A Christian in search of religious freedom

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2003 by Aiken, David

On 28 December 1869, in a letter more closely resembling a cheerful sermon, Simms chides his old friend James Lawson for waxing gloomy over age and death. With his usual disregard for dogma, Simms says,

If you get to reading the so called religious books, you will get gloomy, precisely as those who pore over Drs. books get sick, & fancy themselves cursed with all the maladies of which they have read .You have done your best, according to your allotment, and being human, and animal, you have erred, blundered, sinned, if you please, & perhaps knowingly, indeed, if not knowingly, you could not sin at all. If you have been guilty of wrongdoing to anyone, atone for it as well as you can. If you cannot, the desire to atone, is a proof that you repent the wrongdoing. (5: 288)

Then he suggests that Lawson throw himself on God's mercy, "fully resigned and having full faith in him as a Father who finds no satisfaction in the torture or destruction of his children." Next Simms advises his friend to let his body, an intricate machine of God's creation, wear itself out: "You, the inner, the real, James Lawson have no further use for it.... Think only of life, and of Eternal life." Simms adds that Lawson has been "a faithful worker according to his gifts" (5: 288). This is high praise coming from Simms to whom the dedicated use of God-given talents is seen as obedience to God's will. A letter such as this to Lawson reflects the confidence of a man who has found his place in God's Providence. It betrays no fear of death. It touches on the call to service, the belief in Providence, and the gifts of eternal life. It is the letter of a Christian.

In "The Sense of the Beautiful," an oration delivered just a month before his death (1870), Simms returns one more time to individual endowments. The language is more poetic in his last oration than that used in "Self-Development." The audience-consisting of mothers and daughters of Carolina-is urged to train their children in the Sense of the Beautiful which Simms says is "one of the first essentials of religion." He further contends, "It is this sense which develops all the soul's activity. It endows the soul with eyes to see." These eyes of the soul shall, he says, "develop the beautiful within ourselves" (6). In the middle of this, his last oration, Simms declares, "My friends, the germ of soul is of very little account, among men or women, unless trained and developed into the Sense of the Beautiful, which is ever a sense bringing us nearer to God" (11). Simms's own Sense of the Beautiful kept him near God. He was a man who felt called to be a poet. Freed by Christ from the shackles of authority, he found the freedom he sought within himself His work-especially his poetry-was his lifelong prayer, outwardly offered to a Divine Creator in whom he never lost faith.

Christian belief can be defined by doctrine, which is important because it serves as a blueprint. But again and again Christian thinkers from St. Paul, to St. Augustine, to Martin Luther have argued that there is a higher way, a way closer to the heart of God. From Romans and Corinthians where Paul argues that Christ is the great liberator, to the Confessions and "The Morals of the Catholic Church" where St. Augustine states that, having loved God, man is free to choose as he will, to "On the Freedom of the Christian Man" where Luther asserts that once someone becomes a slave to Christ, he is free to do what he wills, the theme is the same: the beginning of all personal freedom is the love of Christ.