Literary and General Lectures and Essays

And it is just this which Mr. Vaughan fails in doing.  In his sketch, for instance, of the Mysticism of India, he gives us a very clear and (save in two points) sound summary of that “round of notions, occurring to minds of similar make under similar circumstances,” which is “common to Mystics in ancient India and in modern Christendom.”

Summarily, I would say this Hindoo mysticism—

(1)  Lays claim to disinterested love as opposed to a mercenary religion;

(2)  Reacts against the ceremonial prescription and pedantic literalism of the Vedas;

(3)  Identifies, in its pantheism, subject and object, worshipper and worshipped;

(4)  Aims at ultimate absorption in the Infinite;

(5)  Inculcates, as the way to this dissolution, absolute passivity, withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers: giving recipes for procuring this beatific torpor or trance;

(6)  Believes that eternity may thus be realised in time;

(7)  Has its mythical miraculous pretensions, i.e. its theurgic department;

(8)  And, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion to submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide—his Guru.

Against the two latter articles we except.  The theurgic department of Mysticism—unfortunately but too common—seems to us always to have been (as it certainly was in neo-Platonism) the despairing return to that ceremonialism which it had begun by shaking off, when it was disappointed in reaching its high aim by its proper method.  The use of the Guru, or Father Confessor (which Mr. Vaughan confesses to be inconsistent with Mysticism), is to be explained in the same way—he is a last refuge after disappointment.

But as for the first six counts.  Is the Hindoo mystic a worse or a better man for holding them?  Are they on the whole right or wrong?  Is not disinterested love nobler than a mercenary religion?  Is it not right to protest against ceremonial prescriptions, and to say, with the later prophets and psalmists of the Jews: “Thinkest thou that He will eat bull’s flesh, and drink the blood of goats.  Sacrifice and burnt-offering Thou wouldst not . . . I come to do thy will, O God!”  What is, even, if he will look calmly into it, the “pantheistic identification of subject and object, worshipper and worshipped,” but the clumsy yet honest effort of the human mind to say to itself: “Doing God’s will is the real end and aim of man?”  The Yogi looks round upon his fellow-men, and sees that all their misery and shame come from self-will; he looks within, and finds that all which makes him miserable, angry, lustful, greedy after this and that, comes from the same self-will.  And he asks himself: How shall I escape from this torment of self?—how shall I tame my wayward will, till it shall become one with the harmonious, beautiful, and absolute Will which made all things?  At least I will try to do it, whatever it shall cost me.  I will give up all for which men live—wife and child, the sights, scents, sounds of this fair earth, all things, whatever they be, which men call enjoyment; I will make this life one long torture, if need be; but this rebel will of mine I will conquer.  I ask for no reward.  That may come in some future life.  But what care I?  I am now miserable by reason of the lusts which war in my members; the peace which I shall gain in being freed from them will be its own reward.  After all I give up little.  All those things round me—the primeval forest, and the sacred stream of Ganga, the mighty Himalaya, mount of God, ay, the illimitable vault of heaven above me, sun and stars—what are they but “such stuff as dreams are made of”?  Brahm thought, and they became something and somewhere.  He may think again, and they will become nothing and nowhere.  Are these eternal, greater than I, worth troubling my mind about?  Nothing is eternal, but the Thought which made them, and will unmake them.  They are only venerable in my eyes, because each of them is a thought of Brahm’s.  And I too have thought; I alone of all the kinds of living things.  Am I not, then, akin to God? what better for me than to sit down and think, as Brahm thinks, and so enjoy my eternal heritage, leaving for those who cannot think the passions and pleasures which they share in common with the beasts of the field?  So I shall become more and more like Brahm—will his will, think his thoughts, till I lose utterly this house-fiend of self, and become one with God.

Is this a man to be despised?  Is he a sickly dreamer, or a too valiant hero? and if any one be shocked at this last utterance, let him consider carefully the words which he may hear on Sunday: “Then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we are one with Christ, and Christ with us.”  That belief is surely not a false one.  Shall we abhor the Yogi because he has seen, sitting alone there amid idolatry and licentiousness, despotism and priestcraft, that the ideal goal of man is what we confess it to be in the communion service?  Shall we not rather wonder and rejoice over the magnificent utterance in that Bhagavat-Gita which Mr. Vaughan takes for the text-book of Hindoo Mysticism, where Krishna, the teacher human, and yet God himself, speaks thus:

