Chapter I

Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Wie könnten wir zur Sonne blicken?
Wär nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,
Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?[398]

GOETHE.

Early in December, Atherton was called away from Ashfield by some matters of business. His solitary evenings were spent in the chief inn of a quiet cathedral town, and solaced by the drawing up of a kind of summary, which was to indicate the main results arrived at by so much reading and talking about the mystics. This final review was despatched in a letter to Gower,—was read aloud by him to a full auditory (comprising, beside its ordinary members, Mr. and Mrs. Lowestoffe, who had come up to spend Christmas),—and is here inserted.

_Old Red Dragon, Snorumbury._

MY DEAR GOWER,

I had purposed keeping this concluding paper, which you asked of me,
till I could rejoin you once more, and we might read and talk over
it together. But I cannot say how long I may be detained here: so I
send it you at once, that our mystical inquiries may be wound up
before the Christmas merry-makings begin.

In the present day, there are few who will acknowledge the name of
mystic. Indeed, Mysticism is now held in combination with so many
modifying or even counteracting elements, that a very
strongly-marked or extreme expression of it is scarcely possible.
Yet in many and very diverse forms of religious opinion, a mystical
tendency may be discerned. It is apparent in the descendant of
Irving, with his supernatural gifts; among some of the followers of
Fox, where the inner light eclipses the outer; in the disciple of
Swedenborg, so familiar with the world of spirits. The mystical
tendency is present, also, wherever the subjective constituent of
religion decidedly overbalances the objective. It is to be found
whereever the religionist (under whatever pretence) refuses to allow
the understanding to judge concerning what falls within its proper
province. Thus, I tend toward mysticism, if I invest either my
religious intuitions or my particular interpretation of scripture,
with a divine halo—with a virtual infallibility—and charge with
profanity the man whose understanding is dissatisfied with my
conclusions. The ‘evangelical’ is wrong, if he hastily condemns, as
‘carnal,’ him who does not find his express doctrines in the
Bible;—if, instead of attempting to satisfy the understanding of the
objector with reasons, he summarily dismisses it, by misquoting the
passage, ‘the natural man discerneth not the things of the spirit.’
The ‘spiritualist’ errs, in precisely the same way, when he assumes
that his intuitions are too holy to be questioned by the logical
faculty,—proclaims his religious sentiment above criticism, and
pronounces every objection the utterance of a pedantic formalism, or
a miserable conventionality. So to do, is to confound the childlike
and the childish,—to forget that we should be, in malice, children;
but in understanding, men. If the intuition of the one man, or the
faith of the other, be removed from the sphere of knowing, and the
court of evidence,—be an impulse or an instinct, rather than a
conviction, and be rendered inaccessible utterly to the
understanding, then is the bridge broken down between them and their
fellows. The common tongue of interpretation and the common ground
of argument are taken altogether away. For such faith no reason can
be rendered to him who has it not.

In Germany, it may be questioned whether the efforts of the
‘faith-philosophers’ were not more injurious than helpful to the
cause which they espoused. They endeavoured to shelter religion from
Rationalism by relegating it to the province of feeling or
sentiment. Hamann and Jacobi[399] might have withstood Rationalism
on its own ground. But these defenders abandoned, without a blow,
the fortifications of an impregnable argument, and shut themselves
up in the citadel—faith. Both were soon eclipsed by the deservedly
great name of Schleiermacher. His position was a stronger one than
theirs, and more comprehensive; yet, in the issue, scarcely more
satisfactory. In Schleiermacher’s theology, the individual
‘Christian consciousness’ is made the test according to which more
or less of the recorded history of the Saviour is to be received.
The supposed facts of Christianity contract or expand according to
the supposed spiritual wants of the individual Christian. Thus, if
any say, ‘Certain of the miracles, the resurrection and ascension of
Christ, do not make a part of my Christian consciousness,—I can
realize spiritual communion with Christ, independently of these
accessories,’—Schleiermacher tells him he may dispense with
believing them. Here, again, too much is conceded: portions of the
very heart are set aside as non-essentials. Christianity is a
_living_ whole, and cannot be thus dismembered without peril to
life. This baptism of Schleiermacher is rapid and sweeping, and the
veriest sceptics are Christianized in spite of themselves. Men whose
Christianity is historic, much as Mahommedanism is historic, turn
out excellent Christians, notwithstanding.

