1 - Henry Scougal: The Life of God in the Soul of Man
ISBN 978-1-78191-107-5
1
HENRY SCOUGAL
The Life of God in the Soul of Man
‘I never knew what true religion was till God sent me this excellent treatise,’ wrote George Whitefield.
When a man of Whitefield’s stature applauds a book in such terms, it is our wisdom to sit up and take notice. For who was Whitefield? The ‘Grand Itinerant’, as his contemporaries called him, was, more than anyone else, the trail-blazing pioneer and personal embodiment of the eighteenth-century revival of vital Christianity in the West, the revival that shaped English-speaking society on both sides of the Atlantic for over a hundred years and that fathered the evangelical missionary movement which for the past two centuries has been taking the gospel literally round the world.
That epoch-making revival threw up many outstanding leaders, but head and shoulders above the rest were four giants, landmark figures not just for their own lifetime but for all later ages too: John Wesley, supreme as organiser, educator, pastoral leader, publicist and apologist; Charles Wesley, his younger brother, sublimest poet of Christian experience; Jonathan Edwards, America’s greatest theologian; and with them, indeed in one sense ahead of them all, Whitefield, who for a generation till his death in 1770 was acknowledged as the focal figure of the entire movement. First to preach the transforming message of the new birth, first to take it into the open air and declare the world his parish, first to publish journals celebrating God’s work in and through him, and first to set up societies for the nurturing of those who came to faith under his ministry. Whitefield proclaimed Christ tirelessly throughout Britain and colonial America, drawing huge crowds, winning thousands of souls, impacting myriads more, and gaining celebrity status of a kind matched only by Billy Graham and John Paul II in our time. Wesley’s influence as a renewer of popular religion is sometimes credited with saving England from an upheaval like the French Revolution; if there is substance in such reasoning, Whitefield should receive greater credit, for his ministry ranged wider and his pulpit power was greater. We live at a time when uncertainty as to what constitutes true religion is more widespread, perhaps, than at any time since Christianity was born; we shall do well to recognise that the little old book that cleared Whitefield’s mind on this basic matter might have something to say to us too.
Henry Scougal’s exposition of ‘true religion’ (his phrase, echoed by Whitefield, meaning genuine Christianity) was from one standpoint the seed out of which the English side of the revival first sprouted; for the book was favourite reading in Oxford’s Holy Club, where the Wesleys and Whitefield first came together. For half a century religious societies, as they were called, had been set up in various places to supplement the parish church’s Sunday ministry by midweek gatherings for prayer, discussion, and the reading of works of devotion (‘good books’). The society lampooned as the Holy Club was run by John Wesley in his capacity as an ordained priest and Fellow of Lincoln College. It was distinctive only for being in Oxford, where such a thing had not, it seems, been seen before, and for the ascetic intensity with which its dozen or so members pursued the goal of true religion. Whitefield, a tall, good-looking, well-spoken freshman from Gloucester, a servitor at Pembroke College – one, that is, who performed menial duties to finance his education – admired the Holy Club from afar, and wanted to join. Charles Wesley, himself a member, took a liking to Whitefield and gave him Scougal, which he eagerly devoured. An agonizing quest, evidently Scougal-sparked, for the life of God in his own soul then led to the dawning of an assured certainty that through the grace of Jesus Christ he was ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’ and truly born again.
I once heard a Christian testify, ‘I knew I was converted when religion stopped being a duty and became a delight,’ and that is something Whitefield could have said, for that was precisely what he felt. Once ordained, he preached the new birth as the door of entry into true religion as Scougal described it, and the English revival began. Without Scougal it might not have happened.
What precisely was it that Whitefield learned from Scougal? In a word, it was the inwardness and supernaturalness of biblical godliness. Not that Scougal’s testimony here was in any way unique. During the century that followed the Reformation conflicts, English Puritans like Perkins, Owen and Baxter, Anglicans of the ‘holy living’ school like Jeremy Taylor, Lutheran pietists like Johannes Arndt, and Roman Catholic teachers like Ignatius Loyola, Francis de Sales, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, had all centred attention on the realities of the Christian’s inner life, to such an extent that scholars can nowadays speak of the seventeenth-century devotional revival. In this study the Reformation debates about church, sacraments, justification and authority largely receded into the background; communion with the Father and the Son through the Spirit, lived out in the disciplined practice of patient love and humble obedience, was the common theme, and Scougal, a devoted soul himself, was able to draw on a rich legacy of fairly homogeneous thought about ‘the life of God in the soul of man’. This helps to explain the extraordinary authority, maturity, and sureness of touch with which at the age of twenty-six he was able to analyse the reality of spiritual life. Granted, he was brilliant and precocious (he served as Professor of Philosophy in Aberdeen University for four years, from the age of nineteen); granted, he was the son of a minister, and a godly one, and had had every spiritual advantage in his upbringing plus, as it seems, a heart responsive to God from his earliest days; but even so, he could hardly have produced this little classic – for such it is – without the distilled wisdom of the seventeenth century behind him.
