insight, and the moral reinforcement of personal Faith in
Christ, religion comes to its consummate flower, and may with some
right be called "spiritual Religion."

V

The most radical step which these spiritual Reformers took--the step
which put them most strikingly out of line with the main course of the
Reformation--was their break with Protestant Theology. They were not
satisfied with a programme which limited itself to a correction of
abuses, an abolition of mediaeval superstitions, and a shift of
external authority. They were determined to go the whole way to a
Religion of inward life and power, to a Christianity whose only
authority should be its dynamic and spiritual authority. They placed
as low an estimate on the saving value of orthodox systems of
theological formulation as the Protestant Reformers did on the saving
value of "works." To the former, salvation was an affair neither of
"works" nor of what they called "notions," _i.e._ views, beliefs, or
creeds. They are never weary of insisting that a person may go on
endless pilgrimages to holy places, he may repeat unnumbered
"paternosters," he may mortify his body to the verge of
self-destruction, and still be unsaved and unspiritual; so, too, he may
"believe" all the dogma of the most orthodox system of faith, he may
take on his lips the most sacred words of sound doctrine, and yet be
utterly alien {xlvii} to the kingdom of God, a stranger and a foreigner
to the spirit of Christ. They were determined, therefore, to go
through to a deeper centre and to make only those things pivotal which
are absolutely essential to life and salvation.

They began their reconstruction of the meaning of salvation with (1) a
new and fresh interpretation of God, and (2) with a transformed
eschatology. As I have already said, they re-discovered God through
Christ, and in terms of His revelation; and coming to God _this way_,
they saw at once that the prevailing interpretations of the atonement
were inadequate and unworthy. God, they declared, is not a Suzerain,
treating men as his vassals, reckoning their sins up against them as
infinite debts to be paid off at last in a vast commercial transaction
only by the immeasurable price of a divine Life, given to pay the debt
which had involved the entire race in hopeless bankruptcy. Nor, again,
in their thought is He a mighty Sovereign, meting out to the world
strict justice and holding all sin as flagrant disloyalty and