Such a theory is, after all, ignoble, because it does not seek Truth
alone, at all costs. The first object of religious inquiry is not
moral expediency, not edification, not what we may deem productive
of the most wholesome impressions, not what we wish to find true;
but what _is_ true. Let us seek the Truth, and if faithful to what
we can find of _that_, these other things will be added to us. Mere
good nature is a spurious charity. The cause of religion can never
be served by acquiescence in a falsehood. The Christianity offered
by Schleiermacher is a glass which mirrors every man—a source of
motive, never beyond our own level—a provision which is always what
we like and expect. Now, it may so happen that the kind of religion
we should like is not that which is the true—not that, therefore,
which is good for us. We need a religion adapted to us, but yet high
above us, to raise us up. The untrained eye does not at the first
view appreciate the old masters of art. If we are sincere in seeking
God’s truth, we must count on having to receive some things that do
not at once commend themselves to our judgment, but into which we
shall grow up, in the process of spiritual education. Now, for this
kind of self-transcendence Schleiermacher makes no preparation, and
his easy entrance does, in reality, preclude progress. We are not
surprised to see the Romish priest considering first, not what is
truth or fact, but what statement will bring the greatest number
within the pale of the Church, what will produce the most edifying
impression, what will do least violence to the current
preconceptions. The children of the day should disdain the slightest
approach to such facile complaisance. If Christ did not rise from
the dead, Christianity is a lie. On this question no inquiry must be
spared—our minds must be thoroughly made up. But to allow the name
of Christian to men who do not regard this fact as established,
looks as though we were afraid of inquiry,—as politic governments
will seem hot to see offences which it would be dangerous to punish.
I justify my means by my end—I am wanting in truth and manhood, if,
having myself rejected some doctrine, I yet appear to hold it,
because I think it morally expedient that it should be generally
received. I am guilty of a similar pious fraud if I yield up as
non-essential some fact on which the Christian faith must hang, in
order to recall certain wanderers to the fold of a nominal
Christianity. Schleiermacher’s sincerity can only be saved at the
expense of his judgment. This was the weak point of his accomplished
intellect—a weakness shared by many a German divine,—he regarded
external facts as of small moment compared with inward feeling. The
continual evaporation of outward reality in sentiment is the
vitiating principle in his system.[400]

Side by side with the advocates of faith and feeling in the
religious province, appeared German Romanticism in the field of
art and literature. The Romanticists were the enthusiastic
champions of the Ideal against Realism, the assailants of all
artificial method and servile conventionality, the sworn foes
everywhere of that low-minded, prosaic narrowness which Germany
calls Philistinism.[401]

Schelling gave them a poetical philosophy, and young
Schleiermacher’s _Discourses on Religion_ were, for a time, their
Bible. French Encyclopedism and German Rationalism had professed a
summary explanation for every mystery, had exiled the supernatural,
and ridiculed the Middle Age. In the pages of the _Athenæum_ and the
_Europa_, Romanticism undertook the defence of mediæval
superstition, extolled its fist-law, its wager by battle, its
‘earnest’ religious wars; and confounding clear thought and definite
expression with the pert self-complacence of Rationalism, announced
itself enamoured of every mystical obscurity, for the very shadow’s
sake.

The evils against which the Romanticists contended were many of them
real; much they laughed at, well deserving ridicule; but with their
truth they mingled a world of fantastic folly. Voltaire was, in many
things, as shallow as he was transparent,—_therefore_ the muddy
obscurity of every visionary who rhapsodized about the All, must be
profound as the ‘everlasting deeps.’ Conventionalism,
utilitarianism, logic-grinding, old formulas,—all were to be
dethroned by the inspired votaries of intellectual intuition. The
most startling extravagance or desperate paradox of opinion was
hailed with the loudest plaudits, as most surely fraught with the
divine afflatus. The Romanticists essayed to harmonize the ideal and
the real. For the most part, they succeeded only in confounding
their spheres; and ending by absorbing the real in the ideal. In
their hands, philosophy became imaginative and rhetorical,—a very
garden of gay fancies; while poetry grew metaphysical and analytic.
Where they should have created, they dissect; where they should have
inquired, they imagine.[402]

