Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries

1. 1 Cor. Xv. 50

[2] 2 Cor. v. 1-4.

[3] John iii. 6.

[4] 1 John iv. 13; John xiii. 34 and xvi. 13; 1 John iv. 4.

[5] They found their authority for this outer sheath of body in the text which says: “The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.”—Gen. iii. 21.

[6] Many of these historical reappearances are considered in my Studies in Mystical Religion.

[7] Isaac Penington, “A True and Faithful Relation of my Spiritual Travails,” Works (edition of 1761), i. pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii.

[8] Isaac Penington’s Works, i. pp. xxxvii.-xxxviii.

[9] The exact and sharply-defined “ladders” of mystic ascent which form a large part of the descriptive material in books on Mystical Religion are far from being universal ladders. Like creeds, or like religious institutions, they powerfully assist certain minds to find the way home, but they seem unreal and artificial to many other persons, and they must be considered only as symbolisms which speak to the condition of a limited number of spiritual pilgrims.

[10] Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Bk. ii.

[11] Theologia Germanica, chaps. xxii. and xliii.

[12] Ibid. chap. liii.

[13] Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 20.

[14] Tauler’s Sermons. See especially Sermons IV. and XXIII. in Hutton’s Inner Way.

[15] The Divine Names of Dionysius the Areopagite, chap. i. sec. i.

[16] Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer, p. 320. 25-30.

[17] Quoted in W. H. J. Gairdner’s The Reproach of Islam, p. 151.

[19] Denck’s Was geredet sey, dass die Schrift, B. 2. Pascal’s saying is: “Comfort thyself; thou wouldst not be seeking Me hadst thou not already found Me.”—Le Mystere de Jesus, sec. 2.

[19] The Threefold Life of Man, xiv. 72.

[20] Sterry’s Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the Soul of Man, p. 24.

[21] “The finite individual soul seems naturally to present a double aspect. It looks like, on the one hand, a climax or concentration of the nature beneath it and the community around it, and, on the other hand, a spark or fragment from what is above and beyond it. It is crystallized out of the collective soul of nature or society, or it falls down from the transcendental soul of heaven or what is above humanity. In both cases alike it has its share of divinity.”—Bernard Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual (London, 1913), p. 1.

[22] The way to the world of Perfect Reality, Socrates says in the Theaetetus, consists in likeness to God, nor is there, he adds, anything more like God than is a good man.—Theaetetus 176 A and B.

[23] Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre.

[24] Republic vii. 518 B.

[25] Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”

[26] Realm of Ends, p. 230.

[27] Lectures and Addresses, p. 193.

[28] Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Poems of Life and Moments.

[29] Jacob Boehme, however, shows this fascination for the super-empirical at its height and culmination. It was an attempt, though a bungling attempt, to pass from an abstract God to a God of character, and it was a circuitous way of getting round the problem of evil.

[30] Mystical Elements of Religion, i. p. 26.

[31] William Dell’s sermon on “The Trial of Spirits,” Works, p. 438.