SPIRITUAL DENUDATION AND BLANCO WHITE.
LTO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATC1R.1
SIR,—The Spectator of the 22nd inst., on "Spiritual Denude- tion," during the last thirty years, makes the following state- ment :— " The first remarkable revelation of this state of mind was, per- haps, the publication [in 1845] of Blanco White's Letters and Biography. There we saw the nervous restlessness with which one belief after another was dismissed till a mind marked by the deepest sensibilities and every sort of human piety of feeling, was left as bare of trust, in the highest sense of the word, as the peak of the Matter- horn is bare of vegetation."
Of this man, said here to have become as devoid of religious trust as the bleakest summits of the Alps are devoid of vegeta- tion, I produce some utterances of his spirit, summaries of his long religions experience, confessions of his faith in the imme- diate expectation of death, as they stand recorded in the Biography referred to :— T. "In the midst of my sufferings, all the leading thoughts are present with me. I stand upon a rock. God's providence is carried on by the straggles of reason against the passions. I have no doubts. I came from God, and I go to Him. The guide, the light within us, is not ourselves, nor dependent on our volitions. There is, then, an infinite source of the rationality we know to be in us, who will receive us to Himself. I should trust a friend, and can I not trust Him ! There is not, in my mind, the possibility of a doubt." 2. "Oh my God ! I know thou dost not overlook any of thy creatures. Thou dost not overlook me. Have mercy upon me, oh God ! I cry to thee, knowing that I cannot alter thy ways. I cannot if I would, and I would not if I could. If a word could remove these sufferings, I would not utter it ! —Just life enough to suffer. But I submit,—and not only submit, but rejoice."
3. To the friends around him,—" You all are to me the represen- tatives of the merciful compassions of the Almighty."
4. "I wish you to ask for me the prayers of your congregation. I do not doubt the goodness of my God. Nor do I believe that he overlooks me, or requires intercession—bat my soul longs for religious sympathy, and I wish to have the feeling that I am not separated from my fellow Christians, nor deprived of the consolations I have always found from social prayer." 5. "I see the links in the chain of Providence that has brought me to where I am. Though there are difficulties in the course of this our life, yet in the direction of those difficulties there are circumstances that are more than compensations. I never doubted of Providence, but I see it in my own case more clearly than in any treatise."
6. "When the hour shall come, let it be said once for all, my soul will be concentrated in the feeling, My God, into thy hands I com- mend my spirit.' God to me is Jeans; and Jesus is God,—of course, not in the sense of Divines."
Is this a spirit that has made itself as bare of religious trust as the peak of the Matterhorn is bare of vegetation ?
Blanco White's religious course was that of gradual develop- ment in a spiritual growth. He advanced slowly, but never turned back upon his path. The beliefs successively stripped from him were displaced by living growths, not spiritual beliefs, but only of the external accretions which veil, or become sub- stitutes for, the soul's knowledge of God. He denuded himself only,—firstly, of Roman sacerdotalism ; secondly, and long after, of Church of England and orthodox Protestant dogmatic schemes and conditions of saving intercourse with God ; lastly, of the mechanical belief that miracles are the essential evidences of Christian truth, or that spiritual things can be otherwise than spiritually discerned.
Minds overrun and determined by some strong dogmatic tendency, whatever may be their general nobleness of nature, often seem incapable of justice or tenderness towards those who are moving on another, it may be a directer, way towards God. One such dogmatist, the Spectator is aware, will not shrink from declaring the mpossibility of any real sense of the "Fatherhood of God," unless it is received through the medium of a co-eternal, co-equal Son in organic communion with our spiritual consciousness. Another such dogmatist will be absolutely certain that, unless the soul clings to ecclesiastical traditions, and is borne in the ship of the authoritative Church through the seas of doubt and error, it must sink in unbelief, or be stranded on barren sands where no life is. The early Christians seemed Atheists to contemporary Heathens ; to Poly- theism, as to some modern theological schools, pure Monotheism vanished into nothingness. That the pure in heart see God, and believe with the heart unto righteousness, and follow Christ for his own sake because the Father draws them to him, must surely be a crux to those who hold the only methods of divine approach to be sacerdotal or metaphysical.—I am, Sir, ttc.,
[We were quite wrong, and sincerely regret the undue con- fidence in memory which caused the neglect to verify and correct a mistaken impression. The writer had in his mind Mr. Blanco White's statement (Vol. III., p. 276, of the "Life ") :—" It is long since I renounced the (to me) superstitious practice of falling upon my knees and formally addressing to Thee either
praises or petitions The order of Thy universe is im- mutable; nothing can be but what is to be, nothing is possible but what will happen,"—and he had forgotten entirely the evidence of a genuinely spiritual attitude of mind with which these rather hopeless negations were combined. It is clear enough that Blanco White was to the last a spiritual Theist of the necessarian type, who had rejected indeed all the external supernaturalism of Christianity, but who still clung to the Christlike conception of God, so far as that was compatible with the notion of a universe of "immutable order."—ED. Spectator.]
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