Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries

Dr. John Everard of Clare College, Cambridge, was clearly one of the earliest and one of the most interesting carriers of these ideas, and in his case it is not difficult to discover the influences which shaped the course of his thought and suggested the general lines of his message. He was born about 1575—the birth year of Jacob Boehme—though all early biographical details are lacking. He had a long student period at Clare College, receiving his degree of B.A. in 1600, M.A. in 1607, and D.D. in 1619. He was deeply versed in the great mystics, and always reveals in his sermons the influence of Plotinus and Dionysius the Areopagite, and no less the influence of Eckhart, Tauler, and the Theologia Germanica. But at some period of his life he tapped a new source and came into possession of a fresh group of live and suggestive ideas which influenced all the thinking of his later stage. His translations, some of which are in MS. and some in printed form, furnish a clue to the main sources of his ideas, which present a striking parallelism with those held by the continental spiritual Reformers of the sixteenth century. He was possessed of original power and of penetrating insight, with "eyes of his own," but no one can fail to see that he had read and pondered the writings of these submerged Reformers, and that in a country remote from theirs he has become a reincarnation of their ideas and a new voice for their message.

His public career, in the England of the first two Stuarts, was a stormy one. He was Rector of St. Martin-in-the-Field. In the early stage of his preaching he felt called upon to oppose the "Spanish Marriage" as "the great sin of matching with idolaters," and he underwent a series of imprisonments for his attacks upon this precious scheme of King James, who wittily suggested changing his name from Dr. Everard ["Ever-out"] to "Dr. Never-out." Some time before his fiftieth year—the date cannot be exactly fixed—he reached {240} his new and deeper insight, and henceforth became the bearer of a message which seemed to him and to his friends like the reopening of the treasury of the Gospels, and in this new light he felt ashamed of the barren period of his life when he walked in "the ignorance of litteral knowledge," when he was "a bare, literal, University preacher," as he himself says, and had not found "the marrow and the true Word of God."[4] The great change which cleaves his public career into two well-defined parts is impressively indicated by his friend and disciple, Rapha Harford, in his "Dedicatory Epistle" to the Sermons and in his preface "to the Reader," though he nowhere gives any light upon the events and influences which initiated the transformation. "In a special and extraordinary manner God appeared to him in his latter days," Harford says, "and after that, he desired nothing more than to bring others to see what he saw and to enjoy what he enjoyed."[5] He was, we are told, "a man of presence and of princely behaviour" and was known "as a good philosopher, few

or none exceeding him," "endowed with skill and depth of learning," but after his new experience, when he "came to know himself," and to "know Jesus Christ and the Scriptures experimentally rather than grammatically, literally or academically," he came to esteem lightly "notions and speculation," "letter-learning" and "University-knowledge," and he "centred his spirit on union and communion with God" and turned his supreme interest from "forms, externals and generals" to the cultivation of "the inner man," and to "acting more than talking."[6]

His new way of preaching—vivid, concrete, touched with subtle humour, grounded in experience and filling old texts with new meaning—appealed powerfully to the common people and to an elect few of the more highly privileged who had won a large enough freedom of spirit to go with him into new paths.[7] Like his Master, he loved {241} the common people, "thinking it no disparagement to accompany with the lowest of men," "tinkers, coblers, weavers and poor beggarly fellows who came running" to hear him, and he poured out the best he had in his treasury to any, even the simplest and most ordinary, who cared to hear of this "spiritual, practical experiment of life." His preaching naturally brought him suffering and persecution. He was "often fetched into the High Commission," was forced to give "attendance from Court to Court and from Term to Term," was on one occasion fined a thousand pounds for his "heresies," and had many interviews with Archbishop Laud, but he always held that "Truth is strongest," and he declared that God had called him to be "a Sampson against Philistines and a David against the huge and mighty Goliath of his times,"[8] and he was ready to pay the cost of obedience to the Light.

His friend, Harford, who had "much ado" to keep the manuscript of his sermons "out of the Bishop's fingers," declares that though Everard clearly "distinguished the outward and killing letter from the Life and Spirit of the Holy Word," he was not an antinomian or in sympathy with ranterism. "Our author," the Dedicatory Epistle says, and says truly, "missed both rocks against which many have split their vessels. He carries Truth amain with Topsail set. He cuts his way clear between the meer Rationalist who will square out God according to his Reason, and the Familist who lives above all ordinances and by degrees hath turned licencious Ranter." Thomas Brooks added to Harford's Testimony a brief "Approbation" to the Volume, on Behalf of the Publishers, recommending all readers to receive its "heaven-born truths" into their homes and into their hearts, assuring them that as they read and open their inner eyes they will find their own hearts in the book and the book in their own hearts, i.e. the book will "find them."

