h as blear-eyed beholders."
Legal religion compared with the religion of the Spirit is "like a spark
struck from flint at midnight" compared with the sun; it is like "drawing
the waters of Grace, a bucketful at a time," when we might have "the
Spirit gushing as a living and perpetual Fountain."[64] But God is so
good that He speaks to us in a variety of ways, and He lets us "spell His
name" with the alphabet, until we learn to know His own Voice. Nature,
in the elements of visible creation, tells us of Him; Reason compels us
to recognize One who is First and Best, the All in all; the written word
cries in our ears that God is Love; but above these voices there is a
Principle within our own souls by which "God propagates His Life" in us,
and he who, in this love-way, has become a son knows God as
_Abba-Father_.[65] We pray now with power, when this new Life of the
Spirit has come into us, and we pour our spirits out in
self-forgetfulness, "as a River pours itself into the sea, where it
loseth its own name and is known only as the waters of the Sea."[66]

He is always gentle in his account of other religions and other stages of
faith, and he sees good in all types, if only they help the soul to
hunger for the Eternal and do not cramp it. "O that I had a hundred
mouths," he writes, "an hundred tongues, a Voice like the Voice of God
that rends Rocks, to cry to all sorts of Persons and Spirits in this Land
and in all the Christian World through the whole creation: 'Let all that
differ in Principles, Professions, Opinions and Forms, see the good there
is in each other'!"[67]

The world, busy with action and choosing for its historical study the men
who did things, has allowed {287} Peter Sterry to drop into oblivion and
his books to gather dust and cobwebs, but there was, I think, a Seed of
God in him, and he had a message for his age. He sincerely endeavoured
to hand on the torch which in his youth at Cambridge had been kindled in
him by some other flame. "When one candle is lighted," he beautifully
says, "we light many by it, and when God hath kindled the Life of His
glory in one man's Heart he often enkindles many by the flame of
that."[68]

[1] I have studied the "Familists," the "Anabaptists," the "Seekers," and
"Ranters," and some of the interesting religious characters, such as John
Saltmarsh, William Dell, and Gerard Winstanley, in my _Studies in
Mystical Religion_ (London, 1908).

[2] Oliver Cromwell's