t that he could describe the processes of creation,
must have also prepared the people by the instruction of the same
Spirit, so that they could understand what was written, and so that the
Spirit in one man could verify itself in the experience of many men.
He declares that when the Scriptures instruct and perfect the man of
God, they are effective, "not as a meer relation of things done," but
as the medium of the living Word which reaches the inward Man, the
hidden Man of the heart, the Christ in us, so that we pass beyond "the
history of Christ" and rise to "the experience that Christ is born
within us."[18]

No other book, he says, but the Scriptures, teaches {216} man "with
assured knowledge of all the things which concern the soule, the
eternal part of man," for other writers have written from the
observation of their outward senses, but these writers had "inward
senses--their eyes saw, their ears heard, their hands handled the Word
of Life." And yet for those in these days who can "look through the
vayle or shell within which the Eternal Spirit works its Wonders," the
visible things of the world prove to be "a glasse wherein the
similitude of spirituall things are represented" and "the Minde of man
is a most clear and undeceiving glasse wherein we may perceive the
motions and activities of that Work-Master, the Spirit who hath created
everything in the world."[12] In the most satisfactory of all his
Introductions, the one to the _Aurora_ in 1656, he undertakes to show
that "the Light within" which has now arisen in England is not a
substitute for the Christ of history. On the contrary, he insists that
the Christ within and the Christ of history is one and the same Person
who is not divided. He was once manifested in the likeness of sinful
flesh, suffering, dying, rising, ascending in glory, and now, in an
inward and spiritual manner, He is actually present within men so that
they may become conformable in soul and spirit to Him and share in His
life, sufferings, death, resurrection and glory, or they may, by their
own choice, crucify Him afresh within themselves.[20] The Word of Life
calls loudly within every man, urging the soul to forsake that which it
perceives to be evil and to embrace that which it perceives to be good
and holy and divine. This, he says, is the Eternal Gospel, and it
brings to all men everywhere the good news that we live and move and
have our being in God, and that the soul that grope