he wants to make the fact forever plain that
men are saved or lost as they say _yes_ or _no_ to a Light and Word
within themselves. "The Holy Scriptures," he writes in his dying
testimony, "I consider above every human treasure, but not so high as
the Word of God which is living, powerful, and eternal, for it is God
Himself, Spirit and no letter, written without pen or paper so that it
can never be destroyed. For that reason, salvation is not bound up
with the Scriptures, however necessary and good they may be for their
purpose, because it is impossible for the Scriptures to make good a bad
heart, even though it may be a learned one. A good heart, however,
with a Divine Spark in it is improved by everything, and to such the
Scriptures will bring blessedness {29} and goodness."[43] The
Scriptures--the external Word--as he many times, in fact somewhat
tediously, declares, are witnesses and pointers to the real and
momentous thing, the Word which is very near to all souls and is
written in the heart, and which increases in clearness and power as the
will swings into parallelism with the will of God, and as the life
grows in likeness to the Divine image revealed in Christ. This inward
life and spiritual appreciation do not give any ground for relaxing the
moral obligations of life. No fulfilling of the law by Christ, no
vanishing of the outward and temporal, furnish any excuse to us for
slacking a jot or tittle of anything which belongs to the inherent
nature of moral goodness. "Christ," he says, "fulfilled the law, not
to relieve us of it, but to show us how to keep it in truth. The
member must partake of what the Head partakes."[44] _To love God alone
and to hate everything that hinders love_ is a principle which, Denck
believes, will fulfil all law, ancient or modern.[45]

Such were the ideas which this young radical reformer, dreamer perhaps,
tried to teach his age. The time was not ripe for him, and there was
no environment ready for his message. He spoke to minds busy with
theological systems, and to men whose battles were over the meaning of
inherited medieval dogma. He thought and spoke as a child of another
world, and he talked in a language which he had learned from his heart
and not from books or from the schools. It is "the key of David," he
says, that is, an inward experience, which unlocks all the solid doors
of truth, but there were so few about him who really had this "key"!
His task, which was