It is a cardinal doctrine with Romanticism that the common should be
regarded as the wondrous, and the wondrous as the common. The land
of faëry is to be our beaten business track; its dreamy speech, a
household language; its spirit-glances, our familiar looks. At the
same time, the objects and appliances of everyday existence are to
be informed with supernatural significance, and animated with a
mysterious life. So, in _Sartor Resartus_ (a book which is simply
the Evangel of Romanticism, in its more vigorous form), Mr. Carlyle
reminds the reader that his ‘daily life is girt with Wonder,’ and
that his ‘very blankets and breeches are Miracles.’ Thus our life is
to be at once a trophy and a bazaar; like old Westminster Hall,
where the upper story was gorgeous with blazonry and proud with the
ensigns of chivalrous romance, and the ground-floor laid out in
shops.

Ere long, Romanticists like Creuzer and Görres, began to resolve the
old mythologies into allegorical science: while Romanticists like
Frederick Schlegel, were resolving religion into poetry, and
morality into æsthetics. Dante and Tasso, Camoens and Goethe, had
intermingled classic and romantic myths as a poetic decoration, or a
fanciful experiment. With the Romanticists (so frequently mastered
by their own materials), such admixture became actual earnest. They
announced the approach of a new Religion of Humanity and Art. They
summoned flower-spirits from the Ganges, braceleted crocodiles from
the Nile, monstrous forms from the Talmud and the Koran, to fill its
incongruous pantheon of symbols. The novel wonders of animal
magnetism were to constitute its miracles. Thus, like Proclus, they
could make philosophy superstitious, they could not make
superstition philosophical. They attempted the construction of a
true and universal religion, by heaping together the products of
every recorded religious falsity, and bowing at all shrines in turn.
Like Iamblichus, they sought in theurgy for a sign; and in their
credulous incredulity, grew greedy of every supranaturalism except
the scriptural. In a moment of especial inspiration, Frederick
Schlegel, writing in the _Athenæum_, declared that the only
opposition which the new religion of philanthropy and good taste was
likely to encounter, would spring from the few Christians proper
still in existence; but even they, when the Aurora actually shone,
would fling aside their prejudice, fall down, and worship.[403]

Such anticipations appear ridiculous enough. But against ridicule,
to which they were peculiarly sensitive, the Romanticists possessed
a ready safeguard. This resource consisted in their doctrine of
Irony. After advancing a paradox, or pushing a fancy to the edge of
absurdity, let the author turn round, and abandon his own creation;
or dissipate it, with a serene smile; or assuming another tone, look
down upon it, as questionable, from some new and superior height.
Thus, if any dullard begins gravely to criticise, he shall have only
laughter for his pains, as one too gross for the perception of
humour; while at the same time, the reader is given to understand
that beneath that jest there _does_ lie, nevertheless, a kernel of
most earnest and momentous truth. According to the Ironic theory,
such saying and unsaying is not convenient merely (as a secret door
of escape behind the tapestry), but in the highest degree artistic.
For what is Art, but a sublime play? Does not loftiest genius ever
sport, godlike, with its material, remote and riddling to the lower
apprehension of common minds? In _Sartor Resartus_ the English
public have been familiarized with this ingenious device. After
professing to translate, from the paper-bags of Teufelsdröckh, some
ultra-transcendental sally, Mr. Carlyle makes a practice of
addressing the reader, admits that he may well feel weary and
perplexed, confesses that he himself does not always see his way in
these ‘strange utterances,’ calls them a farrago whose meaning must
be mainly conjectured, and finally leaves it pleasantly uncertain
how much is delirium, how much inspiration.

