83 ART. IV.—1. Memoirs of William Forster. Edited by BENJAMIN SEEBOHM. 2 vols. London: Alfred W. Bennet, Bishopsgate Street Without. 1865. 2. Quakerism, Past and Present: being an Inquiry_into_the Causes of its Decline in Great Britain and Ireland. By JOHN STEVENSON ROUNTREE. First Prize Essay. London: Smith and Elder. 1859. 3. The Peculium: an Endeavour to throw Light on some of the Causes of the Decline of the Society of Friends, especially in regard to its original claim of being the Peculiar People of God. By THOMAS HANCOCK. Second Prize Essay. London: Sinith and Elder. 1859. 4. Doctrine, Practice, and Discipline. Fourth Edition. Friends' Book Depository, 86, Houndsditch. 1861. Ir will not be a matter of surprise to our readers if a Review like ours, devoted to the maintenance and illustration of Catholic dogma, should from time to time examine the principles and inquire into the progress of those bodies of professing Christians which surround, though they are separated from, the Church. In Vol. xxii. of the Christian Remembrancer we discussed some of the social characteristics of the community whose members appropriate to themselves the title of Friends. To use their own language, we propose a more solid subject in our present paper: we propose tracing out the theological history of a very remarkable class of professing Christians. The course of our remarks will lead us to conclusions which will be found to modify rather than to differ from those arrived at by the two intelligent writers, the titles of whose prize essays are prefixed to this paper. It appears that a gentleman, lamenting the decline of the Society of Friends, offered two prizes, one of one hundred guineas and another of fifty, for the two best Essays on the Decline of Quakerism. Mr. Rountree obtained the former, Mr. Hancock obtained the latter prize. Mr. Maurice was one of the umpires. The excellence of the selected essays was so nearly equal that the founder of the prize was induced to make the second equal in value to the first. In our judgment, Mr. Hancock's essay is the better of the two. They are both very thoughtful and readable volumes. We commend the whole subject and the essays that discuss it to the devout consideration of all true churchmen. The rise, the development, the collapse of a sectthe last, unhappily, a most rare event--can never be a matter of indifference or contempt to those who inherit the Apostolical Deposit. The relation that heresy bears to the whole body of the truth is such as to entitle it to humble and careful consideration from all Catholics. For, to reaffirm what, unfortunately, cannot be too often reaffirmed, heresy in its origin, and as the very genesis of the word implies, is not necessarily the denial of truth, but the affirmation of truth in such an undue, onesided, and disproportioning measure, as to overthrow the analogy of the faith. That such spiritual wantonness abruptly degenerates into falsehood and unbelief is the lamentable fact, which the history of the sects abundantly establishes. And nowhere can this history be so easily read as in England. Nowhere in all the world have the sects multiplied more-if America be excepted-or more daringly vindicated for themselves a 'habitation and a name.' Now, among all the sects of the empire, not one holds a higher historical position, or occupies a truer logical basis, than the Society of Friends. It may be argued, indeed, that the followers of Lodovick Muggleton' carry their principles to a more legitimate conclusion; for they reject not only the two sacraments, but the ordinances of prayer and preaching, 1 Lodovick Muggleton came forward in the same year as George Fox. He and his fellow-labourer, John Reeve, offered themselves to the world as the two Apocalyptic prophets. Since they represented the Day of Judgment as already come, they concluded the time of prayer and preaching as already past. The sect is not yet wholly extinct. We have before us a volume, purporting to be a reprint, and bearing date 1756, which contains three letters of Muggleton, the titles of which are curious: The Neck of the Quakers broken or cut in sunder by the Two-edged Sword of the Spirit which is put into my mouth. Written by Lodovick Muggleton, one of the two last Prophets and Witnesses unto the High and Mighty God, the Man Christ Jesus, in Glory.' A Looking-glass for George Fox, the Quaker, and other Quakers, wherein they may see themselves to be right Devils; in answer to George Fox,' &c. &c. The Answer to William Penn, Quaker, His Book, entituled The New Witnesses proved Old Hereticks, wherein he is proved to be an ignorant, spatter-brained Quaker, who knows no more what the true God is, than one of his coach-horses doth, nor so much; for the Ox