All these modes of argument reappear in our nineteenth century perfectionists and become stereotyped in them. It is impossible to say how far they are derived from Barclay directly or indirectly—from reading his “Apology,” which had long since become the Quaker “classic,” and was not suffered to mold on dusty shelves; or from contact with those who carried forward his teaching in living tradition. Barclay was not the first to frame them nor the only accessible source from which they could be derived. And this may illustrate the difficulty in determining how far Quaker influences coöperated in producing the perfectionism of nineteenth century America. It was there; it was a vera causa; but the extent of its contribution to the effect is indeterminate. Let us only remind ourselves that Robert Pearsall Smith, and Hannah Whitall Smith were both of Quaker birth and breeding. They received their perfectionism directly from Methodism. But we can hardly be wrong in assuming that they had been prepared for receiving it by their Quaker associations. In Hannah Whitall Smith’s case this is demonstrably true. And it was she who took the lead in their common adoption of perfectionism.⁴ She remained, it requires to be remarked, a Quaker all her life, and was perhaps more and more a Quaker as she grew in years.⁵

The name of William Law slips off of the pen of more than one of the perfectionist writers of nineteenth century America. Off of that of John Humphrey Noyes, for example. Noyes considers Law, whom he represents as the real father of Methodist Perfectionism, the best of the Mystical Perfectionists,⁶ and his “Address to the Clergy” (1761) his best book.⁷ Law is also repeatedly quoted, as he could not fail to be, by Thomas Cogswell Upham.⁸ But it would be absurd to attribute to this aloof high-churchman any large influence in the production of movements to which he stood in no other connection than that of relative nearness in time. While Law gives large expression to his mysticism, moreover, he speaks only occasionally and briefly of its perfectionist corollary, and makes, therefore, only a limited appeal to those whose interests lay chiefly in the latter region. Even Upham passes over him to find the sources of his mystical doctrine of perfection in those Quietistic writers of the preceding century of whom Law apparently thought as meanly as he could think of any mystic.⁹ What we find in Upham is in fact a sustained attempt to revive the specifically Quietistic perfectionism of the seventeenth century, and to give it a new vogue in the conditions of the nineteenth century life of America. For this purpose he drew on the whole series of Quietistic writers from Miguel de Molinos himself to Antoinette Bourignon, and adapted them to his purpose with the utmost freedom, not to say violence. His attitude toward these writers was the precise opposite of Law’s. Recognizing, of course, the presence in them of the general mystical conception in which he shared, Law, nevertheless, repelled with the utmost disfavor the extravagances which constituted their peculiarity and made them what we know as Quietists. Upham, on the contrary, laid a remolding hand on these very extravagances, and by a skillful firmness or firm skillfulness of dealing with them, transmuted them into a tolerable likeness to evangelical Protestantism. By this means he built up on their basis a complete system of mystical perfection, which stands out boldly in a certain—though not very deeply going—contrast with the other systems of perfection launched in such profusion in his day among the Protestants of New England inheritance.

Thomas Cogswell Upham came of a distinguished New Hampshire family, members of which have attained eminence in a variety of activities, through a series of generations, and not least in his own.¹⁰ He was one of four brothers all of whom won recognition as men of conspicuous ability. He was born at Deerfield, New Hampshire, where his grandfather had served as pastor for a generation, on the 30th of January, 1799. It was in the autumn of this year (November 9) that Asa Mahan also was born. These two perfectionist leaders were, therefore, close contemporaries. The superior advantages which Upham enjoyed, however, showed themselves in his more rapid advancement. He was finishing his scholastic preparation about the time when Mahan was beginning his. He was graduated from college two years before Mahan entered; and had published his first book—an excellent translation of Johann Jahn’s “Biblical Archæology” (1823)—a year before Mahan was graduated. By the time Mahan had completed his theological course (1827), Upham had already been for three years seated in the chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Bowdoin College—a chair which he occupied for the rest of his active life—and had published his “Elements of Intellectual Philosophy” (1827), by which his reputation as a thinker was established. On the other hand, Mahan was the first of the two to obtain the “second blessing” and to enter upon the career of a perfectionist teacher. The light that came to him in the winter of 1836–1837 did not reach Upham until 1839. Mahan wished to believe that he was the channel of its conveyance to Upham. That, however, was not the fact; and he must content himself with the honor of having in this matter of the first importance to both of them not merely overtaken Upham, but forestalled him by two or three years. He was publishing his first perfectionist book—his “Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection” (1839)—about the time that Upham was just attaining perfection. Upham’s first perfectionist book—the “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life” (1843)—followed, however, at no more than the due interval. It would be hard to say which one was, after this, the more diligent in propagating their common opinions.

Dartmouth was Upham’s college, and 1818 was his year of graduation. The period of his residence there was a time of great turmoil. During it the great Dartmouth College controversy was fought out. It was in 1815 that John Wheelock was, after much violent debate, removed by the Trustees from the Presidency of the College, and Francis Brown elected in his stead. It was in 1816 that the usurping action of the Legislature, voiding all the college’s vested rights, was taken. It was on March 10, 1818, that Daniel Webster’s famous argument in the case which resulted, was made before the United States Supreme Court, presided over by John Marshall, and through it the sacredness of private trusts was established, as a principle of American law. The whole college, officers and students alike, shared in the distraction of this long excitement. The new president, Francis Brown, was broken by the strain and died in 1820. There would seem no room in this preoccupation for another strong emotion to enter in. Nevertheless, at the very moment when the struggle between Trustees and President was reaching its climax,¹¹ in the spring of 1815, a remarkable revival of religion broke, unheralded and unexpected, upon the college. Nathan Lord, Brown’s successor in the presidency, writing in 1832, gives an account of it.¹² “At once, and without premonition,” he says, “the Spirit of God evidently descended, and saved the great body of the students. A general and almost instantaneous solemnity prevailed. Almost before Christians became aware of God’s presence, and increased their supplications, the impenitent were deeply convicted of sin, and besought instructions of their officers. The chapel, the recitation room, every place of meeting became a scene of weeping, and presently of rejoicing; so that in a few weeks about sixty students were supposed to have become regenerate. A revival of such rapidity and power has been rarely known, and perhaps never one of such unquestionable fruits. Not one of the number of apparent converts, at that time, is known to have forfeited a Christian standing. Most of them are ministers of the gospel, a few are missionaries, and all are still using their influence for Christ.”

Upham himself tells us that he “supposes” that he “experienced religion” “in connection with” this revival.¹³ It is not probable that he meant by this language to throw doubt on the genuineness of the religious experience which he then enjoyed. It is not impossible, of course, that, looking back upon it from the exaltation of his “second conversion,” it had lost in his mind some of its significance. It is more likely, however, that it seemed in retrospect less certain than at the moment, that what he then experienced was the inception of religious life, rather than perhaps an intensified manifestation of a life already existing. Throughout his writings he exhibits a marked distaste for religious excitement, and with it an unmistakable distrust of revivals of excitement.¹⁴ Whether his religious life began in the revival of the spring of 1815, or not, however, it flowed on thence unbrokenly. He does not appear, it is true, to have made a formal profession of his faith, by uniting with the (Congregational) Church, until about the time of his graduation, three years later. He proceeded then, however, at once to the theological seminary at Andover, whence he was graduated in 1821. The professors under whose instruction he came at Andover were Leonard Woods, Moses Stuart, Ebenezer Porter and James Murdock; and he came in contact there (as indeed he had done at Dartmouth)¹⁵ with many young men as fellow students who afterward achieved distinction. Among his classmates were Baxter Dickinson, afterward to be a professor in Lane and then in Auburn Seminary; Charles D. Pigeon, the capable editor of The Literary and Theological Review; and Alva Woods, who had a notable academic career in the South: while in the other classes in the seminary with him there were to be met such men as Orville Dewey, Jonas King, Joseph Torrey, Elias Cornelius, Francis Wayland, Rufus Anderson, Leonard Bacon. His career at Andover was a distinguished one. During the last year of his course (1820–1821) he also served as a teacher in Phillips Academy. And after his graduation he remained two years at the seminary as instructor in Sacred Literature—under Moses Stuart. The last of these years he was registered also as “resident licentiate” (1823). It was during these years that he prepared his translation of Johann Jahn’s compendium on “Biblical Archæology,” the first edition of which bears the date of 1823, and the fifth, stereotyped, edition came out in the fifties.¹⁶

Of his own interior life during this period of preparation there seems to have survived little direct record. We are not without indirect intimations, however, which warrant the pleasantest inferences. When pleading on one occasion for the union of spiritual with mental culture in the education of youth, he draws a beautiful picture of what he found in Phillips Academy, in which we can read his own heart. “In early life,” he writes,¹⁷ “I had the privilege of being associated, for a short time, in an institution, where it seemed to me that some of these views were happily illustrated. The studies always opened in the morning and closed at night with religious services. The first half hour of every morning, in particular, was devoted to the reading of the Scriptures, the explanatory and practical remarks of the worthy and learned instructor, and to prayer. And it was understood by all, whatever might be the state of their own minds, that this religious exercise was regarded by the teacher as one of preëminent importance. When he came before his pupils on this occasion, they did not doubt that he had first commended them to God in private; and that of all objects which he desired and had at heart, there was none so dear to him as their souls’ salvation. Every movement was stilled; every voice hushed; every eye fixed. And whatever might be their creed or want of creed, their religious adhesions or aversions, such was their sympathy with his obvious sense of responsibility and his divine sincerity, that even the hearts of the infidel and the profane were cheerfully laid open before him; so that with their own consent he was enabled, by means of his prayers and warnings, to write upon them, as it were, inscriptions for immortality. I was not a pupil in the seminary to which I refer, but an assistant teacher; and had a good opportunity to observe and judge. My own heart never failed to be profoundly affected; and, from what I have learned and known of his pupils since, scattered as they have been in all parts of the world, and engaged in various occupations, I have no doubt that God eminently blessed the faithful labors of this good man, and that he was permitted to realize in his instructions, to an extent not often witnessed, the beautiful union of the culture of the heart with that of the understanding.”¹⁸

When Upham left Andover in 1823 it was to become pastor of the Congregational Church at Rochester, New Hampshire—his “home church”¹⁹—where he was ordained July 16, 1823. He remained at this post, however, only a single year. In 1824 he received an invitation to become Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Tutor in Hebrew at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine; and accepting it, entered upon what proved to be his life-work. He continued in the active work of his chair from 1824 to 1867, and then, becoming Professor Emeritus, retired to Kennebunkport, where his later years were spent. He died in the city of New York, April 2, 1872. The literary activity which had begun at Andover was continued with renewed vigor at Bowdoin. By the time he was forty years old he had printed eight separate works. There were included in these a treatise on the polity of Congregationalism (1829),²⁰ and a very notable plea for universal peace, including the suggestion of a “Congress of Nations” (1836).²¹ But, as is natural, the larger place among them is given to treatises in his own special department of instruction. These treatises, taken together, constitute a comprehensive discussion of the whole field, written with charming simplicity and directness, and manifesting a very wide acquaintance with the literature of the subject, and, with it, clear and acute thinking. The “Elements of Intellectual Philosophy” appeared already in 1827, to be followed in 1831 by “Elements of Mental Philosophy, Embracing the Two Departments of Intellect and the Sensibilities” (of which an abridged edition also was at once published),²² in 1834 by “A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Will,” and in 1840 by “Outlines of Imperfect and Disordered Mental Action.” The inclusion of the last of these treatises in his scheme of a comprehensive discussion of mental faculty and action, may serve to suggest to us the wide range and rather popular character of Upham’s method of treatment. He keeps himself always in contact with life and the common interests of life, and enlivens his pages with copious illustrations drawn from a wide acquaintance with literature. Above all the interests of religion, and very specifically of the Christian religion, are everywhere kept in view. The books have quite as much the flavor of a Christian minister instructing his people, as of a professor of philosophy, lecturing his class: they are almost as much theology as psychology.

We see at once that Upham carried his religion to Bowdoin with him and did not sink it in his academic work.²³ We are not surprised to learn, therefore, that outside the class-room he was looked to by his pupils for guidance in their times of religious distress.²⁴ We find, for instance, young Henry Boynton Smith, when, in the course of a notable revival which visited Bowdoin College in 1834, he was smitten in his conscience and awakened to his soul’s needs, turning to him especially for counsel and direction. Smith had been bred under Unitarian influences, and his perplexities were accordingly as much theological as practical. But it is quite clear that Upham was no less helpful to him in his distresses than in his difficulties. “Last evening,” he writes,²⁵ “Professor Upham came in, and we conversed a long while. I stated to him, fully and explicitly, my doubts, fears, hopes, and, in fine, my situation in every respect, and he talked to me calmly and reasonably. I am to see him again this afternoon.” Then, some three weeks later: “I talked with Professor Upham about the Trinity. Of one thing I feel assured, that I need an infinite Saviour. Further than that, may the Lord in his mercy and wisdom guide me! My prejudices were fixed in regard to this point as well as to the innate sinfulness of men. On the latter point I am convinced. As to the former, I know nothing but that Christ is my Redeemer and has atoned for my sins.” Young Smith won out as we know, and was born once for all to God. What part Upham’s counsel really played in the great change we can only conjecture. Smith’s was the stronger mind of the two, and he soon passed into the position of the teacher, not the taught. But he retained Upham in warm friendship; and it is clear enough that, in this episode at least, in which the corner of the veil has been lifted that we may see him at work, what we see in Upham is the devoted man of God.

