Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th CenturiesJones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Religion
Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries
Jones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Mysticism; Reformers
The other tendency in the movement, which received its fullest expression
in the group of Collegiants at Rynsburg and their friends in Amsterdam,
had a still greater parallelism with Quakerism, in fact, the most
important book which came from a member of this group--_The Light on the
Candlestick_--is indistinguishable in its body of ideas from Quaker
teaching, and differs only in one point, that it reveals a more
philosophically trained mind in the writer than does any early Quaker
book with the single exception of Barclay's _Apology_. The author of
_The Light on the Candlestick_--written originally in Dutch and published
in 1662 under the title _Lucerna super candelabro_--was probably Peter
Balling, though the book, with characteristic Collegiant modesty, was
published anonymously. Peter Balling was one of an interesting group of
scholarly Collegiants who became very intimate friends of Baruch Spinoza,
and who received from the Jewish philosopher a strong impulse toward
mystical religion. Before they became acquainted with the young Spinoza,
however, they had already received through Descartes a powerful
intellectual awakening, {124} and had discovered that consciousness
itself, when fully sounded, has its own unescapable evidence of God. It
is not possible here to turn aside and study adequately this
extraordinary philosophical movement known as Cartesianism, beginning in
Descartes (1596-1650) and culminating in Spinoza (1632-1677), but the
distinct religious influence of it is so profoundly apparent, both in
Peter Balling and in the Quaker apologist Robert Barclay (1648-1690),
that a very brief review of the contribution from this source seems
necessary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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