There is nothing greater than I; all things hang on me, as precious gems upon a string. . . . . I am life in all things, and zeal in the zealous.  I am the eternal seed of nature: I am the understanding of the wise, the glory of the proud, the strength of the strong, free from lust and anger. . . .  Those who trust in me know Brahm, the supreme and incorruptible. . . . . In this body I am the teacher of worship.  He who thinks of me will find me.  He who finds me returns not again to mortal birth. . . . . I am the sacrifice, I am the worship, I am the incense, I am the fire, I am the victim, I am the father and mother of the world; I am the road of the good, the comforter, the creator, the witness, the asylum, and the friend.  They who serve other Gods with a firm belief, involuntarily worship me.  I am the same to all mankind.  They who serve me in adoration are in me.  If one whose ways are ever so evil serve me alone, he becometh of a virtuous spirit and obtaineth eternal happiness.  Even women, and the tribes of Visya and Soodra, shall go the supreme journey if they take sanctuary with me; how much more my holy servants the Brahmins and the Ragarshees!  Consider this world as a finite and joyless place, and serve me.

There may be confused words scattered up and down here; there are still more confused words—not immoral ones—round them, which we have omitted; but we ask, once and for all, is this true, or is it not?  Is there a being who answers to this description, or is there not?  And if there be, was it not a light price to pay for the discovery of Him “to sit upon the sacred grass called koos, with his mind fixed on one object alone; keeping his head, neck, and body steady, without motion; his eyes fixed upon the point of his nose, looking at no other place around”—or any other simple, even childish, practical means of getting rid of the disturbing bustle and noise of the outward time-world, that he might see the eternal world which underlies it?  What if the discovery be imperfect, the figure in many features erroneous?  Is not the wonder to us, the honour to him, that the figure should be there at all?  Inexplicable to us on any ground, save that one common to the Bhagavat-Gita, to the gospel.  “He who seeks me shall find me.”  What if he knew but in part, and saw through a glass darkly?  Was there not an inspired apostle, who could but say the very same thing of himself, and look forward to a future life in which he would “know even as he was known”?

It is well worth observing too, that so far from the moral of this Bhagavat-Gita issuing in mere contemplative Quietism, its purpose is essentially practical.  It arises out of Arjoun’s doubt whether he shall join in the battle which he sees raging below him; it results in his being commanded to join in it, and fight like a man.  We cannot see, as Mr. Vaughan does, an “unholy indifference” in the moral.  Arjoun shrinks from fighting because friends and relatives are engaged on both sides, and he dreads hell if he kills one of them.  The answer to his doubt is, after all, the only one which makes war permissible to a Christian, who looks on all men as his brothers:

“You are a Ksahtree, a soldier; your duty is to fight.  Do your duty, and leave the consequences of it to him who commanded the duty.  You cannot kill these men’s souls any more than they can yours.  You can only kill their mortal bodies; the fate of their souls and yours depends on their moral state.  Kill their bodies, then, if it be your duty, instead of tormenting yourself with scruples, which are not really scruples of conscience, only selfish fears of harm to yourself, and leave their souls to the care of Him who made them, and knows them, and cares more for them than you do.”

This seems to be the plain outcome of the teaching.  What is it, mutatis mutandis, but the sermon “cold-blooded” or not, which every righteous soldier has to preach to himself, day by day, as long as his duty commands him to kill his human brothers?

Yet the fact is undeniable that Hindoo Mysticism has failed of practical result—that it has died down into brutal fakeerism.  We look in vain, however, in Mr. Vaughan’s chapter for an explanation of this fact, save his assertion, which we deny, that Hindoo Mysticism was in essence and at its root wrong and rotten.  Mr. Maurice (“Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy,” p. 46) seems to point to a more charitable solution.  “The Hindoo,” he says, “whatsoever vast discovery he may have made at an early period of a mysterious Teacher near him, working on his spirit, who is at the same time Lord over nature, began the search from himself—he had no other point from whence to begin—and therefore it ended in himself.  The purification of his individual soul became practically his highest conceivable end; to carry out that he must separate from society.  Yet the more he tries to escape self the more he finds self; for what are his thoughts about Brahm, his thoughts about Krishna, save his own thoughts?  Is Brahm a projection of his own soul?  To sink in him, does it mean to be nothing?  Am I, after all, my own law?  And hence the downward career into stupid indifferentism, even into Antinomian profligacy.”