Before turning to Everard's message, as it finds expression in the rare volume of his sermons—The Gospel Treasures Opened—we must consider the Translations {242} which he left unpublished. They are preserved in clearly written manuscripts in Cambridge University Library, under the title "Three Bookes Translated out of their Originall."[9] The first "Book" bears the following title-page: "The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, And the Tree of Life in the Midst of the Paradise of God: Taken out of a Book called The Letter and the Life, or The Flesh and the Spirit. Translated by Dr. Everard." An interesting article on Dr. Everard in Notes and Queries[10] concludes that this first "Book" of Everard's is a free translation of the Second Part of Tentzel's Medicina diastica. This guess, however, proves to be incorrect, though there is a slight likeness between Tentzel's book and the English MS. Everard's book is, in reality, a translation of Sebastian Franck's Von dem Baum des Wissens Gutes und Boeses ("Of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil"). The translation is made from a Latin edition of Franck's little book, which was published in 1561. The entire message of this treatise, written by the wandering chronicler and spiritual prophet of Germany, and here reproduced in English, is the inwardness of everything that concerns the religious life. The Tree of Life was in Adam's heart, and in that same inner region of the soul was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The story of Paradise is a graphic parable of the soul's experience. "That Tree which tested Adam was and is nothing else in truth but the Nature, Will, Knowledge, and Life of Adam, and every man is as much forbidden to eat of this Tree as Adam was." Franck's significant book contained passages from Hans Denck's Widerruf ("Confession"), and Everard translated them as an appendix to his first manuscript book.[11] They hold the very heart of Denck's message and deal, with Denck's usual sincerity and boldness, with the fundamental nature of spiritual religion. He here declares the primacy of the Word of God in the soul over everything else that ministers to man's life: "I prefer the Holy Scriptures before all Humane {243} Treasure; yet I do not so much esteem them as I do the Word of God which is living, potent, and eternal, and which is free from all elements of this world: For that is God Himself, Spirit and no letter, written without pen or ink, so that it can never be obliterated. True Salvation is in the Word of God; it is not tied up to the Scriptures. They alone cannot make a bad heart good, though they may supply it with information. But a heart illumined with the Light of God is made better by everything." Franck declares, in comment on Denck's words: "I myself know at least twenty Christian Religions all of which claim to rest on the Holy Scriptures which they apply to themselves by far-fetched expositions and allegories, or from the dead letter of the text. . . .

They can be understood rightly, however, only by the divine new-man, who is God-born, and who brings to them the Light of the Holy Spirit." There can be no doubt, I think, that Dr. Everard found in the writings of these two sixteenth-century prophets the body and filling of his own new conceptions of Christianity, and it was through his vigorous interpretations that this stream of thought first flowed into England.

It will not be necessary to make extended comment on Everard's other translations. The second one was "The Golden Book of German Divinitie," rendered into English in 1628 from the Latin edition of "John Theophilus," who is Sebastian Castellio, and the third is a translation of Nicholas of Cusa's De visione Dei ("The Vision of God"), which is a profound and impressive piece of mystical literature and deserves to be much better known than it is. Everard, further, translated the "Mystical Divinity" of Dionysius the Areopagite, selections from John Tauler and Meister Eckhart, and "The Divine Pymander [Poemander] of Hermes Trismegistus"—a book which nearly all the spiritual Humanists ranked in the very first list of religious literature.[12]

We must now turn to Everard's message as it is {244} presented in his Sermons, and endeavour to discover what he told the throngs of people who came gladly to hear him in the Kensington Meetings and the gatherings at Islington. The central emphasis in every sermon is on personal experience, or, as we should phrase it to-day, on a religion of life and reality. He has had his own "scholastic" period, but he looks back on it as a passage across an arid desert, and he feels a mission laid upon him to call men everywhere away from a religion of "notions and words"[13] to a religion of first-hand experience and inwardly felt realities. Unless we know Christ, he says, experimentally so that "He lives within us spiritually, and so that all which is known of Him in the Letter and Historically is truly done and acted in our own souls—until we experimentally verify all we read of Him—the Gospel is a meer tale to us." It is not saving knowledge to know that Christ was born in Bethlehem but to know that He is born in us.

