c. 6.] Mistakes concerning Passivity. 275 matter is beyond discussion. I can only say, my consciousness is different. I shall be to him a rationalist, as he to me a mystic; but let us not dispute. Obviously, the great difficulty is to be quite sure that we have so annihilated every passion, preference or foregone conclusion as to make it certain that only powers from heaven can be working on the waters of the soul. That ripple, which has just stirred the stillness! Was it a breath of earthly air? Was it the leaping of a desire from within us? Or was it indeed the first touch, as it were, of some angelic hand, commissioned to trouble the pool with healing from on high? If such questions are hard to answer, when judging ourselves, how much more so when judging each other! When we desire to determine difficult duty by aid of the illumination promised, self must be abandoned. But what self? Assuredly, selfishness and self-will. Not the exercise of those powers of observation and judgment which God has given us for this very purpose. A divine light is promised, not to supersede, but to illuminate our understanding. Greatly would that man err who should declare those things only to be his duty to which he had been specially 'drawn,' or 'moved,' as the Friends would term it. What can be conceived more snug and comfortable, in one sense, and more despicable, in another, than the easy, selfish life which such a man might lead, under pretence of eminent spirituality? Refusing to read and meditate on the recorded example of Christ's life-for that is a mere externalism -he awaits inertly the development of an inward Christ. As he takes care not to expose himself to inducements to unpleasant duty to any outward teachings calculated to awaken his conscience and elevate his standard of obligation-that conscience remains sluggish, that standard low. He is honest, respectable, sober, we will say. His inward voice does not as yet urge him to anything beyond this. Others, it is true, exhaust themselves in endeavours to benefit the souls and bodies of men. They are right (he says), for so their inward Christ teaches them. He is right (he says), for so does not his inward Christ teach him. It is to be hoped that a type of mysticism so ignoble as this can furnish but few specimens. Yet such is the logical issue of some of the extravagant language we occasionally hear concerning the bondage of the letter and the freedom of the spirit. When the letter means what God chooses, and the spirit what we choose, Self is sure to exclaim, 'The letter killeth.' If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! Such, then, in imperfect outline, is what I hold to be true on this question concerning the reality and extent of the Spirit's influence. As there are two worlds-the seen and the unseen -so have there been ever two revelations-an inward and an outward-reciprocally calling forth and supplementing each other. To undervalue the outward manifestation of God, in nature, in providence, in revelation, because it is outwardbecause it is vain without the inward manifestation of God in the conscience and by the Spirit, is the great error of mysticism. Hence it has often disdained means because they are not-what they were never meant to be-the end. An ultra-refinement of spirituality has rejected, as carnal and unclean, what God has commended to men as wholesome and helpful. It is not wise to refuse to employ our feet because they are not wings. But it is not mysticism to believe in a world of higher realities, which are, and ever will be, beyond sight and sense; for heaven itself will not abrogate manifestation, but substitute a more adequate manifestation for a less. What thoughtful Christian man supposes that in any heaven of heavens, any number of millenniums hence, the Wisdom, Power, or Goodness of God will become manifest to him, as so many visible entities, c. 6.] Pantheistic Excess. 277 with form, and hue, and motion? It is not mysticism to believe that the uncreated underlies all created good. Augustine will not be suspected of pantheism; and it is Augustine who says 'From a good man, or a good angel, take away angel, take away man-and you find God.' We may be realists (as opposed to the nominalist) without being mystics. For the surmise of Plato, that the world of Appearance subsisted in and by a higher world of Divine Thoughts is confirmed (while it is transcended) by Christianity, when it tells us of that Divine. Subsistence, that Eternal Word, by whom and in whom, all things consist, and without whom was not anything made that is made. And herein lies that real, though often exaggerated, affinity between Platonism and Christianity, which a long succession of mystics have laboured so lovingly to trace out and to develop. In the second and third centuries, in the fourteenth, and in the seventeenth; in the Christian school at Alexandria, in the pulpits of the Rhineland, at Bemerton, and at Cambridge, Plato has been the 