THE INNER LIGHT.*
WE have in the little volume before us a confession of faith which has a wider interest than that suggested by its title. In form a discussion of those principles which unite the Society of Friends, proceeding from one whom conviction, not birth, has placed in their ranks, it is, in fact, an endeavour to answer the question : What is the channel by which a message from the Invisible can reach the heart of man? The literary power which marks the book will attract some readers who might be indifferent to its rare union of devout reverence and fearless tolerance; and one or two among them, perhaps, will feel grateful to it for having led them to reopen a volume as unlike it in balk as in all other obvious respects,—Sir James Stephen's contributions to the Edinburgh Review, collected by him under the title of Essays in _Ecclesiastical Biography. The comparison of the two, however, has led us to some criticism that will sound unreasonable, for we could wish that the later book were at once more and less like that which it has recalled to us. What occasionally strikes us as a hesitation between opposite ideas might, if Miss Stephen bad made us know the early Quakers as her father made us know the early Evangelicals, have been exchanged for a sympathetic presentment of varied feelings, in which there need have been no inconsistency. We should not, for instance, have it con- ceded on p. 33 "that to some persons the words inward and
outward' appear to have no meaning at all," and asserted on p. 34 that it is in degree only that the gift of response to the Inner Light is exceptional. If we are to reconcile those statements, we must knock all sense out of one of them. However, if Miss Stephen has not chosen to write history, the comparison she has suggested is itself a striking instance of that spiritual evolution which gives history its deepest meaning. Unlike as are the two books we have compared—nay, because they are so unlike, they may be set side by side as typical instances of that development by which the yearnings of one generation appear in its successor, at once the same and different. The earlier volume is an expression of their common recoil from all outwardness in religion, as it was stirred and influenced by the High Church movement of half-a-century ago. At that time, it did not tend in any perceptible degree to thin the ranks of the national Church. The ground-swell of a great storm was then still felt on our shores ; the influence of the French Revolution came to us like those waves which sometimes break in thunderous foam from a glassy sea, speaking of a mighty agitation that has passed away. There was a sense of value in the national recognition of an Unseen Power which our genera- tion has to a great degree lost ; many then felt, as Miss Stephen does, that the crises of the spiritual life belong wholly to the realm in which the spirit is alone with the Father of Spirits, and still clung to the Church which recognised that he was also the Lord of Hosts and the Ruler of Nations. But of the two great reactions stirred by the High Church movement, one tends to weaken any sacramental Church, and the other weakens every Church whatever. The "Low Church" of a former day contained many who turned from a worship which seemed to localise and temporalise the Divine ; the "Broad Church" of our own day contains many who turn from all endeavour to approach the Unseen as one which they have made with earnest persistence, with un- questionable desire, and, as it seems, with absolute futility. And while the "Low Church," turning from rites to dogma, has lost all influence over an age which questions everything, the "Broad Church," turning away from both, has become a mere corridor through which those could pass who sought to quit the enclosure of the Temple gently and graciously, and
• Quaker Strongholds. By Caroline Emelin Stephen. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Trilbner, and Co.
escape into a different domain. Thus it has come to pass that the contrast between those who consider that communion with God must be wholly an individual thing, and those who still cling to a corporate expression of their common faith and the symbols which imply it, is a very small matter in comparison with the contrast between those who believe and those who- disbelieve that man can know God in any way. Here we have the great division of our day, throwing all others into the shade..