Scougal’s life was short. Born in 1650, he was ordained in 1673 and served for a year in a country parish, a holy man excelling as preacher, catechist, and worship leader. In 1674 he was made Professor of Divinity at Aberdeen, where he diligently mentored ministerial students, impressing on them the gravity of the pastoral task, lending them books and helping them in many ways. A nineteenth-century reprint of Whitefield’s sermons was discerningly titled The Revived Puritan; Scougal was another Anglican who qualified for that description. He died of tuberculosis in 1678.
‘Christians,’ declares Scougal, ‘know by experience that true religion is a union of the soul with God, a real participation of the divine nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul, or, in the apostle’s phrase, “it is Christ formed within us”.’ It is ‘life’, the life of God within, in the sense of being spontaneous energy actively responding to the grace of God set forth in the gospel. Scougal calls it ‘an inward, free and self-moving principle ... a new nature instructing and prompting’. Love, purity and humility are the three fundamental virtues in which this life takes form, and all three are blossomings of faith. ‘Faith (is) ... a kind of sense, or feeling persuasion of spiritual things; it extends itself unto all divine truths; but in our lapsed estate, it hath a peculiar relation to the declarations of God’s mercy and reconcilableness to sinners through a mediator; and therefore ... is ordinarily termed “faith in Jesus Christ”.’ The virtues themselves are to be conceived in a way that sees acts as the outworking of attitudes and attitudes as the expression of motives; so Scougal defines them as follows.
Love, basically, is love of God: ‘a delightful and affectionate sense of the divine perfections, which makes the soul resign and sacrifice itself wholly unto him, desiring above all things to please him, and delighting in nothing so much as in fellowship and communion with him, and being ready to do or suffer anything for his sake, or at his pleasure ... A soul thus possessed with divine love must needs be enlarged towards all mankind ... this is ... charity ... under which all parts of justice, all the duties we owe to our neighbour, are eminently comprehended; for he who doth truly love all the world ... so far from wronging or injuring any person ... will resent any evil that befalls others, as if it happened to himself.’
Purity is ‘a due abstractedness from the body and mastery over the inferior appetites ... such a temper and disposition of mind as makes a man despise and abstain from all pleasures and delights of sense or fancy which are sinful in themselves, or tend to ... lessen our relish of more divine and intellectual (he means, God-centred and rational) pleasures, which doth also infer a resoluteness to undergo all those hardships he may meet with in the performance of his duty: so that not only chastity and temperance, but also Christian courage and magnanimity may come under this head.’
And humility means ‘a deep sense of our own meanness, with a hearty and affectionate acknowledgment of our owing all that we are to the divine bounty; which is always accompanied with a profound submission to the will of God, and great deadness to the glory of the world, and the applause of men.’
‘These qualities,’ says Scougal, ‘are the very foundation of heaven laid in the soul,’ just as they are the basic elements of genuine Christlikeness here and now. The rest of his book is a celebration of these qualities, with encouragement to develop habits of repentance and discipline in using the means of grace (thought, prayer, and the Lord’s Supper) so as to engender all three ever more radically and robustly in one’s personal life.
Scougal never loses sight of the inwardness of true religion, as a state of being that starts in our hearts, nor of the fact that it is a supernatural product, ‘having God for its author, and being wrought in the souls of men by the power of the Holy Spirit’; so we do not find him slipping into the self-reliant, performance-oriented, surface-level, ego-focussed, living-by-numbers type of instruction that is all too common among Christians today. He knows that personal change will not occur without use of means, just as he knows that no use of means will change the heart without God’s blessing, and he marks out the path of change with admirable balance.
One could wish, however, that his exposition had been more explicitly and emphatically Christ-centred. Like so many seventeenth-century writers, he lets himself assume that his readers know all about Jesus and need only to be told about real religion, the life of faith and faith-full turning Godward as opposed to the orthodoxism, formalism, emotionalism and legalism that masquerade as Christianity while being in truth a denial of it. Had Scougal elaborated on the Christian’s union with Christ, which the New Testament sees as regeneration by the Holy Spirit; had he explained incorporation into the Saviour’s risen life, whereby Jesus’s motivating passion to know and love and serve and please and honour and glorify the Father is implanted in sinners so that it is henceforth their own deepest desire too; had he thus shown, in black and white, that imitating Jesus’s aims and attitudes in serving God and mankind is for the born-again the most natural, indeed the only natural, way of living, while for the unregenerate it is hard to the point of impossible; his little treatise would have been immeasurably stronger. As it is, Scougal’s profile of divine life in human souls is much more complete than his answer to the question, how do I get into it? – or, how does it get into me? This is a limitation.