knoweth his Owner, and the Ass his Master's scrip (sic) but Penn doth not know his Maker, as is manifest by the Scriptures, which may inform the reader, if he mind the interpretation of Scripture in the discourse following.' The 6th section of this third publication shows that God, by his Prerogative Power, hath elected the seed of Adam to be saved, and hath pre-ordained the seed of the serpent, such as Penn the Quaker is, to be damned,' &c. The Quakers were equally violent in language; and, as to tenets, Leslie, on this point at least undoubtedly impartial, declares the delusions of the Quakers to be more gross than those among the Muggletonians. We believe that among some more prominent forms of the Baptist sect, prayer is superseded wholly or in part, or to speak more precisely, the Lord's Prayer is wholly disused, as suiting only the times of spiritual childhood, and as unsuited to the requirements of adult and robust believers. which are retained in the Society of Friends. No professedly Christian body has rendered more service to the country, and indirectly to the Church, than the Quakers. By more than the associations of flesh and blood they have endeared themselves to the English people. If they have reached in this the end of their days-if it be the end as a sect-a wealthy place,' they have accomplished this result, not by the labours of a sect, not as witnesses to some predominant spiritual truth, but rather as assertors of the natural and inherent rights of human nature. There are other grounds on which we may justify, if required, the discussion of the present subject. It is surely a part of divine charity to acknowledge, and to thank God for, whatever amount of truth is held and maintained by those bodies, which, through the fault or frailty of the Church, have perpetrated spiritual suicide, and cut themselves off from the visible Body of God, Christ's own historical witness in the world to the Eternal Mercy of the Incarnation. It is the remnant of the truth, viewed out of its due proportion, and pursued to exaggeration, which preserves each sect from decomposition. It is scarcely too much to say that the Catholic faith will be found to be the sum of the distinctive tenets of the sects. Our readers will readily verify for themselves the correctness of this statement. Such a fact not only makes more plain the duty of the Church to teach the whole dogma, but it emboldens her. It is a great vice to be careless about the truth, and it is her duty to do all she can to foster it, even where it is apparently out of her direct power to do so. Catholic teaching and usage in a parish church, even where it repels rather than attracts Dissenters, is of indirect service to them: it induces them to grasp more earnestly their distinctive truths, and to cherish as of faith what they were only too ready to hold lightly as matter of opinion. It is needless, almost, to state that this tender thoughtfulness on the Church's part for those alienated from her can hardly fail altogether in conciliating. It is a sad truth that they too often regard her as an inexorable stepdame, with a Quicunque vult in her right hand, and on her lips a sentence of reprobation for all recusants. How many times have we been called to witness the incredulity and astonishment of even professing churchfolk when assuring them that the damnatory clause is never to be regarded as reaching the unconsciously or the unwillingly ignorant; that the Athanasian Creed affirms the certain hopes of those who are in Christ, the eternal risks of those who criminally refuse to be or to continue in Christ; but advances nothing that prejudices the merciful acceptance, through Christ, of those millions upon millions of human beings who. have passed, or are passing away, while we write, ignorant, through no fault of theirs, of the redeeming love of God. It is not merely deliverance from sin, and a prospect of blessedness hereafter, which the Church is entrusted with and commissioned to proclaim, and which are all a secularized Christianity concerns itself about; she brings with her hopes that are assured, and means of grace that are divinely authenticated; and, in the end, in lieu of mere escape from hell, the royalties of heaven, and the very glories of the Lord Himself. Who then but she can be full of pity and love to the wanderers and outcasts? Who but she who is taught in the very heart of the Divine Bridegroom? O thou who bringest good tidings of good things! O Mother of divine tenderness! bare thy breasts to thy alienated and emperilled children, and lure them back to thy embraces and thy consolations! The history of opinion shows how grievously we have suffered from the enormous strength of imagination,' which is 'yet the soul's weaknesse