The Testimony of the Soul (review)

BOOK REVIEW101 ARTICLE VIII Amendments Amendments to these By-Laws may be adopted at any meeting of the Directors, by a majority vote of those present, due notice of the proposed amendment having been given at least one month previously. BOOK REVIEW The Testimony of the Soul. By Rufus M. Jones. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1936. vi + 215 pp. $2.00. IN THE Ayer Lectures, delivered at the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in 1935-36, which form the basis for this book, The Testimony of the Soul, Rufus Jones was speaking not primarily to Friends but to all Seekers who would find a way out of the dilemma in which religion today is caught. In former "battle epochs" the struggle was between a higher and a lower form of religion, between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Today "the religious attitude itself is challenged. . . . The validity of a spiritual outlook of any kind is put in jeopardy." The very word "soul" has become "bedraggled," and religion is regarded by increasing numbers of both the thoughtful and the sheeplike as an "opiate." Rufus Jones does not overlook the discoveries of science nor evade the issues raised by them, but he points out that when science has explained it all, when biology, when psychology, when history, when physics have described the universe and reduced it to a chart and a formula, there is still an unexplored remainder of "a rare quintessance of richness and worth." It is this overplus, this remainder, that is the soul's testimony. What has become of the "lost radiance" of Christianity? How are we to find our way back to the central sources of life and inspiration? What central philosophy gives us ground for believing that there is a sphere of spiritual reality in the very foundation of man's being? Where does "ought" come from ? What is the soul ? What are the methods and results of the "mutual and reciprocal correspondence and co-operation with God" that we call the mystical experience? These are some of the searching questions that are probed and answered in the Testimony of the Soul. The word mysticism has fallen into disrepute, partly because of its connection with the mystery religions of Greece, partly because of the classical mystics' insistence upon the via negativa of ecstasy and negation of the human personality, and partly because of the psychic phenomena of trance and "possession" long associated with it. As it is too late to coin another word, the old one must be "disinfected," or, better, "sublimated to higher uses." Down through the history of mysticism from St. Paul and St. John to George Fox there has always been an affirmative type of mysticism opposed to the negative type, though indeed some of 102 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION the greatest mystics, such as St. Teresa, embodied both types. The affirmative type, as opposed to the negative way of abstraction and ecstasy, is "the heightened normal type of revelation through enriched personality." "I am eager," Rufus Jones says, "to have the word mysticism widened out in meaning to include this milder and more normal correspondence of the soul with God." The test of mystical experience is the fruit it bears, the increased integration of personality and the "soul-force" thus released. "It is no accident that the two most powerful trends of present-day Christianity are a fresh revival of mysticism and an awakened passion to carry Christianity into the fabric and tissue of the social life of humanity." The Testimony of the Soul is written with the humanness and radiance that we have learned to look for and depend upon in Rufus Jones's writings , and with a simplicity and clarity rare in books which cover so wide a range of history and philosophy. Elizabeth Gray Vining. ARTICLES IN QUAKER PERIODICALS The Friend (Philadelphia) CIXTH Month 30, 1938, pp. 477-486. "The Trial of William Penn," by Elizabeth Janet Gray (Elizabeth Gray Vining), gives a vivid account of the famous trial of 1670, which began as an ordinary arraignment of Quakers for preaching in violation of the Conventicle Act and ended as a historic event in the establishment of the right of trial by...