THE HOLY SPIRIT AND MYSTICISM.

The New Testament doctrine of the Holy Spirit has a definite bearing on various modern movements to which is given the general designation of Mysticism. What does this mean? If we interpret it in the New Testament sense of personal fellowship with God, the direct contact of the soul with God in Christ, it of course represents an essential and profound truth of Christianity. The very heart of the Pauline Gospel is found in the truth of the indwelling Christ, and the identification of Christ with the believer. ' I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself for me' (Gal. ii. 20). ' Christ in you, the hope of glory ' (Col, i. 27.) ' Strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith ' (Eph. iii. 16, 17). But it is, to say the least, unfortunate, that the term ' Mysticism,' which has so many other uses, should be employed to express this essential feature of the true Christian life.1 Assuming for the moment that this is what is meant by the word, we are able to see not merely its reality as an integral and essential part of Christianity, but its practical value in more than one direction. In relation to doctrine, it tends to preserve the life from pure intellectualism, theological severity, and dogmatic rigidity. The mellowing power of a consciousness of Christ's presence in the soul is a preservative against any mere intellectual orthodoxy which stops short of personal experience. Then again, the same idea of Mysticism is a constant safeguard against the over-activity which is only too apt to characterise the Christian life of to-day. If ' Solitude is the mother-country of the strong,' then there must be time for devotional contemplation and personal adoration, and these can only be derived from a consciousness of the nearness and indwelling presence of God in Christ. So that whether against doctrinal severity or practical superficiality the necessity of the New Testament idea of fellowship with God in Christ is obvious and constant.

But most unfortunately the term ' Mysticism ' has to do duty for three different ideas, and herein lies its dangers.

' The word evangelical has, even within the Church, fallen into discredit, for various reasons, some better and some worse. And its place has been taken by such a word as mystical. Shrewd publishers welcome the one word in a title and frown at the other. This may be a straw, but there is a current beneath it. It means at bottom the same thing as the aversion from the name Protestant, with its victory of power and faith, and the culture of the word Catholic, with its comfort of taste and love.'2

In the minds of some Mysticism stands for an attitude which tends to dispense with Christ altogether and to seek union with God apart from Him. By a very general use of the idea and term ' Inspiration,' it is urged that God has not confined His inspiration to Bible times, that the men of to-day are equally inspired to give messages for our age, and that while in times past Christians found authority in a Book, or in a Church, to-day man finds in his own self his greatest discovery, and that when he is true to himself he realises to the full what salvation is intended to mean. But it is evident that in all this there is nothing necessarily Christian; and indeed, in certain applications the idea of Mysticism is utterly opposed to everything distinctively true of the New Testament.

' It is most unfortunate that the spiritual in Christianity has been so often described as the mystical; and men have advocated mysticism when they were really pleading for spirituality. Mysticism, as represented by Neo-Platonism or Vedantism is the religion of pantheism; its aim is to transcend the distinction in consciousness of self and God, and to realise the identity of the Divine and the human. Even in its modified mediaeval form, where Christ was substituted for the Absolute, mysticism tended to a pantheism in which the historical Jesus as the mediator of the life in God was left behind, and an immediate union of the soul to God was claimed; or to an erotism, in which spiritual ecstasy was scarcely distinguishable from sexual passion.'3

Or to put it in another way:

' The mysticism which is essential to religion is not therefore a glow sent through a natural a priori, the transfiguration of a human postulate by a divine current, the elevation of a latent religiosity in us to high and ruling place.'4

The word ' Mysticism,' however, is also used in connection with something quite different, which claims to be distinctively Christian. In the Mysticism of the Quakers we find the tendency to emphasise the doctrine of the 'inner light' as something either independent of, or superior to the written Word. This position is set forth by Barclay, the leading theologian of the Society of Friends.