To be sure, there are real strengths in Scougal’s account of the means of grace for the changing of the heart, particularly when he directs us to meditation – sustained thought, that is – on the ‘vanity and emptiness of worldly enjoyments’, the truth of Christianity, and the redeeming love of God as shown in the saving ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is strong too when he urges us to form habits of behaving as if our hearts were changed even though as yet they are not. This is more than ‘fake it till you make it’; Scougal is telling us to give God proof that we are serious and sincere in seeking inward renewal, for he knows that evidence of sincerity is something God regularly requires as a condition of answering our prayers. With these emphases, however, should be linked specific directions on looking to and coming to the living Christ Himself, believing on Him, trusting in Him, and waiting for Him till we know that we are His and He is ours – the sort of directions that Whitefield himself was later to give during the last half-hour of many thousands of evangelistic messages. Scougal’s omission here, which leaves the impression that godliness blossoms in us as a kind of natural growth, is certainly a shortcoming.
It will be appropriate as we close to cite more fully Whitefield’s witness to what Scougal gave him. This comes from a sermon preached in the last year of his life, taken down as he spoke and not corrected.
When I was sixteen years of age, I began to fast twice a week for thirty-six hours together, prayed many times a day, received the sacrament every Lord’s day, fasting myself almost to death all the forty days of Lent, during which I made it a point of duty never to go less than three times a day to public worship, besides seven times a day to my private prayers, yet I knew no more that I was to be born again in God, born a new creature in Christ Jesus, than if I were never born at all ...
I must bear testimony to my old friend Mr Charles Wesley; he put a book into my hands, called The Life of God in the Soul of Man, whereby God showed me, that I must be born again, or be damned.
I know the place: it may be superstitious, perhaps, but whenever I go to Oxford, I cannot help running to that place where Jesus Christ first revealed himself to me, and gave me the new birth ... How did my heart rise, how did my heart shudder, like a poor man that is afraid to look into his account-books, lest he should find himself a bankrupt; yet shall I burn that book, shall I throw it down, shall I put it by, or shall I search into it? I did, and holding the book in my hand, thus addressed the God of heaven and earth: Lord, if I am not a Christian, if I am not a real one, God, for Jesus Christ’s sake, show me what Christianity is, that I may not be damned at last. I read a little further ... O, says the author, they that know anything of religion, know it is a vital union with the Son of God, Christ formed in the heart; O what a ray of divine life did then break in upon my poor soul ... from that moment God has been carrying on his blessed work in my soul: and as I am now fifty-five years of age ... I tell you, my brethren ... I am more and more convinced that this is the truth of God, and without it you never can be saved by Jesus Christ ...
Thus God used Scougal to awaken the man who himself came later to be known as the Awakener. And all that remains to be said is that some today, who would call themselves Christians if asked, clearly stand in need of a similar awakening: which Scougal, under God, may bring them, if only they will read his smooth late-seventeenth-century rhetoric thoughtfully and let it speak to them. Real Christians will gain from Scougal a healthy reminder that heart-change and character-change thence resulting is what their faith is all about, and the self-deceived will be forced to face the fact that those who have not yet been so changed are not yet Christians at all. Scougal’s word to them will thus have been preparation for the humble hearing of the gospel invitation, which many today would otherwise fail to hear because they are unaware that they need to hear it, and which Whitefield, near the time when he uttered the testimony quoted above, verbalised as follows:
Sinners in Zion, baptised heathens, professors but not possessors, formalists, believing unbelievers, talking of Christ, talking of grace, orthodox in your creeds, but heterodox in your lives, turn ye, turn ye, Lord help you to turn to him, turn ye to Jesus Christ, and may God turn you inside out ... may that glorious Father that raised Christ from the dead, raise your dead souls! ... Bless the Lord that Jesus stands with pitying eyes, and outstretched arms, to receive you now. Will you go with the man? Will you accept of Christ? Will you begin to live now? May God say, Amen; may God pass by, not in anger, but in love ... and say to you dead sinners, come forth, live a life of faith on earth, live a life of vision in heaven; even so, Lord Jesus: Amen.