The new life in Christ Jesus. Essays on subjects relating to spiritual life, to which is added, Listening to Jesus and The Law of love

Front matter

Book > r -

CDEOUGier DEFOSU&

THE

Prefatory Note

The author of this httle volume was of noble birth, a Frenchman and a Protestant. He was carried when a child by his mother to Geneva after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The head of the family was at one time French Envoy in Switzerland. He, the eldest brother, to save the estate continued to reside in France and pretended to be a Catholic, while the Dowager Countess and her second son, the Viscount — our author — remained in exile. At the age of sixteen our author went into the army : and while he was in Flanders some pious book having fallen into his hands, he became disgusted with the army life ; and though the importunity of his friends hindered him during four or five years from quitting it, yet at last his desire of solitude, and employing himself to the best purposes without distraction,

X Prefatory Note

made him withdraw with another officer of the same regiment, and the Chaplain : they ah three retiring to an obscure place in Germany, where they gained their bread by the labour of their hands in some one of the common occupations of the country. There happened to be in that neighbourhood a young gentlewoman of quality by birth, but who from a spirit of piety and disrelish of the frivolities of the world had left her relations and passed her time in obscurity and retirement. From the similarity of their characters and pursuits our author and this lady contracted the most intimate habits of friendship : and lest the difference of sex might be a matter of scandal they agreed to marry under a mutual engagement to continence, in which state they always lived. The author and his wife dwelt for some time in a cottage with a poor widow, but a little distant from their former habitation, and by manual labour they supported her and themselves. The eminent virtue and piety of the author, notwithstanding his endeavours to lead a common course of life in appearance, drew several seriously-disposed persons to consult him, and they received great light and aid from him ; many that came to him partly from curiosity becoming truly converted, so powerful

Prefatory Xote xi

was the influence of the Holy Spirit working through him. The first thing he wrote that was published is the Letter to his Sister (p. i8i) dated May 14, 1735. As that letter produced in her a thorough conversion she was desirous to see him, and he travelled on foot to Geneva for that purpose. During his stay there he acquired knowledge in watch-making, and practised it for his own maintenance and in order to help his indigent neighbours. His ability in this trade brought him in contact with the chief of a certain princely house of Germany. Our author converted His Highness, his wife, and several great families allied to them, and having abandoned the world they all retired to the

Castle of H — , where they led a primitive

and evangelical life, to the great edification of the many who sought their society and spiritual help. Of this association our author and his wife were looked upon as the spiritual parents. His life from the time of his conversion to his death is reported to have been that of a true and practical follower of Christ, of a man full of the Holy Spirit. The present book, which was published anonymously and in parts in Germany during 173S, 1739, 1740, although it had an immediate and immense influence for xii

Prefatory Note good, was always rare (de Saint Martin, writing to his friend Kirchberger, Baron de Liebestorf, under date " M, 25 prairial — 14 Juin, 1794, vieux style" — calls these discourses ^'extremement rares and during this century the work has become almost impossible to find. Hence this reprint, which I have edited and revised.

The pure Love of God (a doctrine which has been strongly asserted from the time of vSt. Katherine of Genoa and by others before her down to the present day, but not always without causing considerable vexation to its supporters, as in the case of Fenelon) : Union with God complete and absolute : Transformation into His likeness (which presupposes the extirpation of self-love, or the self principle, the root of all human misery, for ^' if there were no self-will there would neither be Hell nor Devil," says our author), that we may love God as He loves us — that is, so far as is competent to finite natures : in other words, a complete new Birth and new Life, — that is the basis of our author's spiritual teaching.

