If recommendations pique your interest in a book, these should carry some weight:
John Wesley: “I think Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man has had a profound effect on me. It has influenced my understanding of Christian perfection and the nature of true religion more than almost any other book.”
George Whitefield: “I have read The Life of God in the Soul of Man, and it has been a means of awakening a more holy desire to experience the inward work of the Spirit.”
A.W. Tozer (1897–1963): “In his Life of God in the Soul of Man, Henry Scougal paints a picture of the Christian life that is often far removed from the empty formalism that characterizes too much of religion today. His words point us to the true goal of the Christian experience: not merely an outward show of faith, but an inward communion with God.”
Charles Spurgeon: “This book has been a delight to my soul. It has done more than any other book to reveal to me the heart of true religion. I am constantly returning to it for its depth and simplicity.”
C.S. Lewis: “If ever there were a book that encapsulated the true meaning of Christianity, The Life of God in the Soul of Man is it. It takes the truth of our faith and distills it into something profoundly simple yet eternally significant.”
Scougal wrote the book in 1677. He explores the nature of true religion and concludes that the “life of God” in a person’s soul is the essence of genuine Christianity. The Christian life is another’s life. Here are his words, “true religion is a union of the soul with God, a real participation of the Divine nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul, or, in the apostle’s phrase, ‘it is Christ formed within us’. Briefly, I know not how the nature of religion can be more fully expressed, than by calling it a Divine life”.
In other words, the book is about union with God. External behaviors or theological knowledge are not the essence of real Christianity. True conversion is an inner transformation, a union with God’s presence in one’s soul. Scougal proposes that a person’s soul, when alive with the life of God, will naturally display virtues like love, joy, humility, and holiness. For Scougal, the greatest joys are found in humble immersion into God’s glory: “It is impossible to express the great pleasure and delight which religious persons feel in the lowest prostration of their souls before God, when, having a deep sense of the divine majesty and glory, they sink, if I may so speak, to the bottom of their beings, and vanish and disappear in the presence of God, by a serious and affectionate acknowledgement of their own nothingness”
Scougal also points out that the affections are at the very root of the Christian life. “The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.”
The book is deeply devotional. It emphasises prayer, meditation, and communion with God. Scougal discusses the cultivation of this life through spiritual disciplines. But, says Scougal, the true Christian life is not like the heavy and onerous duties of man-made religion or moralism. Instead, it is “an inward free and self-moving principle; and those who have made progress in it, are not acted only by external motives, driven merely by threatenings, nor bribed by promises, nor constrained by laws, but are powerfully inclined to that which is good, and delight in the performance of it. The love which a pious man bears to God and goodness, is not so much by virtue of a command enjoining him so to do, as by a new nature instructing and prompting him to do it; nor doth he pay his devotions as an unavoidable tribute, only to appease the Divine justice; but those religious exercises are the proper emanations of the Divine life, the natural employments of the new-born soul.”
A short book (about 28 000 words, about 50 pages), it remains one of the best treatments of the Christian life.
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