[?] “Copy at B.O. has note: ‘The last 2½ pages are Pusey’s in substance. J.H.N.’“—Blehl.
[British Critic, vol. 21, July 1837.]
The Pietists of Germany, to whom Mr. Bickersteth has directed our attention in this Memoir of Franké, one of their principal ornaments, rose out of the orthodox Lutheran School, and terminated in the Rationalists. Every history has its own moral, and every reader draws it in his own way. Mr. Bickersteth would view the Pietists in contrast with the orthodox Lutherans who preceded them; we perhaps are rather disposed to regard them in connection with the Rationalists who followed. He probably discerns in Franké and his associates, that English school of which he is a distinguished member; and here we may on the whole agree with him. But he would proceed to liken the Lutherans, over whom they triumphed, to what is commonly called the High-Church party in England; whereas we should discover in the present state of what are called Evangelical opinions, the more than incipient development of a double tendency, which was realized in the history of Pietism, at once towards that formalism out of which it started, and to the free-thinking system in which it ended. As time went on, Pietism either relapsed or went further; and its English parallel, following its career, is rapidly becoming in one of its portions technical, in another latitudinarian. Now, considering Mr. Bickersteth’s publication says not a word about High Church or Low Church, we may be thought unfair and party-spirited thus to interpret it. It may be said that he is simply desirous of doing good, not of making a controversy. Doubtless he is; but then, if we may judge from his usual turn and tone of thought, his notion of religious excellence is such as not to admit of being explained and communicated except through the medium of such contrasts. His main notion of a religious man is of one who relies not on what is outward, but on what is inward; his notion of the Church’s warfare with the world, is of a contest between self-righteous and barren orthodoxy, and spiritual faith. Under these circumstances he can but mean Franké’s life to be a type of the history of every religious man in his contest with the world; and, inclusively, of every religious man in the English Church.
We have above shown our willingness to agree with Mr. Bickersteth in considering the Pietists of the same religious family with his own friends; yet though this may be granted in general terms, it is by no means true on an accurate comparison between the two schools. Spener and Franké were much more of Romanists than is Mr. Bickersteth. Spener re-published the work of Tauler, an eminent Roman Catholic Mystic; Franké, following his example, translated two of the works of Molinos, “a celebrated pious Spanish Mystic,” as the work before us calls him, “who finished his days at Rome in the eighteenth century.” As the circumstances of Franké’s publication are instructive, we shall present them to the reader in the translator’s words.
“In 1687, Franké was induced, by a disputation held in Leipzig, ‘De Quietismo contra Molinosum,’ in which the antagonist confessed that he had never read Molinos’ writings, to translate two of the latter’s works—‘Guida Spirituale,’ ‘Manuductio Spiritualis,’ and ‘Della Comunione Cotidiana,’ or ‘De Communione Quotidiana,’ from the Italian into Latin. This step was taken amiss of him, as if he thereby acknowledged himself an adherent of Molinos, and a friend to Catholicism. To this he replied, ‘I have never sought to justify or maintain every thing contained in Molinos. But I have been much displeased that others should fall upon an author, and condemn him, without understanding him, or ever having read him, and attribute sentiments to him, which probably never occurred to him. On the contrary, I assert that there is much of what is edifying and useful in his writings, which I can never bring myself to reject or condemn. Truth must be esteemed everywhere, whether found amongst friends or foes. We ought to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good. Am I necessarily a heathen, when I say that many good things are to be found in Cicero’s De Officiis? And why must I be vilified and made out to be a Catholic, because I find many useful observations in a Roman Catholic book?’”
But to return. It seems from what has been said, we are at issue with Mr. Bickersteth on a sufficient number of points, as regards the history of Pietism, more indeed than it is possible to treat in this article;—on what is life in religion, what is deadness, whether the Lutherans of the seventeenth century were like the so-called orthodox among ourselves, how far the Pietists are like the so-called Evangelical, how far German Pietism, how far English Pietism, how far in short what is called vital religion, tends on the one hand to formal religion, on the other hand to freethinking religion, as being a transition state, vacillating between one or other of two inevitable issues. Out of these ample topics, we shall set apart a very small field for discussion, still, as we hope, not an unprofitable one. We mean to say a few words on the character of the formal Lutheranism which preceded the Pietists, and to inquire whether there be not alarming signs among our English Pietists at the present moment of a tendency to a similar formalism.