Pamphlets and Magazines.

The Radical Review, May, 1877. Issued Quarterly. Edited by Benj. R. Tucker. New Bedford, Mass. Vol. I, No. 1. 8vo.

Memorial Sketch of the Life and Character of Ezekiel Webster Dimond, late Professor of General and Agricultural Chemistry in the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts. Prepared at the request of the Board of Agriculture, by Joseph B. Walker. Concord, N. H. Pamphlet. pp. 26.

Church Papers.—Sundry Essays on Subjects relating to the Church and Christian Society. By Leonard Woolsey Bacon. Geneva, (Switzerland.) 12mo. pp. 343. [Among these Essays are reprinted many of those which have appeared, from time to time, in the New Englander, from the pen of the author.]

THE

NEW ENGLANDER.

No. CXLI.

OCTOBER, 1877.

ARTICLE I-ENGLISH MYSTICS OF THE PURITAN PERIOD.

MYSTICISM is a type of thought and devotion, which reappears in every age of the world, and either within every relig ious system, or external to it and in antagonism to it. It owes this universality to the fact that it is the feminine mode of insight and aspiration. Whenever woman's intellect or even that of the more woman-like part of the other sex, finds itself depreciated and excluded from the sanctuary of religious thought, it asserts for itself a right and a place by effecting a reaction against the principles and methods which would have excluded it. Hence the readiness with which Buddhism was welcomed in the far east, by those who found in Shintoism, Confucianism, and other indigenous Turanian faiths no play for the affections, no scope for the gentler virtues. But Mohammedanism presents within its own sphere the most striking instance of this. If ever there was a purely and thoroughly masculine creed, it was Islam,-a religion made up of external duties, public relations, and abstract beliefs, and making little or no demand upon the affections. It was utterly theocratic;

it presented God as a king, a man of war, an irresistible ruler; not as a Father, a Friend, a Comforter. It upheld the masculine virtues of truth, courage, soldierly obedience, self-respect; for those of woman it had no blessing, no recognition. And its works have been according to its faith. It has taken, it is every day taking, villages of low caste Hindoos and debased negroes, and lifting them to their feet, bidding them to know themselves the equals of the greatest on earth, and to look their fellow men in the face. And for the same reason its foot has been on the neck of woman, crushing her down from the place. of free equality where the Prophet found her, as the mistress of a free Arab home, to the place she now fills in every Moslem country, as the slave, the plaything of man. Mohammed never taught that women have no souls; but he might as well have done so, as proclaim a creed which presents no object to her affections, and puts no honor upon her virtues. The mystical reaction against his creed shows by its intensity, how utterly masculine it was. Soofeeism is mysticism of the extreme type. It arose in the very first century of the Hejira, and among its earliest saints the woman Rabia holds the chiefest place, as the sublimest instance of its gospel of resignation and submission. To her, Allah was not king and sovereign, but lover, and as such she addressed Him in her prayers; by the paths of mystic self-denial, mortification and annihilation, she had entered into the union of her being to that of God; and the narratives of her life represent her as the center of the great Soofees of her time, inciting their devotion and reproving their lack of faith.* But it was in the following ages that Soofeeism flourished the most, when the crude theocratic optimism of Islam became no longer credible to men, during the dissolution of the Caliphate, and the expiration of the great hopes of the conquest of the world. It was then that princes and generals abandoned the world, to adopt the life of voluntary mortification, to put on the wool (soof), and to become monks after the model of Christendom or of Buddhism, in spite of the Prophet's express prohibitions. Hence the vast outgrowth of Dervish orders, anchoritism, and all the paraphernalia

* See Tholuck's Ssufiismus sive Theosophia Persarum Pantheistica. (Berlin, 1821.) pp. 50-54.

of an exuberant monasticism. It seems not unlikely that just as the Caliphate was broken up by the reemergence of old lines of national division and the reawakening of national feeling, so also Soofeeism was not without historical relation to the mystical elements in the religions which Islam was supposed to have superseded. It seems to have flourished best on the ground previously occupied by Zoroastrianism and Magianism. Inside Christendom reactions of this same sort have repeatedly occurred, but never with such violence. Christianity itself being utterly free from all onesidedness, and complete in its recognition of every aspect and power of man's nature, every ignored or depressed interest can rightfully appeal to the original norm as given in the life and teachings of the Master. In these teachings and in that life, the feminine virtues are exalted to an honor which they never before received. The beatitudes are a series of blessings pronounced upon woman's condition; and the revelation of God as the Friend, the Comforter, the Father, and the Helper to whom man can have the freest and most immediate access, is given in all its fulness. The Christian system presents the Truth not in an abstract form, as a system, but concretely as a person, a living object of trust and faith, to which the heart of woman, and the heart of womanliness in every complete man, can alike cling. Yet Christianity is as manly as it is womanly. It does not set aside the social and civic virtues; it enjoins truth and courage and all the manly excellencies with the largest emphasis in its teaching. It declares that God is King as well as Father, and that to consecrate all public and private relations alike as part of the order of His Kingdom is one purpose of the Incarnation. But the treasure is put into earthen vessels,-very earthen vessels sometimes. And therefore the Christianity of different periods in the Church's history may be but partial and onesided, thus provoking reaction and antagonism. The church has had her periods of dry, arid dogmatism, in which a masculine intellectualism has prevailed in the elaboration and the defence of systems of theology. She has had periods of rigid hierarchy, in which the soul was shut out from the light of God's countenance by the shadow of pope and priesthood. Such were the middle ages of Europe, when dogmatism and hierarchy were in