Chapter 5 | Table of Contents | Chapter 7

Now if in any of my writings I have ever said anything higher or further of the nature and necessity of continual divine inspiration, I refuse no censure that shall be passed upon me. But if I have from all that we know of God, of nature, and of creature, shown the utter impossibility of any kind or degree of goodness to be in us, except from the divine nature living and breathing in us, or if I have shown that in all scripture, Christ and His apostles over and over say the same thing as well as our church liturgy is daily praying according to it, what kinder thing can I say of those churchmen who accuse me of "fanaticism" than what Christ said of His blind crucifiers, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do."

It is to no purpose to object to all this, that these kingdoms are over-run with fanatics of all kinds and that Moravians with their several divisions and Methodists of various kinds are everywhere acting in the wildest manner under the pretense of being called and led by the Spirit. Be it so or not, that is a matter I do not meddle with, nor is the doctrine I am speaking of in the least affected by it. For what an argument would this be that fanatics of the present and former ages have made a bad use of the doctrine of being led by the Spirit of God, ergo, "He is enthusiastic or helps forward fanaticism who preaches up the doctrine of being led by the Spirit of God"? Now as absurd as this is, were any of my accusers as high in genius or as bulky in learning as the colossus was in stature, he would be at a loss to bring a stronger argument than this to prove me an enthusiast or an abettor of them.

I do not begin to doubt about the necessity, truth and perfection of gospel religion when told that whole nations and churches have under a pretense of regard to it and for the sake of it, done all the bad things that can be charged upon this or that fanatic (whether you call those bad things schism, perjury, rebellion, worldly, craft and hypocrisy), so I do not give up the necessity, the truth, and the perfection of looking wholly to the Spirit of God and Christ within me as my promised inspirer and only worker of all that can be good in me. I do not give this up, because some age or other spiritual pride and fleshly lusts have prospered by it, or because Satan has often led people to the heights of self-glory and self-seeking under a pretense of being inspired with gospel humility and gospel self-denial.

Another charge upon me equally false and more senseless, is that I am a declared enemy to the use of reason in religion. Why? Because in all my writings I teach that reason is to be denied. I agree that I have not only taught this, but have again and again proved the absolute necessity of it, and this because Christ has made it absolutely necessary by saying, "Whosoever will come after me let him deny himself..." How can a man deny himself without denying his reason unless reason is no part of himself? Or how can a rational creature whose chief distinction from brutes is his reason be called to deny himself, any other way than by denying what is peculiar to himself? Let the matter be thus expressed: man is not to deny his reason. Well how then? Why he is only to deny himself? Can there be a greater folly of words? Their wisdom of words shows the necessity of the denying of self to be good doctrine, but boggle and cry out at the denying of reason as being quite bad.

How can a man deny himself but by denying what is the life and spirit and power of self? What makes a man a sinner other than the power and working of his natural reason? Therefore, if our natural reason is not denied, we must keep up and follow what works every sin that ever was or can be in us. We can sin nowhere or in anything but where our natural reason or understanding has its power in us. What is meant in all scripture by the flesh and its works? Is it something distinct and different from the workings of our rational and intelligent nature? No, it is our whole intelligent, rational nature that constitutes the flesh or the carnal man , because his carnality has all its evil from his intelligent nature, reason being the life and power of it. Everything that our Lord says of self is said of our natural reason. All that the scripture says of the flesh and its evil nature is said of the evil state of our natural reason, which therefore must be denied in the same manner and degree as self and flesh must be denied.

I have elsewhere shown the gross darkness and ignorance that govern what is called metaphysics in the schools, "is so great that if you were to say that God first creates a soul out of nothing and when that is done, takes an understanding faculty and puts it into it, after that adds a will and then a memory, all as independently made as when a tailor first makes the body of a coat and then adds sleeves and pockets to it, were you to say this the schools of Descartes, Malebranche or Locke could have nothing to say against it." (Spirit of Love First Part.)

Here truth obliges me to say that scholastic divinity is as ignorant about the most fundamental truths of the gospel, as I have again and again shown, in regard to the nature of the fall of man and all the scriptures concerning the new birth. These scholars are as ignorant of the doctrine of a man's denying himself , which modern learning supposes to be possible without denying his own natural reason, an absurdity of the greatest magnitude. What is self but what a man is and has in his natural capacity? Or what is the fullness of his natural capacity, but the strength and power of his reason? How then can any man deny himself but by denying what gives self its whole nature, name and power? If man was not a rational creature, he could not be called to deny himself. He could neither need nor receive the benefit and goodness of self-denial. No man, therefore, can obey the precept of denying himself or have any benefit or goodness from it, except as far as he denies or dies to his own natural reason, because the self of man and the natural reason of man are entirely the same thing.

