ap ("elan") of the soul of the creature toward the
Creator; it is a way of renewing strength in Him and of becoming a
participator in His divine nature. It is a return of the soul to its
source. It is a _persistent will_, which multiplies one's strength a
hundredfold, makes Pentecost possible again, and enables us to achieve
the goal which the vision of our heart sees. The only obstacle to this
all-conquering faith is selfishness, the only mortal enemy is
self-will.[11]

There have been, Castellio holds, progressive stages in the Divine
education of the race, and in man's apprehension of God. The mark of
advance is always found in the progress from law and letter to spirit,
and from {101} outward practices and ceremonies to inward experience.
Divine revelations can always be taken at different levels. They can
be seen in a literal, pictorial, temporal way, or they can be read
deeper--by those who are purified by faith and love, and made partakers
of the self-giving Life of God--as eternal and spiritual realities.
The written word of God is the garment of the Divine Thought which is
the real Word of God. It takes more than eyes of flesh to see through
the temporal garment to the inner Life and Spirit beneath. Only the
person who has in himself the illumination of the same Spirit that gave
the original revelation can see through the garment of the letter to
the eternal message, the ever-living Word hidden within.[12] In the
Christianity of the full-grown spiritual man, sacraments and everything
external must be used only as pictorial helps and symbolic suggestions
for the furtherance of spiritual life. Within us, as direct offspring
of God, as image of God, there is a Divine Reason, which existed before
books, before rites, before the foundation of the world, and will exist
after books and rites have vanished, and the world has gone to wreck.
It can no more be abolished than God Himself can be. It was by this
that Jesus Christ, the Son of God--called, in fact, Logos of God--lived
and taught us how to live. It was in the Light of this that He
transcended books and rites and declared, without quoting text, "God is
Spirit and thou shalt worship God in spirit and in truth." This Reason
is in all ages the right investigator and interpreter of Truth, even
though time changes outward things and written texts grow corrupt.[13]

As his life was drawing to a close, he sent forth anonymously another
powerful prophet-cal