CHAPTER XII READER AT LINCOLN'S INN 1617-1621 THOSE who are in the habit of observing the religious life of others with attention are familiar, in whatever temper they may regard it, with the spiritual phenomenon which is known as "conversion." conversion." It is not a matter of conviction or works, though the first may produce and the second result from it; nor is it in any degree universal among those who are eminent for piety and unction. It may come to the most and to the least instructed; it is a state of soul, a psychological condition abruptly reached by some, and not reached at all by many. Some pass into it who afterwards pass out again into indifferentism; some never experience the sudden advent of it, although their fidelity to the faith persists unshaken. There is abundant evidence to show that this condition or crisis was passed through by Donne in the winter of 1617; that at that time he became "converted" in the intense and incandescent sense. At that juncture, under special conditions, and at the age of fortyfour, he dedicated himself anew to God with a peculiar violence of devotion, and witnessed the dayspring of a sudden light in his soul. The statement must not be adopted without our casting back our thoughts upon what Donne's spiritual life had been up to this date. Our acceptance of it involves the acknowledgment that in the three years which had elapsed since he gave way to the King's wishes and took orders, he had not been what he now became and remained throughout the rest of his life. Are we, then, to say that when Donne accepted the profession of the Church he was an insincere and ungodly man? A thousand times, no! The lamp had long been there, brimming with pure oil; the wick was trimmed; in the general array of the English Church in that age it passed as an efficient illuminator. Even Donne himself probably perceived imperfectly and intermittently, that the light which flashed from its welltended curves was but reflected from the lamps around it. But now the match was to be laid to the threads; now it was to be no merely decent and conventional transmission of the light of others, but a blazing and crescent beacon, a centre of independent radiance. To many natures, perhaps to most, religion enters by way of the emotions. But with Donne the opposite was the case; his intellect was gained to the service of God while still his heart was cold. We have had to observe the frigidity of his early religious poetry, appealing exclusively to the intelligence, preferring every species of learned ingenuity to a genuine cry of experience. We have seen that, in his controversial writings in prose, he wrote like a lawyer rather than a divine, persistently evading and ignoring the inner struggle, the plastic quality of the individual soul. It is in remembering these evidences of his too exclusively intellectual habit of mind that we are able to explain the inconsistencies of Donne's early life. He was very slowly called to the threshold of the Holy of Holies, very slowly prepared for the perfect life, and yet, in a certain sense, he believed himself prepared and called from the outset. So that we see him, to our surprise and scandal, if we judge hastily, able to say that from the age of twenty he had seriously surveyed and considered "the body of divinity," while we find him, long after that time, living a life without humility or reserve, and even, in his hot youth, without the outward decencies and rudimentary principles of piety. With Donne, an intellectual curiosity as to theological questions long preceded any subjection of his brain or heart to that conduct of life logically involved by them. With no suspicion of insincerity, he was a practised theologian before he could make any pretence to being a Christian man. But, as time went by and the turmoil of his instincts |