But no artifice could save Romanticism, in the hands of its most
extravagant representatives, from the condign catastrophe. This
sensuous æsthetic religion, this effeminate symbolism, with its
gallery of arbitrary and incongruous types from the dreams of all
time,—this worship of Art as Deity, could tend but in one direction.
The men who began with sentimental admiration for the Church of
Rome, ended by passing their necks beneath her yoke; and the artist
terminates miserably in the bigot. They had contemned the
Reformation, on æsthetic grounds, as unromantic: they came to dread
it on superstitious grounds as unsafe. Romanticism, so sanguine and
so venturous in its revolutionary youth, grew anile in its premature
decrepitude; mumbled its _credos_; cursed its heretics—and died.

It was at the opening of the present century that the great rush to
Rome took place: a significant lesson, indicating the constant issue
of that subjective poetical religionism which divorces Truth from
Beauty, which craves religious fancies and neglects religious facts,
till it falls a victim to the greatest religious fallacy. Then was
celebrated the perversion of Frederick Schlegel, of Adam Müller, of
Zachariah Werner—‘a born mystic,’ as Carlyle rightly styles him.
Tieck, who must stand acquitted of the follies of the school; and
August Wilhelm Schlegel (despite some crotchets, immeasurably
superior to Frederick) retained their Protestantism.

Novalis, for by this name Friedrich von Hardenberg is most known, is
perhaps as fair a representative of Romanticism as can be found. He
had no occasion, like some of the party, to affect, as so much art,
the language of the mystics whom he studied with such devotion.
Novalis was to the manner born. To none was the realm of reverie and
fable—visited by most of us only at intervals—more completely a
familiar, daily dwelling-place. Scarcely to the morbid phantasy of
Hoffmann was the ordinary life more visibly inwrought with the
mysterious. Poetry was his practical staff of every-day existence;
and practical life, to him, all poetry. The creations of his fancy
were his Holy Writ; and Holy Writ the most divine creation of the
fancy. Werner regretted that men should ever have employed two
distinct terms to designate Art and Religion. With Novalis they are
perfectly identical. It is his wont to deal with spiritual truth by
analogies drawn from physics, and to investigate physics by his
mystical axioms concerning spiritual truth. A mind so desultory and
discursive was quite unequal to the formation of a system. But to
what sort of system such a confusion of thought must lead, if ever
methodically elaborated, has not patient, hard-working Jacob Behmen
already shown us? Where other men are satisfied with tracing a
resemblance, Novalis announces an identity. What others use as an
illustration, he will obey as a principle. With him, as with the old
theosophists, the laws of the universe are the imaginative analogies
which link together all its regions, seen and unseen,—analogies bred
in his own heated brain.

Thus, according to Novalis, he is the true Archimage of Idealism,
‘who can transform external things into thoughts, and thoughts into
external things.’ ‘The poet,’ he says, ‘is the true enchanter: by
identifying himself with an object he compels it to become what he
will.’ ‘Experience is magical, and only magically explicable.’
‘Physics is the theory of imagination.’ ‘Religion, Love, Nature,
Politics, all must be treated mystically.’ On such a principle alone
can we account for the ultra-Neoplatonist rodomontade he utters in
praise of mathematics. He declares the genuine mathematician the
enthusiast _par excellence_—mathematics is the life of the gods—it
is religion—it is virtual omniscience. Mathematical books are to be
read devoutly, as the word of God.[404]

The suggestive and sparkling aphorisms of Novalis should be read
with due allowance. Some contain admirable thoughts, pointedly
expressed; others are curiously perverse or puerile. Now they
breathe the lofty stoical spirit we find in Schleiermacher’s
monologues. Presently, Fichte seems forgotten; the strain of Titanic
self-assertion is relaxed, and Novalis languidly reclines with the
Lotos-eaters among the flowers. In one page life is but ‘a battle
and a march,’ in another, the soul’s activity is an eating poison;
love, a sickness; life, the disease of the spirit—a brief fever, to
be soothed by the slumber of mystical repose, and healed at last by
healthful, restful death. In this latter mood he woos the sleepy
abstraction of the oriental mysticism. Action is morbid, in his
eyes; to dream is to overcome. All activity ceases, he says, when
Knowledge enters. The condition of Knowlege is Eudæmonia—saintly
calm of contemplation.[405] Such is the aspiration dimly discernible
through the florid obscurity of his _Hymns to Night_. Shutting out
the garish outer world of the Actual, forgetting all its tinsel
glories and its petty pains, the enthusiast seems to rise into that
mystic meditative Night, whose darkness reveals more truth than the
searching brightness of the daylight, and in whose recesses his
transported spirit celebrates its bridal with the Queen of
Heaven—the æsthetic Mary, the Eternal Beauty.