What we mean by this book being too like that with which we have compared it, is that we miss in it an adequate consciousness of that antithesis which the reader cannot but remember at every line. Miss Stephen would answer to this objection (she virtually does so on p. 72), that she has nothing to say which those would care to hear who need to be convinced that worship has an object. To write for a definite state of mind is, indeed, the first literary requisite of any book, and no doubt the very excellence of the style of Quaker Strongholds belongs to this careful limitation of the writer's audience ; but, nevertheless, a book on this subject taking so little cognisance of the negative attitude of our day, seems to us like a work on gardening which takes no cognisance of climate. The following extract, which we would cite also for its own beauty, seems to us to lose half its force from the fact that it ignores the limitations which it cannot but suggest to those who could echo every word :—
" That individual and immediate guidance in which we recognise
• that 'the finger of God is come unto us,' seems to come in, as it were, to complete and perfect the work rock-hewn by morality and conscience. We may liken the laws of our country to the cliffs of our island, over which we rarely feel ourselves in any danger of falling ; the moral standard of our social circle to the beaten high- way which we can hardly miss. Our own conscience would then be represented by a fence, by which some parts of the country are enclosed for each one, the road itself at times barred or nar- rowed. And that Divine guidance of which I am speaking could be typified only by the pressure of a hand upon ours, leading us gently to step to the right hand or the left, to pause or go for- ward, in a manner intended for ourselves alone." (pp. 43-44.) There is nothing here, certainly, which obliges the author to enter into the position of those who deny the fact of this guidance. She has chosen her imagery perfectly to avoid any such need, though we think she has needlessly and erroneously complicated the question by setting up a dis- tinction between this guidance and conscience, especially
in a passage on p. 37, which seems to us a result of endeavour after a kind of definiteness not suited to her subject-matter, a.gainst which she makes elsewhere an
implicit protest. But this is only partly relevant to what we would dwell on now. The Church of our fathers gathered together many, in a worship by no means insincere, who knew as much of the experience here described as of what, it feels like to fly through the air. Between those who feel the invisible world the true home of their spirits, as Miss Stephen does, and those who regard it as a conventional expression for mingled fancies and hopes about what will happen to us when we die, which is the way the scientific intellect of our day is inclined to regard it, there is an inter- mediate class, forming, probably, the majority of an Estab- lished Church, who make a place in their minds for spiritual interests much as they make a place in their minds for national interests, as something large and vital, and certified by respectable authority, but not susceptible of any verification at first-hand. They belonged to the Church in the same way as they belonged to the Kingdom of England. To many critics of the Church of England, in some degree to Miss Stephen, it is a part of the indictment against it that it makes room for this kind of second-band worship ; and none can deny the fact, however they may regard it. "In a very important sense," said Frederick Maurice, addressing one who took the reverse path from that of Miss Stephen—quitting the Society of Friends to join the Church —and who quoted to him the text, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," "it may be said that the Kingdom of England is within you." But it is unquestionable that the Kingdom of England is a reality without us, and the Kingdom of Heaven, never an unquestioned reality, is one now con- stantly denied. A very dim and inchoate aspiration after divine guidance is enough for some sort of spiritual life, while this aspiration finds itself surrounded by a national assump- tion of such guidance, and led towards it by the memories of childhood, and all the important events which form the la.ndmsrks of life. So long as the State looks to the Church to register the beginning and the end of life, and to consecrate conjugal union—to sympathise, in short, with all the crises of national and individual life—(while we readily admit that in doing this it does something to make some persons hypo- crites), so long we may say that it ranges on the aide of the Invisible, beside the purely spiritual impulses of man, those which he feels as a citizen. When once this is done away with, the individual element in religion has to bear a new strain. The question is more and more brought home to the conscience of every man : "Am I alone when no human form meets my eye and no human voice my ear?" When the corporate witness to the Divine is gone, it becomes a new difficulty that the individual witness is not universal.
Almost every large popular movement characteristic of our day tends to intensify this difficulty. While Democracy has induced the doubt whether anything which cannot be shouted to a crowd should be made a basis of action, Science has tried to establish the dogma that nothing which cannot be exhibited to a crowd should be made a basis of belief. Certainty has come to mean transferable certainty. And even those who feel that the deepest certainty begins where transferable certainty ends, must recognise that this new spirit has had an important lesson for them. They have been taught to dis- tinguish those truths which can be set down in definite propositions and conveyed from one mind to another, from those which can be discerned only by their own vital glow within the soul ; and in this process, they have come to feel differently towards creeds which they can repeat without the slightest insincerity, but which they value as a record of the thoughts of men more than as an authentic deci- sion as to the Being of God. The recognition of the Divine within the soul is untouched by such a change ; but its appropriate expression has become an individual thing, and being individual, we cannot but ask, as none were inclined to ask in former ages : Why is it not universal ? "There is a spirit which I feel," wrote an early Quaker, James Naylor, whose blameless life may well have been shortened by the cruelties inflicted on him, "that delights to do no evil, but to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptation.
I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellow- ship therein with those who lived in dens and desolate places on the earth, who through death obtained their resurrection and eternal holy life." This quotation (which is not Miss Stephen's, though doubtless well known to her) appears to us, as it did to John Sterling, through whose biography we know it, as "the eternal truth embodied in Christianity." But it gives, we think, very expressively the aspect under which the belief in Christianity has become more difficult for the intellect of our day. The Nation no longer declares belief in the Holy Ghost as a part of its corporate life. The Individual must give that belief with a new certainty if it is not to be discarded, for the old one is gone.
When we say that our heaviest indictment against Miss Stephen is that she has not given an adequate space to diffi- culties which lie outside her subject as she has limited it, we shall seem to many to pay a high tribute to her work. In some ways it has no doubt gained by the exclusion we have censured, for the authoress could not have satisfied us without entering on ground where the simplicity and directness which give her book its charm would have been lessened. We think that something of greater value might have been gained ; but possibly our very attempt to supply the lacuna will be of use to Miss Stephen and her readers in showing her and them that she was right, and we were wrong.
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