It is vastly more important to know experimentally that we are crucified with Christ than to know historically that He died in Jerusalem many years ago, and to feel Jesus Christ risen again within you is far more operative than to have "a notional knowledge" that He rose on the third day. "When thou begins to finde and know not merely that He was conceived in the womb of a virgin, but that thou art that virgin and that He is more truly and spiritually, and yet as really, conceived in thy heart so that thou feelest the Babe beginning to be conceived in thee by the power of the Holy Ghost and the Most High overshadowing thee; when thou feelest Jesus Christ stirring to be born and brought forth in thee; when thou beginnest to see and feel all those mighty, powerful actions done in thee which thou readest that He did in the flesh—here is a Christ indeed, a real Christ who will do thee some good."[14]

To have Christ born in the soul means also to "do the deeds of Christ," to grow and increase toward perfection as His life is more fully manifested in us, to be able to say as we read of divine events, "This day is this Scripture fulfilled in me," and to see Christ work all His miracles before our eyes to-day. It is the "key of experience" which unlocks all the drawers and cabinets and hidden and secret doors of Scripture.[15] We can discover, as we read, that there are whole armies of Philistines in us to be overcome, that there are Goliaths to be slain, and that there are Promised Lands to be won.[16] "When thou hast seen God and found Him for thyself; then thou mayest say: Now I believe, not only because it is written in Genesis, but because I have felt it and seen it written and fulfilled in mine own soul."[17] "Men should not so much trouble themselves," he says to those who are expecting a "Fifth Monarchy," "about a personal reign of Christ here upon earth, if they saw that the chief and real fulfilling of the Scriptures were in them; and that, whatever is externally done in the world or expressed in the Scriptures, is but typical and representative, and points out a more spiritual saving, and a more divine fulfilling of them."[18]

In almost the same figures used by Sebastian Franck he contrasts the letter and the Spirit, the outward and the inward, the word of the written Book and the living Word of God. This contrast is carefully worked out in four sermons, preached at Kensington, on "The Dead and Killing Letter, and the Spirit and the Life." Here he insists, often in quaint and curious phrases, that the Old Testament, "from the first of Genesis to the last of the Prophets," is an allegory, "woven like a beautiful tapestry" to picture forth to the eye a history whose real meaning is to be found within the soul; if you dwell upon it only as picture, only as history, it is a letter that kills; if you see your own selves in it and by it, then it gives life.[19] You may learn the whole Bible by heart and speak to any point in divinity according to text and letter, and yet know {246} nothing of God or of spiritual life.[20] "If you be always handling the letter of the Word, always licking the letter, always chewing upon that, what great thing do you?

No marvel you are such starvelings!"[21] The letter is the husk; the Word, the Spirit, is the kernel; the letter is the earthen jar, the Spirit is the hidden manna; the letter is the outer court, the Spirit is the inner sanctuary; the letter is the shadow, the Spirit is the substance; the letter is the sheath, the Spirit is the sharp two-edged sword; the letter is the hard encasing bone that must be broken, the Spirit is inward marrow which nourishes the soul; the letter is temporal, the Word is eternal[22]—"if ye once know the truth experimentally after the Spirit ye will no longer make such a stir about Forms, Disciplines, and Externals as if that were the great and only Reformation!"[23] The real difficulty, the true cause of spiritual dryness, is that "men strive and contend so much for the letter and the external part of God's worship, that they neglect the inward and internal altogether; for where is the man who is so zealous and hot for the internal as he is for the external. If we press men to the inward before the outward, or do as I do, lift up that; either how cold and heartless they are, or else how quarrelsome and malicious they are!"[24] When once the inward core of things has been grasped and the transforming experience has occurred, making a new man—freed, illuminated, sin-delivered, with "God the Life of the life and the Soul of the soul"[25]—the outward forms and the external things will fall into the right perspective and will receive their proper emphasis. Imitating St.

Augustine's great saying: "Love God absolutely and then you may do as you please," Everard says, "Turn the man loose who has found the living Guide within him, and then let him neglect the outward if he can; just as you would say to a man who loves his wife with all tenderness, 'you may beat her, hurt her or kill her, if you want to!'"[26]

The conception of God which forms the foreground of {247} all Everard's teaching is one perfectly familiar to those that have studied the great mystics who have formed their ideas under the direct or indirect influence of Plotinus. The conception is, of course, not necessarily mystical—it is rather a recurring type of metaphysics—but it has peculiarly suited the mystical mind and is often regarded by Christian historians as synonymous with mysticism. God, for Everard as for Dionysius and for Eckhart, Tauler, and Franck, is unknowable, unspeakable, unnamable, abstracted from all that is created and visible, an absolute One, alone of all beings in the universe able to say "I am," since He alone is Perfect Reality; but just for that reason He is unrevealable in His inmost nature to finite beings and incapable of manifestation through anything that is finite.[27]

