Some heretics of yesterday

Front matter

t.

•ir^l*

Some heretics of yesterday

Preface

Lest some reader sliould be disappointed in the contents of the present vohime, let me briefly say by way of preface that no new facts are brought to light in the following pages ; they are old stories simply retold — not for students — but for the young men and women of the Congregation to which it is my privilege to minister, and whom I am trying to train, from Sunday to Sunday, in the Christian graces of Faith, Hope, and Charity, and in that Kingdom which is " righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost."

The several chapters were prepared from week to week and delivered as a course of Sunday Evening Lectures during the last winter, with no thought of publication until the last one had been given. Indeed such a purpose, arising at an earlier day, would have suggested a preparation so protracted and thorough as to preclude the possibility of producing them at intervals so brief. Nor would they now be committed to the types but for the strenuous entreaty of my people.

The Luther celebrations of last autumn turned the minds of men anew, throughout the Christian world,

VI PRE FA CE.

to that great revolt against traditionalism and authority which we call the Keforuiatioii. To show that the revolt neither began nor ended with Luther — if indeed it can be said to be finished yet ; to follow it in its gradual development in principle and trace it in its geographical and national expansion ; at the same time to exhibit it concretely in the lives of its leaders, and so to bring the reader into a personal sympathy with them and awaken an interest in personal investigation ; is the object which I have endeavored to accomplish. And yet, I should not be content, if I could feel that only this were attained. The great Protestants of the past have gained comparatively little for the world, if they have not established for all succeeding ages the indefectible right to question even their authority, and the perpetual privilege of intellectual readjustment. In other words, a traditional Protestantism has no more right to a claim of infallibility than a traditional ecclesiasticism.

Every age that the world has seen so far has been prefatory ; it is hardly probable that the present age is final. The five centuries fi'om the birth of Taider to the death of Wesley (1290-1791) are unified by a visible progress of religious thought and of spiritual life. There is no good reason for sujiposing that the lines along which that progress has developed have yet found their termini. It may be said of these " Heretics of Yesterday," as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says of the worthies of the Ancient Jewish Church ; " These all having obtained a good report

PREFACE. vii

tliroiigli faith, received not the promise ; God having provided some better thing for us, tliat th3y without us shoukl not be made perfect." Nor shall we be perfected without the work and attainment, the broader light and clearer knowledge, of the coming years.

Contents

PAGE

I. Tauler and the Mystics 1

II. WicLip 23

I. Tauler And The Mystics

A. D. 1290-1361.

Curious it is to observe how the?e Common-sense Philosophers, men who braff chiefly of their irrefragable logic, and keep watch and ward, as if this were their special trade, against 'Mysticism,' and 'Visionary Theories,' are themselves obliged to base their whole system on Mysticism, and a Theory ; on Faith, in short, and that of a very comprehensive kind ; the Faitli, namely, either that man's Senses are themselves Divine, or that they afford not only an honest, but a literal representation of the workings of some Divinity. So true is it that for these men also, all knowledge of the visible rests on belief of the invisible and derives its first meaning and certainty therefrom. — Caklyle, Essay on Novalis.

SOME HERETICS OF YESTERDAY.

I.

TAULER AND THE MYSTICS.

Man's religion, like himself, combines the seen and temporal with the unseen and eternal. The soul, or spirit, or unseen reality of religion, is something entirely distinct from the visible form in which it is embodied. The two may exist apart, but the normal condition is that of combination in balance and harmony and mutual helpfulness. Eeligion may exist only as a corpse ; and it may exist also only as a disembodied spirit. There may be only the visible appearance, the phenomena of churches and dogmas and sacraments and sermons, without any interior and spiritual reality. There have been, as we know, not only individuals, but whole communities and long ages, in which this has been the case, when religion has been like the fair shell of a nut in which the kernel has completely decayed. And, on the other hand, there may be religion which takes on little or no visible manifestation, no church, no human ministry, no formulated creed, no sacraments, nothing save the spiritual intercourse between man and his God. But as in the human constitution body and soul are intended to exert a mutual influence, each working healthfully and helpfully upon the other, — the body giving utterance and expression to the soul and carrying out its purposes and desires, and the soul animating the body and informing it with grace and beauty, — so also is the intent in all religion. All form is to the end of spiritual life and vigor, and spiritual life is in order to outward influence and fruitfulness. But neither in man nor in his religion are the twain often found in perfect balance. The one or the other is likely to preponderate, and in both cases the flesh tends to get the upper hand of the sjairit, and to tyrannize over it. Then comes the necessity for a protest and a reaction to restore the normal relation ; and in this fact lies the whole meaning of Protestantism, in whatever age it appears and whatever the temporary form it takes. Matthew Arnold, in his recent lecture on Emerson, said that " Mr. Emerson's great work lay in this, that he was the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit," which is but another way of saying that Mr. Emerson was a mystic. For mysticism is not an ism, but an effort. It has not to do so much with doctrine as with life. It is not a revolt from theory or from prevalent belief, but from materialism in practice and conduct. Hence it is not peculiar to any one age or church or country, but is found in all times and under all ecclesiastical and theological systems, and under the religions of paganism as well as under that of Christianity. Perhaps it is impossible to construct a formula for mysticism that shall be brief, concise, and adequate, and so answer the demands of a definition, as it certainly is impossible to find one. The more, because the thing itself has always been a reaction from formula. It is