Now that the assailants of Revelation have grown so extremely pious,
we find them zealously enlisting certain modifications of mysticism
on their side. Modern spiritualism revives the tactics of ancient
philosophy. It borrows from Christianity (as did Porphyry) a higher
moral tone than it could otherwise have reached, and then pretends
to look down upon the ethics of the scriptures. The religious
sentiment so variously evolved in every age and country, is brought
forth to overwhelm the religious truth revealed in Christ. A
philosophic church is set up. The hope full of immortality is
depreciated as low and selfish. Quietism abased itself so profoundly
that it would scarcely lift its eyes toward that hope. Spiritualism
exalts itself so ambitiously, that it will not stoop to make that
hope its own. In the seventeenth century, mysticism was in sad
earnest on this question of disinterestedness: in the nineteenth,
such indifference is the pretence of a preposterous
self-sufficiency.

But the device which failed so signally, some fourteen centuries
ago, cannot now prevail, though the hostile approach is more
artfully contrived. That antichristian sentimentalism which is too
refined for the medium of a book, and for the morality of the Bible,
was discomfited as soon as seen, and received its _coup de grace_
from the ‘_Eclipse of Faith_,’ amidst universal laughter. But this
repetition of old ideas is, after all, the most mortifying and
damnatory fact. To think; that the advocates of a philosophic
religious sentiment, in opposition to the old Book, should exhibit
as little novelty as their enemies,—that even after throwing off the
Biblical fetters, no progress should be visible,—that the haunting
Past should be with them still,—that after making their escape from
antiquated Paul and John, they should find themselves in company
with antiquated Proclus and Plotinus!

The theosophy of Swedenborg was original. Mysticism has produced
nothing really new in that direction since his day, and the northern
seer still walks alone within his circle. Franz Baader re-clothes
the bones of Behmen’s system from the materials of modern science;
and Oetinger, a student both of Behmen and of Swedenborg, attempts
to arrange a divine system of science by the mystical interpretation
of scripture. Even the ‘holy vegetation’ of oriental mysticism has
been reproduced. Schelling bids man know God ‘in silent
not-knowing,’ as the plant reveals eternal beauty in ‘stillest
existence and without reflection.’ Such counsel means much more than
the maxim, ‘Il ne faut pas voyager pour voir, mais pour ne pas
voir,’ so frequent with John of the Cross and Fénélon. Laurence
Oken, a physiologist of note and a disciple of Schelling, sees in
the snail an exalted symbol of mind slumbering deeply within itself.
He beholds in that creature an impersonation of majestic wisdom: it
is ‘the prophesying goddess sitting on the tripod.’ What reflection,
what earnestness, what timidity, what confidence! The same Oken
travesties Behmen, when he makes red = fire, love, Father; blue =
air, truth, belief, Son; green = water, formation, hope, Ghost;
yellow = earth, Satan. He imagined that he wrote his
Physio-philosophy in a kind of inspiration. Here, again, we see that
this intellectual intuition, professedly so keen, so spontaneous, so
free from every formula, does yet continually repeat itself.

Great and various have been the services rendered by mysticism
throughout the history of the Christian Church. It has exposed
pretence, it has demanded thoroughness. It has sought, amidst
surrounding formalism, what was deemed the highest form of
spirituality. Its strain has been sometimes of a mood so high as to
‘create a soul within the ribs of death.’

