proportion
to its personal experience and its moral capacity to transmit divine
power. Here again the emphasis is on the moral aspect of religion as
contrasted with the magical. There can be no severing of the
ecclesiastical office or function from the moral character of the
person himself. Schwenckfeld has cut away completely from
sacerdotalism and has returned, as far as with his limited historical
insight he knew how to do it, to the ideal of the primitive Apostolic
Church. The true mark and sign of membership in the community of
saints--the invisible Church--is, for him as for St. Paul, {80}
possession of the mind of Christ, faith, patience, integrity, peace,
unity of spirit, the power of God, joy in the Holy Ghost, and the
abounding gifts and fruits of the Spirit. "No outward unity or
uniformity, either in doctrine or ceremonies, or rules or sacraments,
can make a Christian Church; but inner unity of spirit, of heart, soul
and conscience in Christ and in the knowledge of Him, a unity in love
and faith, does make a Church of Christ."[34] The Church is in a very
true sense bone of Christ's bone and flesh of His flesh, vitalized by
His blood, empowered by His real presence, and formed into an organism
which reveals and exhibits the divine and heavenly Life--a world-order
as far above the natural human life as that is above the plant.

Quite consistently with this spiritual view of religion--this view that
the true Church is an invisible Church--Schwenckfeld taught that the
true sacrament is an inner and spiritual sacrament, and not legal and
external like those of the Old Testament. "God must Himself, apart
from all external means, through Christ touch the soul, speak in it,
work in it, if we are to experience salvation and eternal life."[35]
The direct incoming of the Divine Spirit, producing a rebirth and a new
creation in the man himself, is the only baptism which avails with God
or which makes any difference in the actual condition of man. Baptism
in its true significance is the reception of cleansing power, it is an
inward process which purifies the heart, illuminates the conscience,
and is not only necessary for salvation but in fact _is_ salvation.
Christian baptism is therefore not with water, but with Christ: it is
the immersion of the soul in the life-giving streams of Christ's
spiritual presence.

Schwenckfeld was always kindly disposed toward the Anabaptists, but he
was not of them. He presente