MYSTICISM— THE WALK WITH GOD. 5

one of those spiritual things which may be spiritually discerned, wherever it appears, but which transcend the limitations of words. You may chase it through the dictionary, but you will not capture it there ; the network of words is as incapable of holding it as are the meshes of a seine to retain a wave of the sea. I suspect that the first mystic of whom we have any record was Enoch, and that the four words which give us his whole biography come nearer to a true definition than any attempt that has since been made by theologians or philosophers, '•'- Enoch walked with God.'" That such solitary prominence should have been given to the name of one man among a multitude of others in that far-off age beyond the flood indicates that he was distinguished from his fellows in some such way as Prince Gautama was in India, as Confucius was in China, as Socrates was in Greece, and as in after times Tauler and his companions were in Germany, Fenelon in France, and the Wesleys in England. There is discernible in them all the same craving to get above the low and unspiritual level of their respective times, to break away from the formalism and perf unctoriness of the average religious life, to find a union with God which shall be as real as the common relationships of daily life.

It was in that darkest time that is just before day that the German mystics arose. It was not yet the dawn of the Reformation. These men were preparers of the way ; voices crpng in the wilderness, as John the Baptist heralded the coming of Christ. Tauler was the forerunner of Luther, though he did his work solely with reference to the call of present duty, all unconscious and unsuspicious of the bright future to which that work was leading up the German people.

But very little is known of his earlier da3^s, save that he was born the sou of a wealthy family in the city of Strasburg-, in the year 1290. At the tige of eighteen, he betook himself to a religions life. That expression now does not mean that a man leaves the work-bench or the counter, or any honest and respectable calling. We live in the happy day in which religion is understood to possess and sanctify any useful calling, in which it is as holy and as God-approved a work to make shoes or sell calico as it is to translate the Scriptures or go on a mission to the heathen. But not so then. To enter upon a religious life meant to join some order of monks, to renounce, at least outwardly, the employments and enjoyments of the world and live in the convent. Shortly after his renunciation of the world he proceeded to Paris, which was at that time the great centre of Christian learning, and where able professors were expounding to thousands of students the philosophy of Aristotle and the speculations of the Schoolmen. It was the characteristic doctrine of scholasticism that Christianity was a mere objective phenomenon, to be looked at and studied simply as a movement of histor^^ That it was also an inward life was well-nigh forgotten. God and Christ were banished from human sympathies ; men studied and speculated upon the divine nature as one might peer at the sun through a telescope from the snowcovered summit of a mountain, where its life-giving warmth is unfelt. Religious thought was purely speculative and religious life as purely in externals, and in neither of these could Tauler find much satisfaction. It was life, not logic, that he longed for. He turned over the huce volumes with an ea"er mind and a yearning heart, but found not what he sought. It