He preaches the ''annihilation" — a term used by the mystics and ridiculed by their adversaries, though supported by that expression

Prefatory Note xiii of St. Paul — Philipp. ii. 7, when he says of our Lord that He "emptied Himself" (Revised Version), cKeVwcre exinanivit," Vulg.) — the '^annihilation" of Self in order that Jesus may reign alone in our hearts. He endeavours to show that what is called the wrath or anger of God is properly His Love acting upon the corruption of nature to accompHsh its purification, since infinite Love can do no hurt. He strikes with unwearied persistence the one grand keynote of all true Christian life, namely, that the whole essence of practical Christianity, concerning which acres of ponderous tomes have been written, is to be summed up in four words — Be always with Jesus : soul and spirit, heart and mind for ever with Jesus ; such ceaseless intercourse with the Saviour constituting the Divine Life which, beginning here, knows no ending ; the peace and joy of which cannot be marred or even reached by any of the woes of this world, since this Life is hidden in Christ, and saturated with the divine, consoling truth that God is Love, — infinite, eternal Love; and, to quote the simple words of one who lives Christ : "Love's purposes lie behind every disappointment, every bereavement, every pain : and those xiv

Prefatory Note who have set themselves to find out these, tell us that —

' Only Heaven is better than to walk With Christ at midnight over moonless seas.' "

J- F.

The Editor's note will furnish the reader with some particulars about the little book to which he has asked me to write a brief introduction. The author was a French Protestant, and he held that form of religious belief which, under the names of Quietism and Mysticism, was far more common among Romanists than among Protestants. The book was a favourite with the Princess Charlotte, and a copy still exists somewhere which belonged to her. The marginal remarks with which she has here and there annotated it, show that she had studied it with deep interest. The printed work is, however, believed to be now almost intronvabk. All that I can here attempt to do is to say a few words about the style and manner of the writer, and about one or two of his central thoughts.

xvi

His style unfortunately was unattractive. His sentences are often long, and loaded with parentheses and iterations. He would have gained incomparably if he could have expressed himself in such brief quivering sentences" as those which pierce our memory like winged arrows of light from the pages of the Imitatio Chris ti.

The solemn truths which he expresses may seem strange to us because they lie indefinitely remote from the ordinary currents of modern religious thought and practice : but that is the very reason why they may be all the more necessary and profitable for our contemplation.

The writer was overwhelmingly impressed with the necessity for Regeneratio7i. The conviction that he who would aim at Christian perfectness must be "born again/' — that he must become, in the fullest meaning of the word, "a new creature," or rather ^^a new creation," — was ever present to his mind. He accepted it in no otiose or conventional sense, but in a sense which maintains that it is the duty of every one who would "go on unto perfection " absolutely to subvert, revolutionize, abnegate, and even amiihilate his self-hood. The

Introduction xvii

necessity for this deadness to self, made St. Paul write to his converts, Ye are dead, and your Hfe is hid with Christ in God " (Col. iii. 3). Of himself the Apostle said, in language which to him was not paradoxical or extravagant, "I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live : yet not I, but Christ liveth in me " (Gal. ii. 20).

This language, indeed, is not exceptional : it recurs again and again. ^'If we died with Him," he writes to Timothy, "we shall also live with Him." Death and life, to the habitual mode of thought of the Early Christians, meant "death in trespasses and sins," and "Hfe in Christ" ; so that St. Paul says again, " to me to live is Christ." The tragic poet of Greece asked in language which amused, and excited the ridicule of his contemporaries, " Who knows if death be Ufe, and life be death ? " ; — but the paradox of the Greek thinker was the commonplace of the Christian Apostle.

In these days such language is interpreted only in the sense that we must mortify, or slay at one blow, our lower nature, our purely animal instincts, " our members which are upon the earth." But the Mystics were perhaps nearer to the sentiment of those who first made

b x\"iii such phrases famiUar, when they extended the significance of these expressions to the hfe of the intellect and the existence of even innocent desires. To them the language of our Lord and His Apostles implied not merely the suppression^ but the obliteration of oar own individuality. Our own human spirit, our own identity, so to speak, was, in their opinion, to be destroyed. Hence the writer seems to think very little of " the Pharisees " — so he calls them — who do httle more than aim at the ordinarily virtuous and religious life. He seems scarcely even to allow that they are good Christians,'^ however much they may pass for such.