But it has been influential for good in proportion to its temperance
in the doctrine concerning the outward rule and the inner light.
Wherever it has been extravagant in this respect—has thrown off
common sense or decency—been turbulent, licentious, or ‘high
fantastical,’ there good men and thoughtful have stood mournfully
aloof from it, while formal men or designing have made its follies a
plea for tightening the cords of spiritual oppression. It has won
acceptance from men when it has been sufficiently moderate to urge
intelligible arguments, and to appeal sincerely (if not always
warrantably) to that outward Revelation which is commonly received.
But the world has rarely been disposed to receive boastful
professions of spirituality or freedom, vague declamation and
rhapsodical denunciation of reason or the schools, in the place of
those definite expressions of opinion which, though sometimes
narrow, are at least readily apprehensible. Incalculable must be the
advantage of any man or party who can manifest a clear meaning over
those who cannot.

There is danger in the present day, lest in the reaction against
logical formalism and prescription, an extravagant value should be
set on faith for its own sake. The Romanist makes mere faith, blind
and implicit, a saving virtue. The spiritualist falls into the same
error when he says, ‘Only be in earnest—get faith in an idea—in
something, at any rate—and all will be well.’ But faith is a
principle, not an instinct. Among the many claimants for my belief,
I must make an intelligent choice. It is of some consequence whether
the ‘idea’ on which I am mounted be false or true. It can be good
for no man to be recklessly earnest in the devil’s work.

Mysticism has generally apprehended religion rather on its divine
than on its human side. It makes haste to lose humanity, and to be
glorified. Grievous afflictions have reminded some of the mystical
aspirants that they were human still. The spiritual pride of others
has betrayed them, first to ostentatious sanctity, and then to
shameful sin. Among those who would surpass humanity, some have
fallen disgracefully, others ludicrously, below it. There have been
those whose transformation proved to be downward to a lower sphere,
not upward to an element more rare. They fare like Lucius in the
_Golden Ass_ to whom Fotis has given the wrong witch-salve. He
extends his arms, he sways himself to and fro, he expects the next
moment to find himself changing into a bird. But his hands and feet
grow horny, his thickening, irritated skin shoots forth hairs, and
behold him metamorphosed into an ass. The theatrical devotion, so
frequent among the ornaments of Roman saintship, overlooks common
duties, sometimes despises necessary helps, generally mistakes
altogether the nature of true greatness. The Christianity exhibited
in the New Testament differs most conspicuously from the Mystical
Theology in being so much more human. It addresses man as he is; it
addresses all; it appeals to the whole nature of every man. It knows
nothing of class-religion. It does not bid men exhaust themselves in
efforts to live only in the _apex_ of their being—that ἄνθος νόου of
which Plotinus speaks.

The history of mysticism shows us, farther, that the attempt to
escape all figure or symbol, in our apprehensions of divine truth,
is useless, or worse than useless. Such endeavour commonly ends in
substituting for a figure which, though limited and partial, has
life and heart in it, some vague abstraction, cold and lifeless,—and
itself, perhaps, ultimately a figure, after all. It is one thing to
remember that language is _but_ language,—that behind all the
expressions of love or power lies an infinity that cannot be
expressed. It is another to leave behind (as many mystics have
striven to do) even the vital breathing metaphors of Holy Writ, and
restlessly to peer beyond, into the Unutterable—the Illimitable.
Surely the words ‘King,’ ‘Shepherd,’ ‘Father,’ express more truth
concerning God than the ‘pure Act’ of philosophy. When I speak of
God as near or distant, pleased or displeased, the change may be in
me rather than in Him. But in practical result—in the effects I
feel—it is to me _as though_ such change of disposition were real.
And mysticism must freely grant me this, if it would not play into
the hands of scholasticism, its hereditary foe. There is a sickly
dread of anthropomorphism abroad among us, which is afraid of
attributing to God a heart.

Mysticism has often spoken out bravely and well against those who
substitute barren propositions for religious life,—who reject the
kindly truth to make a tyrant of some rigid theory or system. But
there is danger also on the other side. An imaginative, brainsick
man, may substitute religious vagaries, whims, conceits, for
religious truth. Men may be led as far astray by mere feeling as by
mere logic. While the man of method makes an idol of his theory, the
enthusiast may make an idol of his passion or his fancy. To this
latter snare we have seen mysticism repeatedly fall a prey. The
fanatic and the formalist both essay to build a temple to the Holy
Spirit. The formalist is satisfied with raising the structure; and a
sorry taper, here and there, makes darkness visible. The fanatic
kindles so many lights, and with so little care, that he burns his
edifice to the ground, as did the Florentines their Church of the
San Spirito, from excessive illumination.

