Those who rightly understand religion and have had this birth and this Sabbath-peace within themselves will stop contending over outward, external things, which make separations but do not minister to the spirit; they will give up the Babel-habit of constructing theological { 43} systems,[18] they will pass upward from elements to the essence, they will stop building the city-walls of the Church out of baptism and the supper, which furnish "only clay-plastered walls" at best, and they will found the Church instead upon the true sacramental power of the inward Spirit of God.[19] The true goal of the spiritual life is such a oneness with God that He is in us and we in Him, so that the inner joy and power take our outer life captive and draw us away from the world and its "pictures," and make it a heartfelt delight to do all His commandments and to suffer anything for Him.[20]
Here, then, in the third decade of the sixteenth century, when the leaders of the Reformation were using all their powers of dialectic to formulate in new scholastic phrase the sound creed for Protestant Christendom, and while the fierce and decisive battle was being waged over the new form in which the Eucharist must be celebrated, there appeared a little group of men who proposed that Christianity should be conceived and practised as _a way of living_--nothing more nor less. They rejected theological language and terminology root and branch. They are as innocent of scholastic subtlety and forensic conceptions as though they had been born in this generation. They seem to have wiped their slate clean of the long line of Augustinian contributions, and to have begun afresh with the life and message of Jesus Christ, coloured, if at all, by local and temporal backgrounds, by the experience of the earlier German mystics who helped them to interpret their own simple and sincere experiences. They are as naïve and artless as little children, and they expect, as all enthusiasts do in their youth, that they have only to announce their wonderful truths and to proclaim their "openings" in order to bring the world to the light! They go to the full length of the implications of their { 44} fresh insight without ever dreaming that all the theological world will unite, across the yawning chasms of difference, to stamp out their "pestilent heresy," and to rid the earth of persons who dare to question the traditions and the practices of the centuries.