There is a great deal to learn from the writer's way of presenting these convictions, and they may be stated in forms, and with limitations, in which they are deeply worthy of our meditation. But in the lives and writings of some of the ]\Iystics and Quietists they are tainted by the falsehood of extremes.''" Apart from the blind Uteralism, which — with no allowance for Eastern metaphors and modes of expression — confuses rhetoric with logic, and would fain identify "the syllogism of passion" with the syllogism of calm reason — the Hfe which ruthlessly effaces from itself every human xix desire, and all which is distinctively itself, finds no real countenance either from the words of Scripture or from the lives of the Saints of God.

The God who made us and is our Father, requires of us nothing which is non-natural ; but only that which is in the highest degree natural, and is indeed the only worthy outcome of our real^ which is our spiritual, nature. The suppression of " the ape and the tiger within us " is not the suppression of our genuine self, but of that animal part of us — that lower nature — which, as even Plato and the Greek philosophers saw, must be curbed, subdued, and even crushed within us, if we are to be holy men. It would be more true to the ideal of Scripture to describe the object of our efforts to be the elevation, the transformation, the transfiguratio7i (so to speak) of our self-hood, rather than the total effacement of that which we have to acquire in order to possess — namely, our real personality. By your endurance,'' said our Lord, ''^ ye shall acquire {KTy^o-ecrOe) your souls."

The sculptor of the magnificent Beau Dieu " on the West front of the cathedral of Amiens had this thought in his mind when he represented Christ as standing pedestalled upon the lion and the dragon of human passions, while underneath are the cockatrice and the adder; representing ''the most active evil principles of the earth in their utmost malignity — the infidelity of pride and the infidelity of spiritual death." ^ It is a material symbol of the words of the Psalmist, " Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder ; the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under thy feet."

In point of fact, then, those exercises of calm and ordinary virtuous living, of which the writer thinks perhaps too disdainfully because they move on a level so far below the icy summits of his own spiritualism, receive again and again the approval of Old Testament Prophets, and, quite as emphatically, of Evangelists and Apostles ; — yes ! and of our Blessed Lord Himself. He emphasized the words of Hosea, I will have mercy and not sacrifice." In the summing up of the Law and Prophets as contained in the one golden rule, and in His answer to the young ruler that the keeping of the commandments was the entrance into Life, He gives no sanction to those who talk contempt- ^ See Ruskin, Oitr Fathers have told tcs^ p. 172.

xxi uously or slightingly of mere morality." And, on one most memorable occasion, St. Peter, including all the virtuous heathen in his large eulogy, said — ''Verily, I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but in every 7iation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him." We, in the frailty of our mortal nature, may be thankful that the chief Apostle thus admits the best sons of even the Pagan world into " the mystical Body of Christ, which is the blessed company of all faithful people." They too, as St. Augustine says, '' knocked at the door of Truth." Yet, while we do not forget these facts, we may be helped by the writer to remember also that St. Paul's

hi Christ'' is the very signature of the ideal Christian, and that it involves indefinitely more than many Christians ever attempt to attain.

While then the reader may learn from these pages the spirit of deep devotion, he need not be discouraged if the writer aims at carrying him into regions where the atmosphere has become far too rarefied for ordinary breathing. Keble sang most wisely —

We need not bid for cloistered cell Our neighbour or our work farewell, Nor seek to wind ourselves too high For sinful man beneath the sky.

xxii

Introductio7L

The trivial round, the common task Should furnish all we ought to ask : Room to deny ourselves, — a road To lead us daily nearer God."

In the following verse he does indeed say —

Seek we no more : content with these Let present rapture, comfort, ease, As heaven shall bid them come and go — The secret this of rest below.

