Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 30

Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 30

The world, busy with action and choosing for its historical study the men who did things, has allowed {287} Peter Sterry to drop into oblivion and his books to gather dust and cobwebs, but there was, I think, a Seed of G.o.d in him, and he had a message for his age. He sincerely endeavoured to hand on the torch which in his youth at Cambridge had been kindled in him by some other flame. "When one candle is lighted," he beautifully says, "we light many by it, and when G.o.d hath kindled the Life of His glory in one man's Heart he often enkindles many by the flame of that."[68]

[1] I have studied the "Familists," the "Anabaptists," the "Seekers," and "Ranters," and some of the interesting religious characters, such as John Saltmarsh, William Dell, and Gerard Winstanley, in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_ (London, 1908).

[2] Oliver Cromwell's _Letters and Speeches_ (New York, 1900), i. p. 103.

[3] These three books were issued together in Latin under the t.i.tle, _Interiora Regni Dei_, in 1655 and in 1674, and in an English Collection of Rous' Works under the t.i.tle, _Treatises and Meditations_ (1657).

[4] _Mystical Marriage_, pp. 1-2.

[5] _Treatises and Meditations_, pp. 230-231.

[6] _Treatises and Meditations_, pp. 240 and 258.

[7] _Ibid._ p. 235.

[8] _The Heavenly Academy_, pp. 110-111.

[9] _Mystical Marriage_, p. 10.

[10] _Treatises and Meditations_, p. 496.

[11] _Mystical Marriage_, p. 10.

[12] _Ibid._ p. 16.

[13] _Ibid._ p. 193.

[14] Preface to _Mystical Marriage_.

[15] _Mystical Marriage_, p. 322.

[16] _The Heavenly Academy_, Preface, and _ibid._ p. 57.

[17] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_, i. p. 75.

[18] Clarendon, _History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars_ (Oxford, 1827), p. 1581.

[19] Milton's sonnet _To Sir Henry Vane the Younger_.

[20] Burnet, _History of his Own Times_ (Airy ed.), i. p. 286.

[21] Pepys, _Diary_ (ed. by H. B. Wheatley, London, 1893), ii. p. 242.

[22] An Epistle to the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth. The lines which I have put in italics in the text clearly show the "seeker"-att.i.tude.

[23] See my _Quakers in the American Colonies_ (1911), pp. 1-25.

[24] In his _Retired Man's Meditations_ he speaks of "Christ's rule in the legal conscience" and "Christ's rule in the evangelical conscience,"

by which he means to contrast a religion founded on external performances or historical events, and a religion founded on _events transacted in the soul of the man himself_.

[25] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_, i. p. 75.

[26] See Vane's _A Brief Answer to a certain Declaration made of the Intent and Equity of the Order of Court_, etc., in Hutchinson's Collection of Original Papers.

[27] Preface to Williams' _Bloudy Tenet_.

[28] _The Retired Man's Meditations_, p. 388. Italics mine.

[29] _Ibid._ Preface

[30] _Ibid._ chap. ii.

[31] _Ibid._ ii. chaps. iii. and iv. See also _A Pilgrimage into the Land of Promise_, pp. 1-3.

[32] _A Pilgrimage into the Land of Promise_, pp. 51-52.

[33] _Ibid._ pp. 55-56.

[34] _Retired Man's Meditations_, chap. xxvi.

[35] _Journal of George Fox_ (Cambridge ed.), i. pp. 313-314.

[36] _Animadversions on Cressy's Answer to Stillingfleet_ (1673), p. 59.

[37] See _A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will_ (1675), pp. 31-32.

[38] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_, i. p. 75.

[39] A Mr. Sterry was appointed Sept. 8, 1657, to a.s.sist Milton as Latin Secretary (_Nat. Dict. of Biog. Art._ "Sterry").

[40] Besides the above named I have also used his Sermons on _The Clouds in which Christ Comes_ (1648) and _The Spirits' Conviction of Sinne_ (1645).

[41] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 8.

[42] There is, he thinks, an inner "body" which is as immortal as the soul and which together with the soul is united to the body of flesh--"the fleshly Image."

[43] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 435.

[44] _Ibid._ p. 24. See also _ibid._ p. 5, and _Discourse_, p. 55.

[45] _Discourse_, pp. 30-35. Also p. 161.

[46] _Ibid_. Preface, p. c 8, and _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 164.

[47] _Rise, Race and Royalty_, p. 126.