utwardly effected, but is a new self, a new spirit,
a new relation to God: "Man must cease to be what he is before he can
come to be another kind of person."[26] Outward baptism and external
supper may, if one wishes, be used as symbols of the soul's supreme
events, but they cannot rightly be thought of as effecting any change
of themselves in the real nature of the man; only Christ the
Life-bringer, only the resident work of God within the soul, can
produce the transformation from old self to new self. "Salvation is
not tyed to sacraments."[27]

It is a well-settled view of Weigel's that Heaven and Hell are
primarily in the soul of man. He says, in _Know Thyself_, that both
the Trees of Paradise are in us; and in his _Ort der Welt_ he declares
that "the Eternal Hell of the lost will be their own Hell."[28] And in
his _Christliches {148} Gespraech_ he insists that the holy Spirit, the
present Christ, does not need to _come down_ from Heaven to meet with
us, for when He is in our hearts there then is Heaven.[29] No person
can ever be in Heaven until Heaven is in him.

In _Der gueldene Griff_ and elsewhere Weigel works out a very
interesting theory of knowledge, which fits well with the inwardness of
his religious views. He holds that in sense perception the percipient
brings forth his real _knowledge_ from within. The external "object,"
or the outward stimulus, is the soliciting occasion, or suggestion, or
the sign for the experience, but what we see is determined from within
rather than from without. All real knowledge is in the knower. Both
external world and written scriptures are in themselves _shadows_ until
the inward spirit interprets them, and through them comes to the Word
of God which they suggest and symbolize.

Weigel plainly arrived at his ground ideas under the formative
influence of Schwenckfeld and Franck, but he also reveals, especially
in his conception of the deeper inner world and of the microcosmic
character of man, the influence of Paracelsus and of the nature mystics
of his time. He was himself, in turn, a most important influence in
the development of the religious ideas of Jacob Boehme, and he is
historically one of the most significant men of the entire spiritual
group before the great Silesian mystic.[30]

This chapter cannot come to a proper close without some consideration
of a Weigelean book which was translated into English in 1649, under
the title, "_Astrologie Theologized_: