1652, he says, "to that of God in you both I speak and beseech you both to return within and wait to hear the voice of God there." 32 Fox, without altogether realizing the step, broke utterly with Augustinian theology. He no longer thinks in terms of human depravity. The "man" whom he knows best is not a mass of sin, foul and defiled from birth, unattended by any divine splendor or untouched by any inner springs of grace. He does not feel that his world is separated by a vast chasm from God's world. He believes rather that man and God are very close companions. In fact, somehow - he does not undertake to solve the how something of God is embedded in the very structure of the human soul. Barclay, with his Cartesian metaphysics, makes this divine seed a thing wholly foreign to man himself, a seed-particle deposited in the otherwise barren soil of man's fallen nature and brought from another world across the chasm into this one. Fox is innocent of this contrivance. It does not occur to him that the chasm is there. He is impressed with the principle of darkness in the universe. He knows that evil is an appalling fact and he says much of Satan and the seed of the serpent which must be bruised. But God for him is the supreme reality and He is of such a nature that He is somehow unsundered from the soul whom He has created. Something radiates out from the life of God and shines into our souls with illuminating power so that we can see ourselves as we are and can draw upon the resources of help within our reach. "That which shows a man his sin away. Every spiritual step is a process of inward life. There is no way for a man to be saved apart from the man himself. All that really matters is the discovery of power, the formation of an attitude, conformity to the true model, the construction of character is the same that takes it 32 Epistles, v. 33 Journal I, p. 67. "33 and habits, the creation of a spirit. "I bid them give over babbling about the Scriptures," Fox says, "I told them not to dispute about God and Christ but to obey Him." 34 He changes his central interest from a concern about getting ready to die to a profound concern about getting ready to live. There is nothing forensic in his Christianity. He is done with "notions" and schemes. He is endeavoring to launch a movement which begins and ends with life, and the ground of his faith in this life-movement is his confidence that man has something of God in himself and can correspond with God, as the eye does with light, until the inner life is fortified with divine power and recreated in inward purity and holiness. "Live in the life of God," he writes, 66 and feel it." 35 "Dear lambs, and babes and plants of the Lord God," again he says, "dwell every one of you in your own [i. e., in your own inner self] that you may feel the precious springs of God." 36 In a beautiful Epistle of counsel, he reminds his friends that they have tasted of "the immediate working power of the Lord," that they have experienced " an alteration" in their minds and have learned to 'see from whence virtue doth come, and strength that doth renew the inward man and doth refresh you." Even though you see little and know little, and have little," he continues," and you see your emptiness, and see your nakedness and barrenness and unfruitfulness and see the hardness of your hearts and your own unworthiness; it is the light that discovers all this and the love of God to you. So wait upon God in that which is pure, in your measure, and stand still in it every one to see your Savior." 37 66 66 All this sounds naïve and uncritical. It is what Fox himself once called "the movings and bubblings of life." The 34 Journal I, pp. 50–56. 35 Epistles, xcv. 37 Epistles, xvi, best test of its religious value is found in the type of personality which the experience produced in Fox himself and its dynamic power in the Society which he founded. He had little education and, as Penn puts it," the side of his understanding which lay next to the world" was untrained and undeveloped and yet he plainly bore "the marks of God's finger and hand." There was an extraordinary interior depth within him, a moral quality of a rare order, an unusual power of penetration into the heart of social problems, a great capacity of leadership and what Penn well calls "a religious majesty " which "visibly clothed him with a divine preference and authority." He broke with all recognized authorities. He denied all outward infallibilities and yet he kept his movement from running into a wild and lawless chaos. One of his jailers pronounced him "clear as a bell and stiff as a tree." He knew what constituted spiritual religion and he stood unbendingly for it. Persecution could not weaken him, prisons could not break him, or budge him. One might truthfully say of him what the present Master of Balliol College (A. L. Smith) said of one of Fox's later followers, Thomas Hodgkin, "I always came away from him with higher thoughts and the feeling of having breathed purer air; his walk with God was so real. He was one of those men who make us feel that personality is more real and more immortal than anything else in this world." He produced a religious fellowship - he called it a Society and not a Church with no visible head, with no rigid system, with no cramping official authority, with no creed, no ordinances, no ritual. Exceedingly individualistic, free and democratic, it nevertheless held together by its internal coherency and it has proved to be the most impressive experiment in Christian history of a group-mysticism, a religious body maintaining corporate silence as the basis of worship and affirming for two centuries and a half its faith in spiritguided ministry. Its weakness has not been its radicalism It or its fanaticism, but its conservatism and crystallization. has been much inclined to settle into a dangerous quietism, the seeds of which lay hidden in the original interpretation of its principle, but whenever strong social sympathies and human interests have blended with its inner passion for God a fine type of religious life has flowered out and a beautiful quality of sainthood has been realized. THE MYSTICISM OF WORDSWORTH E. HERSHEY SNEATH Notwithstanding the production of an exceptionally large literature relating to Wordsworth's poetry, very few writers have reckoned sufficiently with his mysticism in its influence upon his life and art; neither has the literary critic nor professional psychologist dealt thoroughly with the nature of this unique mode of functioning of the poet's consciousness. And yet there can be no adequate understanding of much of the poetry of Wordsworth without a careful consideration of this conspicuous feature of his personal psychology. Those refined spiritual conceptions of Nature and her wholesome ministry to the spirit of man; that perception of the unity of things, and of the unity of man under moral law; those intimations of preexistence and immortality, to be found in his poetry, are largely due to the mystic flashes of his genius and to the more profound trance experiences that gave warmth to it. And when we eliminate the poetry of mystical insight from his large body of verse, comparatively little is left that would entitle him to a seat among the immortals. It is fortunate that we are able to deal with this unique experience, to a very large extent, first hand. "The Prelude," Wordsworth's elaborate metrical autobiography, "The Excursion," "Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey," "Ode, Intimations of Immortality," and other poems by the author, are descriptive and, in a measure, explanatory of it. There are also several letters containing conversations of Wordsworth which throw light on the nature of the trance experience to which he was subject in his boyhood |