But no supposed counsel of perfection requires us to interpret this to mean the necessity for a life of seclusion, asceticism, self-torture, and contemplative inanition, such as the previous verses have repudiated. Such a discipline has often shown a tendency to become dangerous to ourselves and useless to others. And as there is not a single life of any saint in the Old or New Testaments — with the sole and very partial exceptions of Elijah and John the Baptist — which gives the least countenance to habitual eremitism and self-maceration, so, unquestionably, the experiments practised by many in this direction, from the days of the desert Hermits to those of the French Quietists, proved themselves, by their complete failure, to be beyond the reach of what God ordinarily requires of our frail humanity. Their careers not seldom ended in egregious downfall and

Introduction xxiii collapse — mental, physical, and moral. In 171 1 Lieutenant Cordier — his mind filled with the teachings of Madame Bourignon — retired with two like-minded Quietists to a life of silence and solitary starvation at Schwarkenau. When his companions found the life maddening rather than profitable, and therefore modified its original rules, he left them for a deeper solitude. ^^So," says Mr. Vaughan, in his Hours with the Mystics^ he was carried from extreme to extreme, till he reached a spurious resignation, a passivity which did not resist evil — a self-forgetfulness which ceased to recognize in himself his most dangerous enemy. From the height of spiritual pride he was precipitated into license." After marrying a wicked and hypocritical woman ''he eventually returned to the world and a godless libertinism."

Again the writer dwells much on that silent rapture, that absorbed passivity in player, which makes him almost disparage, or at any rate hold in very much lower esteem, not only all forms of words^ but all expression of one's own desires in our supplications to God. Here again he seems to push to an extreme a true principle. It is true that we shall not be heard xxiv for our much speaking, and that prayers exclusively selfish, especially when they are not only selfish but also earthly, may become contemptible. It is true that we experience the most perfect happiness when we feel that we can resign ourselves wholly to the will of God. The story tells how the vision of Christ, appearing to St. Thomas Aquinas, said to him — Thou hast written well of me, Thomas : what reward dost thou desire ? " and he replied, with meek rapture — Non aliaDi nisi Te, Do77iine — " No other reward than Thyself, O Lord ! We know how Luther prayed, " O God, smite me with poverty, persecution, the loss of all, and with all the sore diseases in the world, rather than that Thou be silent to me.'' We all delight in the beautiful verse —

Father, I know that all my life

Is portioned out for me, And the changes which are sure to come

I do not fear to see ; But I ask Thee for a present mind

Intent on pleasing Thee."

''You ask me what I wish?'' wrote Baron

Bunsen. " Dear C , a man is, and remains,

a child, when he sets about wishing: he is like a boat on the sea, between ebb and flood, never at rest/'

XXV

Complete acceptance of the will of God towards us is an attitude of mind at which every son of God should endeavour to arrive ; but God, so far from excluding, even encourages us to express to Him every desire of ours which is in itself right and becoming. We see from the example of St. Paul, and of Christ Himself, that we may, with perfect holiness and acceptance, entreat God even for earthly mercies, provided only that we bear in mind our ignorance of what may be best for us, and ask for such blessings — which may not be real blessings — in the spirit which says, "Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done.''

And as for forms of words, there is no age or country in which they have not been found helpful to earnest supplicants. Our Lord so readily encouraged them as a guidance and aid to prayer, that He at once granted a set form of words, both as a prayer and as a model for all prayers, to the entreaty of His Apostles, " Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples." And in that prayer, though six of the petitions concern our souls, yet one is inserted which, in its primary sense, bears also upon the needs of our mortal bodies.

I do not make these remarks with any xxvi desire to depreciate the teaching of this Protestant mystic, but only to urge that, in trying to gain something of the spirit of hoUness and deep devotion from his exhortations, we should not be hopelessly discouraged and repelled by some of the extreme forms of his advice. With this caveat in their minds, I think that many readers will be helped by the thoughts which they read in the following pages. This little book will, indeed, have fulfilled its purpose if it leads any to substitute a real for a sham self-denial ; to sit more loosely to the vain and passing interests of time and sense ; and to aim at ^' something more high and heroical in religion than this age affecteth."

