ristians are
in this world guests and their country is above." "It is not fitting
for a guest that comes into an Inne, where nothing is his own, that he
should appropriate things to himself and quarrel about them!"[17]

As fast as Christ is formed within, as the Life of one's life, the
believer attains thereby a peace and a power which make the "rent"
between flesh and spirit ever less disturbing, though it still remains
until the fleshly tabernacle dissolves. The goal of the spiritual life
here on earth is the attainment of "the silent Sabbath of the soul," in
which God becomes so completely the soul's sufficiency that the flesh
has little scope or sway any more, and there is no longer need of
furious struggle against it, "like a serpent between two rocks, trying
to pull off his old skin!"[18] In his _Heavenly Jerusalem in Us_, he
says: "It is an attribute of God that He is the Eternal Peace which is
longed for by us men, but found by few because they do not _mind
Christ_, who is the Way. God has not grounded either thy Peace or thy
Salvation on thy running hither and yon, nor on thy works and thy
creaturely activities, but on an inner calm and quiet, on a Sabbath of
the soul, in which thou canst hear, with the simple and the
tender-minded, what the Lord is saying and doing."[19]

In close conformity to the teaching of Sebastian Franck,[20] Weigel
thinks of the Church of God as an invisible Assembly of all true
Believers in the entire world, united, not outwardly but inwardly, in
the unity of the Spirit and by the bond of Love and Peace. There are
for him, as for Franck and other "Spirituals," two kinds of churches:
(1) The church composed of a visible group, {146} "to be pointed out
with the finger," located in a definite country, allied with a temporal
government, held together by a body of doctrine, "tied to" certain
sacraments and possessed of force to constrain men, by "carnall
perswasions," to conform.[21] Then there is (2) the real Church of
God, "the upper Jerusalem," a body visible in no one locality, but
dispersed over the earth like wheat in chaff, held together by no
declarations of doctrine, tied to no sacraments, dependent on no
earthly Lieutenant or Vice-gerent, and on no university-trained
Doctors, which recognizes Prince and Ploughman alike, and secures its
unity through Christ and through the invisible cement of Love. "To
this Assembly," writes Weigel, "doe I stick; in this holy Church doe I