AT PARIS. 7

was like looking through mndow-panes upon which the dust of years had settled and over which generations of spiders had spun their webs, while he longed for open vision. In after years when he had become the preacher of a living gospel, this student-life at Paris seemed, when he remembered it, to fill him with disgaist. "Those great masters at Paris," he says, "do read vast books and turn over the leaves with great diligence, which is a very good thing ; but spiritually enlightened men read the true living book, wherein all things live ; they turn over the pages of the heavens and the earth and read therein the mighty and admirable wonders of God." But dry and frigid and unsatisfactory to him as all this logic-chopping of the schools was, it probably was not without an indirect benefit. It made him feel still more keenly a hunger for spiritual realities. It prepared him to welcome the light still more eagerly when the light shoidd come. And come it did. On returning from Paris to Strasburg to take up his work as a preaching friar, not well knowing as yet what he had to preach, he fell in with a distinguished brother of his own order, who was teaching the people in their own language, with great enthusiasm. He was mighty in the doctrines of the Schoolmen, but along with his metaphysi#s he gave the hungry people much of the Scripture story, in a popular and pictorial form, turning it into parables and allegories, teaching them withal the evil of sin, and the necessity of being at one with God. This Master Eckart produced a gTcat impression upon Tauler, and seems to have firmly settled him in the truth that was then dawning upon the world, that "outward rites and observances are not necessary to the essence of piety." This truth Tauler took up and carried forward and supplemented. He taught likewise that outward rites and observances are not necessary to the essence of piety, but he added also this, that true piety is in the application of religious principles to real life. He showed that piety had its positive as well as its negative aspect ; what it is, as well as what it is not. " One can spin," he says, " another can make shoes ; and all these are gifts of the Holy Ghost. I tell you, if I were not a priest, I would esteem it a great gift that I was able to make shoes, and would try to make them so well as to be a pattern to all." " The measure with which we shall be measured is the faculty of love in the soul, — the will of a man ; by this shall all his life and works be measured."

Truth has ever its counterfeit, even as substance its shadow ; and the mysticism which was springing up in the minds of thoughtful people was accompanied by its grotesque imitations and bui-lesques. There were not wanting men who were ready, then as now, to turn the truth of God into a lie, and make His grace a cloak for licentiousness. Even in our own day there are men who, whether from constitutional inability or from willful perversion, make no distinction between faith and presumption, between inward freedom of the spirit and lawlessness, between an easy conscience and holiness. So this resurrection of true faitii was accompanied by the upspringing of the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, as they called themselves. Taider himself felt the hindrance which they imposed upon the truth, and, though charitable and gracious in his disposition, handled them without gloves wlienever the opportunity offered, "These Free Sj^irits," he says, " strive after a false freedom, and, on pretext of following the inward light, follow only the inclinations of their own nature."

PERVERSIONS OF MYSTICISM. 9

It would not be possible for me to give, within the compass of a brief lecture, any adequate and discriminatino: rerview of the character and results of the mysticism of the fourteenth century. I must content myself with quoting- from Mr. Vaughan a single sentence: "The memorable step of progress (made by Tauler and his companions) 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." ^ And it is easy to see how this new thought — an old thought now, and one that has grown very precious to the Christian world — would, in its first freshness and impressiveness, be likely to be perverted and parodied and made the pretext both for theoretical error and vicious practice. " All things are in God and all things are God," said Master Eckart. " All creatures in themselves are naught : all creatures are a speaking or utterance of God." "Simple people conceive that we are to see God as if He stood on that side and we on this. It is not so ; God and I are one in the act of my perceiving Ilim." It is easy to see how such statements as these could be misconstrued and perverted ; how they might be interpreted as a deification of the creature, and the exaltation of self-will might be construed as an expression of the will of God ; how all distinction between good and evil, virtue and vice, might be swept away, and all external conduct become a matter of indifference. Nay, let these utterances be hardened into intellectual dogma, and they are the most dangerous of falsehoods. If God is thus unqualifiedly in all created things, and all things are filled with Him, then my will, whatever it be, is but the putting ^ Vaugliaii's Hours with the Mystics, book vi., ch. G.

forth of His will, and my act is the act of God Himself. But the loftier the truth, the baser the parody of which it is susceptible. The devil, says St. Augustine, is but the ajae of God.

The little that we know about Tauler's personal history after he returned to Strasburg and began to exercise his vocation as a preaching friar may be gathered about three events, and, meagre as it is, will be quite sufficient to show us what manner of man he was. These events are, —

1. His defiance of the papal ban.

2. His conversion.

3. The advent of the plague usually known as the Black Death.

1. "According to medieval notions, Christendom was one, — one church and one political state. The whole ecclesiastical power centred in the Poidc, who was the world-priest. And the whole civil power centred in the Emperor, who was the world-king." ^ The Pope was chosen by the college of cardinals. The Emperor was similarly chosen by a number of princes called Electors, though, after his choice by electors, the Emperor had to be approved and acknowledged by the Poi^e. Sometimes there was a contested election in either case, — two popes claiming the papal tiara, two emperors claiming the imperial cro^^^l. In the year 1314 this state of things occurred in the empire ; Frederick of Austria and Louis of Bavaria both claimed the election, and both were crowned, and for eight weary years there was a contest between them for the undivided power. The people were divided in their sentiments. The Pope could recognize but one of the claimants, and Frederick was his favorite. The 1 Dr. T. M. Lindsay, Reformation, p. 178.