He is a permanent and unchanging Substance; all things that are visible are but shadow and appearance, are like bubbles in the water which are now here and now gone.[28] Every created and finite thing, however—from a grain of sand to a radiant sun and from a blade of grass to the Seraph that is nearest God—is a beam or a ray or expression of that eternal Reality, is an angel or messenger that in some minute, or in some glorious fashion, reveals God in space and time; and all created things together, from the lowest to the highest, from the treble of the heavenly beings to the base of earthly things, form "one mighty sweet-tuned instrument," sending forth one harmonious hallelujah to the Creator and revealing a single organic universe, "acted and guided by one Spirit"—the Soul of all that is.[29] "Ask the craggy mountains what part they sing, and they will tell you that they sing the praise of the immutableness and unchangeableness of God; ask the flowers of the field what part they sing, and they will tell you they sing the wisdom and liberality of God who cloathes them beyond Solomon in all his glory; ask the sun, moon and stars what part they sing, and they will say the constancy of God's promises, that they hold their course and do not alter it; ask the poor received sinner {248} what part he sings, and he will tell you he sings the infinite free mercy of a most gracious Father; and ask the wicked, obstinate sinner what part he sings, and he will tell you he sings the praise of the patience and justice of God."[30]

In a very striking passage, Everard points out how the beings nearest in order to God are most free of matter and imperfection, while those lower in hierarchical scale are increasingly more material: "God is a pure Spirit, only Form without any manner of matter; and all the Creatures, the further off from Him, the more matter [they have] and the nearer the less. For example, Angels are pictured with complete bodies; yet to show they are further off from matter than men, therefore they have always wings. And Arch-angels, they being nearer the Nature of God than Angels, are pictured with bodies cut off by the middle with wings. But Cherubims, having less matter and nearer God Himself than either, are pictured only with heads and wings, without bodies. But Seraphims, being farthest off from man and nearest of all to God, have no bodies nor heads nor wings at all but [are] only represented by a certain yellowish or fiery Colour."[31]

'Whence are we? Canst thou conceive whence we are? Dost thou know either whence we come or to whom we belong, or whither we shall go? Something we are, but what will in a short time become of us, canst thou tell?' And the other drop might answer, 'Alas, poor fellow-drop, be assured we are nothing, for the sun may arise and draw us up and scatter us and so bring us to nothing.' Says the other again, 'Suppose it do, for all that, yet we are, we have a being, we are something.'

The way back to this infinite Ocean from which we have come and in which we belong is through the tiny rivulet, the narrow inlet, of our own souls, for "the Sea flows into all the creeks and crannies of the World."[33] But to find Him—this original Ground and Reality—we must "leave the outcoasts" and go back into "the Abysse." Most of us are busy "playing with cockel-shells and pebble-stones that lie on the outcoasts of the Kingdom," and we do not put back to the infinite Sea itself, where we become united and made one with His Life.[34]

The process of return is a process of denial and subtraction. The "cockel-shells and pebble-stones" must be left, and one finite thing after another must be dropped, and finally "all that thou callest I, all that self ness, all that propriety that thou hast taken to thyself, whatsoever creates in us Iness and selfness, must be brought to nothing."[35] If we would hear God, we must still the noises within ourselves. "All the Artillery in the World, were they all discharged together at one clap, could not more deaf the ears of our bodies than the clamorings of desires in the soul deaf its ears, so you see a man must go into silence or else he cannot hear God speak."[36] All "the minstrels" that are singing of self and self interests "must be cast out." If "the creature" is to be loved and used at all, it must be loved and used rightly and in balance, which is hard to do. "Thou must love it and use it as if thou loved it not and used it not, not appropriating it to thyself, and always being ready to leave it willingly and freely; so that thou sufferest no rending, no tearing in thy soul to part with it, and so thou usest it for God and in God and to ends appointed by God."[37]

The result of this junction of finite and infinite in us is {250} that a Christian life is bound to be a strenuous contest: "you must expect to fight a great battel." "You are," Everard says again, "bidden to fight with your own selves, with your own desires, with your own affections, with your own reason, with your own will; and therefore if you will finde your enemies, never look without. If you will finde out the Devil and what he is and what his nature is, look within you. There you may see him in his colours, in his nature, in his power, in his effects and in his working."[38]