We have thought it worth while to make this clear, because Upham’s own account of his state of mind at this time is not altogether cheering. Of course he did not doubt his interest in his Saviour. But he was not happy in his religious life. He had early set a high ideal of religious attainment before himself and he was conscious of not having reached it. He advanced sometimes, he says, and then again was thrown back, “living what may be called the common Christian life of sinning and repenting, of alternate walking with God and devotedness to the world.”²⁶ He is looking back on himself here from the heights of his “second conversion,” and describing his earlier experience from that more elevated point of sight: and from the same point of sight, he suggests that the difficulty he experienced in attaining the state he longed for was, in part at least, due to “the discouraging influence of the prevalent doctrine that personal sanctification cannot fully take place till death.” It is plain, however, that he was not acquiescent in his shortcomings. Apparently, as time went on, his sense of them continued ever unabated; and he seems to wish us to understand that his sense of personal danger in view of them steadily increased. This emphasis on his increasing sense of danger in view of his shortcomings makes the unpleasant impression that the righteousness of Christ was becoming to his apprehension ever less sufficient as the ground of his hope: that he was growing ever more anxious to supplement it, or supersede it, by a righteousness of his own: that he was uneasy—increasingly so—so long as he had nothing but Christ’s righteousness to rest upon. It is probable, however, that he intends no more than to convey a strong impression of the distress the consciousness of his shortcomings gave him, and his consequent increasing anxiety to be completely delivered from them. He wishes us in any event to understand that anything short of complete deliverance from sin was becoming intolerable to him, and thus to prepare the way for his account of how he sought and obtained the “second blessing.” If this is all that he means, however, he has expressed himself badly.

He proceeds now, in any case, to describe at considerable length, how, spurred on by his uneasiness or fear, he sought and at length found the “second blessing.” “In this state of mind,” he writes,²⁷ “I was led, early in the summer of 1839, by a series of special providences, which it is here unnecessary to detail, to examine the subject of personal holiness, as a matter of personal realization.” Conducting this examination, as he thought, “prayerfully, candidly and faithfully, looking at the various objections as well as the multiplied evidences,” he was led to the conclusion “that God required” him “to be holy, that He had made provision for it, and that it was both” his “duty” and his “privilege to be so.” “The establishment” of his “belief in this great doctrine was followed,” he tells us, “by a number of pleasing and important results.” One was that he “felt a great increase of obligation to be holy.” God required him to be holy, and God does not require impossibilities: on the contrary God’s requirement of him to be holy involved “an implied promise” to give aid in the accomplishment of the required result. Accordingly, “within a few days after rejecting the common doctrine, that sanctification is fully attainable only in the article of death, and receiving the doctrine of the possibility and duty of present holiness, I consecrated myself,” he says, “to God, body and spirit, deliberately, voluntarily, and forever.” There were no witnesses, and no formal written document; “it was a simple volition.” But simple as the act was, it marked a crisis in his moral life. The date was about the middle of July, 1839, and the step taken was not in his view without a certain boldness in it: he was not perfectly instructed as yet in the way of life; he was acting “in comparative darkness,” walking by faith, not by sight. It seemed, however, justified by the effects. “Two almost immediate and marked results followed this act of consecration. The one was an immediate removal of the sense of condemnation, which had followed me for many years, and had filled my mind with sorrow. The other result, which also almost immediately followed, was a greatly increased value and love of the Bible.”

We have thus far been told nothing of any influence from without directing Upham to the new paths he was entering. He does speak, to be sure, of having been led by “special providences” to study the subject; and this may be taken to imply some sort of impulse received from without. The carefulness of his examination of the matter, which he emphasizes, moreover, may suggest that he sought aid where aid was to be found. There seems, however, to be a studied implication running through his whole narrative, that he went his own way and was his own guide. We reach a point now, however, where contact with those who were before him in believing his new doctrine and seeking to exemplify it in their lives, becomes decisive for his experience. He visited New York on business, he tells us, in December, 1839. That business, he says, “brought” him “into connection with certain persons who belonged to the Methodist denomination.” “I was,” he continues, “providentially led to form an acquaintance with other pious Methodists, and was exceedingly happy in attending a number of meetings which had exclusive reference to the doctrine of holiness and to personal holy experience.” He made known to his new friends his own recently acquired belief in the doctrine of holiness, and of his attitude as a seeker of the experience: and they greatly cheered and aided him. Precisely what they did for him, he tells us, was to remove a difficulty which stood in the way of his victorious progress. That was his “ignorance of the important principle, that sanctification, as well as justification, is by faith.” He had put himself, it is true, in a favorable position to exercise this faith, by consecrating himself to God. “But” he “had never understood and felt the imperative necessity of this exercise, viz., of faith, as a sanctifying instrumentality.” He is explicit that it was his “Methodist friends” who gave him his needed instruction here. And it was because of this new point of view solely, he intimates, that he was enabled “in some degree”—“in a very considerable degree”—now to gain the victory. He can date the very day when he gained it. “It was early on Friday morning, the twenty-seventh of December.” “The evening previous had been spent in deeply interesting conversation and in prayer on the subject of holiness, and with particular reference to myself. Soon after I awoke in the morning I found that my mind, without having experienced any very remarkable manifestations or ecstasies, had, nevertheless, undergone a great moral revolution. It was removed from the condition of a servant, and adopted into that of a son.… I had no ecstasy, but great and abiding peace and consolation.”

Under the influence of these feelings Upham now consecrated himself anew to God; and this time he did it formally in a written document. He still was unable to speak confidently of having actually experienced “sanctification.” Consecration and sanctification are different things, although it is possible that the latter may follow the former immediately—God’s work follows man’s act. This did not occur, however, in Upham’s case. He had received great blessings—“a new sense of forgiveness, increased love, actual evidence of adoption and sonship, clear and deeper communion with God.” But something was still lacking. He left New York about the middle of January, 1840, and at once on reaching home, “united with some Methodist brethren in establishing a meeting similar to those which had benefited” him “so much in New York, for the purpose of promoting present godliness.” This meeting was open to persons of all denominations of Christians—that is, it took the form of a perfectionist propaganda. “Nevertheless,” he says, that is to say, despite his earnest seeking, “I was unable for about two weeks to profess the personal experience and realization of the great blessing of holiness, as it seemed to be experienced and realized by others.” Two weeks may seem to us a very short time in which to become perfectly holy. Upham felt them a long delay. The difficulty, he says, was that “while other evils were greatly or entirely removed,” he was still conscious of “the remainders of selfishness.” It seemed indeed as if the principle of self-love was even stimulated in him. He was no doubt not more selfish than before; but he felt it more. He prayed fervently for the realization in time of perfect love, though he did not fully know its nature.

On February 2, 1850—Sabbath evening—he suffered great affliction of mind. On the next morning—Monday—he was for the first time able to say that he loved the Heavenly Father with all his soul and all his strength. This attainment once made was permanent. Ever after his heart expressed itself in this language—language, he says, “which involves, as I understand it, the true idea of Christian perfection or holiness.” “There was no intellectual excitement,” he tells us, “no very marked joy when I reached this great rock of practical salvation.” “The soul had gathered strength from the storm it had passed through the preceding night; and, aided by a power from on high, it leaped forward, as it were, by a bound to the great and decisive mark.” He was distinctly conscious of the attainment made. Those selfish exercises which had troubled him were gone; he was now sanctified. Temptations, no doubt, continued, and “it would be presumption to assert positively,” he says, that there has never since been a lapse. But there certainly has been a new life, and the “witness of the Spirit” has been constant. This “witness” is not delivered in the way of reasoning or of reflection; “it is a sort of interior voice, which speaks silently and effectively to the soul.” There have even been times—for example, on February 14, 1840—when “some remarkable operations on the mind” were experienced. These are indescribable. The stress is laid, however, on ordinary spiritual succor. His whole soul turns from self to God, and all his longing sums itself up in the desire for union with God.

In this luminous narrative we have merely a typical account of the attainment of the “second blessing” or the experience of the “second conversion.” It differs from other similar accounts only in its unusually clear analysis of the several steps or stages of the experience; perhaps these steps or stages were more clearly marked in Upham’s case than usual. There is traced first the rise of the conviction of the obligation to be holy; then the discovery of the way by faith alone; and then the somewhat lagging actual attainment by faith of the blessing. Every step was taken under Methodist influence, or rather direction: this is explicitly noted in every instance except the first, where we read only of the direction of “providence.” That this formed no exception to the others—the exact nature of the providential circumstances thus alluded to—we learn from a narrative which Mrs. Upham gives us, in the same volume,²⁸ of her own experiences as she journeyed to the same goal, some six months or so earlier.

She had been for fifteen years a professing Christian, she says, before she found the way. “I never heard of the doctrine of entire holiness,” she explains, “as a thing to be realized in this life, until February, 1839.” “When I tell you,” she adds apologetically, speaking to Phoebe Palmer and her circle, “that I do not belong to your, order”—that is, to the Methodist Church—“and have never been at all associated with people of this belief, you will be able to account better for my ignorance.” We could not have a more direct assertion than this, that the experiences she is about to relate were the only ones operative on her in her “second conversion.” “In the good providence of God,” she now proceeds, “I went last February”—that is, February, 1839, and we observe that she is writing within the year after the experiences narrated—“into a Methodist protracted meeting. I heard a sister there speak as I never before heard a man or woman speak. A holy composure sat on her countenance, and she seemed to me to be breathing the atmosphere of heaven. She spoke with the simplicity and love of the beloved disciple, who leaned on Jesus’ bosom. I sought a private interview with her. I opened to her my heart. I told her I lived in a state of daily condemnation, and I had never indulged a hope of living above that state. Then, for the first time in my life I heard of Jesus, a present Saviour from all sin.” Here we have an explicit statement that Mrs. Upham heard of the holiness doctrine for the first time from this woman. “I had only one interview with this sister,” she continues, “as she left town, having been here only on a visit. Alone, unaided, except by the Spirit of God, I pursued the doctrine of heart holiness.… I soon became speculatively convinced, not only of the extent of God’s requirements, but of the obligation and the ability of the Christian to fulfill these requirements in and through Jesus, who, I saw, was manifested to take away our sins.” In these circumstances it was natural that she should set herself to make the attainment which she perceived to be required of her. The Bible alone was her guide. She saw and believed. Her efforts to be holy failed: but faith conquered its way. “For the last year I can say,” she writes, “the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God.”

Now, Mrs. Upham tells us²⁹ that she was led, on May 25, 1839, publicly—“at a public prayer-meeting,” she says—“to declare the greatness of the salvation she had experienced.” We will recall that Upham’s examination of the matter was undertaken “early in the summer of 1839.” The appearance is that Mrs. Upham’s publication of her own experience constituted the “providential circumstances” which led to Upham’s inquiry. Thus the only obscure point in his narrative is cleared up; and the beginning as well as the prosecution of his “second conversion” is brought under direct Methodist influence. It is quite clear that we have in the cases of Upham and his wife nothing more than instances of conversion to Wesleyan Perfectionism. All this, perfectly plain in itself, is authenticated now by an absolutely contemporary entry in Phoebe Palmer’s diary of the date of January 3, 1840.³⁰ She tells us here that Mrs. Upham had been led by the simple testimony of a Methodist sister to seek “the blessing” and had entered into the enjoyment of it. The difficulties thrown in her way by her connection with the Congregational Church (which discountenanced the experience itself and also the speaking of women in the church) were “overcome,” and Mrs. Upham bore her public testimony to her new experience. Her husband, however, held back. “For several months, he was skeptical as to his privilege in reference to this blessing,” though he had come to be assured of the glory of the inheritance. He came to New York to attend to the publication of his book on “The Will,”³¹ and Mrs. Upham, who accompanied him, found her way to the famous Tuesday holiness-meeting for women, which for a whole generation was held in Phoebe Palmer’s parlor.³² She asked the privilege of bringing her husband to the meeting. This was granted and some other gentlemen were invited to be also present. Upham came and was deeply impressed. On the following Thursday he had a long interview with Phoebe Palmer and the next morning entered into the rest of faith.