THE BAN. 11

burghers of Strasburg declared for Louis, and thought that the Pope had no right to interfere in civil affairs. He had his own throne at Rome ; let him attend to his business and rule the church. And so the Pope said, " Strasburg shall be put under the ban, and all cities, towns, and individuals who acknowledge Louis for their emperor." We must not forget what this meant. It closed the doors of all the churches. It forbade the preaching of the gospel to those who were under the interdict, though if the Pope were right and the people wrong, one would think that they needed preaching all the more. It refused the sacraments to Christian people ; it compelled the wicked and lawless to go uuadmonished. It reduced society, as far as possible, to the condition of paganism. The sick could receive no comfort, and the dpng no assurance of absolution. And poor as the aid and comfort of the church were in those days to the weary and the heavy-laden, they were yet far better than none. The priests and the monks took their departure to other towns and pro\dnces which sided with the Pope, in order to avoid excommunication. In a word, the multitudes of the poor and the ignorant were made to suffer for the offenses of their superiors ; and if the ban were deserved at all, it was made to press the heaviest where it was least deserved and most feared.^ Through

1 " That awful doom which cauoiis tell Shuts paradise and opens hell ; Anathema of power so dread, It blends the living with the dead, Bids each good angel soar away, And every ill one claim his prey ; Expels thee from the church's care, And deafens Heaven against thy prayer ; Arms every hand against thy life, all this long and fearful contest, in wliicb the Pope's curse hung like a thunder-cloud over Alsatia, Tauler shrank not for a moment from his customary labors. The heavens were clear over his head. In the fear of God and the love of man all lower fear vanished away. The church door of his convent was not to be nailed up. Day after day he went about encouraging the fearful, consoling the sorrowing, telling men everywhere of the love of God, endeavoring in every way to vary and multiply his labors so as far as possible to fill the places deserted by liis brethren. He was the good shepherd of his own flock and of all the shepherdless flocks that he could reach by his voice or his pen. God's gentleness made him great in that fearful time, — very great. If we knew nothing else about him than this, this alone would glorify him as a star of the first magnitude in that dark night of the Middle Ages. Strong and tender, brave and Christly man, John Taider ! There is no sainthood since apostolic days that can outrival thine ! He addressed a letter to his brother-priests about this time, urging them to

Bans all who aid tbee in the strife,

Nay, each whose succor cold and scant

With meanest alms relieves thy want ;

Hannts thee while living, — and, when dead,

Dwells on thy yet devoted head ;

And spurns thy corpse from hallowed groimd.

Such is the dire and desperate doom

For sacrilege decreed by Rome." — Lord of the Isles.

Sir Waller's picture, so far from being overdrawn, is tamer than the facts woidd warrant, through the exigencies of rlij-me and metre. For a description less bizarre, but really more adequate, see Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, part I., xxxvi.

CONVERSION. 13

comfort the people, and keep on preaching and administering the sacraments. " For," he says, "ye are bound to visit and console the sick, remembering the bitter pain and death of Christ, who hath made satisfaction, not for your sins only, but also for those of the whole world ; who doth represent us all before God, so that if one falleth innocently under the ban, no pope can shut him out of heaven. Ye should, therefore, give absolution to such as wish therefor, giving heed rather to the bidding of Christ and his apostles than to the ban, which is issued only out of malice and avarice." " Those who hold the true Christian faith, and sin only against the person of the Pope, are no heretics. Those rather are real heretics who obstinately refuse to repent and forsake their sins : for let a man have been what he may, if he will so do, he cannot be cast out of the true church. Through Christ, the truly penitent thief, murderer, traitor, adulterer, all may have foro-iveness. Such as God beholdeth under an unrighteous ban, lie will turn for them the curse into a blessinir." Luther himself uttered no braver words than these, two hundred years later, at Worms or Wittenberg.

