Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 35

Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 35

[26] _Ibid._ p. 311.

[27] _Select Discourses_, pp. 303, 305, and 315.

[29] _Ibid._ p. 364. For Smith's view of mimical Christians see pp.

359-364.

[29] _Ibid._ p. 144.

[30] _Select Discourses_, p. 452.

[31] _Ibid._ p. 456.

[32] _Ibid._ pp. 452 and 445.

[33] _Select Discourses_, p. 416.

[34] _Ibid._ pp. 97-98. Quoted freely.

[35] _Ibid._ pp. 419-420.

[36] _Select Discourses_, pp. 421-423.

[37] _Ibid._ pp. 332 and 336.

[38] _Ibid._ p. 398.

[39] _Ibid._ p. 325.

[40] _Ibid._ p. 2.

[41] _Select Discourses_, pp. 4, 7, and 8.

[42] _Ibid._ p. 278.

[43] _Ibid._ pp. 3 and 288.

[44] _Ibid._ p. 12.

[45] _Select Discourses_, p. 12.

[46] _Ibid._ p. 165.

[47] _Ibid._ p. 260.

[48] _Ibid._ pp. 461 and 458.

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CHAPTER XVII

THOMAS TRAHERNE AND THE SPIRITUAL POETS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

I

The powerful religious upheaval in England which reached its culmination during the two middle decades of the seventeenth century, profoundly stirred both the upper and lower intellectual strata of society. It fused and organized men on the one hand, and carried them beyond themselves; and on the other hand it broke up settled habits of thought, swept away many customs and practices which had become almost irresistible subconscious influences, and left those who were in any way morally and intellectually defective at the mercy of chance currents and eddies. As a result there appeared a strange medley of tiny sects. These groups, seething with enthusiasm, scattered pretty much over England, unorganized or loosely organized, generally gathered about some influential psychopathic leader, were lumped together in the public mind and named "Ranters."[1] They are by no means a negligible phenomenon of the period. They reveal the back-wash of the spiritual movement, which in the main went steadily onward. They exhibit, in their loose and unmoralized freedom, the inherent dangers which attach to the proclamation of spiritual liberty, and they furnish a clear historical ill.u.s.tration of the truth that progress toward a religion grounded upon the inner life of man can only be slowly and painfully achieved.

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The religious poets of this period, on the other hand, furnish clear evidence of the constructive, organizing and fusing power of these newly dawning spiritual insights, as they worked upon the minds of highly gifted and endowed persons. Poets are not Reformers. They do not consider themselves "commissioned" to reconstruct old systems of thought, old forms of faith and old types of church-organization, or to re-interpret the Gospel, the way of salvation and the communion of saints. Their mission is a different one, though it is no less spiritual and, in the best sense of the word, no less practical. The poets are always among the first to feel the direction of spiritual currents, and they are very sure voices of the deeper hopes and aspirations of their epoch. All the religious poets of this particular period reveal very clearly the influence of the ideas which were central in the teaching of the spiritual leaders whom we have been studying. The reader of Milton needs no argument to convince him of the fact that, however far removed the great poet was in most points of view from the contemporary Quakers, he nevertheless insisted emphatically, as they did, on the illumination of the soul by a Light within; "a celestial Light," he calls it in _Paradise Lost_, which shines inward and irradiates the mind through all her powers, and supplies an inward sight of things invisible to sense[2]--a Light which steadily increases as it is used by the obedient soul.[3] The origin of this inward Light, according to Milton's thought, is the eternal Word of G.o.d, who is before all worlds and who is the source of all revelation, whether inward or outward: the Spirit that prefers

Before all temples the upright heart and pure.[4]

The minor religious poets of the period had not, however, formed their intellectual outlook under the imperial sway of theological systems of thought in anything like {322} the degree that Milton had. They reflect the freer and less rigidly formulated currents of thought.

"All divinity is love, or wonder," John Donne wrote in one of his poems. No phrase could better express the intense religious life of the group of spiritual poets in England who interpreted in beautiful, often immortal, form this religion of the spirit, this glowing consciousness that the world and all its fulness is G.o.d's and that eternity is set within the soul of man, who never is himself until he finds his Life in G.o.d.

E'en like two little bank-dividing brooks, That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams, And having rang'd and search'd a thousand nooks, Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames, Where in a greater current they conjoin: So I my best beloved's am; so He is mine.

E'en so we met: and after long pursuit, E'en so we joined; we both became entire: No need for either to renew a suit, For I was flax and He was flames of fire.

Our firm united souls did more than twine; So I my best beloved's am; so He is mine.[5]

Whatever these poets, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Crashaw, Quarles, say of the soul and its fuller life, they say quite naturally in terms of love and wonder. Religion has become for them the flowering of the soul; the flooding of the whole being with health and joy; the consummation of life; and they tell of it as lovers tell of their discovery and their joy.

Oh mightie love! man is one world and hath Another to attend him.[6]

We have here in these poets, as in the writings of Whichcote and Smith, a type of religion which is primarily concerned with the liberation and winning of the whole of life, a thing which, they all tell us, can be done only in conscious parallelism with the set of eternal currents.

These minor prophets of seventeenth century English literature have often been treated as mystics, and there {323} is in all of them, except George Herbert, a rich strand of mystical religion, but their mysticism is only an element, a single aspect, of a very much wider and completer type of religion which includes all the strands that compose what I have been calling "spiritual religion"--an inner flooding of the life with a consciousness of G.o.d, a rational apprehension of the soul's inherent relation to the Divine, and a transforming discovery of the meaning of life through the revelation in Christ, which sets all one's being athrob with love and wonder.

Eternal G.o.d! O thou that only art The sacred fountain of eternal light, And blessed loadstone of my better part, O thou, my heart's desire, my soul's delight, Reflect upon my soul and touch my heart, And then my heart shall prize no good above thee; And then my soul shall know thee; knowing, love thee.[7]

II

Thomas Traherne is one of the best and most adequate representatives, in this literary group, of this type of religion. He was profoundly influenced by the revival of Plato and Plotinus, and by the writings of the religious Humanists and he had absorbed, consciously or unconsciously, the ideas and ideals which appear and reappear in the widespread movement which I have been tracing. He was a pure and n.o.ble soul, a man of deep experience and fruitful meditation, the master of a rare and wonderful style, and we shall find in his writings a glowing appreciation and a luminous expression of this type of inner, spiritual religion.

He was born about the year 1636, probably at Hereford, the son of a poor shoemaker, but of a notable and well-endowed family line. He took no pains to inform the world of his outward history and we are left with guesses as to most of the details of his earthly career, but he has himself supplied us with an unusually full account of his {324} inward life during the early years of it. "Once I remember," he says, "I think I was about four years old when I thus reasoned with myself, sitting in a little obscure room of my father's poor house: If there be a G.o.d certainly He must be infinite in Goodness, and I was prompted to this by a real whispering instinct of Nature."[8] Whereupon the child wonders why, if G.o.d is so rich, he himself is so poor, possessed of "so scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts," but he tells us that as soon as he was old enough to discover the glory of the world he was in, and old enough for his soul to have "_sudden returns into itself_," there was no more questioning about poverty and narrow fortunes. All the wealth of G.o.d was his--

I nothing in the world did know But 'twas divine.[9]

As n.o.body has better caught the infinite glory of being a child, and as n.o.body in literature has more successfully "set the little child in the midst," than has Traherne, it may be well to let him tell us here in his splendid enthusiasm what it is to be a child and what the eyes of a child can see. He shall do it, first in his magnificent prose and then in his fine and simple verse.