The close relations thus established between him and Phoebe Palmer naturally were maintained. We find him writing to her on March 24 following, and again, in September, in accents of deep gratitude. His experience in her parlor, he tells her, was “in religion, the ‘beginning of days’ ” to him; and Mrs. Upham declares to her (March 24), “you have begotten him in the gospel.” They are glad to inform her that they have set up a meeting in their own house modeled after hers, where (Mrs. Upham says, with wifely pride) Upham spoke tenderly to the people of his great blessing.³³ There can be no question that Phoebe Palmer looked upon Upham and Upham looked upon himself as her pupil; and so strong was her sense of this relation that when she found him after a while wandering from the path in which she had placed his feet she did not hesitate, in her capacity as instructress, soundly to rebuke him, and to point him back to the right way.³⁴

It has seemed desirable to make the facts of Upham’s “second conversion” perfectly clear for several reasons. One of them is, of course, because they are intrinsically interesting. Another is because of the importance, for the understanding of his career, of the circumstance that his perfectionist doctrine was fundamentally just the Wesleyan doctrine. A third is because a different and misleading representation has been made with respect to the source from which he derived his new knowledge. To put it brusquely, Asa Mahan has pointed to him as a trophy of his own spear. He shows, to be sure, a (somewhat distorted) knowledge of the circumstances; but with that fine self-centeredness which often characterizes the mental attitude of “selfless” saints, he reads them chiefly in his own honor. He enjoyed Phoebe Palmer’s acquaintance,³⁵ and one would have wished to see him gladly leave her in quiet possession of a feather in her cap in which she took pride. This, however, is how he deals with the matter:³⁶ “The spiritual writings of the late³⁷ Professor Upham, of Bowdoin College, in the State of Maine, U. S., are ‘known and read of all men.’ The manner in which he became such a fruitful writer on such a theme was on this wise. When the peculiar views advocated at Oberlin were spread before the public, he took it for granted that they were wrong, and gave them no examination. Mrs. Upham, however, was induced by a lady friend, then residing in the family of the former, to give our writings a careful examination—her husband, in the kindest manner possible, often expressing his utter incredulity in respect to the subject. Mrs. Upham at length became fully convinced, and sought and obtained ‘the sealing and earnest of the Spirit.’ The new life to which she had attained, and that in connection with the manifest divineness of the change wrought in her, soon arrested the attention of her husband, and induced him also to inquire, until he was brought fully to accept the views which the wife had embraced. It was the example of the wife, as an epistle of Christ, that rendered the husband ‘the man of God’ and the spiritual writer which he afterwards became.”

It may be just within the bounds of possibility that the Uphams had “the Oberlin writings” in their hands during their period of stress and strain. When this period began for Mrs. Upham, in February, 1839, there were, however, no expositions of Oberlin Perfectionism generally accessible, except the two lectures on “Christian Perfection” included in Finney’s “Lectures to Professing Christians” (1837) and whatever was contained in the first two or three numbers of The Oberlin Evangelist, which was started at the close of 1838. In these early numbers there was published, it is true, Mahan’s famous address, which formed the nucleus of his little book on “Christian Perfection,” which was just now on the eve of publication and which may have been in Upham’s hands in the summer. It cannot be affirmed, therefore, that Mrs. Upham could not, or may not, have read these expositions, or that Upham did not read them later; and if they read them there is no reason why they should not be supposed to have received instruction from them. But in the face of their own detailed accounts of their experience, it is impossible to ascribe to these writings—even if read—any such part as Mahan assigns to them. It is perfectly clear that the Uphams were the converts, not of Oberlin, but of the Methodists.

Something more requires to be said. There is some reason to doubt whether “the Oberlin writings,” had they been read, would have made an altogether favorable impression upon the Uphams. Upham himself, at any rate, was of a markedly different spirit from the Oberlin men, especially if we look upon Finney as their type; and there are numerous remarks scattered through his writings which bear the appearance at least of referring with distaste to their noisy and bustling religion. Quietness is the mark of Upham’s piety.³⁸ “Quiet men,” says he,³⁹ “other things being equal, are the truly strong men.” He deprecates not only the religious excitement of visions and dreams and revelations, but also the religion of nervous and even of strong emotional manifestations. He wishes the emotions, “whenever they make their appearance,” to be “so kept under control, as never to disturb the calmness of the perceptive and rational action of the mind.”⁴⁰ It is not by way of vagrant impulse and unregulated feeling, he says, that we come to know God or His will. God is a God of order. It is impossible to doubt that in some of the remarks of this kind which he makes, the phenomena of the Finney revivals are lying at the back of his mind. He frankly did not like them. He would have had but little pleasure in the strong tremors which have often moved the hearts of those who, like the Oberlin men, saw God in the whirlwind and the storm. His own ears listened for the still, small voice. “Fanaticism,” says he very significantly,⁴¹ “is characterized, among other things which help to define it, by being out of repose, by being restless, excitable, visionary, and denunciatory.… Granting that he [the fanatic] has a disposition to do good, it is still true, that he aims, although perhaps he is not distinctly conscious of it, to do God’s work in man’s hasty and selfish temper.… He is in too much of a hurry for God himself …” As he wrote these words, did he not have Finney’s “denunciatory revivals,” as Lyman Beecher called them, in mind? “I have sometimes thought,” he says,⁴² “that persons of flighty conceptions and vigorous enthusiasm would regard the Savior, if he were now on the earth, as too calm and gentle, as too thoughtful and intellectual, as too free from impulsive and excited agitations, to be reckoned with those who are often considered the most advanced in religion.” “It is probably through a disregard, in part at least, of the course taken by the Savior, … that we find, in all denominations of Christians, melancholy instances of persons, who are young in the Christian life, or who are prompted by an undue confidence, exhibiting a disposition to enter prematurely, and sometimes violently, upon measures which are at variance with the results of former experience, and with the admonitions of ancient piety.”

We have not observed that Upham anywhere in his religious writings mentions the Oberlin men by name. That also may be a significant fact, for it cannot be that he remained ignorant of their writings. To other perfectionist movements preceding his own, he more distinctly alludes—sometimes very unhappily. There is an allusion, for example, to the “New Dispensation” Perfectionists,⁴³ with especial reference to their teaching as to the Sabbath. He rejects their teaching, but in doing so deals very gently with them themselves. “It is something worthy of notice, amongst the remarkable things of the present time,” he says,⁴⁴ “that the Christian Sabbath, contrary to what would be the natural expectation in the case, is attempted to be set aside by persons who have a respect for religion, and appear to be persons of true benevolence and piety. Some of them make high claims to holiness of heart. The holiness of their hearts, as they understand it, has made all things holy. Their work is holy; their rest is holy; their recreations are holy;—everything they do, while the heart is holy, partakes of the character of the source or motive from which it proceeds. No one day, therefore, can be more holy to them than another. The Sabbath is on a footing with other days. All days are alike. This is the general train of their thought and reasoning. And it cannot be doubted, I think, that there is not only a degree of plausibility, but a portion of real truth in these views.” This element of truth, he proceeds to point out, is that we must be holy on every day—the Sabbath is not different from other days in that. But it does not follow, he urges, that we are to do the very same things on every day. Each day has its appropriate activities, and our holiness consists, among other things, in doing on each day what is appropriate for it. It is a holy duty to rest on the Sabbath; it is the day for public worship and social service, and it should be kept for that. No doubt the holier we are, the better we ourselves could get along without it; but also the holier we are the more we shall be impelled to preserve it, for ourselves and others. It is a good ad hominem argument, which he develops, but he says nothing in contravention of the fundamental antinomian assumptions of the errorists whose anti-Sabbatarianism he is repelling. They “appear to be persons of true benevolence and piety”; they are recognized as holy brethren.

It is quite possibly these same people who are in Upham’s mind, when a few pages further on he astonishes us by adopting from some not clearly identified “experimental writers,” and utilizes for his doctrine of the family, that notion of “correspondences” on the basis of which they had in Upham’s own memory put into practice the iniquity of “Spiritual Wives.”⁴⁵ “There seems,” says he,⁴⁶ “to be a just and adequate foundation for the doctrine, of which we find some intimations and glimpses from time to time in experimental writers, that all holy beings have their correspondences.” That is to say there is somewhere existing the completion or complement of each spiritual being, destined at the appropriate time to be revealed to it. “Then, under the attractions of mutual love, which is wiser and stronger than mere arbitrary and positive law, they unite together:—and they do it under such circumstances that it is not possible to separate them. They thus fulfill the purposes of their Maker; and realize in time a marriage, which, in spirit and essence, is eternal.” “The moment that such beings are unveiled to each other as perfect correspondences, the mutual attraction, at once strengthened to its highest intensity, becomes irresistible.” Perhaps, however, it is Swedenborg, rather than the “New Dispensationists,” on whom Upham is drawing in proclaiming these bizarre notions, and we recall that his Dartmouth classmate, George Bush, had become a vigorous Swedenborgian propagandist and may be thought of as a channel of Swedenborgian influence to Upham.⁴⁷ In any case, however, he was bound to remember the evil use to which this very notion of correspondences had been put only a few years before by men of whom he had just spoken without any manifestation of reprobation.

If it is surprising to see Upham adopt and utilize this notion of “correspondences” which had just wrought out so evil a history among the “New Dispensationites,” it is more surprising still to see him adopt and utilize the general conception of the New Dispensation itself, from which these errorists derived their name. He announces his adherence to this conception, it is true, in connection with an exposition of some teaching of Madame Guyon’s to the same effect,⁴⁸ but he does not so much represent himself as deriving this conception from her as according with her in it. In point of fact, the conception is very widespread among mystical perfectionists, who have been prone in every age to represent themselves as introducers of a new dispensation, the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, set over against the dispensations of the Father and the Son, conceived as now past. Among Upham’s immediate predecessors in America, the so-called “New York Perfectionists,” as we have already noted, derived their more descriptive name from this doctrine; and John Humphrey Noyes himself, who no longer held to the Millenarianism by which this conception was justified by them, yet managed to retain the conception itself. Upham’s presentation of it possesses no advantages over that of his predecessors and seems clearly to belong to the same mintage. The great doctrines of the Divine unity and of Christ crucified, he says, have been proclaimed, have had their advocates and martyrs, and have prevailed. “But there is another great truth, of which it may at length be said, that its hour has come;—namely, that of God, in the person of the inward Teacher and Comforter, dwelling in the hearts of his people, and changing them by his divine operation into the holy and beautiful image of him who shed his blood for them. Christ, received by faith, came into the world to save men from the penalty of sin; but it has not been so fully … recognized that he came also to save them from sin itself. The time in which this latter work shall develop itself is sometimes spoken of as the period of the reign of the Holy Ghost. It is now some time since the voice has gone forth; an utterance from the Eternal Mind, not as yet generally received, but which will never cease to be repeated;—Put away all sin; Be like Christ; Be ye holy.” And then again: “The kingdom of the Holy Ghost has come. Its beginnings are feeble, it is true.… But the signs of its full approach are too marked, too evident, to be mistaken.… Happy will it be, if its friends shall remember, that it is a kingdom which comes without observation.… Behold here the dominion of the Holy Ghost, the triumph of the true Millennium, the reign of holy love!” The reader can hardly believe his eyes when he sees Upham discovering in his perfectionist sect, which has only recently come into being (“some time since”),—referring no doubt to the rise of Molinism—and is now embodied in himself and his coterie, the dispensation of the Holy Ghost which has now at length, after so long a time, dawned. We wonder whether he really imagined that never until this sect had arisen, had the cry of, Put away all sin! been heard. And we wonder even more what judgment he intended to pass on all the perfectionist sectaries, stretching in unbroken succession from, say, Pelagius to, say, the Ranters, that they should be passed by and the dispensation of the Spirit made to begin only with his own special party. We must not leave without notice that he identifies this New Dispensation, the inauguration of which “some time since” he asserts, with the Millennium. In doing so he places himself distinctly on the plane of the Chiliastic perfectionism which had been troubling the churches for the preceding quarter of a century.

The general position taken in these amazing claims presents a curious parallel to the fundamental Montanistic assumption, and it is not strange that the opponents of Quietism were quick to take note of this fact. When A. C. McGiffert⁴⁹ writes of Montanism: “Its fundamental proposition was the continuance of divine revelation which was begun under the old Dispensation, was carried on in the time of Christ and his apostles, and reached its highest development under the dispensation of the Paraclete, which opened with the activity of Montanus,” his words would require very little adjustment to adapt them to Upham’s representations. Upham does not, it is true, assert that a new revelation in the strict sense has come with him and his companions. But he does assert that a new truth has come into the possession of the Church, through him and them; a new truth by means of which a new and culminating dispensation of the Kingdom of God has been introduced. Thus in a true sense he contends that in him and them the Kingdom of God has at last come. In this broad application of the parallel, Bossuet was not wrong, then, in comparing Fénelon and Madame Guyon to Montanus;⁵⁰ and the similarity cannot be evaded as Fénelon endeavored to evade it, by pleading that there were many particulars in the Montanistic teaching, and especially in the conduct of its protagonists, to which he and Madame Guyon provided no parallel. Neither Madame Guyon nor Upham were Montanists. But they shared with Montanus the fanatical assertion, that the culminating dispensation of the Kingdom of God, the dispensation of the Spirit, has been introduced only by them. It would be wrong, of course, to suppose that they derived this fanatical point of view, which they shared with the Montanists, either directly or indirectly from them. It came down to them, as we have already intimated, from quite a different source, and through a well-marked line of tradition. John the Scot, the head of the line of Western Mystics, holds it with as great clearness as Madame Guyon or Upham, although he avoids the identification of the Dispensation of the Spirit, which he conceives as still future, with himself. John continued in a very positive way—Rufus M. Jones describes his teaching thus⁵¹—“the idea of a progressive revelation, already taught by the Montanists. He marked out in his Commentary on the Gospel of John three stages of priesthood. The first stage—that of the priesthood of the Old Testament—was transitory, and it saw the truth only through the thick veils of mysterious types. The second priesthood, that of the New Testament, had a greater light of truth, but still obscured by symbols. The third priesthood, that which is to come, will see God face to face. To the first corresponds the laws of condemnation, to the second the law of Grace; the third will be the kingdom of God. The first assisted human nature, which was corrupted by sin; the second ennobled it by faith; the third will illumine it with direct contemplation. The Church of the present will be swallowed up by the light of the Church of the future, when souls will actually possess God by direct communion with Him by the Spirit.” Joachim of Fiori repeats in effect the representations of John and still, like him, places the Dispensation of the Spirit in the future, although he looked for it in the immediate future;⁵² and his disciple, Gerard of San Donnino, in the famous “Eternal Gospel,” fixed so firmly in the minds of “spiritual” men the idea of a coming religion of the Spirit that it never afterward died out.⁵³ In Amaury (Amalrich) of Bene, however, and his followers, the Dispensation of the Spirit, formerly looked forward to, has already come in himself and his coterie. “The Father, they taught, was incarnated in Abraham; the Son in the child of Mary’s womb; and the Holy Spirit has become incarnated in them.” And this new “reign of the Holy Spirit,” now at last begun, “frees humanity from all burdens and servitude. In Him all laws and commandments are at an end.”⁵⁴ It is this form of the conception, rife among the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and equally so among the Anabaptists and Ranters of seventeenth century England, which reappears in the mystical perfectionists of Western and Central New York at the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and is proclaimed with the confidence of strong conviction by Upham.

