His spiritual conception of Christianity was formed and fed by the sermons of Tauler, and by that little book which was "the hidden Manna" for all the spiritual leaders of these two centuries--the _German Theology_. Weigel edited it with an introduction. He calls it "a precious little book," "a noble book"; but he tells his readers that they can understand it and find it fruitful only if they read it "with a pure eye" and with "the key of David," _i.e._ with a personal experience. But while he loved the golden book of mysticism and the sermons of the great Strasbourg preacher, and was led by the hand of these guides, he drew also from many other sources and finally arrived at a type of religion, still interior and personal, but less negative and abstract than that of the fourteenth-century mystics, and more penetrated and informed with the presence of the Christ of the Gospels. He insists always that in the last analysis it is Christ in us that saves us, but it was Christ in the flesh, the Christ of Galilee and Golgotha, that revealed to men the way to apprehend the inward and eternal Christ of God. "The indwelling Christ," he wrote, "is all in all. He saves thee. He is thy peace and thy comfort. The outward Christ, the Christ in the flesh, and according to the flesh, cannot save thee in an external way. He must be in thee and thou must abide in Him. Why then did He become man and suffer on the Cross? There are many reasons why, but it was especially that God by the death and suffering of Christ might take the wrath and hostility out of _our_ hearts, on account of which we falsely conceive of God as a wrathful enemy to us. He had to deal that way with poor blind men like us and so reconcile us with Himself. { 142} There was no need of it on His part. He was always Love and He always loved us, even when we were enemies to Him, but we should never have known it if God had not condescended to show Himself to us in His Son and had not suffered for us."[9]
Weigel everywhere maintains Christ's double identity--an identity with God, so that in Christ we see God; and an equal identity with man, so that Christ is man revealed in his fulfilled possibilities. In Him God and man are _one_. In this deep-lying and fundamental idea of his entire Christianity he was undoubtedly influenced, profoundly influenced, by Schwenckfeld. He presents in chapter i. of his _Life of Christ_ the Schwenckfeldian view that Christ is God and Man in _one_. But He is Man not in the crass, crude and earthly form: He is not composed of mortal and earthly substance as our "Adamical bodies" are. He is wholly and absolutely composed of heavenly, spiritual, divine substance. His flesh and blood are as divine and spiritual in origin as is His spirit, so that His resurrection and ascension are the normal outcome of His nature. It was as natural for Him to rise into life and to ascend into glory as it is for heavy things to fall. But that divine, spiritual, heavenly nature, which appeared in Him, is the true, original, consummate nature of Man. Man, as we know him, is cloudy, or even muddy, with a vesture of decay, but that is not a feature of his _real_ nature--either in its original or its potential form--and all who "put on Christ," all who have "Christ in them," become one flesh with Him and gain an indestructible and permanent inward substance like His.