Let me only point out, in conclusion, that there is one lesson on which the writer insists, and on which the Mystics often dwelt, which is supremely true, and which — had it but been rightly apprehended — would have prevented a thousand execrable persecutions and deplorable quarrels in every age of the Church. It is the truth that all "our unhappy divisions" are not due to religion^ but to religionism; that they arise from the stubborn self-admiration of opposing intellects, and from violent opinionativeness about non-essential minutiae.

Introduction xxvii

" In our own day/' says the author of Hours with the Mystics^ every one implicated in religious abuses identifies himself mth religion, and invests his own miserable personality with the benign grandeur of the Gospel."

Those who have the root of the matter will not hate each other w^ith the boundless selfworship and infamous ruthlessness of Inquisitors. These famihars of the Holy Office," in the brutality of the torments at which they could gaze in cold blood, seemed to have wiped out from their own souls the tenderest and most Christlike of all human impulses. Could anything be more frightful^ more essentially 7io7i- Christian and ^?;?//-Christian, than the saying of Queen Mary, As the souls of heretics are hereafter eternally burning in hell, there can be nothing more proper than for me to imitate the Divine vengeance by burning them on earth " ?

The best Christians, when they have learnt rightly to apprehend that "love is the fulfilling of the law," will rest on their essential unity in the common, simple faith expressed by the Apostles' Creed. The wisest and truest saints of God are at one in this view ; and all the world over, the holiest Christians are brothers of all other sincere Christians, in spite of

XXVlll theological differences. ^'The meek, the just, the pious, the devout," said AVilliam Penn, are all of one rehgion, and they shall meet and recognize each other in the world to come, when their respective liveries are stripped away.'*' ^'Take away these walls of separation,'" says the fervid Chillingworth, take away this burning, cursing, damning of men for not subscribing to the words of men as the words of God ; require of Christians only to believe Christ, and to call no man master but Him only. Let those leave claiming infallibility that have no title to it, and let them that in words disclaim it, disclaim it likewise in their actions.'"

^'I love Calvin very well,'' wrote the excellent Dean Potter in 1713, "and I cannot hate Arminius. And for my part, I am verily persuaded that these two are now where they agree well in the kingdom of heaven, while some of their passionate disciples are so eagerly brawling here on earth." And again, For some years in my youth, when I was most ignorant, I was most confident : before I knew the true state or any grounds of these opinions, I would peremptorily resolve them all. . . . Out of all this I collect, for my part, that all these points are no necessary catholic verities, nor essential to our

XXIX faith, but merely matters of opinion, problematical, of inferior moment, wherein a man may err and be ignorant without danger to his soul."

I am sick of opinions," said John Wesley, *'give me good substantial religion, a humble, gentle love of God and man. . . . How far is love, even with wrong opinions, to be preferred before truth itself without love ! We may die without the knowledge of many truths, and yet be carried into Abraham's bosom. But if we die without love, what will knowledge avail us ? Just as much as it avails the Devil and his angels."

Do they accept love towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ?" said Whitefield. "If so, they are my brethren."

Are not these testimonies of saints direct echoes of the blessed promise of our Lord, " Where two or three shall be gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them " ? And when we contrast this lovely and immense simplicity of God's requirements with the entangled scholasticism, arrogant fury, and vain janglings of a mass of human theology, we may attach the greater value to what the writer of the following pages has said on this

XXX subject, and to the exclamation of the Christian poet —

O how unlike the complex works of man. Heaven's easy, artless, unencumbered plan ! It stands like the cerulean arch we see ^Majestic in its own simplicity. Inscribed above the portal from afar. Conspicuous as the brightness of a star, Legible only by the light they give, Stand the soul-quickening words — ' Believe and live :

F. W . Farrar.

THE

NEW LIFE IN CHRIST JESUS

THE

NEW LIFE IN CHRIST JESUS

Chapter I

Excellence of prayer — The false notion which we have of it — What it is — Operated by love — Its aim is our union with God, to which we cannot attain by our own efforts — The prayer of exposition, or laying ourselves open to God, prescribes nothing to Him — Vocal prayer — Few words — Aridity in prayer — Stated times are necessary — Fruit of prayer — How to distinguish the aridity occasioned by our own fault — What it is to pray without ceasing.