The Hebrew, on the other hand, begins from the belief of an objective external God, but One who cares for more than his individual soul; as One who is the ever-present guide, and teacher, and ruler of his whole nation; who regards that nation as a whole, a one person, and that not merely one present generation, but all, past or future, as a one “Israel”—lawgivers, prophets, priests, warriors.  All classes are His ministers.  He is essentially a political deity, who cares infinitely for the polity of a nation, and therefore bestows one upon them—“a law of Jehovah.”  Gradually, under this teaching, the Hebrew rises to the very idea of an inward teacher, which the Yogi had, and to a far purer and clearer form of that idea; but he is not tempted by it to selfish individualism, or contemplative isolation, as long as he is true to the old Mosaic belief, that this being is the Political Deity, “the King of Kings.”  The Pharisee becomes a selfish individualist just because he has forgotten this; the Essene, a selfish “mystic” for the same reason; Philo and the Jewish mystics of Alexandria lose in like manner all notion that Jehovah is the lawgiver, and ruler, and archetype of family and of national life.  Christianity retained the idea; it brought out the meaning of the old Jewish polity in its highest form; for that very reason it was able to bring out the meaning of the “mystic” idea in its highest form also, without injury to men’s work as members of families, as citizens, as practical men of the world; and so to conquer at last that Manichæan hatred of marriage and parentage, which from the first to the sixteenth century shed its Upas shade over the Church.

And here let us say boldly to Mr. Vaughan and to our readers: As long as “the salvation of a man’s own soul” is set forth in all pulpits as the first and last end and aim of mortal existence; as long as Christianity is dwelt on merely as influencing individuals each apart—as “brands plucked, one here and another there, from the general burning”—so long will Mysticism, in its highest form be the refuge of the strongest spirits, and in its more base and diseased forms the refuge of the weak and sentimental spirits.  They will say, each in his own way: “You confess that there can be a direct relation, communion, inspiration, from God to my soul, as I sit alone in my chamber.  You do not think that there is such between God and what you call the world; between Him and nations as wholes—families, churches, schools of thought, as wholes; that He does not take a special interest, or exercise a special influence, over the ways and works of men—over science, commerce, civilisation, colonisation, all which affects the earthly destinies of the race.  All these you call secular; to admit His influence over them for their own sake (though of course He overrules them for the sake of His elect) savours of Pantheism.  Is it so?  Then we will give up the world.  We will cling to the one fact which you confess to be certain about us—that we can take refuge in God, each in the loneliness of his chamber, from all the vain turmoil of a race which is hastening heedless into endless misery.  You may call us Mystics, or what you will.  We will possess our souls in patience, and turn away our eyes from vanity.  We will commune with our own hearts in solitude, and be still.  We will not even mingle in your religious world, the world which you have invented for yourselves, after denying that God’s human world is sacred; for it seems to us as full of intrigue, ambition, party-spirit, falsehood, bitterness, and ignorance, as the political world, or the fashionable world, or the scientific world; and we will have none of it.  Leave us alone with God.”

This has been the true reason of mystical isolation in every age and country.  So thought Macarius and the Christian fakeers of the Thebaid.  So thought the medieval monks and nuns.  So thought the German Quietists when they revolted from the fierce degradation of decaying Lutheranism.  So are hundreds thinking now; so may thousands think ere long.  If the individualising phase of Christianity which is now dominant shall long retain its ascendancy, and the creed of Dr. Cumming and Mr. Spurgeon become that of the British people, our purest and noblest spirits will act here, with regard to religion, as the purest and noblest in America have acted with regard to politics.  They will withdraw each into the sanctuary of his own heart, and leave the battle-field to rival demagogues.  They will do wrong, it may be.  Isolation involves laziness, pride, cowardice; but if sober England, during the next half-century, should be astonished by an outburst of Mysticism, as grand in some respects, as fantastic in others, as that of the thirteenth or the seventeenth centuries, the blame, if blame there be, will lie with those leaders of the public conscience who, after having debased alike the Church of England and the dissenting sects with a selfish individualism which was as foreign to the old Cromwellite Ironside as to the High Church divine, have tried to debar their disciples from that peaceful and graceful Mysticism which is the only excusable or tolerable form, of religion beginning and ending in self.

