den transcendence of the outward helps to the soul.[46]

Here in England, then, during the tumultuous years from 1625 to 1650 a
solid scholar and a great preacher was teaching the people the same
views which the spiritual Reformers of Germany had taught a century
earlier. Like them, Everard taught that the book of the Bible, in so
far as it consists of words, syllables, and letters, is not the Word of
God, for God's Word is not ink and paper, but Life and Spirit, quick
and powerful, illuminating the {252} soul immediately, and
demonstrating itself by its creative work upon the inward man until he
becomes like the Spirit that works within him.[47] Like them, he
insisted that Christ becomes Saviour only as He becomes the Life of our
lives and repeats in us in a spiritual way the events of His outward
and historical life. Like them, too, he had discovered that God is not
a being of wrath and anger, needing to be appeased. On the contrary he
says: "Beloved, were you once to come to a true sight of God, you would
see Him glorious and amiable, full of love and mercy and
tenderness--all wrath and frowns blown clean away. We should see in
Him not so much as any shadow of anger."[48] Like them, he found
heaven not far away but in the redeemed soul: "Heaven is nothing but
Grace perfected, 'tis of the same nature of that you enjoy here when
you are united by faith to Christ."[49] "I remember," he once said,
"how I was taught as a child, either by my nurse, or my mother, or my
schoolmaster, that God was above in heaven, above the sun, moon and
stars, and there, I thought, was His Court, and His Chamber of
presence, and I thought it a great height to come to this knowledge;
but I assure you I had more to do to unlearn this principle than ever I
had to learn it."[50] He tries to call his hearers away from "the
childish apprehensions" that heaven is a place of "visible and ocular
glories," or that "it shall be only hereafter," or that its glory
"consists in Thrones, and Crowns, and Scepters, in Music, Harps and
Vyols, and such like carnal and poor things."[51]

He was a man of beautiful spirit, of saintly life, "courageous and
discerning," "concerned not so much over self-sufferings as that truth
should not in any way be obstructed through him," and he belongs in the
list of those who saw through the veil of the outward, through the
parable of the letter, and found the inward and eternal Reality.[52]

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III. GILES RA