Even the “New Dispensationists” do not represent, however, the extreme to which Upham was able to sink in order to find companionship in his vagaries. In a most astonishing chapter in his latest work⁵⁵—published posthumously—he undertakes to reconstitute the Trinity into a Duality—Father and Mother instead of Father, Son, and Spirit; but a Duality which afterwards becomes a Trinity by the appearance of a Son, which is identified with—the creation, “the whole of creation from the lowest to the highest form.” In order to obtain support for this precious speculation he does not scruple to appeal to the teaching of a long catalogue of heresies, ancient Gnostics, the Jewish Cabala, Mediæval Mystics, the Familists, the Philadelphians, the Shakers, and—this is the culmination of all—“the Bible Communists,” that is to say, John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community.⁵⁶ To this length his sense of solidarity with fellow-perfectionists had brought him in his old age. He actually sets forth the ravings of Noyes as an element in the “absolute religion,” that is, in that essential, universal, and eternal religion which may harmonize with Christian teaching, but is in essence the rational faith of all men.

We should be sorry to leave the impression that these grotesque speculations are a fair sample of the substance of Upham’s teaching. That is far from the fact. Upham belongs among the soberest of our perfectionist leaders. Our main purpose in the preceding paragraphs has been to suggest the extent of his knowledge of his immediate predecessors in this type of religious thinking, and the distance to which his mental sympathy with them was able to carry him—on occasions. He owed his “second conversion” wholly to Methodist influences: Phoebe Palmer, to use Mrs. Upham’s figure, “begot him in the Gospel”; it was the Methodist doctrine of perfection which he desired to proclaim, and in the main did proclaim.⁵⁷ But his mind was not an empty cask into which the Methodist doctrine was poured, and that was the end of it. He was blessed, or, as he might himself say, cursed, with great intellectual curiosity; and first and last he explored many odd corners of religious thought, and usually came back with something in his hands. It is probable that he never taught the Methodist doctrine of perfection quite in its purity—not even in those first days of his return from New York when, laying aside his dislike for public utterance, he spoke so winningly, in Mrs. Upham’s opinion, in their little propagandist meetings at Brunswick. We have expressed our opinion that the writings of the Oberlin people did not furnish the subject of his study during those days of feverish examination of the nature of the Gospel requirements and provisions with reference to holiness, to which he was incited in the summer of 1839 by Mrs. Upham’s adoption of the Methodist doctrine. But we have had no intention of implying that no writings on holiness were then in his hands. Upham being the man he was, that would have been inconceivable. It is very safe to say that many books on holiness were subjected to very intensive study during those difficult weeks. And it does not seem very difficult to say in general what books they in the main were. The writings of the Quietistic Mystics were certainly among them. They were not the whole of them, but they occupied the central place.

The general reason for saying this is that, when Upham comes into view after he had found his peace, he has these books in his hands. In point of fact we know no Upham after his “second conversion” but the mystical Upham. It is quite true that there was an interval of two or three years between his return from New York at the beginning of 1840 with the treasure conveyed to him by Phoebe Palmer, and the publication of his first religious book in 1843. We cannot confidently assert that there may not have been a period immediately after his finding “the blessing” in which he preached Methodist Perfectionism, unmodified by mystical infusions. But the wide acquaintance he shows with the Quietistic literature, and the abundant use he makes of it in his first book⁵⁸—and the deep absorption in it which he manifests in its immediate successors—suggests pushing back the beginnings of his engagement with it as far as possible.

What strikes us most strongly, however, as we glance through Upham’s literary history is the greatness of the crisis which he passed through at his “second conversion.” The direction of his studies and the whole character of his reading were transformed by it. We have already had occasion to point out the strength of his natural literary impulse and the abundance of his literary product. His first book came from the press contemporaneously with his own emergence from the schoolroom; and in the course of seventeen years thereafter he had published eight solid volumes on very abstruse subjects. A sudden and complete change takes place in this stream of publications on his “second conversion.” The literary activity continues, but the subjects on which it expends itself are totally altered. Never again does he print a philosophical work.⁵⁹ There was a volume of poems,⁶⁰ and a volume of “Letters” from abroad.⁶¹ But with these exceptions everything else that he printed through a long list of publications—embracing a dozen items—was not only religious in its subject, but designed specifically for “the promotion of practical holiness.”⁶² There are included in the list, it is true, two works which take the form of biographies—the “Life of Madame Catharine Adorna” (better known, perhaps, as St. Catharine of Genoa), 1845, and the “Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la Mothe Guyon,” 1847. But these books are biographies only in form: the didactic element dominates them, and indeed constitutes even physically the greater part of their contents. They are simply additional commendations of Upham’s perfectionist doctrine, cast in a biographical form in the hope, no doubt, of obtaining thereby a fresh appeal. All the rest of his books, published in this second period of his life, are openly pleas for “holiness,” or aids to its attainment. They include the following volumes: “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” 1843; “The Life of Faith,” 1845; “A Treatise on Divine Union,” 1851; “Religious Maxims,” 1854 (taken from the “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life”); “A Method of Prayer,” 1859 (an analysis of the work by Madame Guyon so entitled); “Christ in the Soul,” 1872; and “Absolute Religion,” 1873. It is obvious from this list of titles that Upham’s real interest lay in “holiness,” and his engagement with Quietistic Mysticism was secondary and ancillary to that. If he did not merely repeat the Methodist doctrine of “holiness” which he “learned more perfectly” from Phoebe Palmer, neither did he transmute it into Quietistic Mysticism. He modified his statement of it, here and there, with formulas which he borrowed from the Quietists, but for “substance of doctrine” what he taught remained steadily Wesleyan Perfectionism. So far from assimilating his Wesleyan doctrine to Quietism, he sought rather at bottom to assimilate Quietism to it. What he undertook, indeed, was nothing less in effect than the amazing task of evangelicizing Quietism. We say evangelicizing rather than Wesleyanizing, for, after all, there was a deeper lying stratum in Upham’s thought than even the Wesleyan Methodism which Phoebe Palmer taught him. He was a Congregationalist before he became a Methodist Perfectionist—a Congregationalist of the “New Divinity” type, and holding the “New Divinity” firmly, though not in an extreme form. What we have to do with in him, accordingly, is a somewhat mild “New Divinity” Congregationalism, overlaid with Wesleyan Perfectionism, endeavoring to read the Quietism of Madam Guyon in harmony with itself.

II. Upham and the Quietists

It was a tremendous undertaking—this of evangelicizing Quietism. Fénelon had expended his genius in an attempt to Catholicize it, with a great deal less than indifferent success. Upham looks over the “Maxims of the Saints” and pronounces them in essence evangelical! The Jansenists, whom Fénelon persecuted and who had no weapon against their persecutor except their wit, wrote an epitaph for him:

“Neath two damnations, here lies Fénelon—
One for Molinos, for Molina one.”

Upham seems to think that in combining Molinos-ism and Molina-ism, instead of doubling his condemnation, Fénelon escaped it altogether and became—evangelical. Something as, we suppose, the combination (in proper proportions) of oxygen and hydrogen comes out, not doubly gaseous, but a good, serviceable liquid. No doubt we must remember that Upham looked at Fénelon out of “New Divinity” eyes, and the “New Divinity” had invented for itself a doctrine of sin and grace, of dependence and freedom—indeed, of “congruism” itself—of which Molina-ism need not have been ashamed. From this point of sight, Fénelon might very well have been quoted as a brother, and Upham’s fundamental mistake was in imagining the “New Divinity” to be evangelical. But it was not merely Fénelon’s Molina-ism which he proclaimed evangelical, but his Molinos-ism also. And, perceiving no difference between the exquisite nicety of Fénelon’s distinctions, by which he attempted to give Catholic standing to the essence of Molinos-ism, and the raw crudity of Madame Guyon’s declamations, he pronounced her teaching also in substance evangelical. All Quietism was the same to him, whether read in Molinos’ “Spiritual Guide,” at the one end, or in Antoinette Bourignon’s “Light in Darkness” at the other; and it was all in intention and effect evangelical. His method was very simple. He read all this literature with so firm a conviction that it is in intention and effect evangelical, despite the unfortunate appearance given it by its unhappy use of language, that he persistently imposed on the unwilling language his own evangelical sense so far as his own sense (the sense of the “New Divinity,” with Methodist Perfectionism superposed on it) was evangelical. Thus the unevangelical language came in the end really to speak to him in evangelical accents, and he actually employs it to express his own evangelical meaning. The effect on his writings is very curious. However natural it may have become to him to express his evangelical conceptions in Quietistic language, his readers do not find it easy to read his Quietistic language in an evangelical sense. A veil of ambiguity is thrown over the page. The reader is continually disturbed by doubt as to how much or how little is intended by the mystical language which he reads; and it is much if he does not end by raising the general question whether Upham is a mystic at all, or whether he has not merely acquired a bad habit of obscurely expressing himself in mystical forms of speech.

Much of this confusion is due, however, to a more deeply lying confusion still—the confusion of inwardness in religion with evangelicalism. Evangelicalism is, of course, in its very idea, a religion of the heart. But it does not follow that all inwardness in religion is evangelicalism. That form of religion which we call mysticism is as inward as evangelicalism—in fact, more exclusively inward than it. It is in this that its appeal has always lain—and its usefulness—as a protest against the externalities of the sacerdotalism of the Romish Church. It is in it that the self-consciousness of the mystic has centered; or we might as well say plainly, his pride, a pride in which he has as heartily despised external religion as it has him. The ethos of the contestants in the Quietistic controversy is not badly revealed in the contemptuous name of “the new spiritualists” which the Catholics fixed on the Quietists, and in Fénelon’s repudiation only of the epithet “new”—“It is not a new spirituality which I defend, but the old.” It is quite in the manner of the mystics of all ages when Jacob Behmen reminds us grimly that Cain was an observer of ordinances. “Cain,” he says,⁶³ “goes to church to offer and comes out again a murderer of his brother.” The altar of God, he explains, is wherever the living knowledge of Christ is; and at that altar alone can true and acceptable offerings be made. He would not, it is true, “abolish and raze the stone churches,” but he would keep us reminded of that “Temple of God which must be brought into the stone churches with us,” or else the whole business of the stone church is only “a Cain’s offering, both for the preacher and hearer.” Nothing truer than that could well be said; and, reading it, and the like of it, after their own fashions of speech, in the Quietistic writers, we are almost ready to say with Upham, when speaking of Madame Guyon’s “Method of Prayer”:⁶⁴ “Its doctrines are essentially Protestant; making Faith, in distinction from the merits of works, the foundation of the religious life, and even carrying the power of faith in the renovation of our inward nature beyond what is commonly found in Protestant writers.”

Such a remark rests, nevertheless, on a complete misunderstanding. Madame Guyon has nothing in common with Protestantism except the inwardness of her religion and her consequent emancipation from rites and ceremonies, on the one hand, and on the other a certain exaltation of Christ in the center of her religious life, although thinking of Him quite differently and looking to Him for quite different benefits, from Protestantism. In all that concerns the distinction between Protestantism and Romanism she is wholly Romanist. Her conception of faith is not the Protestant conception; and her notion of its function is far from the Protestant understanding of it. Nothing could be more misleading than to suggest that she opposed faith and works in the Protestant sense. What she did was to oppose faith to external works—for did she not teach an “interior religion”? But as for works in the broad sense, she taught as arrant a work religion as other Romanists—only the works on which she depended were not external but internal works. She suspended everything on the subjective state and looked upon personal holiness as the condition, not the issue, of communion with God. In describing the work of Madame Guyon among the young ladies at Madame de Maintenon’s “Female Institution” at St. Cyr, Upham employs an expression which, if we may be permitted to press it into our service, may not only rather sharply express to us the difference between the ordinary Romanist teaching and that of Madame Guyon, but also suggest part of the distinction between her teaching and that of Protestantism. These young ladies, he says,⁶⁵ had no doubt generally been accustomed—under the ordinary Romanist teaching—to regard “their acceptance with God as depending, in a great degree at least, on a number of outward observances, rather than on inward dispositions”—as Madame Guyon now taught them to regard it. Here we have the exact fact—Madame Guyon suspended acceptance with God not on outward observances but on inward dispositions, and it was in this sense that she interiorized religion.