Let it be always borne in mind, that Quakerism was not a protest against, or a revulsion from, the Church of England, but from Calvinism.  The steeple-houses, against which George Fox testified, were not served by Henry Mores, Cudworths, or Norrises: not even by dogmatist High-Churchmen, but by Calvinist ministers, who had ejected them.  George Fox developed his own scheme, such as it was, because the popular Protestantism of his day failed to meet the deepest wants of his heart; because, as he used to say, it gave him “a dead Christ,” and he required “a living Christ.”  Doctrines about who Christ is, he held, are not Christ Himself.  Doctrines about what He has done for man, are not He himself.  Fox held, that if Christ be a living person, He must act (when He acted) directly on the most inward and central personality of him, George Fox; and his desire was satisfied by the discovery of the indwelling Logos, or rather by its re-discovery, after it had fallen into oblivion for centuries.  Whether he were right or wrong, he is a fresh instance of a man’s arriving, alone and unassisted, at the same idea at which Mystics of all ages and countries have arrived: a fresh corroboration of our belief, that there must be some reality corresponding to a notion which has manifested itself so variously, and among so many thousands of every creed, and has yet arrived, by whatsoever different paths, at one and the same result.

That he was more or less right—that there is nothing in the essence of Mysticism contrary to practical morality, Mr. Vaughan himself fully confesses.  In his fair and liberal chapters on Fox and the Early Quakers, he does full justice to their intense practical benevolence; to the important fact that Fox only lived to do good, of any and every kind, as often as a sorrow to be soothed, or an evil to be remedied, crossed his path.  We only wish that he had also brought in the curious and affecting account of Fox’s interview with Cromwell, in which he tells us (and we will take Fox’s word against any man) that the Protector gave him to understand, almost with tears, that there was that in Fox’s faith which he was seeking in vain from the “ministers” around him.

All we ask of Mr. Vaughan is, not to be afraid of his own evident liking for Fox; of his own evident liking for Tauler and his school; not to put aside the question which their doctrines involve, with such half-utterances as—

The Quakers are wrong, I think, in separating particular movements and monitions as Divine.  But, at the same time, the “witness of the Spirit,” as regards our state before God, is something more, I believe, than the mere attestation to the written word.

As for the former of these two sentences, he may be quite right, for aught we know.  But it must be said on the other hand, that not merely Quakers, but decent men of every creed and age, have—we may dare to say, in proportion to their devoutness—believed in such monitions; and that it is hard to see how any man could have arrived at the belief that a living person was working on him, and not a mere impersonal principle, law, or afflatus—(spirit of the universe, or other metaphor for hiding materialism)—unless by believing, rightly or wrongly, in such monitions.  For our only inductive conception of a living person demands that that person shall make himself felt by separate acts.

But against the second sentence we must protest.  The question in hand is not whether this “witness of the Spirit” “is something more” than, anything else, but whether it exists at all, and what it is.  Why was the book written, save to help toward the solution of this very matter?  The question all through has been: Can an immediate influence be exercised by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man?  Mr. Vaughan assents, and says (we cannot see why) that there is no mysticism in such a belief.  Be that as it may, what that influence is, and how exercised, is all through the de quo agitur of Mysticism.  Mr. Vaughan, however, seems here for awhile to be talking realism through an admirable page, well worth perusal (pp. 264, 265).  Yet his grasp is not sure.  We soon find him saying what More and Fox would alike deny, that “The story of Christ’s life and death is our soul’s food.”  No; Christ Himself is—would the Catholic Church and the Mystic alike answer.  And here again the whole matter in dispute is (unconsciously to Mr. Vaughan) opened up in one word.  And if this sentence does not bear directly on that problem, on what does it bear?  It was therefore with extreme disappointment that on reading this, and saying to ourselves: “Now we shall hear at last what Mr. Vaughan himself thinks on the matter,” we found that he literally turned the subject off, as if not worth investigation, by making the next speaker answer, apropos of nothing, that “the traditional ascetism of the Friends is their fatal defect as a body.”

Why, too, has Mr. Vaughan devoted a few lines only to the great English Platonists, More, Norris, Smith of Jesus, Gale, and Cudworth?  He says, indeed, that they are scarcely Mystics, except in as far as Platonism is always in a measure mystical.  In our sense of the word they were all of them Mystics, and of a very lofty type; but surely Henry More is a Mystic in Mr. Vaughan’s sense also.  If the author of “Conjectura Cabbalistica” be not a mystical writer (he himself uses the term without shame), who is?

We hope to see much in this book condensed, much modified, much worked out, instead of being left fragmentary and embryotic; but whether our hope be fulfilled or not, a useful and honourable future is before the man who could write such a book as this is, in spite of all defects.

Since the above was written, Mr. Vaughan’s premature death has robbed us of a man who might have done brave work, by lessening, through his own learning, the intellectual gulf which now exists between English Churchmen and Dissenters.  Dîs aliter visum.  But Mr. Vaughan’s death does not, I think, render it necessary for me to alter any of the opinions expressed here; and least of all that in the last sentence, fulfilled now more perfectly than I could have foreseen.