by Craig Larson
In 1965, The Rolling Stones released "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," decrying their attempts at satisfaction from the material world. Though the lyrics were expressly not profound, the topic of the song was quintessentially human. This, in part, explains the lingering appeal of the song in 2004 when Rolling Stone (the magazine) declared it the second greatest song of all time.
Three hundred years earlier and four hundred miles to the north, another twenty-something British Isle inhabitant begged to differ with the Stones’ conclusion about life and satisfaction. From the hand of Henry Scougal came a letter to a friend that crossed the Atlantic and caused George Whitefield to remark, “I never knew what true religion was till God sent me this excellent treatise.” The treatise was titled The Life of God in the Soul of Man.
What Life is Not
Scougal asserted that the difference between people possessing satisfaction (true life) and those without is that “in the one, divine life bears sway, in the other the animal life [sense/appetite] doth prevail.” In the animal life, self-love spreads into as many branches as men have appetite and inclination. Rock and roll bands have tested this theory, and so have the rest of us in divers manner and degree.
There is a natural cycling of craving, indulgence, and reaction that misleads men to evaluate their own goodness by apparent differences between themselves and others. This worldview works to some degree because self-love results in moralistic restraint when a man considers “the prejudice which intemperance and inordinate lust do bring unto his health, fortune, and reputation” (even though all manner of evil in the world also stems from self-love). But ultimately this produces frustration, not satisfaction, because it is based on smokescreens, not reality.
But those in whom divine life resides decreasingly measure themselves in this manner. The natural life consists in a “confined love which is terminated in a man’s self.” The divine life stands in a “universal and unbounded affection, and in the mastery over our natural inclinations, that they may never be able to betray us to those things which we know to be blamable.” Allowing the course of affairs in our life to be charted by appetite is blamable.
What Life Is
A popular phrase in American Protestantism has been “I’m not religious, I just love the Lord.” Scougal instead said that true religion is true life: an inward, free, and self-moving principle. When the life of God permeates the soul of man, a new nature wins election and exerts its overriding influence. It pays irrepressible tribute to its source and does not function well from commandment. Rather, it is drawn to the purity of the law of God and is sensible of its want.
True life is “a real participation of the Divine nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul…It is Christ formed within us.” It is an intensifying flame advancing through the typography of personal experience sparked by union of the soul with God. It expands from imperceptible core into every area of observable form. It does not first operate inductively from the realm of events to transform, but is instead principle infusing all motion, from hidden electrical thought to the most touted act of service.
It is life because of its permanence, and because it is not coerced. A new nature pulses through old habits creating inclination toward Christ. An expanding awareness of all that leads to death inclines the mind toward intelligent decisions. Liberal outpourings begin to outweigh intemperance. The reasonableness and goodness of the law prevail over its sanctions:
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Who shall prescribe a law to those that love? Love’s a more powerful law which doth them move. |
Love is the law of life because it accesses, then resembles, divine perfection.
The Root of Life
As sense feeds appetite, so faith is the symbiotic driver for the divine life. Faith’s most essential structure does not lie in its cognitive understanding or behavioral transformations, nor zeal from its affections (the natural life frequently mimics each of those measurements). Scougal describes faith this way:
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Faith has the same place in the divine life that sense hath in the natural, being indeed nothing else but 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 reconciliation to sinners through a mediator. |
In other words, the quickened soul senses what Peter sensed in declaring “not my feet only, but my hands and head also.” Kyrie eleison. This love for God is a delight-based sense of divine perfection that causes holy resignation in the soul toward the animal life. This affection may have its beginnings in the favors of God toward us, but goes beyond comprehension of mercy to “ground itself on his infinite goodness.” Within this unlimited goodness is found:
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The very foundation of heaven laid in the soul...[man] may find a copy of God’s thoughts concerning him written in his own breast. His love to God may give him assurance of God’s favor to him; and those beginnings of happiness which he feels in the conformity of the powers of his soul to the nature of God are a sure pledge that his felicity shall be perfected and continued to all eternity...I had rather see the real impressions of a godlike nature upon my own soul than have a vision from heaven. |
Bob Dylan asked how it feels to be a rolling stone with no direction home. The Rolling Stones answered him, and so does a sick culture all around us. Scougal pointed to the only satisfaction that endures. The mystery of a new nature in Christ begetting divine life cannot be expressed by the beauty or technical precision of language. We approach and describe with words, but comprehension belongs to those whose spirits have been enkindled within. Union with the divine suffers episodes of decay, and believers resort to pitting remaining vices against each other to accept the lesser of evils instead of embracing what is truly good. Yet human union with Christ groans under a sense of its own finitude, and emerges with another cord binding the union tighter. Therein is found permanent satisfaction in these temporary days.