'Attic Moses' of the Clements and the Taulers, the Norrises and the Mores. But when mysticism, in the person of Plotinus, declares all thought essentially one, and refuses to Ideas any existence external to our own minds, it has become pantheistic. So, also, when the Oriental mystic tells us that our consciousness of not being infinite is a delusion (maya) to be escaped by relapsing ecstatically into the universal Life. Still more dangerous does such mysticism become when it goes a step farther and saysThat sense of sin which troubles you is a delusion also; it is the infirmity of your condition in this phantom world to suppose that right is different from wrong. Shake off that dream of personality, and you will see that good and evil are identical in the Absolute. In considering the German mysticism of the fourteenth century it is natural to inquire, first of all, how far it manifests any advance beyond that of preceding periods. An examination of its leading principles will show that its appearance marks an epoch of no mean moment in the history of philosophy. These monks of the Rhineland were the first to break away from a long-cherished mode of thought, and to substitute a new and profounder view of the relations subsisting between God and the universe. Their memorable step of progress is briefly indicated by saying that they substituted the idea of the immanence of God in the world for the idea of the emanation of the world from God. These two ideas have given rise to two different forms of pantheism; but they are neither of them necessarily pantheistic. To view rightly the relationship of God to the universe it is requisite to regard Him as both above it and within it. So Revelation taught the ancient Hebrews to view their great 'I am.' On the one hand, He had His dwelling in the heavens, and humbled Himself to behold the affairs of men; on the other, He was represented as having beset man behind and before, as giving life to all creatures by the sending forth of His breath, as giving to man understanding by His inspiration, and as dwelling, in an especial sense, with the humble and the contrite. But philosophy, and mysticism, frequently its purest aspiration, have not always been able to embrace fully and together these two conceptions of transcen dence and of immanence. We find, accordingly, that from the days of Dionysius Areopagita down to the fourteenth century, the emanation theory, in one form or another, is dominant. The daring originality of John Scotus could not escape from its control. It is elaborately depicted in Dante's Paradiso. The doctrine of immanence found first utterance with the Dominican Eckart; not in timid hints, but intrepid, reckless, sounding blasphemous. What was false in Eckart's teaching died out after awhile; what was true, animated his brother mystics, transmigrated eventually into the mind of Luther, and did not die. c. 6.] The Theory of Emanation. 279 To render more intelligible the position of the German mystics it will be necessary to enter into some farther explanation of the two theories in question. The theory of emanation supposes the universe to descend in successive, widening circles of being, from the Supreme-from some such 'trinal, individual' Light of lights, as Dante seemed to see in his Vision. In the highest, narrowest, and most rapid orbits, sing and shine the refulgent rows of Cherubim and Seraphim and Thrones. Next these, in wider sweep, the Dominations, Virtues, Powers. Below these, Princedoms, Archangels, Angels, gaze adoring upwards. Of these hierarchies the lowest occupy the largest circle. Beneath their lowest begins our highest sphere—the empyrean, enfolding within its lesser and still lesser spheres, till we reach the centre-' that dim spot which men call earth.' Through the hierarchies of heaven, and the corresponding hierarchies of the church, the grace of God is transmitted, stage by stage, each order in its turn receiving from that above, imparting to that below. This descent of divine influence from the highest point to the lowest is designed to effect a similar ascent of the soul from the lowest to the highest. Of such a theory John Scotus Erigena is the most philosophical exponent. With him the restitution of all things consists in their resolution into their ideal sources (causæ primordiales). Man and nature are redeemed in proportion as they pass from the actual up to the ideal; for in his system, the actual is not so much the realization of the ideal as a fall from it. So, in the spirit of this theory, the mounting soul, when it anticipates in imagination the redemption of the travailing universe, will extract from music the very essence of its sweetness, and refine that again (far above all delight of sense) into the primal idea of an Eternal Harmony. So likewise, all form and colour-the grace of flowers, the majesty of mountains, the might of seas, the red of evening or of morning clouds, the lustre of precious stones and |