t of the past and
condemning a dawning movement which with his apperceiving material he
could not understand, but which was in a few years to have
extraordinary expansion and which, when it should in time become
defecated through discipline and spiritual travail, was destined to
speak to the condition of many minds to whom Rutherford's "notions"
have become only empty words.

IV

A beautiful little anonymous book of this period, containing a similar
conception of Christianity to that set forth in the writings of Everard
and Randall, must be briefly considered here: _The Life and Light of a
Man in Christ Jesus_ (London, 1646). The writer, who was a scholarly
man, shows the profound influence of the _Theologia Germanica_, that
universal book of religion which {264} fed so many souls in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he has evidently found, either
at home or abroad, spiritual guides who have brought him to the
Day-star in his own heart.

Religion, he says, is wholly a matter of the "operative manifestation
of Christ in a man--the divine Spirit living in a man."[88] To miss
that experience and to lack that inner life in God is to miss the very
heart of religion. "There be many and diverse Religions and Baptisms
among many and diverse peoples of the habitable world, but to be
baptized as a man in Christ--that is to be baptized into the living,
active God, so that the man has his salvation and eternal well-being
wrought in him by the Spirit and life of his God--is the only
best."[89] Those who lack "this real spiritual business" never attain
"the true Sabbath-rest of the soul." They go to meeting on "Sunday,
Sabbath or First day [_sic_] merely to hear such or such a rare divine
preach or discourse, or to participate in such or such Ordinances."[90]
They have "an artificiall, historicall Divinity [Theology] which they
have attained by the eye, that is by reading books, or by the ears,
that is, by hearing this or that man, or by gathering up
expressions"--their religion rests on "knowledge" and not on Christ
experienced within.[91] This external religion is not so much wrong as
it is inadequate and immature. "It is," he says, "like unto young
children, who with shells and little stones imitate a real
building!"[92] The religion which carries a man beyond shadows to true
realities and from the cockle-shell house to a permanent and eternal
temple for the Spirit is the religion which finds Christ with