these ideas
appear: "This outward world," he says, "is the best outward
looking-glasse to see whatever hath been, is, or shall be in Eternity,
and our own minds are the best inward looking-glasse to see Eternity
exactly in";[13] and he expresses the belief that any one who learns to
read all the work of God in the world without, and in the mind of man
within, will learn to know Him truly, will see Eternity manifested in
time, will discover that the mind of man is a centre of all mysteries,
and that heaven and hell are potentially in us, and he will be
convinced that God is in all things and all things are in God; that we
live in Him and that He lives in us.[14]

This second idea--that God can be found in the depth of man's soul--is
strongly emphasized in Sparrow's next Introduction, written in
1648--"_The Ground of what hath ever been lieth in man_."[15] All that
is in the Scriptures has come out of man's experience and therefore can
now be grasped by us. All that was in Adam lies in the ground and
depth of any man. When the Apostle John wrote that there is an unction
which teacheth all things and leadeth into all truth, he did not
confine this possibility {215} to apostles, but intended to include all
men in the class of those who may be anointed, and all who know "what
is in man" realize that it is possible to attain to this inward and
apostolic guidance.[16] In a passage of great boldness Sparrow goes in
his venturous faith in the inner Spirit as far as the young
Leicestershire preacher did who was starting out, the very year this
Introduction was written, to proclaim the message of the inward Light.
"The ground," he says, "of all that was in Adam is in us; for whatever
Ground lay in God, the same lieth in Christ and through Him it lieth in
us, for He is in us all. And he that knoweth God in himself . . . may
well be able to speak the word of God infallibly as the holy men that
penned the Scriptures. And he that can understand these things in
himself may well know who speaketh by the Spirit of God and who
speaketh his own fancies and delusions."[17]

In the Introduction to the _Mysterium magnum_, Sparrow returns to this
idea of inward illumination, though he balances it better than he did
in the former Introduction, with his estimation of "the antient Holy
Scriptures," and he does not again suggest that present-day men speak
"infallibly." He thinks that the same God who so eminently taught
Moses by His Spiri