The New Testament and evangelical religion teach that acceptance with God depends wholly on the finished work of Christ, faith being merely the instrument by which this finished work of Christ is received and rested on. Of this fundamental principle of New Testament and evangelical religion, as Heinrich Heppe justly points out, Madame Guyon knew nothing. The foundation-stone, he reminds us,⁶⁶ on which the whole evangelical consciousness is built, is the historical redemptive work of Christ. In this, faith finds, once for all, the righteousness which avails with God. On it the believer reposes with sure confidence for his peace with God here and his eternal felicity hereafter. It is the firm foundation on which his whole system of faith is built. Of all this, however, Madame Guyon was altogether ignorant. The fundamental fact of the Gospel was not known to her as such. Everything therefore which was transacted in the person of Christ here on earth, and found its completion in Him, she transferred to the heart of the individual and had transacted over again there. It is only in this sense that she enthrones Christ in the center of her religious life. It is not the fact of the redemptive work of Christ on which she rests; and it is not the forming of Christ within, as a result of faith in this redemptive work, for which she hopes. She suspended her hope on the repetition in the soul, by its own exercises, of the experiences of Christ, until, having reproduced in itself the qualities that characterized Christ, it becomes sharer in the divine favor which rested on Him. Christ ceases in this view to be our Saviour and becomes our model. He is not Himself the Way by which we reach God, but only the Guide who shows us the way; not the blood of Christ but imitatio Christi has become the ground of our hope. It is not unfair to say, as Upham says,⁶⁷ that in this view religion has become “something more than [a] … mere ceremonial”—it has become “a life.” But we must remember that “life” has two meanings—the life which is lived and the life by which it is lived; the manner in which we live and the power by which we live. And it is only in the former sense that religion is a life with Madame Guyon: after all is said and done, religion remains with her a scheme rather than a power.

It is already apparent how misleading it is to speak of Madame Guyon as recommending herself to Protestants by the honor she places on faith—“even carrying the power of faith in the renovation of our inward nature beyond what is commonly found in Protestant writers.”⁶⁸ The allusion in these words is to what is represented as Madame Guyon’s great discovery—a dramatic account of which is given⁶⁹—of “sanctification by faith.” This is a doctrine, we are told, which, hardly tolerable in the Protestant Church, is quite impossible in the Romanist; but was formed in Madame Guyon’s heart “by infinite wisdom,” and was uttered by her “in obedience to that deep and sanctified conviction which constitutes the soul’s inward voice”—uttered at the moment of its discovery and always, so that it became in a true sense her life-message. Faith, we must bear in mind, however, was in Madame Guyon’s view a “work,” that is to say, a virtue, a virtuous disposition, that particular virtuous disposition which above all others prepared and opened the soul for the reception of divine things. Her proclamation of sanctification by faith had a double significance, negative and positive. On the one hand, it was an assertion of emancipation from the sacerdotal means of sanctification without which in the modes of conception prevalent in the Roman Church, there could be no sanctification. It was anti-sacerdotal. On the other hand, it asserted that the condition of sanctification is an absolutely passive receptivity—and it is this state of mind which is called “faith.” The soul that is empty, says Madame Guyon, is the soul that is filled, and the whole duty of man is to make and keep his soul empty. This is Quietism. In it is announced a philosophy of life under the influence of which—in the furthest extension of its application—inactivity, indifference, apathy, mental and bodily, became the idea of behavior in every department of living. Madame Guyon relates of herself with great satisfaction—Upham quoting her account with apparent approval⁷⁰—that in a dangerous carriage-accident she sat quietly in the vehicle and made no effort to save herself. In any given instance this mode of action may or may not be in accordance with good judgment. That is not however Madame Guyon’s plea. The point of her narrative is that faith in God implies and requires on all occasions complete inactivity on our part. In no circumstances of life are we called upon to act. Our duty at all times and in all spheres of activity (as we say—but how meaninglessly in this view!) is—to do nothing. “It is better to perish, trusting calmly in God’s providence, than to make our escape from danger, trusting in ourselves.” “I would rather endure them”—any conceivable trials—“all my life long, than put an end to them in a dependence on myself.” That is to say, we must never make any effort to save ourselves from any danger, or to relieve ourselves from any difficulties. If the house catches on fire we must sit quietly in it and burn up: to walk out is to distrust God. If the boat sinks under us, we must not swim to shore, but fold our hands and sink—“let go and let God.” Here is a fully developed philosophy of irresponsibility.

We have seen Upham felicitating the young ladies of St. Cyr on the spiritual revival which they experienced under the teachings of Madame Guyon. “Turned by the conversation of Madame Guyon,” he says,⁷¹ “from the outward to the inward, led to reflect upon their own situation and wants, they saw that there is something better than worldly vanity; and began to seek a truer, sincerer, and higher position.” There is unfortunately some reason to fear, however, that this is only an ideal sketch of the effect of Madame Guyon’s instruction on her pupils, framed on the assumption that the substance of what she taught them was “redemption, and permanent inward salvation by faith”—in the Protestant sense of these words. We have a very spirited picture of what happened at St. Cyr under Madame Guyon’s Quietistic teaching, from the pen of an eye-witness—one of the inmates of the house—a Madame du Pérou.⁷² It proves to be very much what might have been expected, as Ernest Seillière puts it, “in a community invaded by a purely emotional morality and Guyonese mysticism.” Whatever may have been the spiritual revolution which they experienced, the observable deportment of the converts was not edifying. “These ladies,” writes Madame du Pérou, “were chilly, distant, even a little scornful, towards those not of their party; very independent towards their superiors and directors, very full of presumption and pride.… They attended preaching as seldom as they could, saying that it distracted them, and that they needed nothing but God.… Nearly the whole house became Quietist. Nothing was talked about but pure love, abandonment, holy indifference, simplicity, in the practice of which every one abandoned herself to her ease, and disturbed herself about nothing, not even her own salvation. It is to this that this alleged resignation to the will of God comes in which we can consent as readily to our own damnation as to being saved; this was what that famous act of abandonment that was taught consisted in.… These fashions of speech were so common that even ‘the Reds’ (the pupils of the lowest class) employed them; even down to the lay-sisters and the servants, nothing was talked of but pure love. There were some who, instead of doing their work, spent their time in reading Madame Guyon’s books, which they fancied they understood.” The novices no longer obeyed. “They fell into ecstatics. They conceived so lively and so inconvenient an appetite for prayer that they neglected their most necessary duties. One, instead of sweeping, stood nonchalantly propped on her broom; another, instead of attending to the instruction of the girls, lost herself in inspiration and abandoned herself to the Spirit. The under-mothers (of the novices) furtively assembled the illuminated in some corner, where they fed themselves on Madame Guyon’s ideas. Under pretence of seeking perfection, they despised the only method of attaining it.…” This last sentence, adds Seillière, in comment, is the protest of Stoic-Christian ethics, against a purely emotional ethics, founded on an irrational feminine mysticism. In the Christian system, perfection is conceived as absolute performance; in the Quietistic as absolute non-performance.

We are here at the heart of Quietism. But not of Quietism alone. For Quietists are not alone among mystics in calling upon man to “nought” himself, that he may become “nothing,” and the floods of God may wash in and fill his emptiness. This is general mystical teaching. “A man shall become as truly poor,” says Eckhart,⁷³ “and as free from his creature will as he was when he was born. And I say to you, by the eternal truth, that as long as ye desire to fulfill the will of God, and have any desire after eternity and God, so long are ye not truly poor. He alone hath true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.” “The soul”—Rufus M. Jones continues the quotations thus in summary—“must withdraw not only from possessions and ‘works,’ but it must also withdraw from all sense experience, from everything in time and space, from every image of memory, every idea of the understanding into an experience above this lower form of consciousness—an experience in which ‘all things are present in one unified now and here.’ ”⁷⁴ The soul must become a tabula rasa if God is to write upon it. Similarly “ ‘Swester Katrei’—Sister Katharine—called in the narrative ‘Eckhart’s Strasbourg Daughter,’ ” declares that “ ‘not even desire of heaven should tempt a good man toward activity.’ ” The story runs that “on one occasion she became cataleptic, and was being carried to burial for dead. Her confessor, just in time, discovered that it was trance instead of death, and awoke her. Katharine exclaimed: ‘Now I am satisfied, for I have been dead all through.’ ” Jones,⁷⁵ in telling this story, speaks of it as presenting “an extreme example of morbid quietistic mysticism”; but it is difficult to perceive anything extreme about it in comparison with the ordinary Quietistic teaching; it is just the common doctrine of the Quietistic mystic uncommonly poignantly expressed. It is quite paralleled, for example, by what Jones⁷⁶ again calls “an extraordinary case” in which as “Friend of God” “got to the indifference-point to such a degree that he, ‘through the power of love, became without love,’ and in this state of perfect surrender, he heard a voice say to him: ‘Permit Me, My beloved child, to share in thee and with thee all the riches of My divinity; all the passionate love of My humanity; all the joys of the Holy Spirit,’ and the ‘Friend of God’ replied: ‘Yes, Lord, I permit Thee, on condition that Thou alone shalt enjoy it, and not I!’ ” Indifference must be carried to such a point as to be indifferent to the very end that is sought. There is nothing startlingly novel, therefore, in the “passivity,” “indifference,” “abandonment,” “annihilation” which was taught by the sixteenth century Quietists and from their teaching of which they derived their name.

This teaching has its roots ultimately in the pantheistic background which underlies the whole mystical teaching. Whenever this pantheistic understratum cropped out fully upon the surface, it naturally destroyed all sense of individuality, and reduced what, to the vulgar apprehension, appeared to be separate personalities to mere momentary wavelets on the bosom of the deep of being. That, however, is pantheism, not mysticism; mysticism seeks as an attainment what pantheism posits as a fact. Mysticism, however, everywhere and always true to its pantheistic groundwork, with more or less force of assertion and clearness of expression, proclaims the necessity, for that union with the divine to which all its yearnings urge, of stripping away everything which enters into the individualization of the subject. This anti-individualistic tendency, intrinsic to mysticism, was, in the days of developed Romanism, no doubt reinforced in its effect, but also modified in its expression—often so greatly modified as to seem even superseded—by another tendency grounded in a wholly different, not to say contradictory, point of view. This is the tendency to contempt of “nature,” arising out of the dualism of “nature” and “the supernatural” in the Romanist doctrine of salvation. For the ellipse of the Romanist doctrine of salvation is not thrown, as in Protestantism, around the foci of sin and grace, so much as around those of nature and the supernatural. God, it is taught, had designed man for a state higher than that of merely natural virtue and felicity and therefore had endowed him, when he left His creative hands, with a donum superadditum—a supplementary gift of something lying wholly outside of and beyond his nature as man—which raised him to a plane of supernatural virtue and supernatural felicity. It was this donum superadditum which man lost in the fall; so that he fell not out of what he ought to be by nature, but back into—mere—nature. It is it also which is restored in salvation; so that man is brought by salvation not into what he ought to be by nature, but into something above all nature. Fallen man, accordingly, existing, as it is phrased, in puris naturalibus, in the purity of his—merely—natural state, just as he came from his Maker’s hands, requires no recreation that he may be able to maintain himself in a state of natural virtue or natural felicity. Salvation is therefore conceived in essence as delivering man not precisely from sin, but from a consequence of his sinning; not as restoring him to the natural purity which belongs to him in the conception of pure manhood, but as raising him above this, to a higher purity, to which he could in any case be brought only by the addition of something to him which does not belong to his nature as such. Human nature, as fallen, is thought of then, not as depraved and corrupted, reduced below what human nature as such ought to be, and needing restoration; but as all that man as such ought to be or can be—only functioning, as such of course, on a lower plane than by God’s supernatural gift to it, it may be elevated to. This doctrine in intention and effect honoring human nature, as it at present exists in the world—“fallen man,” as we say—and only holding out to its heights of attainment to which it may climb above itself—ended, in the hands of earnest men, in dishonoring human nature as such and transferring to it the degradation which belongs to it only as fallen. Fallen human nature having been defined as pure human nature, the characteristics which belong only to fallen human nature—which, however much they were denied, could not remain unfelt—were naturally transferred to pure human nature. The supernatural gifts and felicity held out as the prize to be striven after, threw in contrast with them the nature without them into the blackest shadow and made it contemptible. The natural life in all its manifestations came thus to be looked upon as not merely a less exalted life than might be ours, but as an essentially degraded life; and a Manichaean-like misprision of the whole natural order resulted. Men longed to be delivered not from their sin but from their selves: and only in the deliverance from self could they see deliverance from sin. They became to their own apprehension all evil—in such a sense all evil, that nothing could avail for their salvation but their complete destruction. There was nothing about them or in them which could survive in the process of salvation. They forgot, in other words, that nature itself is the work of God, and that it is the restoration, not the destruction, of nature that Christ came to accomplish—that it is not the works of God but the works of the devil that He came to destroy.⁷⁷