' " We may not call them (the Scriptures) the principal fountain of all truth and knowledge, nor yet the first adequate rule of faith and manners, because the principal fountain of truth must be the truth itself; i.e. that whose authority and certainty depends not upon another." Again, " God hath committed and given unto every man a measure of light of His own Son — a measure of grace, or a measure of the Spirit. This, as it is received, and not resisted, works the salvation of all, even of those who are ignorant of the death and sufferings of Christ." '5

Now it is necessary and important to recognise the truth underlying the Quaker position. There is a sense in which Jesus Christ, as the Divine Logos, ' lightens every man.' Call it what we will, light of reason, or of conscience; there is that in every man which answers to the truth enshrined in this great saying of the Apostle. But it is not true to say that every man, as such, has the Spirit of God, nor can we call the same thing ' light,' ' reason,' ' grace,' ' the Spirit,' ' the Word of God,' ' Christ within,' and ' God in us.' Such a procedure would create untold confusion and lead to almost endless trouble. George Fox once had a discussion with a doctor, arguing that everyone possessed this light, and he appealed to an Indian who was present, in regard to his sense of right and wrong. But, as a Quaker scholar. Dr. Hodgkin, allows. Fox was therein confusing conscience with strictly religious illumination.6 The Spirit of God, according to the New Testament, is given to believers as their light and life, but always together with an objective standard as a safeguard. This standard is the historic and redemptive Person of Christ, recorded in the New Testament, and mediated by the Spirit.

' Is the true badge of spirituality what the Anabaptists who would have wrecked the Reformation thought it to be — a lex insita, an inner light, mystic individualism, and quietist piety, which is co-equated with the historic Word, and moves in socialist sympathies to anarchic demagogy? Or is it historic faith, founded on fact, energising in love, and working by constitutional progress? Which is the way of the Spirit — subjective illuminism with its shifting lights, or objective revelation in an ever-fresh and growing experience? Is it to-day's vagrant insight or yesterday's apostolic inspiration, good for to-day and for ever? '7

' We are not at the mercy of the inward light alone. The Church was not created by the inward light. It was not created by the Spirit of God alone. It was created by the Holy Spirit through an apostolic Word of Jesus Christ crucified; it was created by the redeeming Lord as the Spirit.'8

According to the early Quakers a man of their time might be as truly inspired of God as were the Prophets and Apostles of the Bible. Against the imposition of dogma by authority George Fox said that ' though he read of Christ and God,' he knew them only through a like spirit in his own soul.' And to refer to Barclay again, he taught that ' God hath placed His Spirit in every man, to inform him of his duty and to enable him to do it.' Coming to our own day, the poet Whittier wrote in his last years, ' I have an unshaken faith in the one distinctive doctrine of Quakerism — the light within — the Immanence of the Divine Spirit.' But, as a leading member of the Society of Friends has well said, this doctrine has never been

' adequately harmonised, either with a sound conception of Authority, or with the Divine revelation which they, in common with more orthodox Christians, found in the Christ of history.'9

It is a great satisfaction, however, to know that there are many among the Friends to-day who hold faithfully to the supremacy of the written word and to the need of that in association with the Holy Spirit as the foundation of spiritual authority. To speak of this ' inner light ' as an ' immediate revelation ' of God to the individual is to allege what is not warranted by anything we know of primitive Christian truth, while it confuses between revelation and illumination. The weakness of the theory is seen in the fact that it involves something like a claim to individual infallibility and the denial of any objective authority, whether in the Bible or in the united Christian consciousness of the centuries. No Mysticism, or ' inner light ' can be safe which tends to dispense with, or ignore the historic Christ or the New Testament.