I. Divine Jesus, Thou who makest me to know the value of prayer, that it is the Ufe of our souls, that it is our all, reuniting us to Thee, that its price is invaluable, and cannot be comprehended : Thou who orderest us to pray without ceasing, teach us to pray as we ought. Dissipate the false ideas which our understanding, darkened by self-love, gives us of prayer, and do Thou vouchsafe to grant us true ideas, such as may render us Thy true worshippers^ that

B zuorship God in spirit and in tritth (John iv,). It is Thy Spirit alone that can do this ; for it alone is Truth : all that it doth not operate and do by itself is nothing but error and falsehood. Oh, Divine Jesus, make for Thyself worshippers conformable to Thy will and pleasure. Thou knowest the desire which Thou hast long ago created in me to pray without ceasing ; accomplish it, O Lord, in me, and in all those that appertain to Thee : make them to know wherein true prayer consists, that they may no longer remain fixed in error, nor make a hindrance of what ought to contribute to their progress ; and grant me to write of it according to Thy mind, and what may conduce to their advancement.

2. Prayer is nothing else but the union of the heart or of the will to God^ before Whom we present ourselves, with intention to submit to His will. We offer ourselves to Him, that He may enable us to accomplish it : that for this purpose He may rid us of everything that brings any impediment thereto. It is love that makes us to exert this act, without which it is impossible to do it sincerely. For nothing but a great love for God can bring us to desire sincerely to be entirely subject and obedient to all His orders. Nothing but the same love can give us the will to suffer Him to remove all impediments that may hinder our fulfilling them. It is the same love which alone is able to kindle in us a desire to be incessantly in His presence, and under His eye, to behold Him continually, and never to lose sight of Him one single moment. The same love inclines us to suffer cheerfully all the painful operations which we must indispensably undergo by reason of the frightful dissimiUtude which we have contracted by the fallen state we are in, that we may be reinstated in His likeness and image. This is necessary in order to our recovering union with Him, which is the end of our creation.

3. Here then is the end of prayer, prayer in effect and reality ; it is the Divine Union. When we are arrived at it, we pray w^ithout ceasing ; for we adore, we love, and are united to our beloved object : we know nothing but Him ; we forget ourselves and all things ; He alone is our all, our life, and our love. Having passed into this Supreme Being, solely amiable, solely adorable, we remain in Him without any other thing. O blessed transformation of man into God, even in this tenement of flesh ! The prayer that comes nearest this end, is the most perfect ; that which is

4 Ihe New Life in Christ Jesses

farthest from it is the least perfect. It is plain we cannot by our own unassisted efforts put ourselves in a condition to arrive at the Divine Union, because by ourselves we cannot rid ourselves of the deformities that are in us, and stop our progress.

4. Thus the prayer by which we expose and lay ourselves open before Him, and offer ourselves to Him, that He may take us under His operation, and act upon us according to His good pleasure, under the sensible conviction of our inability to perform this work, is that which is most agreeable to Him, and most conformable to the reality of what He is, what He requires, and is able to do ; and to the reality of our weakness, nothingness, and wickedness. For it is certain that He hath a very great desire to redeem and rescue us from our corrupt and perverse state. He has the power ta do it, and wisdom to conduct that work, according as He sees it expedient for each of us. Destitute as we are of these qualities, what can we do better than to cast ourselves at His feet, as poor, weak, ignorant, and rebellious children, who are convinced of their weakness and do acknowledge His all-sufficiency to change, to assist, and create us anew, and to rescue us from corruption ; what can we, I say, do more to the purpose, penetrated with these sentiments with respect to Him and ourseh-es, than to present ourselves before Him finding ourselves neither worthy nor sufficient, to utter one word in His presence, or to make one request, knowing that He understands, better than we, all that is necessary to be done, that He may glorify Himself in us ?