It is up against this double background of doctrine—Pantheizing Mysticism on the one hand, Pelagianizing Romanism on the other—that the “passivity,” “indifference,” “abandonment,” “annihilation” of the Quietists were thrown. They meant precisely what they said; though naturally they succeeded but indifferently in attaining the states which they described. G. W. Leibnitz, writing to the Landgrave Ernest of Hesse,⁷⁸ reveals how the matter struck a competent contemporary observer. He remarks that there is very little in Molinos’ “Spiritual Guide” which may not be found in other mystics—only Molinos has infused poison into their honey. He instances especially the doctrine of “annihilation.” “For,” says he, “the pretence of being without action, without thought, and without will—of what they call quietude, and of annihilating ourselves, so as to enter into silence and so hear God better (since He speaks within) and to receive His impressions—these things are chimeras, no rational justification of which has been given. We should have to take opium or get drunk in order to attain to such a quietude, or inactivity; which is nothing but the stupidity suitable only to brutes. The true quietude which is found in the Scriptures, in the Fathers, and in Reason, is withdrawal from the outward pleasures of sense, the better to hear the voice of God—that is to say, the inward light of eternal verities. But in order to do this we must give ourselves to meditation and devote ourselves to the learning and study of the great verities; we must consider God’s perfections and direct the will to love Him—and all this is very different indeed from that irrational inactivity of the sham Quietists, whom the Jesuits are very right in combating. No matter what is said, it is not possible for a substance to cease to act. The mind is never more active than when the outer senses are silent. This is the silence and repose which the mystic sages ask for, with no notion of the mind’s sinking itself into a deep lethargy. Tauler, Ruysbroek, Valentine Weigel, and other mystics, Catholics and Protestants alike, often speak of a resignation, or annihilation—of a ‘collectedness.’ But I suppose that they mean it in the sense I have just explained: otherwise the results would be evil, as is seen in the turn which Molinos has given to those ideas.”⁷⁹ Mystics may differ from mystics in the length to which they push their fundamental contempt of nature common to them all; and this difference of degree may seem at times so great as to amount almost to a difference of kind. A man like John Tauler may stand at one extreme of the series: the Quietists stand so at the other extreme that the language which Tauler employs when expressing his reprobation of the men of the “Free Spirit,” might be read almost without change as applicable to them. “They stand exempt from all subjection, without any activity upward or downward,” he writes,⁸⁰ “just as a tool is passive and waits until its master wishes to use it, for it seems to them that if they do anything then God will be hindered in His work; therefore they count themselves above all virtues. They wish to be so free that they do not think, nor praise God, nor have anything, nor know anything, nor love nor ask nor desire anything; for all that they might wish to ask they have (according to their notion). And they also think that they are poor in spirit because they are without any will of their own and have renounced all possessions. They also wish to be free of all practice of virtue, obedient to no one, whether pope, or bishop, or priest. They wish to be free of everything with which the Church has to do. They say publicly that so long as a man strives after virtues, so long is he imperfect and knows nothing of spiritual poverty, nor of this spiritual freedom.” This is the type of religion which the Quietists commended.

It is often a great temptation, in reading the writings of the Quietists, to think of the “nature” which they wish to “crucify” much more in terms of what we commonly speak of as our “sinful nature” than they themselves did; and thus to accord to sin and deliverance from sin a far greater prominence in their thought than it really occupies. Rufus M. Jones offers us a very good example of the greatness of this temptation. Fénelon, he says,⁸¹ “is one of the noblest illustrations in the seventeenth century of the impossibility of successfully solving the problem of spiritual life on the assumption that human nature—the natural man—is absolutely corrupt and depraved, and that God can triumph in the soul only when the human powers have been annihilated, the assumption that God is all only when man is nothing.” Fénelon, however, made no such assumption as “that human nature—the natural man—is absolutely corrupt and depraved.” That was Jansenist doctrine; and would have been thought of by Fénelon, as it is by one of his biographers,⁸² as misrepresenting God’s world “as a sinful chaos, a shaking quagmire of corruption, in the midst of which rises, stark and lonely, the storm-swept citadel of Grace.” “Fénelon,” himself, as this same historian rightly tells us,⁸³ “was a priest who disbelieved in total depravity, and meant to make the best of human nature as it was.” “Children,” according to him, “are born without any natural trend to good or evil,”⁸⁴ and any sin which they ever have is picked up by them in the course of living: it may be much, but it may be little—it may conceivably be so little as to be none at all.⁸⁵ The niceties of the distinctions which divide Protestant and Romanist—and Mystic—in their several conceptions of the state of fallen man, are apparently out of the focus of Jones’s vision. When he tells us⁸⁶ that Quietism “had its birth and its nurture in the absolute despair of human nature which Protestant theology and the Counter-Reformation had greatly intensified”; that “it flourished on an extreme form of the doctrine of the ruin and fall of man—an utter miserabilism of the ‘creature’ ”; that to it “the trail of the old Adam lies over all that man does or thinks,” and “the taint of the ‘creature’ spoils all that springs from this source and fountain”; so that “nothing divine, nothing that has religious value, can originate in man as man”—he has so confounded things that differ as quite to reverse the real state of the case.

What is true in it all is only that Quietism is rooted in the ordinary mystical contempt for the “creature”—we may call this, if we will, a doctrine of the “utter miserabilism of the creature”—and was sure that “nothing divine”—not quite “nothing that has religious value”—“can originate in man as man.” And we must here take “man as man” literally; not man as sinner, but man as man. And it is because this is true that it is also true, that to the Quietist the preparation for all that is spiritual, lay in “the repose of all one’s own powers, the absence of all efforts of self-direction, of all strain and striving, the annihilation of all confidence in one’s own capacities, the complete quiet of the ‘creature.’ ” This, however, only because to the Quietist all that is “spiritual” is “divine,” and cannot come, therefore, out of the “creature,” but must come out of God. We are here in the presence, in other words, of that Romanist dualism of which we have already sought to give an account, and which Jones himself describes very picturesquely as follows:⁸⁷ “There are two levels or storeys to the universe. One level is the realm of ‘nature,’ which has passed through a moral catastrophe that broke its inherent connection with the divine and so left it godless and ruined. The other level is the ‘supernatural’ realm where God is throned in power and splendor as spiritual Ruler. Nothing spiritual can originate on the level of ‘nature’; it can come only from ‘yonder.’ ”

The Quietist’s preoccupation, in other words, was not with sin but with nature. The Protestant, whose preoccupation was with sin, did not look for the annihilation of nature, but for the eradication of its sin. But what the Quietist sought to be delivered from was self. It was not a purified nature he sought but a superior nature. To employ Madame Guyon’s favorite figure of the stream, what the Quietist wished was not that the muddy waters which flow through it should be cleansed but that the sea from which it came and to which it tends, should flow up into it and replace its own waters wholly, hence the appropriateness of Fénelon’s own figure:⁸⁸ “As the sacristan at the end of the service snuffs out the altar candles one after another, so must grace put out our natural life, and as his extinguisher, ill-applied, leaves behind it a guttering spark that melts the wax, so will it be with us if one single spark of natural life remains.” Where Fénelon says “natural life” the Protestants say “sin”: and the difference is polar. It would be misleading in the extreme to say that one and the other identifies sin with self, self with sin. To the Protestant when sin is gone, nature remains—the whole of nature; sin is merely an accident to nature. To the Quietist it is only when “nature” is gone that “sin” is gone; what he is thinking of chiefly when he says “sin” is that limitation of “nature” which constitutes its essential character. There is no cure for this evil but passage into the All.

In drawing up an abstract of Madame Guyon’s “Spiritual Torrents,” Jones points out that she takes her start from the common mystical doctrine of the “seed.” “It is a primary idea of Madame Guyon,” he writes,⁸⁹ “that there is a ‘central depth’ in the soul, which has come from God and which exhibits ‘a perpetual proclivity’ to return to Him, like the push of the stream back to its source in the sea.” All souls are at bottom emanations from God and tend to return to their fountain. Hence, “all souls would return to their native Source, if they did not encounter the obstacle of sin, and therefore the main problem of life is the healing of the wounds of sin. There is, in her opinion, no solution short of the complete annihilation of the individual self in which sin inheres, the absolute spoiling of every particular thing to which the soul clings in its sundered selfhood. The soul must die to everything which it loves for self-sake, even to its desire for states of grace, gifts of the Spirit, supernatural communications, and salvation itself.… The soul must let itself go without thinking or willing or desiring. It must even get beyond doing virtuous actions, and reach a height where the distinction of actions is annulled. But the soul loses its own powers and capacities only to receive an immense capacity, like that of the river when it reaches the sea. It no longer possesses, it is possessed. It has lost ‘the nothing’ for ‘the All.’ It is perfect with the perfection of God, rich with His riches, and it loves with His love. It is one and the same thing with its Source. The divine life becomes entirely natural to it. It moves with the divine moving, acts as He acts through it, and its interior prayer is action.” That is to say, put in simple language, the soul being by nature of the substance of God, by escaping from its individualism is reabsorbed into God. Or employing Madame Guyon’s figure, the river which has flowed out from God, on flowing back to God is washed into by the tide and filled with the salt water of the Sea: the salt water has replaced the fresh and now constitutes the river, which of course now shows the qualities of sea-water.

This is the doctrine in the terms of which Upham undertook to express what, after all is said, remained in substance the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian Perfection. Naturally he did not accomplish this feat without some difficulty, in seeking to meet which he found it necessary to modify both doctrines. He did not, however, modify them equally. The modifications he introduced into the Quietistic teaching amounted to an act of violence, by which he forcibly transposed it into quite another key. The violence thus wrought on it, rendered similar violence less necessary with respect to the Wesleyan Perfectionism which he was endeavoring to express in terms of Quietistic mysticism. There were modifications made in the Wesleyan doctrine, modifications intrinsically of importance; but in the main the result was merely the expression of the Wesleyan doctrine in the language of Quietistic mysticism.

We may illustrate what is meant by this by observing at once, without delaying on minor matters, how the culminating conception of Quietism—that of union with God—was dealt with. Of course Upham took this conception over, and endeavored to make a place for it in his scheme of salvation. He attempts to do this by simply adding to the two stages of salvation provided for by the Wesleyan doctrine—those of justification and sanctification—a third, the state of “divine union.” The adjustment did not turn out, however, to be so simple as, at first blush, it may have appeared; and Upham found himself not quite able to determine whether the third stage was really a third stage of the Christian’s progress or only the second stage in its higher reaches. This doubt was due of course to the fact that, in taking over the conception of “divine union” from the Quietists, he had profoundly modified it, and reduced it to the level of mere sanctification. That he really so conceived it is sufficiently manifest from a sentence like this:⁹⁰ “It is taken for granted, that the subject of this higher experience has passed through the more common forms of religious experience; and has advanced from the incipient state of justification, and from the earlier gradations or steps of sanctification, to that state of divine union, in which he can say with a good degree of confidence, ‘I and my Father are one.’ ” Only two stages of salvation are recognized here, “the incipient state of justification,” and the completing “state of sanctification”—the latter of which, however, passes through a plurality of gradations, the culminating one of which is “divine union.”

Nevertheless Upham permitted himself to use with reference to this “divine union” all the extremities of language which he found in his mystical teachers, and in doing so to give it an apparent significance far in advance of anything which sanctification can be supposed to express. On one occasion, for example,⁹¹ he cites with approval Catharine of Genoa’s repetition of the old formula, “God was made man that He might make men God,” and declares that “it indicates the object at which every Christian ought to aim, and may hope to aim with success, viz. to experience inwardly and entirely the divine transformation, and to become, in the moral sense, and on the limited scale of humanity, ‘God manifest in the flesh.’ ” This is quite shocking language, which only familiarity with it in the mystical writers enables us to tolerate. Its tendency is to obliterate the infinite distance which separates God and man, and to efface the sense of wonder and awe with which the miracle of the incarnation is contemplated. The qualification “in the moral sense, and on the limited scale of humanity,” supplies no excuse for such reckless speech and serves only to declare its impropriety. The perversion of Scripture texts at once adduced in support, merely adds to the offense. When Paul says “I live, and yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,” he means neither that “selfishness had become love,” nor yet that “humanity had become divine,” in him. Nor does John by declaring that we experience “an entire transformation of nature” teach “the conversion of the human and fallen into the restored and the deified,” the “transformation of humanity into divinity.”

