ware of evil and
checks him when he is in the pursuit of it; gives him a vision of
righteousness, attracts him toward goodness, and points him infallibly
toward Christ from whom the Light shines. This Light is pure, immediate,
and spiritual. It is of God, in fact is God immanently revealed.[19]

Then, again, the figure is changed and what was called Light is now
called "Seed," and it is thought of as a resident germ of divine Life
which, through the active co-operation of the individual, produces a new
creation within, and makes the person through and through of a new nature
like itself.[20] It is also frequently called "the Word of God," or
"Grace of God," or "That of God in you," or "Christ within," or "the
Spirit," or "the Kingdom within you." "By this Seed, Grace, and Word of
God, and Light wherewith every one is enlightened," {346} Barclay says,
"We understand a spiritual, heavenly, and invisible Principle in which
God, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, dwells; a measure [_i.e._ a
portion] of which divine and glorious Life is in all men as a Seed, which
of its own nature draws, invites, and inclines to God. This some call
_vehiculum dei_, or the spiritual Body of Christ, the flesh and blood of
Christ, which came down from heaven, of which all saints do feed and are
thereby nourished unto eternal life."[21] But under whatever name it
goes, it is always thought of as a _saving Principle_. He who says yes
responds, obeys, co-operates, and allows this resident Seed of God, or
Christ-Light, to have full sway in him becomes transformed thereby and
re-created into likeness to Christ, by whom the inner Seed was planted
and of whose nature it is. The spiritual predecessors of the Quakers, as
we have seen, all held this view with individual variations of phrase and
experience. All the Quaker terms for the _Principle_ were used by
Sebastian Franck and by Caspar Schwenckfeld; and all the men who taught
the dynamic process of salvation presuppose that something of the divine
nature, as Light or Seed or Spirit, or the resurrected Christ, is
directly operative upon or within the human soul. That is, salvation is
for them more than a moral change, it is a birth-and-life-process,
initiated and carried through by the _real presence_ of the Divine in the
human.[22]

The Quakers are perhaps somewhat more emphatic than were their spiritual
forerunners, with the exception {347} of Schwenckfeld, in their
declarations that this S