In a word, the way to God is the way of the Cross. Christ Himself is the pattern and His way of Life is the typical way for all who would find God—"Christ Jesus is He that all visions tend to; He is the substance of all the types, shadows, and sacrifices. He is the business that the whole Word was ever about, and only is, and shall be about; He hath been, is, and shall be the business of all ages, in one kinde or other."[39] "The Book of God," he says in another sermon, "is a great Book, and many words are in it, and many large volumes have been drawn out of it, but Jesus Christ is the body of it; He is the Mark all these words shoot at."[40] It henceforth becomes our business to find Christ's life and Christ's death in us, to see that all His deeds are done in us. Christ's will must become our will, Christ's peace our peace, Christ's sufferings our sufferings, Christ's cross our cross, and then we may know "the eternal Sabbath," and keep "quiet, even if the whole fabrick of heaven and earth crack and the mountains tumble down."[41]

Everard was always on the watch for those things which prevent the growth, progress, and advance of the soul into the deeper significance of religion. The true Christian continually "grows taller in Christ," he does not stop at "the child's stature," his growth is "not stinted like a Dwarf."[42] He discovers one of the prevailing {251} causes of arrested development, the "stinting" of the soul, to lie in the wrong use of externals, in the subtle tendency to "rest" in the elements or beginnings of religion, as he calls them, in "the lowest things in Christianity." This is "to cover oneself with fig-leaves as Adam did."[43] Men "turn shadows into substance," and instead of using ordinances and sacraments, "as means, schoolmasters and tutors," "as steps and guides to Christ who is the Truth and Substance," they so use them that they stop the soul mid-way and hinder it from going on to Christ.[44] He cites the way in which St. Paul "burst out into a holy defiance" of everything which did not directly minister to the formation of a new creation within the person, whether it were Moses and the law or even Christ after the flesh, or any "outward Priviledges and Ordinances" whatever. Those who make these things "the top and quintessence of religion" miss the Apostle's "more excellent way."

Those who "stick in externals" and "rest upon them as Crutches and Go-bies" [i.e. become arrested there] prevent growth in religion, "turn the ordinance into an Idol" and occasion disputes and differences, "like children who quarrel about triffles."[45] But Everard is, nevertheless, very cautious not to go too far in this direction and he always shows poise and balance. So long as the outward, whether letter or sacrament, is kept in its place and is used as means or medium for the attainment of a spiritual goal—the formation of Christ within—he approves of its use and warns against a too sudden transcendence of the outward helps to the soul.[46]

Here in England, then, during the tumultuous years from 1625 to 1650 a solid scholar and a great preacher was teaching the people the same views which the spiritual Reformers of Germany had taught a century earlier. Like them, Everard taught that the book of the Bible, in so far as it consists of words, syllables, and letters, is not the Word of God, for God's Word is not ink and paper, but Life and Spirit, quick and powerful, illuminating the {252} soul immediately, and demonstrating itself by its creative work upon the inward man until he becomes like the Spirit that works within him.[47] Like them, he insisted that Christ becomes Saviour only as He becomes the Life of our lives and repeats in us in a spiritual way the events of His outward and historical life. Like them, too, he had discovered that God is not a being of wrath and anger, needing to be appeased. On the contrary he says: "Beloved, were you once to come to a true sight of God, you would see Him glorious and amiable, full of love and mercy and tenderness—all wrath and frowns blown clean away.

We should see in Him not so much as any shadow of anger."[48] Like them, he found heaven not far away but in the redeemed soul: "Heaven is nothing but Grace perfected, 'tis of the same nature of that you enjoy here when you are united by faith to Christ."[49] "I remember," he once said, "how I was taught as a child, either by my nurse, or my mother, or my schoolmaster, that God was above in heaven, above the sun, moon and stars, and there, I thought, was His Court, and His Chamber of presence, and I thought it a great height to come to this knowledge; but I assure you I had more to do to unlearn this principle than ever I had to learn it."[50] He tries to call his hearers away from "the childish apprehensions" that heaven is a place of "visible and ocular glories," or that "it shall be only hereafter," or that its glory "consists in Thrones, and Crowns, and Scepters, in Music, Harps and Vyols, and such like carnal and poor things."[51]

He was a man of beautiful spirit, of saintly life, "courageous and discerning," "concerned not so much over self-sufferings as that truth should not in any way be obstructed through him," and he belongs in the list of those who saw through the veil of the outward, through the parable of the letter, and found the inward and eternal Reality.[52]