ho
ranges himself under Christian rubrics and who says paternosters. They
reject all the scholastic accounts of Christ's metaphysical nature,
they will not use the term Trinity, nor will they admit that it is
right to employ any words which imply that God is divided into
multiform personalities; but nevertheless they hold, with all the
fervour of their earnest spirits, that Christ is God historically and
humanly revealed, and that to see Christ is to see the true and only
God, and to love Christ is to love the Eternal Love.

In an age which settled back upon the Scriptures as the only basis of
authority in religious faith and practice, they boldly challenged that
course as a dangerous return to a lower form of religion than that to
which Christ had called men and as only legalism and scribism in a new
dress. They insisted that the Eternal Spirit, who had been educating
the race from its birth, bringing all things up to better, and who had
used now one symbol and now another to fit the growing spiritual
perception of men, is a real Presence in the deeps of men's {45}
consciousness, and is ceaselessly voicing Himself there as a living
Word whom it is life to obey and death to disregard and slight. Having
found this present, immanent Spirit and being deeply convinced that all
that really matters happens in the dread region of the human heart,
they turned away from all ceremonies and sacraments and tried to form a
Church which should be purely and simply a Communion of saints--a
brotherhood of believers living in the joy of an inward experience of
God, and bound together in common love to Christ and in common service
to all who are potential sons of God.

[1] See Veesenmeyer's article on Buenderlin in _N. lit. Anzeiger_ for
August 1807, P. 535.

[2] The details of his life here given have been gathered mainly from
the excellent monograph on _Johannes Buenderlin_ by Dr. Alexander
Nicoladoni. (Berlin, 1893.)

[3] This incident is given in Dr. Carl Hagen's _Deutschlands
literarischt und religioese Verhaeltnisse im Reformalionszeitalter_,
1868, iii. p. 310.

[4] The books are:--

(1) _Ein gemayne Berechnung ueber der Heiligen Schrift Inhalt_, etc.
("A General Consideration of the Contents of Holy Scripture.") Printed
in Strasbourg in 1529.

(2) _Aus was Ursach sich Gott in die nyder gelassen und in Christo
vermenschet ist_, etc., 1529. ("For what cause God has descended here
below and has become incarnate in