spiritual
reality, than was Caspar Schwenckfeld, the Silesian noble. No one, to
a greater degree than he, succeeded in going behind, not only
Scholastic formulations but even behind Pauline interpretations of
Christ, to Christ Himself. The aspects of the Christ-life which
powerfully moved him were very different from {65} those which moved
Francis of Assisi three centuries earlier, but the two men had this
much in common--they both went to Jesus Christ for the source and
inspiration of their religion, they both lived under the spell of that
dominating Personality of the Gospels, they both felt the power of the
Cross and saw with their inner spirits that the real healing of the
human soul and the eternal destiny of man were indissolubly bound up
with the Person of Christ.[2] Here again, as in the early years of the
thirteenth century, there came a gentle Reformer of religion, who would
use no compulsion but love, who knew how to suffer patiently with his
Lord, and whose entire programme was the restoration of primitive
Christianity, though of necessity it would be restored, if at all, in
terms of the spiritual ideals of the sixteenth century, as the
Christianity of St. Francis had been in terms of thirteenth-century
ideals.

Caspar Schwenckfeld was born of a noble family in the duchy of
Liegnitz, in Lower Silesia, in 1489. He studied in Cologne, in
Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and probably also in the University of Erfurt,
though he attained no University degree. His period of systematic
study being over, about 1511 he threw himself into the life of a
courtier, with the prospect of a successful worldly career before him.
Luther's heroic contest against the evils and corruptions of the Church
and his proclamation of a Reforming faith shook the prosperous courtier
wide awake and turned the currents of his life powerfully toward
religion. He deeply felt at this time, what he expressed a few years
later, that a new world was coming to birth and the old one dying away.
To the end of his days, and in spite of the harsh treatment which he
later received from the Wittenberg Reformer, Schwenckfeld always
remembered that it was the prophetic trumpet-call of Luther which had
summoned him to a new life, and he always carried about with him in his
long exile--an exile for which Luther was largely responsible--a
beautiful respect and {66} appreciation for the man who had first
turned him to a knowledge of the truth.[3]

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