and unwieldinesse, whereby she so farre sinks "into phantasmes, that she cannot recover herself unto the use "of her more free faculties of reason and understanding." The Jew, the Christian, and the Gentile have in succession furnished sad proof of the truth of this. Kabbalism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism present only different forms of the same thing; or at least analogous results, from the intermixture in different proportions of the same elements. The influence of Origen on the Church may be traced in that line of mystics which have never ceased to make themselves felt along the whole course of the Church's history, as well as in other departments of Christian thought more commonly connected with his name. But there are two classes of mystics, the orthodox and the heretical. The ideas of the former are all based upon the Creeds; the With this, the sentiment of the Catholic Faith, compare the two determinations; that of Calvin (Instit. iv. 1, § 4), 'extra ecclesiæ gremium nulla est speranda peccatorum remissio, nec ulla salus;' and that set forth by Innocent III. in the first canon of iv. Lateran (A.D. 1215), una vero est fidelium universalis ecclesia, extra quam nullus omnino salvatur.' The true sentiment of the Catholic Faith is re-echoed in the 'where it (Baptism) may be had' of our Office for 'Baptism for those who are of Riper Years.' In the Introduction to the Apostolic Epistles' (Cambridge, 1861, 2d Ed.), at page 123, there is a very interesting extract from a speech of Bishop Horsley in the House of Lords, 31st May, 1791, in which that great prelate quotes with approval the devout belief of Erasmus, expressed in his dedication of the Tusc. Disp.' that the soul of Cicero was 'apud superos.' Arbishop Ussher proves that the prayer of Gregory in behalf of Trajan (alluded to by Dante, Purg. x. 73) is apocryphal : 'Del roman prence lo cui gran valore Mosse Gregorio alla sua gran vittoria; What remains not apocryphal is the divine charity of the great Pope. doctrine of the Trinity, the permanent authority of the letter of Scripture, and the Holy Sacraments, and the Incarnation. The heretical mystics devote themselves to the analysis and the investigation of the soul, which, in fact, they regard as part of, or as God Himself. Hence, with them, the sum of religion consists in abstraction, and in elaborate efforts to escape from the tyranny of the senses. From Origen to John Scotus Erigena, we clear an interval of upwards of five centuries; five centuries more bring us to Barlaam; and less than five centuries more bring us to the crowning effort of reforming Puritanism, and the modern phase of uncatholic mysticism which was taught by that Socrates of the sects, George Fox, but which was to receive, and this, too, without any important doctrinal accretions, its final shape in the catholic intellect of Immanuel Swedenborg. The orthodox mysticism everywhere was encountered and outdone by the heretical counterfeit. It was with Tauler and Spener as with Erigena. The Brethren of the Free Spirit, and the Hesychiasts were in the same age, troubling, the one the Western, the other the Eastern Church; yet with a different fortune. For the ecclesiastical judgments of the West condemned the Beguins, who eventually betook themselves to the kind rule of St. Francis; while the Councils of the East upheld their own mystics, and, in doing so, seem to have given authority to much that can hardly be recognised as agreeable to the Catholic Faith. The term applied to the Quietists of Mount Athos by Barlaam, though possessing an opprobrious sound, is very happy, and may well be revived as descriptive of all professors of subjective religionism. Barlaam called the monks όμφαλόψυχοι. They, in compliance with an ancient opinion of their principal doctors (who imagined that there was a celestial light concealed in the deepest retirements of the mind) used to sit every day during a certain space of time, in a solitary corner, with their eyes eagerly and immoveably fixed upon the middle region of the belly or navel, and boasted that, while they remained in this posture, they found in effect a divine light beaming forth from the soul, which diffused through their hearts inexpressible sensations of pleasure and delight. In this principle, countenanced, as we have seen, by the Eastern Church, and condemned only in some of its consequences in the West, we have the fundamental position, the quicunque vult, of all the later heretical mysticism. For a time there was an effort made to combine natural science with spiritual speculation. This was the great undertaking of what we know as the Rosicrucian school; in which our own countryman, Robert Fludd, laboured with the 1 Mosheim, cent. xiv. |