2. His greatness appears in another way, though perhaps quite as significantly, in the crisis of his life, which is commonly called his conversion, which occurred in 1340, when Tauler was fifty years of age. His humility and childlikeness of spirit were as conspicuous in this as was his bravery in his treatment of the ban. He had been preaching now for many years, and his fame had gone far and wide. He was known and loved as a good and holy man. There appeared one day in his audience a stranger,^ who heard the 1 Nicholas of Basle.

sermon through, and then desired to make confession and receive absolution. This he did several times. At length the layman requested, to the doctor's surprise, that he would preach a sermon setting forth the highest spiritual attainment and how it may be reached. The sermon was preached, and it is still extant, setting forth, in four and twenty articles, the highest spiritual attainment. But the godly layman was not satisfied. He plainly told the preacher that, while preaching to others, he had not yet discovered the sinfulness of his own heart, that he had never yet made a complete surrender of his own wall to God, and that he had come thirty leagues, not so much to hear him preach as to warn him against deceiving himself. A flush of indignation for a moment spread itself over the doctor's face, that a layman should dare to address him thus ; but instantly he recognized it as the faithful wound of a friend, and took the reproof with the utmost humility and sweetness of spirit. The word, like a flash of lightning, had illumined the depths of his nature, had detected in him a lurking pride and self-sufficiency of which he had been all unaware, and, deeply humbled and mortified, he embraced the layman, saying, " Thou hast been the first to tell me of my fault. Oh, stay with me, and show me how I may overcome it. Thou shalt be my spiritual father, and I will be thy poor, sinful son." Now this was not morbidness, but downright honesty. It was the fifty-first Psalm, translated into the German of the Middle Ages. It was the cry of the selfrecognized and self - condemned publican, " God be merciful to me a sinner." So humbled in this new degree of self-knowledge did the poor friar become, that for two years his lips were sealed in shame. He

NICHOLAS OF BASLE. 15

did not dare to preach. The agony of his spirit wasted his body and reduced his physical strength as if a disease were upon him. lie was taunted by his enemies for his silence, and even his friends suspected and forsook him. His fellow-monks ridiculed him for being stricken with a sorrow that they could not understand. Even the mercy of God, which he had preached so freely to others, he felt too wicked and too unworthy to claim for himself. But out of this furnace he was to come forth as gold that has been ti-ied in the fire. The night of weeping was to be followed by a morning of joy. As he lay one day upon his couch there came into his thought the recollection of the sufferings and love of his Lord, and of his own ungratefulness, and there welled up out of his heart and overflowed from his lips these words, " O merciful God, have mercy upon me a poor sinner ; have mercy in thine infinite compassion, for I am not worthy to live upon the face of the earth ! " And as a mother hears the cry and runs to the succor of her child, God came to him with abundant comfort. Emptied of himself, he was filled with the peace that passeth understanding, and with the peace came power. " Now," said his faithful friend, " thou knowest the power of God's grace. Now thou wilt understand the Scripture as never before, and be able to show thy fellow-Christians the way to eternal life. Now one of thy sermons will bring more fruit than a hundred aforetime, coming, as it will, from a simple, loving, humbled heart ; and much as the people have set thee at naught, they will now far more love and prize thee. But a man with great treasure must guard against thieves. See to it that thou hold fast thy humility, by which thou wilt best keep thy riches.

Now thou needest my teacliing" no longer, having' found the right Master, whose instrument I am, and who sent me hither. Now in all godly love thou shalt teach me in turn." And it all came true. From this time forth he was known and loved, and honored and reverenced, for his life of active love and pity, of l^atience and meekness, — a life in imitation of Christ. From this time they called him " Doctor Illuminatus," the Doctor upon whom a great light hath shined.^

3. A few years after this occurred the third event which served to disclose the greatness and real Christliness of the man. In 1348 the Black Death appeared in Strasburg. It was a plague, says Petrarch, that desolated the world. For fifteen years previous it had been ravaging the Orient. It had been accompanied, or rather jDreceded, by terrible convulsions of nature and by a great variety of calamities, which, in those days, and even down to our own time, were regaixled rather as the capricious visitations of a wrathful God than as the inevitable and leo-itmiate results of natural causes. There had been droughts, famines, floods, swarms of locusts, and earthquakes which had changed in an hour the contour of vast areas of the earth's surface. The order of the seasons even seemed to have lost its stability, — heavy snows falling in summer and fierce lightnings in winter, ex-

^ John Tauler's Covenant, A. D. 1340 : " Dear Lord and Bridegroom, I here vow and promise to Thee surely, that all which Thou wiliest I also will. Come sickness, come health, come pleasure or pain, sweet or bitter, cold or heat, wet or dry, whatever Thou wiliest that do I also will ; and desire altogether to come out from my own will, and to yield a whole and willing obedience unto Thee, and never to desire aught else, either in will or thought ; only let Thy will be accomplished in me in time and in eternity."