Anatomists tell us of what they term vicarious secretion in the
bodies of men. One organ is found, in some cases of injury, to
produce the secretion proper to another; and so we survive the hurt.
I think some process of the kind must supervene for the benefit of
our minds. With many of the mystics, I doubt not, the heart
performed, in their spiritual œconomy, the functions of the head. A
careful scrutiny of the mystical theology will show, I am confident,
that several of its prominent doctrines are, in fact, most valuable
correctives, and probably took or maintained their place as such.
These doctrines, some of which by no means commend themselves to the
non-mystical mind, are the preservatives of the mystic from his
peculiar dangers. Mysticism leads to an excessive and morbid
introspection. How necessary, then, that doctrine of
‘unconsciousness’ reiterated by John of the Cross and
Fénélon,—itself an extreme, but indispensable to counteract its
opposite. Mysticism has taught many to expect a perceptible inward
guidance. How necessary, then, the doctrine of ‘quiet,’—that the
soul should be abstracted in a profound stillness, lest the hasty
impulses of self should be mistaken for a divine monition. Mysticism
exalts the soul to a fervour and a vision, fraught with strange
sweetnesses and glories. How necessary, then, that doctrine of the
more elevated Quietism which bids the mystic pass beyond the
sensible enjoyments and imaginative delights of religion—escape from
the finer senses of the soul, as well as the grosser senses of the
body, into that state of pure and imageless contemplation which has
no preference or conception of its own. If Quietism is not to become
a fantastic selfishness, a sensuous effeminacy, a voice must cry,
‘Haste through the picture-gallery—haste through the
rose-garden—dare the darkness, wherein the glory hides!’

The lawless excesses of which mysticism has been occasionally guilty
should not serve to commend spiritual despotism. The stock
alternative with the Church of Rome has been—‘Accept these fanatical
outbreaks as divine, or submit to our rule.’ Unfortunately for this
very palpable sophism, the most monstrous mystical extravagance,
whether of pantheism, theurgy, or miracle, is to be found in the
Romish Church. Angelus Silesius, Angela de Foligni, and Christina
Mirabilis, are nowhere surpassed in their respective extremes. The
best of the Romish mystics are questionable Romanists. Tauler and
Madame Guyon were more Protestant than they were aware. Even the
submissive Fénélon is but a half-hearted son of the Church, beside
that most genuine type of her saintship—the zealous Dominic.
Innocent folk are sometimes inclined to think better of a system
which could produce a man like Fénélon. They forget that, as a
product of the system, Fénélon was a very inferior specimen—little
better than a failure.

There is a considerable class, in these restless, hurrying, striving
days, who would be much the better for a measure of spiritual
infusion from the Quietism of Madame Guyon. She has found an
excellent expositor and advocate in Mr. Upham. The want of leisure,
the necessity for utmost exertion, to which most of us are subject,
tends to make us too anxious about trifles, presumptuously eager and
impatient. We should thank the teacher who aids us to resign
ourselves, to be nothing, to wait, to trust. But it is to be feared
that such lessons will have the greatest charm for those who need
them least—for pensive, retiring contemplatists, who ought rather to
be driven out to action and to usefulness. There is a danger lest
passivity should be carried too far—almost as though man were the
helpless object about which light and darkness were contending,
rather than himself a combatant, armed by God against the powers of
night. It seems to me, too, better to watch against, and suppress as
they arise, our selfish tendencies and tempers—our envy, pride,
indifference, hate, covetousness—than to be always nervously trying
(as Fénélon does) to catch that Proteus, SELF, in the abstract.

