the witness--"the Abba-crying
voice"--in their own hearts. But this process from outward to inward,
from virtue impelled by fear and mediated by law to goodness generated
by love, gives no place for license. Buenderlin has no fellowship with
antinomianism, and is opposed to any tendency which gives rein to the
flesh. The outward law, the external restraint, the discipline of fear
and punishment are to be used so long as they are needed, and the
written word and the pictorial image will always serve as a norm and
standard, but the true spiritual goal of life is the formation of a
rightly fashioned will, the creation of a controlling personal love,
the experience of a guiding inward Spirit, which keep the awakened soul
steadily approximating the perfect Life which Christ has revealed.

The true Church is for Buenderlin as for Denck, the communion and
fellowship of spiritual persons--an invisible congregation;
ever-enlarging with the process of the ages and with the expanding
light of the Spirit. He blames Luther for having stopped short of a
real reformation, of having "mixed with the Midianites instead of going
on into the promised Canaan," and of having failed to dig down to the
fundamental basis of spiritual religion.[10]

In his final treatise[11] he goes to the full length of the implication
of his principle. He recounts with luminous {39} simplicity the
mystical _unity_ of the spiritual Universe and tells of the divine
purpose to draw all our finite and divided wills into moral harmony
with the Central Will. Once more religion is presented as wholly a
matter of the inward spirit, a thing of insight, of obedience to a
living Word, of love for an infinite Lover, the bubbling of living
streams of water in the heart of man. He declares that the period of
signs and symbols and of "the scholastic way of truth" is passing away,
and the religion of the New Testament, the religion of life and spirit,
is coming in place of the old. As fast as the new comes ceremonies and
sacraments vanish and fall away. They do not belong to a religion of
the Spirit; they are for the infant race and for those who have not
outgrown the picture-book. Christ's baptism is with power from above,
and He cleanses from sin not with water but with the Holy Ghost and the
burning fire of love. As soon as the spiritual man possesses "the key
of David," and has entered upon "the true Sabbath of his soul," he
holds lightly all forms and ceremo