d draw us away from the
world and its "pictures," and make it a heartfelt delight to do all His
commandments and to suffer anything for Him.[20]

Here, then, in the third decade of the sixteenth century, when the
leaders of the Reformation were using all their powers of dialectic to
formulate in new scholastic phrase the sound creed for Protestant
Christendom, and while the fierce and decisive battle was being waged
over the new form in which the Eucharist must be celebrated, there
appeared a little group of men who proposed that Christianity should be
conceived and practised as _a way of living_--nothing more nor less.
They rejected theological language and terminology root and branch.
They are as innocent of scholastic subtlety and forensic conceptions as
though they had been born in this generation. They seem to have wiped
their slate clean of the long line of Augustinian contributions, and to
have begun afresh with the life and message of Jesus Christ, coloured,
if at all, by local and temporal backgrounds, by the experience of the
earlier German mystics who helped them to interpret their own simple
and sincere experiences. They are as naive and artless as little
children, and they expect, as all enthusiasts do in their youth, that
they have only to announce their wonderful truths and to proclaim their
"openings" in order to bring the world to the light! They go to the
full length of the implications of their {44} fresh insight without
ever dreaming that all the theological world will unite, across the
yawning chasms of difference, to stamp out their "pestilent heresy,"
and to rid the earth of persons who dare to question the traditions and
the practices of the centuries.

Instead of beginning with the presupposition of original sin, they
quietly assert that the soul of man is inherently bound up in the Life
and Nature of God, and that goodness is at least as "original" as
badness. They fly in the face of the age-long view that the doctrine
of Grace makes freewill impossible and reduces salvation wholly to a
work of God, and they assert as the ineradicable testimony of their own
consciousness that human choices between Light and Darkness, the
personal response to the character of God as He reveals Himself, the
co-operation of the will of man with the processes of a living and
spiritual God are the things which save a man--and this salvation is
possible in a pagan, in a Jew, in a Turk even, as well as in a man w