Our blessed Lord prayed in His agony, "Not my will but Thine be done." And if this had not been the form of His whole life, He had not lived without sin. Thus to deny our own will that God's will may be done in us is the height of our calling. As far as we keep from our own natural will, we keep from sin. But now if our own natural will, as having all sin and evil in it, is always to be denied, whatever it costs us, I want to know how our natural reason can ever escape, or how we can deny our own will and not deny that rational or intelligent power that gives the will its whole existence and continual direction? Or how there can be always a badness of our own will that is not the badness of our own natural intellectual power? Therefore, it is a truth of the utmost certainty that as much as we are obliged to deny our own natural will that the will of God may be done in us, so much are we obliged to deny our own natural reason and understanding, that our own will may not be done or followed by us. Whoever lives to his own natural reason, necessarily lives to his own natural will. For our natural will in whatever state it is found is nothing else but our natural reason, willing this or that.

Now, as hard as this may seem to the unregenerate nature, it is even harder for a nature that is highly exalted and big with the glory of all that wits, poets, orators, critics, sophists and historians have enriched it with. As true as the fall of man is, this full denial of our own natural will and our own natural reason is the only possible way for divine knowledge, divine light and divine goodness to have any place or power of birth in us. All other religious knowledge received any other way, let it be as great as it will, is only great in vanity, emptiness and delusion. For nothing except what comes immediately from God can have anything godly in it and all that comes from self and natural reason, however outwardly colored, can have no better a nature within than self-seeking, self- esteem and fleshly wisdom. This is the exact temptation of the devil in us that Christ came into the world to destroy. If the efforts of natural reason and self-abilities are great in religious knowledge from our own particular talents, they are as Satanical as anything we carry about us. These things in a religious garment are highly contrary to the state that our Lord affirms to be absolutely necessary:

"Except you be converted and become as little children you cannot enter into the kingdom of God."

As sure as this is a spiritual necessity, it is sure that no one can be converted or come under the good influence of this childlike nature until natural reason, self, and will are all equally denied. All the evil and corruption of our fallen nature consists in this. It is an awakened life of reason and will, broken off from God and so fallen into the selfish workings of its own earthly nature.

Now where this self that is broken off from God, reasons, wills and contends about the difference of scripture, words and opinions, or reasons against them, it shows that the same evil state of fallen nature, the same loss of life, the same separation from God, the same evil tempers of flesh and blood will be equally strengthened and inflamed. Hence it is that both papists and Protestants are hating, fighting, and killing one another for the sake of their different opinions. The lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life are in the highest union and communion with one another. If you expect a zealous Protestant to be a new born creature, alive unto God, or a zealous papist to be, therefore, dead to all divine goodness, you may be said to have lived in the world without either eyes or ears. The reason for this is because bad syllogisms for transubstantiation and better syllogisms against have nothing more to do with the casting out of Satan from our souls than a bad or better taste for painting. Hence, Christendom, full of the nicest decisions about faith, grace, works merits satisfactions, heresies, schisms, etc., is also full of all those evil tempers that prevailed in the heathen world when none of these things were ever thought of.

A scholar, who pities the blindness and folly of those who live to themselves in the cares and pleasures of this vain life, thinks himself divinely employed and to have escaped the pollutions of the world. Because he is day after day dividing dissecting and mending church opinions, fixing heresies here and schisms there, he forgets all the while that a carnal self and natural reason are doing so by this learned zeal and that these are as busy and active in him as in the reasoning of the infidel or worldling. Where self is wholly denied, nothing can be called heresy, schism or wickedness, except the lack of loving God with our whole heart and our neighbor as ourselves. Nor can anything be called truth, life or salvation, except the Spirit nature and power of Christ living and manifesting itself in us as it did in Him.

Where self or the natural man has become great in religious learning and scholarly prowess, the more firmly will he be fixed in his religion, "whose God is their belly." "I write not to reason," says the blessed Jakob Boehme. "O fanaticism!" says the mouth of learning, and Jacob said as sober a truth as if he had said, I write not to self and one's will, because natural reason, self and will always did and always must see through the same eyes and hear through the same ears. Now let it only be supposed that Boehme and myself, when we speak of natural reason, mean only the natural man (as is over and over declared by us). Boehme writes neither from his own reason nor to the natural reason of others; he is only saying the very same thing as St. Paul when he says, "the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."

To fully show the perverseness of my accusers in charging me with denying the use of reason in religion, see here a word or two I have said at large and in the plainest words more than twenty-four years ago, which doctrine I have maintained in all that I have since wrote. My words are these:

"You shall see reason possessed of all that belongs to it. I will grant it to have as great a share in the good things of religion as in the good things of this life; that it can assist the soul just as it can assist the body. It has the same power and virtue in the spiritual that it has in the natural world. It can communicate to us as much of the one as of the other and is of the same use and importance in the one as in the other. Can you ask more?"

All of which I thus expand on in the following manner.