' Mystical experiences are an unquestionable fact in man's life. The weakness of mysticism is that it is subjective, emotional, and indeterminate. Christ made it objective by grounding it in a personal God, and He made it cognitive as well as emotional by the specific character which He assigned to God as Father, and He made it determinate and practical by prescribing an ethical task. Jesus was a mystic of the most pronounced type if we define mysticism as fellowship with God. But Jesus was no mystic at all if mysticism be regarded as an indeterminate emotional communion with the infinite without specific theological meaning and apart from the moral life.'10

The danger lies in the occupation of the soul with what is thought to be fellowship with the exalted Christ, and in letting the historic Jesus fall into the background. But this will not happen if we honour and make prominent the Holy Spirit, and allow Him to do His work. He will witness to the redemptive, mediatorial work of Christ in Whom alone salvation is made possible. Redemption is by the truth (2 Thess. ii. 13), and truth is only embodied in the Personal Christ. Faith to be real must have a foundation, and it inevitably fails if it is not constantly based on historic fact. The Holy Spirit is no vague impersonal influence or principle, but a Divine Indwelling Person Who glorifies Christ as Redeemer, Life, and Lord (i Cor. xii. 3).

' To measure truly the Christianity of an age we must ask how far it grasps God's true gift, and not how eagerly or finely it seeks it. What is its conception of salvation? What is it that makes it religious? What is the object of its religion? Do not ask, What is its dream? or, What is its programme or its piety? but, What is its Gospel? Do not ask. What is its experience? Ask what emerges in its experience? It is not the lack of religiosity that ails the Church, it is the lack of a Gospel and a faith, the lack of a spiritual authority and a response to it. For the leaders of the Reformation the gift was not an institution, nor was it vaguely a Christian spirit, but the Holy Spirit as personal life. It was direct and personal communion with a gracious and saving God in Jesus Christ.'11

While, therefore, we are thankful for all that Quakerism has done in its initial protest against a rigid ecclesiasticism, its emphasis on inward and spiritual religion, and its insistence upon social, moral, national, and international obligations,12 we are compelled to call attention to the vital danger of a doctrine of the inner light which tends to separate the Spirit from the Word, and to open the door to tendencies which are far removed from the simplicity and soberness, balance and beauty of New Testament truth.13

From an entirely different quarter the same tendency, to which also is given the name of Mysticism, appears in the exaggerated emphasis on Christian experience, which finds its best expression in Dale's The Living Christ and the Four Gospels. This argues that even though the Gospels were disproved as historical documents, we should still be enabled to rest upon the experience of Christ in the heart. By some this position is accepted as a refuge from modern critical problems and disturbances. It is thought that the intellectual unsettlement and uncertainty due to Biblical Criticism can be practically nullified by the protection of a personal experience of Jesus Christ. But such a position really overlooks the fact that absolute independence of the Gospels is utterly impossible, because this necessarily predicates an imaginary Christ of Whom we know nothing.14 Besides, it is in reality a confession of intellectual defeat and cowardice which cannot satisfy the minds of men. The true attitude of the soul is surely the determination to face its doubts and gather strength by recurring again to Scripture, and by seeking the solution of the problems of criticism in the only right way of a deeper historic insight and a fuller experience of the Holy Spirit in relation to the truth. It is the bounden duty of every man to use his reason to the utmost in all these questions of criticism, and yet to remember the need of his reason being illuminated by the Word and the Spirit. Whatever may be said about the Bible as a whole, it is absolutely certain that we still possess, as Forsyth says, ' the infallible and historic Gospel ' in it and ' the infallible and present Spirit.' In this ' lies our standard and control,'15 and this is the irreducible minimum which Christendom cannot remove or explain away.

The peril of these forms of Mysticism, whether represented by Quakerism or by the emphasis on Christian experience, lies in the severance of the Word and the Spirit. The Christian doctrine of an immediate communion of the soul with God is only possible through the union of the Divine Word and the Divine Spirit. For guidance and inspiration we must have truth. For purity we must have holiness. For consolation we must have grace. And these are only available through the Word of God and the Spirit of God.

' We need more mystic souls and mystic hours. But the true mysticism is not raptly dwelling in the mystery of God, it is really living on His miracle. It is not prolonged elation but sure salvation. And the only mysticism with a lease of life is that which surrounds the moral miracle which makes Christianity in the end evangelical or nothing. It is the mysticism of the Cross.'16

It is the association of the Word and the Spirit which constitutes vital Christianity, preserving us on the one hand from a dry orthodoxy, and on the other from a mere pietistic sentimentality. We must hold with all possible tenacity to the immediate action of the Spirit on the believing soul, but it is always through the Word of the Truth of the Gospel.

