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← ExitCenturies of Meditations

The Third Century

1

WILL you see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness? Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By the Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His special favour I remember them till now. Verily they seem the greatest gifts His wisdom could bestow, for without them all other gifts had been dead and vain. They are unattainable by book, and therefore I will teach them by experience. Pray for them earnestly: for they will make you angelical, and wholly celestial. Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.

2

All appeared new, and strange at the first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was Divine. I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostasy, I collected again by the highest reason. My very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one brought into the Estate of Innocence. All things were spotless and pure and glorious: yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious, I knew not that there were any sins, or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing of sickness or death or ~~rents or~~ exactions~~, either for tribute or bread~~. In the absence of these I was entertained like an Angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory, I saw all in the peace of Eden; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator’s praises, and could not make more melody to Adam, than to me: All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the ~~whole~~ World, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?

3

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things: The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver was mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties, nor bounds, nor divisions: but all proprieties and divisions were mine: all treasures and the possessors of them. So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.

4

Upon those pure and virgin apprehensions which I had in my infancy, I made this poem:

That childish thoughts such joys inspire, Doth make my wonder, and His glory higher, His bounty, and my wealth more great It shews His Kingdom, and His work complete. In which there is not anything, Not meet to be the joy of Cherubim.

He in our childhood with us walks, And with our thoughts mysteriously He talks; He often visiteth our minds, But cold acceptance in us ever finds: We send Him often grieved away, Who else would show us all His Kingdom’s joy.

O Lord, I wonder at Thy Love, Which did my infancy so early move: But more at that which did forbear And move so long, though slighted many a year: But most of all, at last that Thou Thyself shouldst me convert, I scarce know how.

Thy gracious motions oft in vain Assaulted me: my heart did hard remain Longtime! I sent my God away Grieved much, that He could not give me His joy. I careless was, nor did regard The End for which He all those thoughts prepared.

But now, with new and open eyes, I see beneath, as if I were above the skies, And as I backward look again See all His thoughts and mine most clear and plain. He did approach, He me did woo; I wonder that my God this thing would do,

From nothing taken first ,I was; What wondrous things His glory brought to pass! Now in the World I Him behold, And me, enveloped in precious gold; In deep abysses of delights, In present hidden glorious benefits.

Those thoughts His goodness long before Prepared as precious and celestial store With curious art in me inlaid, That childhood might itself alone be said My Tutor, Teacher, Guide to be, Instructed then even by the Deitie.

5

Our Saviour’s meaning, when He said, He must be born again and become a little child that will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven is deeper far than is generally believed. It is not only in a careless reliance upon Divine Providence, that we are to become little children, or in the feebleness and shortness of our anger and simplicity of our passions, but in the peace and purity of all our soul. Which purity also is a deeper thing than is commonly apprehended. For we must disrobe ourselves of all false colours, and unclothe our souls of evil habits; all our thoughts must be infant-like and clear; the powers of our soul free from the leaven of this world, and disentangled from men’s conceits and customs. Grit in the eye or the yellow jaundice will not let a man see those objects truly that are before it. And therefore is it requisite that we should be as very strangers to the thoughts, customs, and opinions of men in this world, as if we were but little children. So those things would appear to us only which do to children when they are first born. Ambitions, trades, luxuries, inordinate affections, casual and accidental riches invented since the fall, would be gone, and only those things appear, which did to Adam in Paradise, in the same light and in the same colours: God in His works, Glory in the light, Love in our parents, men, ourselves, and the face of Heaven: Every man naturally seeing those things, to the enjoyment of which he is naturally born.

6

Every one provideth objects, but few prepare senses whereby, and light wherein, to see them. Since therefore we are born to be a burning and shining light, and whatever men learn of others, they see in the light of others’ souls: I will in the light of my soul show you the Universe. Perhaps it is celestial, and will teach you how beneficial we may be to each other. I am sure it is a sweet and curious light to me: which had I wanted I would have given all the gold and silver in all worlds to have purchased. But it was the Gift of God and could not be bought with money. And by what steps and degrees I proceeded to that enjoyment of all Eternity which now I possess I will likewise shew you. A clear and familiar light it may prove unto you.

167.John 1:9 calls Christ “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”, and from the womb just before echoes Psalm 22:10. Readers have compared Plato’s doctrine that the soul recollects what it saw in pure light before birth (Phaedrus 249b-250c; Meno 81c-d), and Henry Vaughan’s The Retreate (1650), with its “angel-infancy”. The difference is Traherne’s own. Plato and Vaughan imply a life before this one; his light is given at birth, in this world, and is remembered, not recollected.

168.Intuitive knowledge is immediate sight of a truth, without steps of reasoning. The schoolmen held that angels know in this way, while men reason discursively from one truth to the next (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.58 a.3; I q.79 a.8). The child knew as the angels know; what he knew then has since been gathered again by the slower road of the highest reason.

169.A falling away (Greek apostasia, a standing off); see Key Words, apostasy, and the note at II.89.

170.Orient is shining, lustrous, like the finest pearls and the rising sun (see the note at I.90). The corn is immortal because the child sees it outside time, never sown and never reaped, as if it had stood, like God in Psalm 90:2, “from everlasting to everlasting”. The dust of the street as precious as gold repeats the memory told at I.25 (see the note there).

171.Traherne was born within the walls of Hereford, a city with six gates, all pulled down between 1782 and 1799. The gates beyond which the world seemed to end, and the trees first seen through one of them, are very probably Hereford’s, and the temple a few lines on is most naturally the cathedral or the family’s parish church of All Saints. The war that reached the city in his childhood (see the note at I.4) has no place in the vision.

172.Henry Vaughan, an older contemporary from the same Welsh border, opens The World (in Silex Scintillans, 1650) with “I saw Eternity the other night”, likening it to a great ring of pure and endless light. The likeness is a parallel, not a borrowing. On something infinite behind everything, compare II.81, where infinity is “the first thing which is naturally known”.

173.Property, things owned as one’s own and fenced from others (see the note at I.33 and Key Words, proprieties). Churlish is grudging, niggardly, as Nabal the churl was (1 Samuel 25:3); the bounds and divisions are the hedges, marks and boundaries of private land.

174.Seven six-line stanzas rhymed in couplets, lines of eight syllables alternating with longer ones. A version of the poem, titled The Approach, survives in the manuscript of Traherne’s poems known as the Dobell Folio, now in the Bodleian Library, and was first printed by Bertram Dobell in 1903.

175.Two sayings of Christ run together, John 3:3, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God”, and Matthew 18:3 (compare Mark 10:15), “Except ye be converted, and become as little children”. Traherne often quotes Scripture from memory in this way. Careless in the next sentence means free from care, as in Matthew 6:25-34, not negligent.

176.The jaundiced patient, whose skin and eyes turn yellow, was believed to see everything yellow; the ancient sceptics used the case to show that the state of the perceiver alters what is perceived (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism I.44). Conceits, a sentence earlier, are notions or fancies, and the leaven of this world is corruption working unseen, as leaven works through dough (1 Corinthians 5:6-8).