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Quietism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

Rufus M. Jones
Affiliation:
Haverford College

Extract

It has been too much the custom to treat Quietism as a sporadic type of religion, as a sort of capricious “sport,” to use a familiar botanical term, expressing itself in two or three famous, but solitary and isolated, mystics on the continent of Europe, and to assume that later evidences of Quietism must be traced back to the teachings of these few rare expounders of it. I am convinced, on the contrary, that these select individuals were only luminous examples of a profound religious tendency, which, in varying form of expression, swept over the entire western world in the latter part of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries, flooded into the consciousness of all who were intensely religious, and left an “unimaginable touch” even on the rank and file of believers. It was a deep and widespread movement, confined to no one country and it was limited to no one branch of the Christian Church. It burst forth in sundered places and spread like a new Pentecost, through kindled personalities and through quick and powerful books of genius.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1917

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