A union with God so conceived cannot reasonably be explained as merely a high stage of sanctification, and Upham accordingly very categorically declares that it is not. “Divine union,” he says,⁹² “is to be regarded as a state of soul different from that of mere sanctification.” “It is subsequent to it in time,” he says; and “sustains [to it] the relation of effect.” There seems to be, however, some difficulty in telling precisely what it is. It is “union,” and union implies “two or more persons or beings, who are the subjects of it.” We might conceive a perfectly holy soul by itself. We cannot conceive a united soul by itself. “Union, in the experimental sense of the term, is not merely holiness, but is the holiness of the creature united with the holiness of God.” We seize on this language with avidity, as apparently implying that after the union as before there are two, not one; that it results in a society, not a coalescence. But we are told next that, although not sanctification, it is a necessary result of sanctification. “When the soul has reached a certain point in Christian experience, the divine union, in the moral sense of the terms”—that is the only sense, we remember, that Upham admits—“is a matter, not only of choice, but in some sense a matter of necessity.”⁹³ That is because when we become holy God must love us—for He by the very necessity of His nature loves holiness, and what is more, we must love Him—for holiness must love holiness. This then is a necessary law of the life of pure love. “So strong is this tendency, that no obstacles can resist it. It is just as certain that they [God and holy beings] will meet, and that they will become one in purpose and happiness, and one in purity and life, as that they exist.”⁹⁴ Accordingly “holiness of heart implies, as a necessary consequence, union with God.”⁹⁵ But have we not somehow, in the course of the discussion, lost sight of “divine union,” altogether? That is, of that “divine union” which is not sanctification, but something additional to and higher than sanctification? There is nothing of which Upham is surer than that entire sanctification and “pure love” are one and the same thing: and is not the sanctified man one in purpose and one in purity with God? Is not that his very quality as entirely sanctified?

Upham, however, is not satisfied here with generalities. He who is in union with God, is through and through like God. “The soul,” says he,⁹⁶ “which is fully in the experience of divine union, will harmonize perfectly with the emotions and desires of the divine mind.” He apparently wishes us to take this declaration literally and even a little more than literally—for he ends by imposing on himself with his similitudes. As a movement in the ocean throbs in all the streams which are connected with it—we do not stop to inquire, Does it?—so, says he, “the desire of the Infinite mind sympathetically takes shape and develops itself in the finite mind.” Wherever such union exists, “there cannot, as a general thing, be a feeling or purpose in one party, without the existence of a corresponding feeling and purpose in the other.” So far does he push this declaration, that he actually draws as an inference from it the astounding representation that “when we know the thoughts of God’s true people, we know God’s thoughts; when we know what God’s true people desire, we know what God desires; when we know what the people of God are determined to do, we know what God is determined to do.” It is to advance but a step further, to declare that the movement of desire in the soul of “a child of God” is the continuation of “the distant but affiliated throbbing, of the great heart of the universe,” and justifies the sure expectation of its realization. This appears to constitute the holy man a very tolerable prophet:⁹⁷ whatever he desires must come to pass. This too seems to be taken strictly: the voice of a holy man at prayer is something “not only impressive but sublime, and almost terrible”—it is “not more the voice of man than of God.” Upham neglects to tell us how we are to identify the man who has become so holy as thus to be to the observer only a mirror of God’s thoughts, desires, intentions; and thus leaves us unable to avail ourselves practically of his guidance and compelled to content ourselves just with the Scriptures as a guide to life. But what we need to observe is that in the midst of all this extremity of language he yet conceives of the holy man only as a mirror of the divine; it is only sympathetically that the desires of the divine mind take shape in his mind. There is no union of coalescence; only a union of likeness.

Beyond a union which is sanctification, Upham never really gets. At the end of his first religious book,⁹⁸ he undertakes to explain to us what “the Unitive State” is. The “state of union,” he says, is distinctly a “state of mind.” Nothing like a “physical union,” a “union of essence with essence physically,” is expressed by the phrase, but only “a moral and religious union.”⁹⁹ The fact is, he explains, that what we mean when we speak of “the Unitive State” is just a state “of close and ineffable conformity with the Divine Mind.” We do not become in it one with God: we only become in it like God: and the thing we become like God in is holiness. No doubt Upham even here uses phraseology which, taken naturally, might mean more than this: he says, for example, “we unite with God.” But he at once explains his meaning thus: “Holy beings recognize in each other a mutual relationship of character, and are led, by the very necessities of their nature, to seek each other in the reciprocal exercise of love.” And he explains this to mean that “nothing appears to them so exceedingly good, desirable, and lovely as holiness, whenever and wherever found.” Holy beings, in other words, tend to come together, and to act together, and to form with one another a union, a community, of holy beings; in other words, a social union. He speaks in precisely the same sense in the last of his books, the posthumously published “Absolute Religion.”¹⁰⁰ “Man,” he here declares flatly, “must necessarily retain his individuality.” “The finite cannot be the Infinite.” But he can enlarge in the sphere of his sympathies. If we say he is merged and mixed with God, has himself become “extinct,” and “lost” in God—is “self-annihilated”—the “literal meaning” of these terms “must be somewhat modified.” It is not meant that he is “lost,” “annihilated,” in his “actual self-consciousness,” but only that he no longer has different “interests and hopes” from God; that he has ceased to have those “reflex acts which turn the mind too much upon our own joys and purposes.” We may distinguish between the “individual,” the “humanitarian,” and the “holy or divine” (the double designation is significant) man. The difference between them is real, but it is a difference only in the progressive enlargement of man’s benevolence and sympathies, until they embrace all Being. As to the “divine man”—“such a man, in the wide and resistless movement of the divine Spirit within him, not only transcends the restricted bounds of individualism, not only passes beyond the limits of kindred and country, but beyond those of humanity itself; and embraces not only the brotherhood of man but all existences, both those above him and those below him. Nothing but the boundlessness of existence, which is ever developing itself, nothing but the boundlessness of benevolence, which is ever pouring happiness into existences, nothing but the Infinite of creation and the Infinite of love, nothing but God himself in the widest and noblest sense of that glorious term, can meet and satisfy his measureless sympathies.”

How little the conception of intimate and loving conformity with God presented here is that which Upham’s Quietistic guides attached to the notion of Divine Union we may learn by simply permitting Heinrich Heppe to tell us how Madame Guyon thought of the relation of the perfected soul to God. “The state and life of the perfected soul,” in her view, says he,¹⁰¹ “is the most perfect simplicity of being, seeing that it is as little possible for it to distinguish itself from God as God distinguishes Himself from it. As long as the soul still possesses a perception of God, however slight, the union of the soul with God is still incomplete. When this union has reached its completeness, it ceases to be capable of perception, because then the life of God has become altogether restored to the soul, and it, having become merged in God’s being, has become wholly one with God, absolutely deified. God has then become the life-atmosphere of the soul, which belongs as essentially to it as the earthly atmosphere to the body, and which the soul perceives therefore as little as the body does the atmosphere in which it lives. The perfected soul knows of God only that He exists, and that He is exclusively its life.” Here are no two beings bound together only by the bonds of a mutual love, although so closely that the two hearts beat as one. The soul is not like God, but is God. God has ceased to be objective to it: it is not merely immersed in God as its atmosphere—that is an inadequate image. Madame Guyon says expressly that “the soul is not merely hidden in God, but has in God become God.”¹⁰² Why Upham thought it worth while to express his own widely divergent meaning in this language, appropriate only to another circle of thought—and indeed to insist that in doing so he was only bringing out the real meaning of the Quietistic writers—we can only conjecture, and need not be careful to inquire. The effect is to throw a veil of ambiguity over all his references to the subject.

Precisely the same method is followed by Upham with precisely the same effect in his discussion of that whole group of ideas which concern the mortification of “nature.” We may find an excellent example in the chapter in “The Life of Faith” entitled “On the Relation of Faith to Inward Crucifixion.” It is quite clear that it is precisely sin which Upham understands the soul to die to, in its inward crucifixion. To be inwardly crucified, says he, is “to be dead to every desire … which has not the divine sanction,” “to every appetite and every affection, which is not in accordance with the divine law.” Yet he alternatively speaks of the soul having “undergone a painful death to every worldly tie,” and sets in opposition to the “new spiritual life” just “the old sensual life.” And he attains his climax by means of this appeal to Tauler: “To be inwardly crucified, in the language of Tauler, ‘is to cease entirely from the life of self, to abandon equally what we see and what we possess, our power, our knowledge, and our affections; so that the soul in regard to any action originating in itself is without life, without action, and without power, and receives its life, its action, and its power from God alone.’ ” The governing idea of the discussion thus oscillates between deliverance from sin and deliverance from self; and after a while the two statements are brought into immediate contiguity that “holiness is something which must be desired and sought for itself,” and that holiness must by no means be sought for itself but only for God’s sake. The culmination is reached in the violent paradox that “perhaps the most decisive mark of the truly crucified man is, that he is crucified even to holiness itself.” The explanation follows at once: “that is to say, he desires God only, seeks God only, is satisfied and can be satisfied with God only, in distinction from … gifts or graces.”¹⁰³ But why should God and His gifts be set in opposition to one another, as if one could be taken and the other left? Of course God is to be desired above all His gifts; but they cannot be had, or even considered, apart. The mystical analysis is pushed even further than this, however. A definition of “pure divinity,” as the object of the contemplation of those who are in a state of “pure love,” is placed on Madame Guyon’s lips, which cuts even deeper.¹⁰⁴ This “pure divinity” is God apart from His attributes. As God is not the sum of His attributes, but the substrate of them, it is argued that we may and should contemplate Him apart from them all. To think of God’s power is not to think of God; to think of God’s wisdom is not to think of God. And so we may go through the whole list and arrive at last at the “pure divinity” which lies back of all attributes. This is, of course, mere logomachy, and is indicative only of the tendency of this type of thought to seek after undifferentiated Being for God—and for us. We are glad to have it noted that Fénelon at least knew better than to reason thus. What he says is that it is not enough to occupy ourselves merely with the attributes of God, but we should think of “God considered as the subject of his attributes.” “It is not infinite wisdom, infinite power, or infinite goodness, considered separately from the existence of whom they can be predicated, which it [the soul] loves and adores; but the God of infinite wisdom, power, and goodness.”¹⁰⁵

The subject of “interior or spiritual solitude” is dealt with in the same confusing way.¹⁰⁶ Seclusion of the body, we are told, is not meant; nor indeed mental seclusion. What is meant is “solitude from that in the mind, whatever it may be, which tends to disunite and dissociate it from God.” Why then, we feel bound to ask, do we speak of “solitude,” and not rather “renunciation of sin”? The answer plainly is that it is not renunciation of sin, after all, which is really in mind. Hence we read at once in a fuller description that, “in the state of interior solitude,” the soul is “in a state of solitude or separation from two things in particular.” And the average reader may feel some surprise to learn that these two things are the soul’s “own desires” and the soul’s “own thoughts.” These universal phrases receive, however, some limitation in the more precise definitions: “all desire, except such as God himself animates,” all thoughts “which are self-originated, and which tend, therefore, to dissociate it [the soul] from God.” This language is of course dictated by the opposition between “nature” and “the supernatural” which—rather than that between sin and grace—rules the thinking of the Romanist mystics; and on their lips is natural and even inevitable. In Upham it is only disturbing. We should have expected from him such phrases as, “all desire which is not conformed to the law of holiness,” “all thoughts which are not pure and ennobling.” To say that we must be separated from all but God-animated desires and God-originated thoughts is not to say that we must be freed from sin, but that we must be deprived of our own individuality. Accordingly, we are told that we are not to have any thoughts that are “our own,” and it is explained that “thoughts, which arise from the instigation of self, and not from a divine movement, are not in harmony with what God in his providential arrangements would desire and choose to suggest,” and are therefore “not only not from God, but … constitute so many disturbing influences, which separate God from the soul.” Of course the self, as it is now constituted, is corrupt; and all its thoughts and desires are corrupt. But the remedy for this dreadful state of things which the Scriptures offer is not the substitution of God for the self as the source of our thoughts and desires, but the purification of the self. The mystics, however, whom Upham is here reflecting, did not think in terms of sin and grace but in terms of self and God. It was not from sin but from the self itself from which they wished to turn; not to holiness that they wished to flee but to God. The form in which Upham presents that here is to remind us that in its spiritual solitude “the soul is not left alone with itself,” but “with God, who is Eternal Life,” a form of statement which embodies an unusually crass paradox—declaring that the soul enters into “solitude” by entering into “communion.” “Separation, in its spiritual application,” he therefore proceeds to tell us, is “not only seclusion, but transition”—transition to God, so as to be “not only with God, but in him; not only in harmony of action, but in the sacred enclosure of his being.” All roads lead to Rome; and in mystical thinking all roads lead to union.

