n the
historical doings and sufferings of Christ--are only pointers and
suggestion-material to bring the soul to the living Word within, "to
the Lord Himself who is never absent," and who will be spiritually born
within man. "God," he says, "has once become flesh in Christ and has
revealed thus the hidden God and, as happened in a fleshly way in Mary,
even so Christ must be spiritually born in us." So, too, everything
which Christ experienced and endured in His earthly mission must be
re-lived and reproduced in the life of His true disciples. There is no
salvation possible without the new birth of Christ in us, without
self-surrender and the losing of oneself, without being buried with
Christ in a death to self-will and without rising with Him in joy and
peace and victory.[16] He who rightly loves his Christ will speak no
word, will eat no bit of bread, nor taste of water, nor put a stitch of
clothes upon his body without thinking of the Beloved of his
soul. . . . In this state he can rid himself of all pictures and
symbols, renounce everything which he possesses, take up his cross with
Christ, join Him in an inward, dying life, allow himself, like grain,
to be threshed, winnowed, ground, bolted, and baked that he may become
spiritual food as Christ has done for us. Then there comes a state in
which poverty and riches, pain and joy, life and death are alike, when
the soul has found its sabbath-peace in the Origin and Fount of all
Love.[17] His first book closes with a beautiful account of the return
of the prodigal to His Father and to His Father's love, and then he
breaks into a joyous cry, as if it all came out of his own experience:
"Who then can separate us from the Love of God?"

Those who rightly understand religion and have had this birth and this
Sabbath-peace within themselves will stop contending over outward,
external things, which make separations but do not minister to the
spirit; they will give up the Babel-habit of constructing theological
{43} systems,[18] they will pass upward from elements to the essence,
they will stop building the city-walls of the Church out of baptism and
the supper, which furnish "only clay-plastered walls" at best, and they
will found the Church instead upon the true sacramental power of the
inward Spirit of God.[19] The true goal of the spiritual life is such
a oneness with God that He is in us and we in Him, so that the inner
joy and power take our outer life captive an