and blood, as Romanists teach ; nor that his body and blood were locally present in the sacrament, in, with, and under the bread and wine, as Luther held ; nor could he admit the dynamic presence of Christ's body, as taught by Calvin ; nor that the Lord's Supper was merely a significant and commemorative ordinance, as Zwingle taught. He held his own doctrine. He transposed the words of Christ. Instead of " This (bread) is my body," he said, the true meaning and intent of Christ was, "My body is bread ; " that is, as bread is the staff and source of life to the body, so my body, formed of the essence of God, is the life of the soul.
A third inference from Schwenkfeld's fundamental principle was that the redemption of the soul is purely subjective ; something wrought in the soul itself. He denied justification by faith as Luther taught that doctrine, and which Luther regarded as the life of the Church. He said that we are justified not by what Christ has done for us, but by what He does within us. All we need is the communication of the life or substance of Christ to the soul. With him, as with Mystics generally, the ideas of guilt and expi- ation were ignored.
Later Mystics.
The succession of mystical writers was kept up by such men as Paracelsus, Weigel, Jacob Boehme, and others. The first named was a physician and chemist, who combined natural philosophy and alchemy with his theosophy. He was born in 1493 and died in 154 L Weigel, a pastor, was born in Saxony in 1533, and died in 1588. His views were formed under the inflluence of Tauler, Schwenkfeld, and Paracelsus. He taught, as his predecessors had done, that the inner word, and not the Scriptures, was the source of true knowledge, that all that God creates is God himself, and that all that is good in man is of the substance of God. The most remarkable writer of this class was Jacob Boehme, who was born near Gorlitz in Silesia, in 1575. His parents were peasants, and he himself a shoemaker. That such a man should write books which have proved a mine of thoughts to Schelling, Hegel, and Coleridge, aa well as to a whole class of theologians, is- decisive evidence of his extraordinary gifts. In cliaracter he was mild, gentle, and de- vout ; and although denounced as a heretic, he constantly professed his allegiance to the faith of the Church. He regarded himself as hiving received in answer to prayei', on three different occasions, communications of divine lio-ht and knowledge which he was im- pelled to reveal to others. He did not represent the primordial being as without attributes or qualities of which nothing could be
84 INTRODUCTION. [Ch. IV. —Mysticism
predicated, but as the seat of all kinds of forces seeking develop- mfent. What the Bible teaches of the Trinity, he understood as an account of the development of the universe out of God and its relation to him. He was a theosophist in one sense, in which Vauo-han ^ defines the term, " One who gives you a theory of God or of the works of God, which has not reason, but an inspiration of his own for its basis." "The theosophists," says Fleming,^ "are a school of philosophers who mix enthusiasm with observation, alchemy with theology, metaphysics with medicine, and clothe the whole with a form of mystery and inspiration." ^
§ 5. Quietism.
A. Its general character. Tholuck * says " There is a law of seasons in the spiritual, as well as in the physical world, in virtue of which when the time has come, without apparent connection, similar phenomena reveal them- selves in different places. As towards the end of the fifteenth century an ecclesiastical-doctrinal reformatory movement passed over the greater part of Europe, in part without appai-ent connec- tion ; so at the end of the seventeenth a mystical and spiritual ten- dency was almost as extensively manifested. In Germany, it took the form of Mysticism and Pietism ; in England, of Quakerism ; in France, of Jansenism and Mysticism ; and in Spain and Italy, of Quietism." This movement was in fact what in our day would be called a revival of religion. Not indeed in a form free from griev- ous errors, but nevertheless it was a return to the religion of the heart, as opposed to the religion of forms. The Mystics of this period, although they constantly appealed to the mediaeval Mys- tics, even to the Areopagite, and although they often used th'e same forms of expression, yet they adhered much more faithfully to Scriptural doctrines and to the faith of the Church. They did not fall into Pantheism, or believe in the absorption of the soul into the substance of God. They held, however, that the end to be attained was union with God. By this was not meant what Chris- tians generally understand by that term ; congeniality with God, delio-ht in his perfections, assurance of his love, submission to his will, perfect satisfaction in the enjoyment of his favour. It was
1 Hours with Mystics, vol. i. p. 45. ^ Vocabulary of Philosophy.
3 See Baur's Chrigtliche Gnosis ; Dorner's Eislory of the Doctrine of the Person of Chtst, and his History of Protestant Theology ; Hamberger, Die Leh-c des Deulschen Phihisophen J Boehme, 1844.
* Herzog's Encyklopadie, art. " Molinos."