The doctrine taught in this discussion is repeated, with perhaps some additional clearness of statement, in the chapter in “The Life of Faith,” “On the Mental State Most Suitable to the Constant Indwelling of the Holy Ghost.”¹⁰⁷ Upham says “most suitable,” but he is soon found discussing rather what the mental state is that is most favorable to the in-dwelling of the Holy Ghost. What he is investigating is the mental state which we must assume, if we wish to induce the indwelling of the Spirit. His conclusion is, “inward meekness and quietness,” and Ruysbroek and Père Lombaz are quoted to the effect that this state of mind “gives full liberty to the Spirit of God to act in the soul.” Having thus suspended the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the soul on the soul’s prior action,¹⁰⁸ Upham now gives himself to a description of what this “quiet spirit” is. “The quiet mind, in this sense of the terms,” says he, “has no preference, no election, which results from the impulse of its own tendencies. It is precisely in that situation, being free from any desires or purposes of its own, in which the smallest possible divine influence will give it the true direction. In other words, while it remains in this condition, it is susceptible of being moved, only as it is moved upon by the Spirit of God.” There is no question here of sin, and the overcoming of sin by grace. We hear only of the necessity of the mind’s attaining to a state of inanition; and the doctrine taught is that a state of complete inanition is the necessary precondition of the impulsion of the Spirit. A soul is most accessible to divine influence when there is no activity in it at all. Even that is not enough; for Upham now proceeds¹⁰⁹ to argue that not only is a soul so emptied prepared for the Spirit; but the Spirit must enter it. If not physically, it is morally necessary for Him to do so. He always stands at the door and knocks; and he enters when unresisted—“whenever the natural or selfish desire, in distinction from the sanctified desire, ceases.” In these words there may lie a suggestion that after all it is sin that is in question; but the suggestion is not justified by the discussion in general. It is the emptiness of the soul, not its purity, which prepares it for the Spirit. Accordingly Upham at once returns to the broad declaration; “Our doctrine, in accordance with that of many judicious writers on christian experience, is, that desire must cease; otherwise the Holy Spirit cannot be in-dwelling; in other words, cannot take up his abode fully and permanently in the heart.” Desire—not sin—must cease. But no: it is after all sin that must cease. For in his quality as psychologist Upham now goes on to explain that “there is not any such thing, and cannot be any such thing, as an absolute extinction of desire; neither in God, men, nor angels”: “desire is a necessary and unalienable attribute of every rational being.” He uses the term, therefore, he says, in the sense, not that desire, but “the natural, the unsanctified desire has ceased.” Once more then he plays fast and loose with mystical terminology, to the great discomfort of his readers and disadvantage of his meaning.

It will already have been observed that Upham has the odd faculty of suggesting the doctrine of Quietistic inaction as an undertone of his discussion, while avoiding its open assertion. We may find another instance of this mode of writing in the chapter, “On the True Idea of Spiritual Liberty,” in the “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life.”¹¹⁰ The text here is taken from Francis de Sales’ definition of Christian Liberty—as “consisting in keeping the heart totally disengaged from every created thing, in order that it may follow the known will of God.” That is true or false, according as we take it. That we may follow the known will of God, it is not necessary to keep the heart totally disengaged from every created thing. It may rather be necessary to engage it very deeply with every created thing. It is for example the known will of God that we shall love our neighbor, and we may take neighbor here universally. There is a contradiction suggested between obedience to God and natural affection which is not in the least Christian. It is easy, however, so to expound this fundamental declaration as to keep its false suggestion just under the surface, so that it is always suggesting itself, but is perhaps never openly asserted. It is easy to lay the stress on the duty of “in all cases and on all occasions doing the will of God” and of subordinating all else to it; and only subtly to suggest that we are therefore better without the love of country, or the love of parents, or of children, say, because they are apt to absorb us and so interfere with doing the will of God. Soon, however, we strike an openly false antithesis like this: “A man who is really guided by his appetites, his propensities, and even by his affections,”—these are Upham’s three categories of desires—“his love of country, or any thing else other than the Spirit of God, cannot be said to be led by that divine Spirit.”¹¹¹ Why not? The Spirit of God is not a fourth to this trio—appetites, propensities, affections, the Spirit of God—operating on the same plane with them, and contending with them on equal terms for the mastery of action, so that if we follow His guidance we must repel their propulsions. He works in and through them and by their propulsions accomplishes His guidance. It is by purifying them that He guides us in pure paths; by elevating them that He brings us to exalted actions. Nothing less true, accordingly, could be said than this: “In the heart of true liberty the Spirit of God rules, and rules alone; so that he who is in the possession of this liberty does nothing of his own pleasure or his own choice.” On the contrary, he in whose heart the Spirit of God rules and rules alone, does all that he does of his own pleasure and of his own choice. His liberty consists precisely in its being his pleasure and his choice to do what the Spirit of God, who has made him thus free, would have him do. The law of God has been written on his heart, and he spontaneously does its commandments. The suggestions of the succeeding phraseology are accordingly quite unscriptural: “That is to say, in all cases of voluntary action, he does nothing under the impulse and guidance of natural pleasure or natural choice alone. His liberty consists in being free from self; in being liberated from the dominion of the world; in lying quietly and submissively in the hands of God; in leaving himself, like clay in the hands of the potter, to be moulded and fashioned by the divine will.” The question is not whether we are in the hands of the Potter; or whether it is not our joy to be in the hands of this Potter; it is how this Potter proceeds in molding the clay. And we praise God that it is not by liberating us from our selves, but by liberating our selves from sin and forming them in the image of Christ, that He proceeds. What has deflected Upham’s exposition from the truth is the undertone of sympathy with that false antagonism of the natural and the supernatural which dominates the thoughts of his Romanist teachers.

Out of the same source there rises a note of asceticism which sounds through many of Upham’s discussions. We may take as an example the chapter in the “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life” on “The Excision and Crucifixion of the Natural Life.”¹¹² Everything here depends, of course, on what is understood by “the natural life.” If a life of sin is meant, then of course it is to be excised and crucified. And Upham does, at bottom, mean just that. But he is always treading on the border line which divides this conception of the natural life from that which sees in it only a life in accordance with “pure nature.” In other words, the Romanist doctrine of the natural and the supernatural constantly intrudes into his thought. It is a hard counsel when we are bidden¹¹³ to “cut off and crucify the desire of internal consolations and comforts”—although a good meaning can be attached to it. It becomes harder when we read on: “If we would be what the Lord would have us to be, we must be willing, in the spirit of inward crucifixion, to renounce and reject all other natural desires, and all our own purposes and aims.” It is some relief to learn that only “all desires and purposes which spring from the life of nature, and not from the Spirit of God,” are meant; although the antithesis is not exact. And the relief is not lessened so far as the words go, when we read further: “In other words, it is our duty, as those who would glorify God in all things, to check every natural desire, and to delay every contemplated plan of action, until we can learn the will of God, and put ourselves under a divine guidance.” But that by “natural desires” here are meant not the desires intrinsically sinful because the expressions of the “lusts of the flesh” of the “natural man,” but just desires proper to us as men, is clear, since we are only to delay following them until we can ascertain whether they are in accordance with the will of God, which it is implied they may prove to be. And we now read further: “Every desire must so far lose its natural character as to become spiritually baptized and sanctified, before it can be acceptable to God.” What? a desire intrinsically good, which on investigation may prove to be in accordance with God’s will? Would it not be nearer the truth to say that every desire, not corrupted by sin, is already acceptable to God, in its natural character? Baptism and sanctification presuppose sin: and only sin-corrupted desires require baptism and sanctification. It is not nature but sin which needs extirpation. There floats before Upham’s mind, in other words, under the ambiguity of his use of the word “nature,” a condemnation of nature itself, and an aspiration not for a holy natural life, but for a purely supernatural life.

The resultant asceticism shows itself most plainly, however, when he begins to illustrate the doctrine which he has laid down. He illustrates it, for example, from the desire for knowledge.¹¹⁴ The desire for knowledge is in itself innocent; but it becomes wrong when it is so “strong as to disquiet the inward nature, and thus to perplex our intercourse with God.” It is to be “merged and lost, as it were, like all the other natural desires, in the supreme desire for God’s glory”—“a desire which evidently is not the product of nature, but which can come from the inspiration of the Holy Ghost alone.” Why the most complete possession of knowledge may not subserve God’s glory, we are not told. There is no reason for setting the “natural” desire for knowledge and the “supernatural” purpose to seek God’s glory in contradiction to one another, except an underlying feeling that nothing that is of “nature” is good. In point of fact the desire for knowledge and the desire for God’s glory lie in consciousness side by side as alike just desires: as they emerge in consciousness we know nothing of their diverse origins and cannot discriminate between them on that ground. On an earlier page,¹¹⁵ the warning against an excessive desire for knowledge is put on a different ground. We can easily know too much, it is there suggested, for our soul’s good, for every enlargement of our sphere of knowledge decreases our sphere of faith. “Knowledge necessarily excludes faith, in regard to the thing which is known. And we do not hesitate to say, that ignorance with faith is, in many things, better than knowledge without it.” We shall not be led astray by the prudent adjunctive of those two last words “without it”: they merely introduce an “undistributed middle.” The doctrine announced is clearly that it is better not to know too much, because faith is better than knowledge and we should leave all that we can to be merely believed and not known—and there is an unpleasant suggestion that faith flourishes better in half-light. Surely this is that voluntary humility which did not commend itself to an apostle. As with knowledge, so with friendship. Our friendships must be “crucified.” Friends may become idols: better shun the danger and not have too many of them: and among friends he includes kindred—though he does not tell us how it is best to free ourselves of superfluous kindred. Even if our friends are “eminent Christians, so much so as to bear the very image and likeness of the Savior himself,” we must beware of loving them too much. This is an atmosphere more Buddhist than Christian. In this “baptism of fire,” as he rightly calls it, he declares that the natural life dies; and that thus the way is prepared for the true resurrection and life of Christ in the soul. We are, that is to say, not so much to cleanse the soul, as to empty it, that Christ may enter in. “We must not think to go to heaven and carry our natural life with us.” That depends on what we mean by our natural life. We are to continue men in heaven, we suppose. But we are not to love the “world”? That again depends on what we mean by the “world.” Certainly we are not to delight in the world, the flesh, and the devil. But are we not to love the world which is our “neighbor”? But we are now told that it is “the corrupt life” of nature that we are to renounce. And to that we agree with all our heart. The mystical ascetic strain serves only to confuse the two senses of “nature,” and so to convey to the uninstructed mind some very dubious notions.

In some paragraphs¹¹⁶ of a chapter devoted to the duty of a primary, all-embracing, and eternal act of consecration, Upham endeavors to give currency to the mystical term and notion of “nihility,” and yet keep his prescriptions in harmony with his strong New England sense of human activity. We must coöperate with God, he allows: but he adds at once that “in order to realize, personally, the conditions of divine coöperation … it is necessary to be, mentally, in a state of passivity, as it is sometimes expressed,” or “more properly and truly, of strict impartiality before God.” That is to say, we must be free and ready to go God’s way, and that implies that we have none of our own: our minds are to be but mirrors reflecting His will. And we must “not only begin in our nothingness, but must be willing to remain in it.” All our coöperation is really a receiving. If we work it is only God working in us. We are not inactive; but “man is justly and efficiently active” only “when he is active in communication with God, and yet remaining deeply in his own sphere of nothingness.” “Man never acts to higher and nobler purpose than when, in the realization of his own comparative nihility, he places himself in the receptive position, and lets God work in him.” This curious mode of expressing oneself amounts to a forced employment of mystical language, with a constantly suggested reserve. What, for example, is the function of the word “comparative” inserted before “nihility” in the sentence last quoted, except to warn against taking the language in its natural sense? We cannot quite say that all that is taught here is that we must do the will of God. It is taught also that the way to do the will of God is to inhibit our own willing and let God’s willing flow into us in its stead. This is what is understood in mystical language by “the death of the will.” But when Upham comes to deal with this phrase¹¹⁷ he manages to reduce it, too, simply to preferring God’s will to our own. Of course the will cannot cease to exist, he says—then we should cease to be men. But we must cease to will divergently from God’s willing. And, it is added, so soon as we cease to will divergently from God’s willing, we shall find that we have begun to will accordingly with God’s willing. When the will dies, then, it is not dead; it is not even quiescent; it is only transformed. Does it not seem a pity then to speak of this transformation and transfiguration of the will as “the death of the will”? Upham himself has the grace to say:¹¹⁸ “When we use the phrase ‘interior annihilation,’ we of course use it in a mitigated or qualified sense”—in this sense, namely, “as meaning not an entire extinction of any principles within us, but only an extinction of certain irregularities of their action.” “In other words,” he adds, “it is not an absolute annihilation; but only the annihilation of any thing and every thing that is wrong; the annihilation of what the Scriptures call the ‘old man,’ in distinction from the ‘new man, created anew in Christ Jesus.’ ” Of the habit of using in much the same reference the term “nothingness,” he has the grace to speak¹¹⁹ also with mild criticism: this terminology is “convenient,” indeed, “but yet not accurate.” Nevertheless, in deference to the usage of his Quietistic guides, he uses this phraseology and permits himself to speak familiarly of “the soul that has reached the centre of its Nothing”—meaning only, he explains, that it is “absolutely and forever nothing relatively to self,” a statement not itself beyond serious criticism: let us at least say “relatively to sin.” It is pleasing to report that before the end of the volume is reached—though only just before it is reached¹²⁰—the true note is for once firmly struck. Upham is speaking here of the doctrine of “some advocates of Christian perfection,” “especially,” he says, of “some pious Catholics of former times,” “that the various propensities and affections, and particularly the bodily appetites, ought to be entirely eradicated.” That is the familiar “noughting of nature.” No, says he, with unusual directness: No—“we are not required to eradicate our natural propensities and affections, but to purify them. We are not required to cease to be men, but merely to become holy men.” This is true, and it is well said. The question that forces itself constantly on the reader is, Why dally, then, with the mystical phraseology when the mystical meaning is not intended?