Word may be;
however vivid the illumination; however drawing the Love, there is
never compulsion. The soul itself must hear and see and feel; must say
yes to the appeal of Love, and must co-operate by a continuous
adjustment of the personal will to the Will of God and "learn to behave
as a child of God."

Having reached the insight that salvation is entirely an affair of the
spirit, an inward matter, Denck loosened his hold upon the external
things which had through long centuries of history come to be
considered essential to Christianity. Sacraments and ceremonies
dropped to a lower level for him as things of no importance. With his
characteristic breadth and sweetness, he does not smite them as an
iconoclast would have done; he does not cry out against those who
continue to use them. He merely considered them of no spiritual
significance. "Ceremonies," he writes in his dying confession, "in
themselves are not sin, but whoever supposes that he can attain to life
either by baptism or by partaking of bread, is still in
superstition."[38] "If all ceremonies," he adds, "were lost, little
harm would come of it."[39] {28} He appeals to Christians to stop
quarrelling over these outward and secondary matters, and to make
religion consist in love to neighbour rather than in zeal for outward
ceremonies. He laid down this great principle: "All externals must
yield to love, for they are for the sake of love, and not love for
their sake."[40]

He was, consistently with his fundamental ideas, profoundly opposed to
every tendency to make Christianity a legal religion. His friends, the
Anabaptists, were inclined to turn the Gospel of Christ into "a new
law," and to make religion consist largely in scrupulous obedience to
this perfect law of life. To all this he was radically alien, for it
was, he thought, only another road back to a religion of the letter,
while Christ came to call us to a religion of the spirit. "He who has
not the Spirit," he wrote, "and who fails to find Him in the
Scriptures, seeks life and finds death; seeks light and finds darkness,
whether it be in the Old or in the New Testament."[41] "He who thinks
that he can be _made truly righteous_ by means of a Book is ascribing
to the dead letter what belongs to the Spirit."[42] He does not
belittle or undervalue the Scriptures--he knew them almost by heart and
took the precious time out of his brief life to help to translate the
Prophets into German--but