The Quakers, we found, were great disparagers of what they called the outward letter. They were jealous lest reverence for the Bible should interfere with the belief of a Spiritual Invisible Teacher. Nevertheless, it was in the Bible that George Fox learnt clearly the fact that there was such a Teacher; it was from the Bible that he preached of it to others. It was not merely the principle of Justification by Faith which Luther, torn by inward conflicts, learnt from the Bible—he owed to it still more, the personal form of that doctrine, and the conception of it as a vital truth, not as a scholastic dogma. The belief of Election in its highest, purest form, was received by Calvin from the same source; the Unitarian prized the Bible as the great witness for the Divine Unity, for God’s absolute and universal love, for the fact that mankind is under some better condition than that of a curse. Thus, whenever there has been in any man any one of these strong convictions, which seemed to us so precious and important, then he has looked with reverence upon the Scriptures, as the teachers of it and the authority for it; whenever he has been able to carry home that conviction to the minds of his brethren, these have been his instruments. And this fact comes out the more remarkably, when it is set by the side of another, which the study of the different religious systems made known to us—namely, that just in proportion as any of them has become consolidated, the Bible, even if it has been nominally and formally held up to admiration, nay even to worship, has been deposed from its real dignity. The Quaker, who converts it into a system of conceits and allegories, under pretence of doing reverence to the Spirit, has not really treated it worse than the Lutheran, or the Calvinist, who cuts it up into texts for the confirmation of dogmas, or the mottos of sermons, or than the Unitarian, who would reduce it into a collection of moral maxims. So that, instead of being obliged by our belief of the instability and helplessness of these systems, to suspect the value or underrate the authority of the book to which they all appeal; may we not say boldly, that as it was this book which revealed to each founder of a sect that side or aspect of the spiritual economy which it was his especial vocation to present and elucidate, so it has been a perpetual and most embarrassing witness against the effort to compress that economy within the rules and formulas, which he and his followers have devised for the statement of their opinions?
But this is not enough. It is alleged, that whatever may have been the case with religious bodies, the greatest light has, of late especially, been thrown upon the nature of our spiritual constitution, by those who did not derive their knowledge from the Scriptures; nay, who had great doubts about their value and authenticity.
Now, I have not affected to disparage the labours of philosophers, either in these or in past days. I have expressed the highest respect for those who have brought to light what seem to me precious truths respecting certain faculties in us, which have been supposed to have no existence. But I have also intimated an opinion, which I am most anxious should be sifted, and if it be false, exposed, that this is precisely the limit of their doings. They have proved that we have certain faculties which do take cognizance of spiritual transcendental objects: they have not shewn what these spiritual transcendental objects are; they have shewn that we must have a spiritual constitution; they have not shewn what that spiritual constitution is. I do not therefore deny that we have learnt what our forefathers did not know, or did not know nearly as well. I do not deny that it has been the effect of experiments, failures, contradictions, to make us better acquainted with what we are and what we want. I am very thankful, for the sake of mankind, that there have been men who were permitted to make these discoveries, without (obviously, and so far as we know, I mean) seeing the truths which I think answer to them, and which show that Tantalus is not the one type of humanity. But so far from being led by anything that I see or hear of these writers, to believe that they have discovered any substitute for a Revelation of that which is needful for man’s highest necessities, I am well convinced that their teachings honestly received will make his cries for one more passionate; and that it will be seen at last, that the book which has always hitherto met the cravings of its readers, and given them that glimpse of the mysterious world which they required, does contain the full declaration of that state which God has established for us, and which we have been toiling all our lives to find.
The second part of the question is very much involved with the first, and for our purpose is perhaps the most important. ‘Is not the idea of a spiritual King, an actual Person, superintending and ordaining the movements of the universal and spiritual society, the dream of a past age? Is it not one which a sensible man, who was also an honest one, and used words in their simple straightforward sense, would be rather reluctant than anxious to bring forward? Is it not obvious, that every step in the progress of thought and discovery has taken us further from such a notion as this, and has bequeathed it, as their proper possession, to old wives and children?’ I have perhaps implicitly treated this point already; still, I am so anxious to give it a direct consideration, that I will, at any hazard of repetition and tediousness, recur to my former method of proof.