' The action of the Spirit is immediate to the soul yet not unmediated by the Word. The Spirit when He had set the Word down in history did not abdicate for it and its rich posthumous effects. He is always there, personally with and over it. But in bringing it to our experience He does not come to it from the outside, nor simply work alongside. He is immanent always to the Word (for this Word is a perpetual act); He imbues it, flushes it, brings it, carries it home from within for the individual soul.'17

We therefore insist on both elements, never the one without the other. The Spirit without the Word will result in intellectual vagueness; the Word without the Spirit in spiritual dryness.

' Spiritualism, left to itself, does mean the dissolution of the Churches and of Christianity. But then evangelism left to itself, the mere re-echo of the Word without the vitality of the Spirit, is no less fatal. If the one pulverise the Church the other petrifies it.'18

The Christian consciousness can never be the seat of authority, because it necessarily differs with different men.19 The only absolute standard and test of truth is the Divine revelation of God in Christ, and this is to be found in Scripture alone. As we approximate towards the truth revealed there, we shall have safety, certainty, and enjoyment, but in so far as we allow ourselves to be ruled by subjective criteria, we must never be surprised at the recurrence and persistence of intellectual uncertainty and lack of spiritual conviction. When the Word and the Spirit are blended and brought to bear on the believing soul they correct, steady, balance, and protect it under all circumstances.

' Christian mysticism therefore reposes, not on the depths of subliminal being, which give no footing for any authority that royalises life, but upon the miracle of the forgiven conscience of the world and its holy redemption.'20

It is no doubt true that the recent rapid increase of Mysticism is one of the most significant signs of the times, yet, it must be said again, no religion of direct personal experience will ever suffice to meet the problems raised by philosophy, socialism, criticism and ecclesiasticism. The dangers of institutionalism, of the corporate idea, of pantheistic thought are real and pressing, but they will not be met by a faith which has no authority but its own conceptions, intuitions and desires. The objective authority of the Word of God and the Spirit of God can alone suffice for human life. And so, while we can welcome every movement that tends towards direct intercourse with God and a definite spiritual experience of God in the soul, we must not forget the truth of Saphir's words that, though every Christian is a mystic, not every mystic is a Christian.

Literature. — Davison, The Indwelling Spirit, chs. xv., xvi.; Garvie, The Christian Certainty amid the Modern Perplexity, chs. xi., xiii., xiv., xvii.; Hodgkin, The Trial of our Faith, ch. x. ' George Fox '; Grubb, Authority and the Light Within; Forsyth, Faith, Freedom, and the Future, chs. i.-vi.; Fleming, Mysticism in Christianity.

1 Garvie, The Christian Certainty amid the Modern Perplexity, p. 177.

2 Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, p. 463.

3 Garvie, op. cit. p. 177.

4 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 181. See also p. 183.

5 Barclay, Apologia.

6 Hodgkin, The Trial of our Faith, p. 260.

7 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 272.

8 Forsyth, op. cit. p. 282.

9 Grubb, Authority and the Light Within, p. 6. See also pp. 39, 83.

10 Mullins, Freedom and Authority in Religion, p. 233.

11 Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, p. 23. See also Mullins, op. cit. p. 318.

12 Forsyth, Faith, Freedom, and the Future, pp. 42, 43.

13 Forsyth, Faith, Freedom, and the Future, p. 211. See also ch. i., and the entire book for the relation of the Reformation to Quakerism through Anabaptism.

14 Garvie, op. cit. p. 381 ff.

15 Forsyth, Faith, Freedom, and the Future, pp. 210, 211.

16 Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, p. 465.

17 Forsyth, Faith, Freedom, and the Future, p. 29.

18 Forsyth, Faith, Freedom, and the Future, p. 42. See also Elder Gumming, Through the Eternal Spirit, p. 371.

19 Mullins, op. cit. pp. 53, 298.

20 Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, p. 470.