Finally, in the mischievous or unsuccessful forms of mysticism we
have the recorded result of a series of attempts to substitute the
inner light for the outer. When mysticism threw off external
authority altogether, it went mad—as we have seen in the
revolutionary pantheism of the Middle Age. When it incorporated
itself more and more in revealed truth, it became a benign power—as
on the eve of the Reformation. The testimony of history, then, is
repeatedly and decisively uttered against those who imagine that to
set aside the authority of Scripture would be to promote the
religious life of men. The Divine Spirit is with us yet; and the
healing, elevating wisdom of the inspired page unexhausted still.
The hope of our age lies, not in a conceited defiance of controul,
but in our ability more fully to apprehend the counsels God Himself
has given us. Argument may be evaded. To speak in the name of
religion may seem to beg the question. But to resist the verdict of
the past is not the part of any thoughtful man. He who hopes to
succeed in superseding letter by spirit—in disseminating a gospel
more spiritual than that of scripture, by somehow dispensing with
the vehicle which all truth requires for its conveyance,—who hopes
to succeed in any attempt approaching this, where more powerful
minds, sometimes more favourably situated, have met only with
defeat—such a fanatic must be dismissed with pity as totally
incurable.

It grows late. Good night all. If I can get back earlier I will.

Yours,
HENRY ATHERTON.

Footnote 398:

Goethe:

Held our eyes no sunny sheen,
How could sunshine e’er be seen?
Dwelt no power divine within us,
How could God’s divineness win us?

Footnote 399:

See F. H. Jacobi, _Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung_
(1811), where the principles of the Faith-Philosophy are expounded,
though after a desultory, disjointed manner:—more especially pp.
70-93.

Footnote 400:

To Schleiermacher the theology of his country owes great and lasting
obligation for having led the intellectual promise of his time to a
momentous crisis of transition. His genius at once kindled the
enthusiasm of youth, and allowed a space to its scepticism. As much
opposed as Hamann or Jacobi to the contemptuous Rationalism which then
held the scorner’s chair, he did not, like them, couch a polemic lance
against philosophy. But real and important as was his advance beyond
the low and superficial anti-supranaturalism which preceded him, the
followers of Schleiermacher found it impossible to rest where he did.
From among his pupils have sprung the greatest names in this
generation of German divines, and they have admitted, with scarcely an
exception, that he conceded so much for the sake of peace as to render
his position untenable. Their master led them to an elevation whence
they discerned a farther height and surer resting-place than he
attained. For a more detailed account of Schleiermacher and his
theological position, the reader is referred to an article by the
Author in the _British Quarterly Review_ for May, 1849.

Footnote 401:

The principles of the genuine Romanticism (as distinguished from its
later and degenerate form) are ably enunciated by Tieck, in a comic
drama, entitled _Prince Zerbino; or, Travels in Search of Good Taste_.
One Nestor, a prosaic pedant, who piques himself on understanding
everything, and on his freedom from all enthusiasm and imaginative
nonsense, is introduced into the wondrous garden of the Goddess of
Poesy. There he sees, among others, Dante and Ariosto, Cervantes and
Sophocles. He complains of not finding Hagedorn, Gellert, Gesner,
Kleist, or Bodmer; and the Goddess then points him out—as a true
German bard—stout old Hans Sachs. Dante appears to him a crusty old
fogie; Tasso, a well-meaning man, but weak; and Sophocles, whom he was
disposed to respect as a classic, when blamed for the obscurity of his
choruses, turns upon him like a bear. The conceited impertinence, the
knowing air, and the puzzle-headedness of the Philistine, are hit off
to admiration. This Garden of Poesy seems to him a lair of savages, an
asylum for lunatics, where all his smug conventionalisms are trampled
on, and every canon of his criticism suffers flagrant violation. Genii
take him away, and give him something substantial to eat—earth to
earth. The tables and chairs begin to talk to him. They congratulate
themselves on being delivered from their old free life in the woods,
and cut out into _useful_ articles of furniture, so fulfilling the
purpose of their being. He gets on much better with them than with the
poets, and thinks them (himself excepted) the most sensible creatures
in the world.

Footnote 402:

See Julian Schmidt, _Geschichte der Deutschen National Literatur im
19n Jahrhundert_, th. I. c. vi.

Footnote 403:

Schmidt, p. 60.

Footnote 404:

Novalis, _Schriften_, th. ii. pp. 152, 159, 221.

Footnote 405:

_Ibid._, p. 158.