A belief in a direct spiritual government over the life, thoughts, acts, and words, of those who would submit themselves to it, was, we have seen, the third distinguishing peculiarity of Quakerism; the one which produced so many more outward and apparent results than the other two, that in the notions of modern Friends it has absorbed them both into itself. The system of the society appears to be expressly devised for the purpose of giving expression to this belief. Did it then seem to us that this system was falling into decay, because it had borne too decisive and consistent a witness to this bygone notion, or had prevented it from undergoing those changes to which, with the increase of light and civilisation, it ought to have been subject? On the contrary, the essential feebleness of Quakerism appeared to lie in this—that it exhibited the doctrine of spiritual superintendence in an inadequate, inconsistent, and shrivelled form. It testified that sudden thoughts, sudden acts, sudden speeches, oftentimes of the most obviously trifling character, had their origin in divine teaching and inspiration; it virtually excluded what is the most significant, and what Quakers, like all other persons, are obliged to acknowledge as the most significant portion of our life—that which is occupied with calm, orderly, continuous transactions—from the spiritual sphere. Education, we saw that the Quakers looked upon as most important; education according to the system of the society could not be a spiritual work.
If we turned from Quakerism to that which is most unlike it, to Calvinism, the same inference was forced upon us in another form. A belief in the will of God as the only spring of Good, Order, Happiness, was, we found, the earnest practical life-giving principle in the minds of Calvin and his disciples; whatever brave acts they had done, whatever good thoughts they had uttered, sprang from this conviction. Had they pushed it too far; had their system riveted the notion of a ruling Will in their minds, and so perpetuated it to an age, when, in the natural course of things, it ought to have been abandoned? We were led to adopt exactly the opposite opinion. Their system, by setting aside the idea of a human will, had left the doctrine of a Divine will barren and unmeaning; the idea of a personal Ruler had disappeared, and those who were most anxious to assert the government of the living God, had been the great instruments of propagating the notion of an atheistical Necessity.
But it may be said, ‘Though these Quaker and these Calvinistical opinions, concerning the Spirit which works in man, and the absolute Will of God, may involve or be involved in that idea of an actual King of men to which we are alluding, they are not identical with it. That idea evidently turns upon the doctrine of an Incarnation; it asserts that one who is the Son of Man, as well as the Son of God, is the Lord of the world, and, in some higher sense, of the spiritual Society; and it is this doctrine which seems so connected with the oldest fables of the world, that we cannot but think it must give way before the light of truth.’ So the Unitarian of the last century thought, and the question we discussed was—How did this opinion, which was the root of their system, affect these principles which really formed the faith of the better men among them?
It seemed to us, that the idea of the unity of God was sacrificed, because the person who was acknowledged as the great object and centre of human admiration, was denied to be one with the Father; that the idea of the love of God was sacrificed, because it was denied that He had in His own Person interfered on behalf of His creatures; that the idea of our being children of God was sacrificed, because there was nothing to give the name of Father reality, to shew that it was more than a loose and almost blasphemous figure of speech.
Accordingly, in the new Unitarianism, Jesus of Nazareth is beginning to be recognised as merely one of the world’s heroes; it may or may not be the most important and conspicuous one. But this belief, this last and highest discovery of the nineteenth century takes us back to that stage of history, in which universal fellowship was impossible; to the time when there was a Grecian Hercules and an Egyptian Hercules; when he who repealed bad laws was the hero of a country, and he who drained a marsh of a neighbourhood; and when men were crying and sighing for someone who should be the head and prince of all these; who should be indeed the Lord of their race; who should rescue the race from the evils to which, as a race, it was subject; who should connect it with the absolute Being of whom their consciences witnessed. Is not this a strange and melancholy relapse under the name of progression!
We have then a reasonable excuse for inquiring, whether there be on this earth a spiritual and universal kingdom, which the different religious systems have not been able to supersede or destroy; which is likely to make itself manifest when they have all perished; and with which we of the nineteenth century may have fellowship.
And as a preface to this inquiry, it seems not unfitting to consider whether there be any traces of a spiritual constitution in the early ages of the world, and whether the books of Scripture afford us any help in interpreting them.