les scattered throughout the whole
world--only I allow nobody to have dominion over the one place which I am
pledged to the Lord to keep as pure virgin, namely my heart and my
conscience. If you try to bind my conscience, to rule over my faith, or
to be master of my heart, then I must leave you. Except _that_,
everything I am or have is thine, whoever thou art or whatever thou
mayest believe."[11]

It was Franck's primary idea--the principle to which he was dedicated and
for which he was content to suffer, {53} in the faith that men in future
times would come to see as he did[12]--that man's soul possesses a native
capacity to hear the inward Word of God. He often calls Plato and
Plotinus and "Hermes Trismegistus" his teachers, who "had spoken to him
more clearly than Moses did"[13] and, like these Greek teachers of the
nature of the soul's furnishings, he insisted that we come "not in entire
forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness," but that there is a divine
element, an innermost essence in us, in the very structure of the soul,
which is the starting-point of all spiritual progress, the mark of man's
dignity, the real source of all religious experience, and the eternal
basis of the soul's salvation and joy. He names this inward endowment by
many names. It is the Word of God ("Wort Gottes"), the Power of God
("Kraft Gottes"), Spirit ("Geist"), Mind of Christ ("Sinn Christi"),
Divine Activity ("goettliche Wirkung"), Divine Origin ("goettlicher
Ursprung"), the inward Light ("das innere Licht"), the true Light ("das
wahre Licht"), the Lamp of the soul ("das innere Ampellicht"). "The
inward Light," Franck says in the _Paradoxa_, "is nothing else than the
Word of God, God Himself, by whom all things were made and by whom all
men are enlightened." It is, in Franck's thought, not a capricious,
subjective impulse or vision, and it is not to be discovered in sudden
ecstatic experiences; nor, on the other hand, is the divine Word, for
Franck, something purely objective and transcendent. It is rather a
common ground and essence for God and man. It is God in His
self-revealing activity; God in His self-giving grace; God as the
immanent ground of all that is permanently real, and at the same time
this divine endowment forms the fundamental nature of man's soul--"Gottes
Wort ist in der menschlichen Natur angelegt"[14]--and is the original
substance of our being. Consciousness of God and consciousness of self
have one fund