"Man, who is considered as a member of this world and has his share of the good that is in it, is a sensible and a rational creature in that he has a certain number of senses--seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling--by which he perceives the outward world in which he is placed. These can do for him or communicate to him and are sensible of what kind and degree of happiness he can have from it. "Now besides these organs of sense he has a power or faculty of reasoning upon the ideas which he has received from them.

"How is it that the good things of this world are communicated to man? How is he put in possession of them? To what part of him are they proposed? Are his senses or his reason, the means of his having so much as he has or can have from this world? "Now, you must degrade reason just as much as it is degraded by religion [in the Biblical sense] and are obliged to set it as low with respect to the things of this world, as it is set with respect to the things of the spiritual world. It is no more the means of communicating the good things of the one than of the other. And as St. Paul says, "The natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God." For this reason: because they are spiritually discerned. So you must of necessity say the rational man cannot receive the things of this world [as God created it to be] for this reason, because they are sensibly received, that is by the organs of sense. Reason, therefore, has no higher office or power in the things of this world than in the things of religion. And religion does no more violence to your reason or rejects it any more than all the good things of this world reject it. It is not seeing, it is not hearing, tasting or feeling the things of this life. It can not take the place of any one of these senses.

"Now, reason is helpless and useless in true religion. It is neither seeing, nor hearing tasting, nor feeling spiritual things. Therefore in the things of religion and in the things of this world, it has one and the same insignificance. It is the sensibility of the soul that must receive what this world can communicate to it. It is the sensibility of the soul that must receive what God can communicate. Reason may follow afterward in either case and view through its own glass what is done, but it can do no more. Reason may be here of the same service to us as when we want any of the enjoyments of this life. It may direct us how and where they are to be had. It may take away a cover from our eyes or open our window shutters when we want the light, but it can do no more towards seeing than to make way for the light to act upon our eyes. This is all of its office and ability in the things of religion. It may remove what hinders the sensibility of the soul or prevents the divine light's acting upon it, but the activity of the mind upon its own ideas or images which the senses have caused it to form, has nothing of the nature of what it speculates upon by ideas. It does not become dark when it reasons upon the cause or nature of darkness, nor does it become light when it reasons about it. Neither does it apprehend anything of the nature of religion when it is wholly taken up in descriptions and definitions of religious doctrines and virtues.

"The good of religion is like the good of food and drink to the creature that wants it. But instead of giving such a one bread and wine, you teach him to seek for relief by attending to clear ideas of the nature of bread of different ways of making it, etc., he would be left to die in the want of sustenance, just as the religion of reasoning leaves the soul to perish in the want of the good that it sought to have from religion [Jesus said, "I am the bread of life"]. As a man you may have the benefit of food much assisted by the right use of his reason, but reason itself has not the good of food in it. Man may have the good of religion, much assisted and secured to him by the right use of his reason, but reason itself has not the good of religion in it. It would be great folly and perverseness to accuse a man of being an enemy to the true use of reasoning about food, because he declares that reason is not food nor can it take the place of it. It is equal folly to accuse a man as an enemy of the use of reasoning in religion, because he declares that reasoning is not religion, nor can take the place of it. We have no want of religion, but because we want to have more of the divine nature in us, than our fallen nature.

"But if this is the truth of the matter (and who can deny it?), we are sure that nothing can be our good in religion but what communicates to us something of God or alters our state of existence in God and makes us partakers of the divine nature. What a folly it is to put any trust in a religion of rational notions and opinions, logically deduced from scripture words? Do we not see sinners of all sorts and men under the power of every corrupt passion, equally zealous for such a religion? This is proof enough that it does not have the good of religion in it, nor any effect against to the vices of the heart. It neither kills them nor is killed by them. For as pride, hypocrisy, envy or malice do not take away from the mind its geometrical or critical abilities, so a man may be most logical in his religion of reason, words, doctrines and opinions when he has nothing of the true good of religion in him.

"But as soon as it is known and confessed that all the happiness or misery of all creatures consists in the degree they are more or less possessed of God or partake of this divine nature, then it must be equally known that nothing but God can do or be any religious good to us. God cannot do or be any religious good to us, except by the communication of Himself or the manifestation of His own life within us."

Hence we can see the great blindness both of infidels and Christians--the one in trusting to their own reason, dwelling in its own logical conclusions, and the other in trusting their own reason, dwelling in learned opinions about scripture words, phrases and doctrines built on them. "It must be known and confessed [and practiced] that God is all in all; that in Him we live and move and have our being,;that we can have nothing separately or out from Him. He can give us nothing as our good except Himself. To put a religious trust in our own reason, whether confined to itself or working in doctrines about scripture words, has the same nature of idolatry that puts a religious trust in the sun, a departed saint or a graven image." (Demonstration of the Gross Errors in the Plain Account)