e Holy Scriptures
which they apply to themselves by far-fetched expositions and
allegories, or from the dead letter of the text. . . . They can be
understood rightly, however, only by the divine new-man, who is
God-born, and who brings to them the Light of the Holy Spirit." There
can be no doubt, I think, that Dr. Everard found in the writings of
these two sixteenth-century prophets the body and filling of his own
new conceptions of Christianity, and it was through his vigorous
interpretations that this stream of thought first flowed into England.

It will not be necessary to make extended comment on Everard's other
translations. The second one was "The Golden Book of German
Divinitie," rendered into English in 1628 from the Latin edition of
"John Theophilus," who is Sebastian Castellio, and the third is a
translation of Nicholas of Cusa's _De visione Dei_ ("The Vision of
God"), which is a profound and impressive piece of mystical literature
and deserves to be much better known than it is. Everard, further,
translated the "Mystical Divinity" of Dionysius the Areopagite,
selections from John Tauler and Meister Eckhart, and "The Divine
Pymander [Poemander] of Hermes Trismegistus"--a book which nearly all
the spiritual Humanists ranked in the very first list of religious
literature.[12]

We must now turn to Everard's message as it is {244} presented in his
Sermons, and endeavour to discover what he told the throngs of people
who came gladly to hear him in the Kensington Meetings and the
gatherings at Islington. The central emphasis in every sermon is on
personal experience, or, as we should phrase it to-day, on a religion
of life and reality. He has had his own "scholastic" period, but he
looks back on it as a passage across an arid desert, and he feels a
mission laid upon him to call men everywhere away from a religion of
"notions and words"[13] to a religion of first-hand experience and
inwardly felt realities. Unless we know Christ, he says,
experimentally so that "He lives within us spiritually, and so that all
which is known of Him in the Letter and Historically is truly done and
acted in our own souls--until we experimentally verify all we read of
Him--the Gospel is a meer tale to us." It is not saving knowledge to
know that Christ was born in Bethlehem but to know that He is born in
us. It is vastly more important to know experimentally that we are
crucified with Christ than to know historically that He d