epigones of that day had no suspicion of the ideas
that were swarming in the mind of the quiet Pastor of Zschopau, or of
the mass of manuscripts proclaiming his faith in the inner Word which
he was leaving behind him, to fly over the world like the loose leaves
of the Sibyl.

His writings were not printed until 1609 and onwards, and as his
disciples went on producing writings, somewhat in the style and spirit
of the master who inspired them, the list of books in Weigel's name is
considerably larger than the actual number of manuscripts extant at his
death in 1588. It is not always easy to distinguish the
pseudo-writings from the genuine ones, but there is a vividness and
pregnancy of style, a spiritual depth and power in the earlier writings
which are lacking in the later group, and there is an emphasis on the
magical and occult in the secondary writings that is largely absent in
the primary ones.[7] The most important of his books will be referred
to and quoted from as I present his type of religion and his message,
but I shall draw especially upon his little {141} book, _Von dem Leben
Christi, das ist, vom wahren Glauben_ ("On the Life of Christ, or True
Faith"), as it is the one of Weigel's writings which, in English
translation, most deeply influenced kindred spirits in the English
Commonwealth.[8]

His spiritual conception of Christianity was formed and fed by the
sermons of Tauler, and by that little book which was "the hidden Manna"
for all the spiritual leaders of these two centuries--the _German
Theology_. Weigel edited it with an introduction. He calls it "a
precious little book," "a noble book"; but he tells his readers that
they can understand it and find it fruitful only if they read it "with
a pure eye" and with "the key of David," _i.e._ with a personal
experience. But while he loved the golden book of mysticism and the
sermons of the great Strasbourg preacher, and was led by the hand of
these guides, he drew also from many other sources and finally arrived
at a type of religion, still interior and personal, but less negative
and abstract than that of the fourteenth-century mystics, and more
penetrated and informed with the presence of the Christ of the Gospels.
He insists always that in the last analysis it is Christ in us that
saves us, but it was Christ in the flesh, the Christ of Galilee and
Golgotha, that revealed to men the way to apprehend the inward and
eternal Christ of God. "The indwelli