CHAPTER XVI. HENRY MORE AND RICHARD BAXTER. DR. HENRY MORE was born in the year 1614. Chiefly known for his mystical philosophy, which he cultivated in retirement at Cambridge, and taught not only in prose, but in an elaborate, occasionally poetic poem, of somewhere about a thousand Spenserian stanzas, called A Platonic Song of the Soul, he has left some smaller poems, from which I shall gather good store for my readers. Whatever may be thought of his theories, they belong at least to the highest order of philosophy; and it will be seen from the poems I give that they must have borne their part in lifting the soul of the man towards a lofty spiritual condition of faith and fearlessness. The mystical philosophy seems to me safe enough in the hands of a poet: with others it may degenerate into dank and dusty materialism. RESOLUTION. Where's now the objects of thy fears, Needless sighs, and fruitless tears? They be all gone like idle dream Suggested from the body's steam. What's plague and prison? Loss of friends? Collect thy soul unto one sphere Then wilt thou say, God rules the world, * Though pitchy blasts from hell up-born And Nature play her fiery games In this forced night, with fulgurant flames : All this confusion cannot move The purgéd mind, freed from the love Of commerce with her body dear, Cell of sad thoughts, sole spring of fear. Whate'er I feel or hear or see Threats but these parts that mortal be. Nought can the honest heart dismay HENRY MORE'S RESOLUTION. And long acquaintance with the light Power, wisdom, goodness, sure did frame He that beholds all from on high Now place me on the Libyan soil, Commit me at my next remove To icy Hyperborean ove; Confine me to the arctic pole, Where the numb'd heavens do slowly roll; 225 1 It is the light of the soul going out from the eyes, as certainly as the light of the world coming in at the eyes that makes things seen. To lands where cold raw heavy mist Which leave the body thus ill bested, My inward heat more kindled is; By deep-fetched sighs and pure devotion. Yea, though the soul should mortal prove, To my last breath-I'm satisfied A lonesome mortal God to have died. This last paragraph is magnificent as any single passage I know in literature. Is it lawful, after reading this, to wonder whether Henry More, the retired, and so far untried, student of Cambridge, would have been able thus to meet the alternations of suffering which he imagines? It is one thing to see reasonableness, another to be reasonable when objects have become circumstances. Would he, then, by spiritual might, have risen indeed above bodily torture? It is possible for a man to arrive at this perfection; it is absolutely necessary that a man should some day or other reach it; and 1 The action by which a body attacked collects force by opposition DEVOTION. 227 I think the wise doctor would have proved the truth of his principles. But there are many who would gladly part with their whole bodies rather than offend, and could not yet so rise above the invasions of the senses. Here, as in less important things, our business is not to speculate what we would do in other circumstances, but to perform the duty of the moment, the one true preparation for the duty to come. Possibly, however, the right development of our human relations in the world may be a more difficult and more important task still than this condition of divine alienation. To find God in others is better than to grow solely in the discovery of him in ourselves, if indeed the latter were possible. DEVOTION. Good God, when thou thy inward grace dost shower Thy absence. My heart, with care and grief then gride, 1 Cut roughly through. |